Evan McCuish

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Verified

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• PhD (Criminology)
• Professor (Associate) at Simon Fraser University

Developmental criminologists have criticized typologies of juvenile sex offenders (JSOs) for assuming that JSOs involved in nonsexual offending are a homogenous group. However, this criticism has remained largely conceptual. To help empirically address the validity of this criticism, offending trajectories from age 12 to 23 were measured for a samp...

Little is known about homicide co-offending networks at the individual gang member level. Of particular interest is whether and to what degree gang members who are selected to participate in murder are different from those who are not. The current study constructed the co-offense network of 18 participants from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent...

In prospective longitudinal studies of juvenile offenders, the presence of multiple developmental pathways of antisocial behaviors has consistently been identified. An "antisocial" type of juvenile sex offender (JSO) has also been identified; however, whether antisocial JSOs follow different antisocial pathways has not been examined. In the current...

Purpose Measures of adolescent psychopathy have yet to be examined in offending trajectory studies. This may explain why identifying etiological differences between individuals following high-rate and moderate-rate offending trajectories has remained elusive. The current study used the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) to examine psycho...

Studies that focus on whether psychopathy statistically predicts reoffending are not informative of the process that connects the putative cause (psychopathy) to the expected outcome (offending). Understanding the causal mechanisms responsible for the relationship between psychopathy and offending has received minimal empirical attention even thoug...

Several theories and policies on punishment describe within-person processes whereby an increase in the number of days a person spends incarcerated decreases their likelihood of reoffending. Contradicting these perspectives, meta-analyses report universal consensus that incarceration has either a null or crime-inducing impact on reoffending. Howeve...

Objectives: There is empirical evidence that sexual recidivism rates have been dropping for several decades, but it remains unclear whether this drop is an artifact of changing research methodologies over the years. The current study, therefore, examines whether the sexual recidivism drop is robust while accounting for various methodological factor...

Since the late 1930s, laws and policies based on assumptions about high rates of sexual recidivism have been enacted to respond to individuals who perpetrated sexual offenses. The first sex offender laws in the United States and Canada were quite similar. Since then, the two countries have diverged. More recent American policies have included the e...

Recent research suggests that sexual recidivism rates have been declining, which contrasts with observations regarding general recidivism rates as well as perceptions of sexual reoffending risk. If sexual recidivism rates are in decline, it raises fundamental policy questions about the youth justice system’s tendency to operate on the assumption th...

Research summary In the past, the Canadian government followed in the footsteps of its American counterpart by enacting “sex offender laws.” Since the 1990s, however, the Canadian criminal justice system has taken a different approach to the issue of sex offender recidivism (SOR), focusing on treatment, rehabilitation, and community risk management...

In this profile, we describe how the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study (ISVYOS) leveraged detailed administrative data to create a prospective longitudinal study. We also discuss the research and policy context at the time the ISVYOS was initiated, its methodology, and what has been learned so far. The ISVYOS includes 1,719 part...

Reducing explanations of victimization to a person’s risky lifestyle has stalled growth in theories of victimization. Drawing from Carlo Morselli’s contributions to social network analysis, the current study extended past research on community-based co-offending networks and victimization in two ways. First, the current study more comprehensively m...

Warr (1989) conceptualized offence severity as the intersection of the harmfulness and wrongfulness of an act, which overlaps with how Canada’s justice system makes decisions about sentencing. The current study used this logic to move beyond static indicators of crime severity (e.g., history of violent offending) to examine risk factors for longitu...

Although much attention has been given to the relationship between psychopathy and sexual offending, very little of such research examined this link from a developmental criminology perspective. This perspective can help further explicate the relationship between psychopathy and sex offending by inspecting whether psychopathy influences the timing...

Objectives Low self control has been the principal focus of population heterogeneity perspectives in terms of capturing an individual’s antisocial and criminal propensity (ACP). However, conceptual descriptions of the stability of psychopathy, combined with evidence that this construct predicts chronic and violent offending, implies that it may be...

Objectives Concerns about the value of features of psychopathy to explanations of offending may be driven by challenges with testing this relationship as opposed to the construct’s limited predictive validity. The current study introduced psychopathology network modeling as an analytic strategy capable of addressing these challenges through a more...

There is much disagreement regarding the causes of sex offending, the probability of recidivism, and how to respond to perpetrators of sex offenses. While some of this disagreement stems from theoretical and ideological preferences, much of it also surrounds a lack of clarity regarding the heterogeneity of what constitutes a “sex offense.” Social j...

