Patrick Lussier

Laval University | ULAVAL

The current study investigates the offending trajectories of juvenile sex offenders (JSOs) across and beyond adolescence. In doing so, the study examines the number, the rate, and the shape of nonsexual and sexual offending trajectories in a sample of JSOs followed retrospectively and prospectively from late childhood to adulthood. Using semiparame...

Current American policies and responses to juvenile sex offending have been criticized for being based on myths, misconceptions, and unsubstantiated claims. In spite of the criticism, no organizing framework has been proposed to guide policy development with respect to the prevention of juvenile sex offending. This article proposes a developmental...

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...

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...

Sex offender recidivism (SOR) has been the subject of research for over 70 years. Myths, misconceptions, and erroneous conclusions about SOR, however, remain widespread, impeding the development of evidence-based policies aimed at preventing sexual offenses. To address the rich but uneven literature, a comprehensive review was conducted making it p...

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...

A research project aiming to measure, describe, and monitor sex offender recidivism (SOR) rates across two waves of sex offender laws is briefly described and contextualized. A methodology was designed to examine the evolution of sexual recidivism rates since the 1940s. The findings of the study showed that, in Canada, sexual recidivism rates have...

T-37: A Life-Course Perspective on Sex Offending (Symposium Chair: Evan McCuish, PhD)

Background Practitioners mandated to protect child development are sometimes dealing with children's inappropriate sexual behaviors. This set of behaviors presents a potential hindering impact on the child's development and important consequences for all children involved. Denial during the questioning of the child complicates the investigation of...

Being adjudicated for a sex offense carries significant social, legal, and penal implications that are almost unparalleled and adolescents are no exception to this differential treatment by the justice system. This highlights the relevance of providing criminal career information concerning future offending among adolescents who have a record for a...

Purpose The case management of individuals convicted of a sexual offense tends to be specialized and focused on the prevention of sexual recidivism, leaving little room for criminogenic risk and need factors that are critical for community reentry and reintegration. The current study examines the criminogenic risk and needs of those individuals com...

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...

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...

Various tools were designed to guide practitioners in the risk assessment of offenders, including the Level of Service and Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI). This instrument is based on risk assessment principles prioritizing the actuarial approach to clinical judgment. However, the tool’s architects allowed subjective judgment from the practition...

Little is known about the development of childhood sexual behavior problems (SBP) in terms of continuity and discontinuity into adolescence. Prior studies have espoused a nondevelopmental approach focusing on the clinical profiles of these youths at the time of their referral. To address this gap, the current study proposes an examination of the de...

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a flexible quantitative analytic technique whose origins stem, at least in part, from the development of path analysis. In criminology and criminal justice, SEM has been and remains an underused analytical technique. SEM controls for measurement error. Failure to account for measurement error can lead to biased...

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...

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.

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...

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...

Depuis maintenant plus de deux décennies, les États-Unis disposent de registres publics de délinquants sexuels et d’avis publics afin d’informer les citoyens de leur présence dans la collectivité. Selon les promoteurs des lois ayant mené à l’implantation de ces mesures, les registres et avis publics permettent d’accroître la sécurité publique puisq...

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...

In Canada, the community risk management strategy utilized does not include a publicly available sex offender registry. While there is a non-public national sex offender registry for police investigation purposes, in recent years, there has been ongoing pressure to import American sex offender registry and notification (SORN) laws in Canada. Such p...

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...

Le présent article propose un regard actuel sur l’évolution des politiques pénales nord-américaines concernant les auteurs de crimes sexuels. L’approche américaine axée sur la dissuasion est comparée à l’approche canadienne, davantage centrée sur la réhabilitation. Les mécanismes qui caractérisent ces deux approches ainsi que leur efficacité respec...

In North America, over the past twenty years, sex offender registries and public notification have been implemented as crime prevention strategies against sexual violence and abuse. While the Canadian experience has been relatively slow, cautious and at times uneven, the American experience has been more prompt, drastic, continuously expanding with...

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...

Short bio: Sébastien Brouillette-Alarie (Ph.D.) is a postdoctoral candidate at the Université Laval, under the supervision of Patrick Lussier. He has published peer-reviewed articles on the latent structure of risk scales for sexual offenders, sexual sadism, the offending process of hebephiles, and psychopathy in women. His current research interes...

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...

There is growing recognition that sexual offending is a multi-determined phenomenon requiring a multidisciplinary perspective. The significant contribution of psychology and psychiatry, but also sociology, gender studies and anthropology to the study of sex offending and perpetrators of sex offenses has played a key role in the development of a dis...

