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While personality is an important predictor of criminality, this thesis argues that a more holistic understanding of the personality-based drivers of OB is required. Using the guiding framework of interpersonal theory and building upon previous work in this area, it examines personality features that extend beyond traits, representing cognitive, emotional, and relational components. It also takes a 'profile approach' to its investigation of personality traits, whereby configurations of multiple traits are used to examine interactions between variables. Patterns that emerge from these profiles may be used to strengthen our understanding of the personality-based drivers of OB. This thesis was the first to systematically review associations between personality traits and OB. Results of this critical engagement with the extant literature indicate that subclinical psychopathy is positively related to OB; high levels of neuroticism and low levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness may also be implicated, although the evidence for these associations was more mixed. Study 1 established configurations of all the Five-Factor Model and Dark Triad traits together. Using a predominantly UK-based community sample (n = 343), results indicated that three distinct personality profiles emerged. Study 2 assessed whether the same profiles emerged in a US-based community sample (n = 210); whether these profiles were associated with OB; and if other personality features mediated these relationships. The profiles were largely the same as in Study 1, and interpersonal functioning and vindictive interpersonal style emerged as mediators between profiles and some types of OB. Study 3 explored whether the results of Study 2 replicated in an ex-offender sample (n = 292). Again, highly similar personality profiles were observed; however, unlike Study 2, irritability and domineering interpersonal style mediated relationships between profiles and some types of OB. This thesis is the first empirical research to establish personality profiles encompassing the Five-Factor Model and Dark Triad traits together, thereby advancing our knowledge of how personality traits from these two models interact and providing a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of personality. It is also the first to wed personality profiles with other key personality features in an investigation of the drivers of OB. By including other aspects of relational, cognitive, and affective differences, it affords a more nuanced account of the personality-based drivers of OB that extends beyond individual traits or trait profiles alone.

Using a qualitative research design, the contextual factors and processes associated with criminal offending and wider social exclusion were examined for six Black young men from the Southside of Belize City. The young men had been permanently excluded from secondary school between the ages of 14 and 17 years and had been criminally charged. Face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the young men and their mothers after cross-referencing school exclusion data from secondary schools and youth-based organisations with criminal offending data from the Belize Police Department. The study examined the extent of the influence of permanent school exclusion on the offending behaviour and the multidimensional disadvantages experienced in the post-school exclusion lives of the young men. The findings suggest that multiple disadvantages associated with the social environments of the home, neighbourhood, and peer group served as risk factors that contributed to early offending behaviour. Most of the young men grew up alongside demographically similar peers in lone-parent households in neighbourhoods that had a shared historical experience of social and economic marginality, including poverty, high rates of violence, and a proliferation of gangs. However, permanent school exclusion served as a critical life event that deprived the young men of access to education and the opportunity to acquire formal educational qualifications, which set into motion a dynamic process of social exclusion through multiple forms of exclusion, particularly in relation to their participation in education and training, the labour market, social networks, and their experience of criminalisation. In the end, they experienced a cyclical pattern of precarious engagement in low-quality or unsecured work, unemployment, and short-term training programmes, none of which ameliorated their economic marginality. A concurrent process of criminalisation occurred as the young men's offending behaviour evolved into serious criminal offending and gang involvement, leading to criminal charges, criminal records, and incarceration, which further diminished their social and economic participation.