Purpose The anger/sadistic model is one of several typologies proposed for sexual homicide events. This paper aims to empirically test this model by examining sexual homicide cases. Empirically validating these typologies provides greater validity and reliability toward the sexual homicide classification systems that are useful in police investigat...

The relationship between psychopathy and negative behavioral, social, and health outcomes has lead to calls to identify factors that promote change in features of psychopathy. Given that maturation has important implications for changes in personality more broadly, it also may be informative of changes in specific personality traits associated with...

Code for McCuish, E. C., Corrado, R., Lussier, P., & Hart, S. D. (2014). Psychopathic traits and offending trajectories from early adolescence to adulthood. Journal of Criminal Justice, 42(1), 66-76.

Objective: Limited research has examined the association between different dimensions of psychopathy and membership in trajectories of physical intimate partner violence (IPV) while also considering developmental precursors. Thus, the current study examined the role of adolescent unidimensional, interpersonal-affective, and lifestyle-antisocial psy...

Descriptives for ISVYOS variables (work in progress).

Purpose This study prospectively examines the assertion that early risk factors do not predict continuity in offending across the adolescence-adulthood transition as suggested by developmental criminology. Against such statements, psychopathy is asserted to be a pivotal risk factor for offending continuity. Methods The study is based on a sample o...

Addressing common myths and misconceptions about sexual offending, this book highlights the current state of scientific knowledge about the origins and the development of sexual offending. It offers a critical overview of current criminal justice policies and close to 100 years of research on how to best improve these policies through theoretically...

Compared with young men, justice-involved young women are often characterized by a greater array of risk factors, yet show a more limited pattern of offending. This paradox may be related to risk factors functioning differently not only for male versus female adolescents but also among female adolescents involved in offending. Data were used on 284...

Over the years, the societal construction of the sex offender has changed. This evolution has had an impact on the portrayal of perpetrators’ motivation and factors explaining their behavior. Theoretical developments have challenged such portrayals based on myths, misconceptions, and broad generalizations. This chapter provides an overview of theor...

Research and policy are primarily concerned with why individuals continue to sexually reoffend. This contrasts with life course criminology, which argues that since desistance from offending is the norm for even serious offenders, research should focus on why individuals do not continue to offend. This chapter reviews the evidence for sexual and no...

The chapter provides a recent historical perspective on sexual offending since the postwar era. This overview highlights that the social phenomena of sexual offending has been constructed or defined differently across generations. The chapter highlights the presence of four generational social constructions where the “sex offender” has been portray...

No other offenders have been under as much scrutiny as perpetrators of sex crimes. A vast amount of research has been conducted in hospitals, prisons, and community settings to identify what is unique about these perpetrators. The research has been so extensive that multiple meta-analyses have been conducted to shed light on what is unique about th...

The uneven history of sex offender treatment reflects the premise of this book: the relative absence of a rigorous scientific approach aimed at identifying the root cause of sexual offending and the factors responsible for its maintenance. In the absence of evidence-based information about the factors responsible for sexual offending, treatment pro...

Uncertainty about sex offender treatment, the emergence of a risk-oriented correctional philosophy, and the rise of populist justice movements in reaction to violent sexual crimes and homicides involving children were the key ingredients favoring the emergence of new sex offender laws in the 1990s. This chapter focuses on the implementation of thes...

Sexual offending is an important social problem with potentially dramatic and long-lasting consequences. It is a social phenomenon that leaves no one indifferent. When it occurs, it demands some concrete, near immediate, and swift actions. Over the years, these actions have been institutionalized through the criminal justice system and the (mental)...

After nearly a century of research investigating the causes, nature, and extent of sexual violence, widespread myths, misconceptions, and erroneous conclusions still persist about sex offending and the perpetrators of these behaviors. More specifically, there is a pervasive idea that sexual violence is widespread throughout the whole of society, is...

Sexual offending is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. It encompasses a wide range of manifestations that can carry extremely harmful consequences to victims. To date, policies tackling the issue of sexual offending have been mainly reactive and constructed around high-profile and extremely violent acts. However, such high-profile cases are th...

In the past three decades, the criminal justice system in general, and corrections in particular, have been under the spotlight because of the media coverage of high-profile cases involving a sex crime. To address the issue, the prevention of sexual offending was gradually refocused toward the community protection of citizens against the threat of...

Examining desistance has become an important part of the longitudinal examination of patterns of offending. Substantial attention has been given to defining desistance (e.g., as a process versus as an event), but less attention has been given to whether analytic strategies appropriately operationalize such definitions. The current study examines th...

