Crime and physical health: illnesses, injuries, accidents and offending in the Cambridge Study

The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development is a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 South London males. They were seen personally eight times between the ages of 8 and 32 and followed up in criminal records between the ages of 10 and 40. This paper investigates the links between offending (measured by convictions and self‐reports) and poor health (illnesses, injuries, accidents and hospital treatment) at different ages. Offending and poor health were especially related at age 18. The relationship between offending and hospital treatment for both illness and injury at age 18 held independently of an underlying antisocial personality and childhood (age 8–10) predictors of both offending and poor health. As it was more common to find that offending predicted poor health rather than the reverse, it is concluded that offending might in some way cause poor health. Further research is needed to specify precisely how this might happen.