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This project was supported by funds from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the National Institute of Justice, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Grant R01DA019697), the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, and the Arizona Governor's Justice Commission. We are grateful for their support. The content of this paper is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of these agencies.
It is widely acknowledged that involvement in delinquent and criminal behavior increases through adolescence, peaking somewhere around age 16 and declining thereafter (Piquero, 2008; Piquero et al., 2001). Although a small number of youths persist in antisocial behavior across this developmental period, the vast majority of antisocial adolescents desist from criminal behavior as they enter adulthood (Laub & Sampson, 2001; Piquero, 2008; Sampson & Laub, 2003). Psychological theory suggests that part of the reason for this age-related desistance from crime is that individuals mature out of antisocial behavior. Specifically, desistance from antisocial behavior is viewed as the product of psychosocial maturation, including increases in the ability to control impulses, consider the implications of one's actions on others, delay gratification in the service of longer term goals, and resist the influences of peers (Cauffman & Steinberg, 2000; Steinberg & Cauffman, 1996; Monahan, Steinberg, Cauffman, & Mulvey, 2009). To date, however, little research has examined how psychological maturation is associated with desistance from antisocial behavior, largely because psychological maturation during young adulthood has received relatively little attention from developmental psychologists. Recent research indicating protracted maturation, into the mid-20s, of brain systems responsible for self-regulation, however, has stimulated interest in charting the course of psychosocial maturity beyond adolescence.
The mostly widely cited theory regarding psychological contributors to desistance from antisocial behavior during the transition to adulthood has been advanced by Moffitt (1993, 2003). She distinguishes between the vast majority (90% or more, depending on the study) of individuals whose antisocial behavior stops in adolescence ("adolescence-limited offenders") and the small proportion of those whose antisocial behavior persists into adulthood ("life-course persistent offenders"). It is...