The developmental context in which adolescent sexually abusive or aggressive behaviors arise is not fully considered by current policies. The perception of adolescents as sexual predators on a life-course persistent pattern of sexual offending has largely contributed to the current, more punitive, sociolegal context. We suggest that myths, misconce...

A study has examined the postdictive validity of the Cracow Instrument (CI) within early childhood (2-5 years) and found moderate-to-good predictive accuracy to identify the most physically aggressive children. The psychometric properties of the CI remain relatively unknown limiting its use in a clinical setting. Therefore, this study examines the...

Despite the growing body of research on desistance from crime, there have been comparatively few studies that have focused specifically on desistance from sex offending. Much remains unknown about whether the findings from the general desistance literature are applicable to individuals convicted of a sexual offense. The current study explores this...

Andrews, Bonta, and Wormith (2004) present the Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI) as a fourth generation risk/needs assessment tool for adult convicted offenders. Very limited research, however, has been conducted to verify Andrews et al.’s (2004) assertions about the validity of this tool. This study, therefore, provides a detaile...

There is a paucity of Indigenous-specific research examining the reliability and validity of routinely utilized assessment tools within the justice system. Evaluating the cross-cultural reliability and validity of such tools is important for establishing generalizability as part of ethical practices; this is particularly important to address within...

There is little information about the onset and the developmental course of child sexual behavior problems (SBPs), including sexually intrusive behaviors (SIBs). Using data from the Vancouver Longitudinal Study on the Psychosocial Development of Children, the current study examined the presence of distinct patterns of sexual development among child...

This essay examines theoretical, methodological, and empirical knowledge about the activation, course, and desistance from sex offending. The authors discuss theoretical issues and controversies regarding the origins and development and sex offending. Methodological issues in the measurement of sex offending and sex offending careers are reviewed,...

Lahey and Waldman proposed a temperament theory of conduct disorder (CD). Critical is the hypothesized temperament structure in which three relatively uncorrelated temperament dimensions (i.e., negative emotionality, daring, prosociality) central to CD are theorized to emerge in early childhood. The validity of this hypothesized factor structure in...

Criminological theories suggest that desistance from crime cannot be considered outside its social context. Few studies, however, have examined the social context and its importance for individuals convicted of a sex offense. Their unique experience during community reentry warrants specific attention to this group. Using prospective longitudinal d...

For the past three decades or so, criminal justice policies have been enacted under the assumption that individuals who have been convicted of a sex offense are life course persistent sex offenders. In that context, research has been heavily focused on the assessment of risk and the prediction of sexual recidivism.Simultaneously, little to no atten...

Andrews, Bonta, and Wormith (2004) presented the LS\CMI as a fourth-generation instrument designed for the assessment of risk and needs of adults in custody. Now widely used, prior research has focused mainly on the examination of the predictive validity of the overall score provided by the instrument. In practice, however, parole/probation officer...

Several explanations have been proposed to explain the origins and the development of rape and sexual aggression against women. For the most part, the first three generations of research and theorizing provided an inherently static view of the propensity among males to commit a sexual aggression, providing little information about the developmental...

This study tackles one of the key aspects of the criminal career, the age of onset. In criminology and related disciplines, age of onset has become an important theoretical concept with growing policy and practical implications for criminal justice decision making. We claim here that the age of onset, as measured with criminal justice data, provide...

Background: Very little is understood about the developmental antecedents of sexual behaviour prior to adolescence. Aims: Our aim was to examine the impact of different forms of intimate partner violence on early childhood sexual development. Methods: We used data from an ongoing prospective longitudinal cohort study of Canadian families. Inti...

Until recently, clinical research in the field of sexual violence and abuse has been focused on the description, explanation, and prediction of the propensity to commit a sexual (re-)offense. Longitudinal research, however, has shown that, for the most part, sexual offending patterns are relatively short-lived, transitory, and circumscribed to a pa...

The role of primary prevention of sexual offences is an understudied area. The current study examined a sample (N = 100) of men charged or convicted of a sexual offence to determine their interest in interventions that could be offered prior to offending, reasons for not seeking out interventions in the past, and demographic information including o...

Crime specialization is one of the most researched and often-debated criminal career parameters. To date, the concept of specialization has been approached mainly from a static viewpoint whereby crime specialization and criminal versatility have been conceptualized as two opposite end of a continuum. Emerging research based on longitudinal data, ho...

Until recently, developmental criminologists have remained relatively silent about the issue of juvenile sex offending. Consequently, concepts and knowledge from the field developmental criminology are relatively unknown to researchers and practitioners working in the area of juvenile sex offending. In fact, for the past two or three decades, conce...