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Article: Crime and destiny: patterns in serious offenders' mortality rates.
- Article from:
- Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice
- Article date:
- July 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Canadian Criminal Justice Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Introduction
Common sense would expect habitual offenders to increase their odds of premature death. Hobbesians (and moral exhortations) delight in such anticipations: "In each human psyche, there is a primal awareness of a possible world of nightmarish violent anarchy ... sufficiently vivid to permit many to sense that to commit a crime is to invite unforeseeable threats against their own survival" (Novak 1986: 85). Current research does not dispute that offender death rates are higher but dismisses the conventional explanation. Instead of arguing that offenders' criminal activities themselves explain their premature deaths, the assumption is made that ...