Objective. The relationship between crime and mental disorders has long been a topic of debate. While in public perception these two phenomena are often seen as inextricably linked, research has painted a more complex picture, with only little consensus about the precise nature of the association. The aim of this thesis is to further unravel the interrelations between offending and mental disorders and to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of their association over the life-course. Methods. First, a broader view is adopted as a strategy to assess the current understanding of the relationship. Then, a more specific stance is taken within the theoretical framework of developmental and life-course criminology in order (1) to link research into offending pathways with the study of longitudinal effects and intergenerational transmission of mental health problems and (2) to investigate the link between family socio-psychological factors, violence, and personality disorders over the life-course by using different quantitative methods and drawing on data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. Results. Having drawn attention to the importance of studying different offending pathways in the development of mental health problems, the considerable heterogeneity of mental disorder symptoms, and the role of early-life family context, findings demonstrate (1) that those with more severe offending pathways have an overall greater vulnerability to developing internalising problems in middle adulthood, (2) that certain personality disorder symptoms, specifically cluster A and cluster B disorders, are associated with lifetime violent behaviour, and (3) that early life paternal offending is associated with adult children's internalising and externalising problems. Conclusions. It is suggested that early-life interventions targeting families as part of their work can play an important role in preventing the development of both later-life internalising and externalising problems. Further, results highlight the importance of recognising the heterogeneity of people with internalising and externalising problems in order to offer responses that are effectively tailored to an individual's needs. Finally, the thesis supports further efforts to improve mental health awareness and knowledge to reduce stigma.

The Scottish Community Payback Order (CPO) came into force in February 2011, and was envisaged as a sentence that combined punishment, reparation and personal change. However, research into the CPO has been limited, and there has yet to be an in-depth examination of the CPO in practice: how those involved communicate and interact with one another, thereby realising the CPO's operation. This research project is a naturalistic exploration of the communicative interactions between the three key stakeholders of the CPO - social work officers, offender clients and the beneficiaries of unpaid work - in order to develop an understanding of the day-to-day social realities these interactions construct. This project has two objectives. The first is to explore the internal, subjective meanings that each stakeholder interpretively attributes to stimuli within the context of the CPO and which motivate their resultant actions. The second, subsequent, objective is to use these understandings to analyse how the intermingling of stakeholders' meanings through their interactions produces a shared social reality between them. These objectives are achieved through two exemplifying case studies: observing the frontline interactions between officers/clients and clients/beneficiaries in the CPO's supervision and unpaid work requirements respectively. By utilising a hybrid ontological approach that combines social constructivism and symbolic interaction with discourse analysis as an analytical medium, this project explores the actions and interactions of these stakeholders - the experiences and perspectives that shape them, and their consequences in shaping the CPO's day-to-day operations. These observations are supplemented by qualitative, ethnographic interviewing, wherein the same participants provide their own guidance on how they perceive and understand their place and interactions within the CPO. In exploring the interactions that take place both in supervision and unpaid work, this project's findings offer an insight into how the CPO operates in practice. Supervision emphasised a client-driven model of change, with supervisors taking considerable effort to develop an individualised understanding of clients in order to facilitate and encourage clients' own motivation and agency to change. On the other hand, however, even collaboration between clients and their supervisors struggled to overcome the toxic, criminogenic environments in which clients lived, and which hindered and/or undermined their sincere efforts to meaningfully change their lives. Unpaid work, on the other hand, achieved a positive, inclusive atmosphere between clients and the organisations/staff which benefited from their work. Under the correct conditions, unpaid work projects could foster a new self-identity for clients, founded in a sense of worth and contribution. However, unpaid work also struggled with its own identity: a lack of public involvement, and a fictional normalisation of clients, resulted in an obfuscation of clients' social needs (needs which unpaid work was in a position to address). As a result, unpaid work could also be a mindless series of unsatisfying 'odd jobs' with little personal or practical value for clients. These findings have considerable implications, both for government policy and the academic community. At the most basic level, this project presents a more complex picture of the CPO than its policy depiction, with little to no 'payback' to 'communities' occurring in practice. But on a deeper level, these findings highlight not only the benefits of a client-centric, agency-fostering approach to engaged intervention, but the necessity of a broad perspective in supporting offender clients in their efforts to desist. The fostering of social capital is essential for the realisation of even short-term desistance from crime, and extends beyond a client's immediate personal network to the stakeholders encountered as part of their CPO, and even further into the environments in which they live.