Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University

Dr Jason Payne, Senior Lecturer, Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University

Criminologists in Australia have long debated both the empirical and theoretical merits of the so-called ‘drug-crime nexus’. Few, however, have considered this relationship within a life-course context and this omission has potentially serious implications for the development and implementation for prison and community based interventions for drug-dependent offenders. 

Using previously unanalysed criminal conviction data for a representative sample of 1,184 Queensland prisoners, this presentation seeks to disentangle the longitudinal relationship between drug use and crime over the life-course.  Specifically, armed with new latent class and trajectory methods, we return to an old and underutilised dataset in an effort to explore the path-dependent and age-graded relationship between drug use and crime. The findings paint a confronting picture for policy makers and practitioners in their struggle to develop cost-effective programs with long-term promise.