Drugs and Predatory Crime (From Drugs and Drug Use in Society, P 281-310, 1994, Ross Coomber, ed. - See NCJ 159452)

• NCJ Number: 159475
• Author(s): J M Chaiken; M R Chaiken
• Date Published: 1994
• Length: 30 pages
• Sale Source: Greenwich University Press
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This paper examines the coexistence in certain social groups of drug abuse and predatory criminality.

Abstract

Drug abuse and predatory criminality are behavior patterns that coexist in certain social groups. In other groups, drug abuse often occurs without predatory criminality. Among populations involved in drug abuse and predatory crime, a temporal sequence from drug abuse to predatory criminality is not typical; on the contrary, predatory criminality more commonly occurs before drug abuse. Drug-abusing offenders who display increasingly deviant behavior over time eventually cross over a threshold to heroin addiction or frequent polydrug abuse. The intensity of their criminal behavior typically escalates substantially. If these high-rate offenders subsequently decrease the amount of drugs they use, they typically also lessen their rate of criminal activity. Among offenders who use multiple types of drugs, individual predatory crime commission frequencies are typically two or three times higher among offenders when they use multiple types of drugs than they are for the same offenders when they are in drug treatment or abstain from drug abuse. Tables, references