Delinquency and health: Future directions

This chapter highlights some areas that are especially fertile intersectional research grounds that need to be pursued to realize the potential of the health criminology paradigm. One of these agenda items involves expanding beyond mental health into physical health conditions. There is a dearth of studies on the physical health of juvenile offenders. Another is to more fully examine the life course of the co-relationships between poor health and delinquency. Linked to this is the critical need for research collaborations between criminologists and medical/health science researchers. Another major area of need is the inclusion of basic criminological data in health science data collections and vice versa. Doing so would open the door to numerous opportunities to test hypotheses in extant data sources.