Psychological Inertia Revisited: Replicating and Extending the Differential Effect of Proactive and Reactive Criminal Thinking on Crime Continuity

ABSTRACT

Measures of proactive and reactive criminal thinking were evaluated as putative mediators of the past crime‒future crime relationship in a group of 1,354 adjudicated delinquents. Analyses performed on total offending variety scores and aggressive offending frequency scores revealed that reactive but not proactive criminal thinking mediated the past crime‒future crime relationship. As in previous studies, proactive criminal thinking failed to correlate with prior criminal offending. These results have theoretical implications for continued development of the criminal thinking-mediated moral and control models of criminal lifestyle development and practical implications for effective treatment, management, and prevention of serious criminality.

Notes on contributor

GLENN D. WALTERS is a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Kutztown University (Pennsylvania), where he teaches classes in corrections, criminology, substance misuse and crime, and research methods. Prior to this, he spent 29 years working as a correctional psychologist in various military and federal facilities, to include the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr. Walters’ current research interests include offender assessment, classification, and treatment, causal mediation analysis, and the development of an overarching psychological theory of criminal behavior.

Notes

¹ Follow-up periods were not 6 months in all cases, although over 90% of the follow-ups ranged in length from 5 to 7 months. All analyses were therefore recalculated controlling for length of Wave 1 follow-up in the equation predicting Wave 1 offending and length of Wave 3 follow-up in the equation predicting Wave 3 offending. Given that the results did not change the simpler analyses in which length of follow-up was not included in the regression equations as a control variable are reported in this article.