ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the life transitions and investigates their relationship to changes in offending from adolescence to adulthood in several high-risk groups. It focuses on two categories of youth: young men and women who were placed in residential care in their childhood, and special offenders. The chapter consists of men and women who in their childhood had been placed under secure residential care in the Netherlands. It addresses whether the timing of these transitions to adult roles at earlier or later than normative ages affects the criminal careers of these special groups of offenders as they are known to do in normative samples of men and women from the Dutch population. The chapter investigates to what extent findings differ for sample members from Western and non-Western backgrounds, and to what extent they differ for respondents functioning at a below normal intellectual level. It concludes fewer of the vulnerable groups married than average men in the Netherlands.
