Nipped in the bud — youthful transitions or criminal careers?

It seems that offending is part of a larger syndrome of antisocial behaviour that arises in childhood and tends to persist into adulthood … There is significant continuity over time, since the antisocial child becomes the antisocial teenager and then the antisocial adult, just as the antisocial adult then tends to produce another antisocial child. (Farrington 2002: 658)