Early Childhood Victimization Among Incarcerated Adult Male Felons

Many professionals in the criminal justice field hold the common belief that the vast majority of incarcerated felons have been victims of physical abuse or neglect as children. A second widespread assumption is that childhood sexual abuse is associated with later criminal behavior, particularly sexual offending. Early Childhood Victimization Among Incarcerated Adult Male Felons discusses a study of inmates in a New York prison, using carefully developed methods for eliciting retrospective reports of childhood abuse and neglect, found that 68 percent of the sample reported some form of childhood victimization and 23 percent reported experiencing multiple forms of abuse and neglect, including physical and sexual abuse. These findings provide support for the belief that the majority of incarcerated offenders have likely experienced some type of childhood abuse or neglect.