Cognitive abilities in adolescent-limited and life-course-persistent criminal offenders

T. E. Moffitt's (1993a) hypothesis that adolescent-limited criminal offende rs will have higher scores on tests of cognitive ability than life-course-p ersistent offenders was tested with 12 tests of cognitive ability given to a large and diverse sample of delinquent juveniles whose arrest records wer e collected over 20 years. This is the first investigation to empirically e valuate this proposal with longitudinal data obtained Gum a sample for a lo ng enough time to distinguish life course patterns of crime. This study pro vided only partial support for Moffitt's hypothesis because the results var ied by ethnicity. We found relatively consistent support for the hypothesis for Caucasians and Hispanics but no support for the hypothesis for African Americans. These findings are interpreted in terms of differences in devel opmental contexts for individual ethnic groups.