Desistance is now one of the main criminal career parameters investigated by criminologists. Similarly, practitioners working within the criminal justice system are primarily focused on ways to promote desistance among their clients. However, these two groups typically think about desistance in different ways. Practitioners are often exposed to the...

Youth who are dually involved in both foster care and criminal justice systems represent a small minority of individuals with multi-problem risk profiles. Prior research has found that foster care youth are disproportionately more likely to be chronic offenders in both adolescence and emerging adulthood. However, the nature of this relationship rem...

This chapter introduces the scientific literature on the life‐course development of antisocial and criminal behavior. It provides a review of key concepts and findings related to criminal‐career research, developmental criminology, and life‐course criminology. chapter examines some of the implications of such research for the description, explanati...

The integrated maturation theory describes psychosocial, adult role, and identity maturation as interrelated domains associated with criminal desistance, but to this point these domains have not been examined simultaneously, which raises questions about the relative importance of each domain to desistance. The aims of the current study were to unra...

Demographic characteristics, delinquent lifestyles, and personality traits have been used to help explain the victim-offender overlap. From a criminogenic lifestyle perspective, offenders associate with similar peers, which places them at risk for their own victimization. To understand this overlap, existing research has focused on the offender as...

Purpose To examine individual perceptions of the consequences of crime, the role of criminogenic models, and whether rational choice and criminal social capital are informative of desistance during emerging adulthood. Methods Data from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study were used to examine the relationship between different...

Although past studies demonstrated the heterogeneity of the criminal career patterns of juveniles with sexual offenses (JSOs), such studies did not directly assess whether JSOs have different adult offending outcomes compared with juvenile nonsex offenders. Using data on a subsample of males from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender...

A central aim of research on psychopathic personality disturbance (PPD) involves identifying core features of the construct. Such aims have been addressed primarily through prototypicality studies and research using item-response theory. More recently, the logic of social network analysis was extended to psychopathology research to examine which sy...

Using data from 885 male offenders, we examined the role of psychopathic features measured in adolescence on trajectories of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration in young adulthood while also considering developmental precursors. Three trajectories of IPV perpetration were identified: a no IPV trajectory, a low-level IPV trajectory, and a h...

Although it is relatively common for some practitioners to assess psychopathic personality disturbance (PPD) among adolescent offenders, little has been said about interview skills and strategies that are helpful for an accurate assessment. Thus, this article provided recommendations for improving interview protocols for the assessment of PPD among...

PurposeDespite the asserted importance of community reentry as part of the pathway to desistance, there is relatively little empirical research examining the role of custody experiences and a young person’s personal transformation while incarcerated. With the increasing emphasis on service delivery within Canadian facilities, it is possible that so...

There is scarce research on children and youth with sexual behavior problems (SBP) and their developmental antecedents and the research that does exist is mostly retrospective and correlational. While prior research focused on the central role of sexual victimization, recent research suggests that young persons with SBP are exposed to a series of a...

The purpose of this research brief is to provide practitioners, policymakers, and members of the public with a summary of key findings from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study (ISVYOS). This report describes the study’s research design and key findings regarding (a) the adult offending patterns of serious and violent youth, (b...

Research on adolescents involved in sexually abusive or aggressive behavior has paid little attention to the lives of this group prior to and after their involvement in a sexual offense. Consequently, the extant literature often provides a description of such individuals that reduces them to their characteristics at just one stage of their life cou...

The stability of psychopathic personality disturbance (PPD) has important theoretical implications for developmental criminology and population heterogeneity perspective assertions that psychopathy is a key measure of criminal propensity. Data from the Pathways to Desistance Study (n = 1,354) were used to examine short-, moderate-, and long-term re...

Using data from 338 male offenders, this study examined whether symptoms of mental disorder predicted violent offending trajectories from adolescence into early adulthood. Three violent offending trajectories were identified: an adolescent-limited trajectory (AL), a late-onset persistence (LOP) trajectory, and a high-rate fast desistance (HRFD) tra...

Purpose Conceptually, foster care placement is an important risk factor for serious and violent offending. Empirically, little is known about the role of foster care placement on offending outcomes in adulthood. Methods Data from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study were used to examine whether children and youth in care (CY...

Although Indigenous youth are overrepresented in justice systems across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, explanations for this overrepresentation are principally theoretical as data at the individual level are lacking. Risk for offending among Indigenous youth may be overestimated because of their typically more negative socioeconomic out...