Drugs and Predatory Crime

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 may 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.