Psychosocial characteristics of young violent offenders: a comparative study

When young people commit violent crimes such as homicide, the act is sometimes attributed to poorly controlled anger, rage or paranoid symptomatology. To test this assertion, we hypothesised that young men incarcerated for murder would show more anger, hostility and paranoid ideation, as well as increased levels of global psychopathology, than a cohort of non‐violent offenders and normal high school students. These predictions were not supported. Young murderers were indistinguishable from the two control groups on the MMPI‐A, the State‐Trait Anger Scale, and the SCL‐90‐R. Moreover, they showed no evidence of increased anger, paranoid features or global psychopathology relative to standardisation samples. Rather than being differentiated by personality characteristics, the data suggest that a history of gang membership and violent behaviour do a better job of discriminating between these groups.