Am J Psychiatry 1979; 136:1444-1448
Copyright © 1979 by American Psychiatric Association
Drug abuse and criminal behavior in delinquent boys committed to a training school
JF Simonds and J Kashani
To determine drug use or drug abuse status according to DSM-III criteria,
the authors interviewed 109 delinquent boys who had been committed to a
training school. They categorized each boy as an offender against a person
or as an offender against property only. They found that person offenders
were significantly older, came from larger communities, abused a greater
number of drugs, had higher asocial index scores, and had lower full-scale
IQ scores than property-only offenders. The IQ score and the number of
drugs abused were the most important variables predicting whether a subject
belonged to the person offender or property-only offender group.
