Alias: lying to the police and pathological criminal behavior

Abstract

The use of aliases has been shown to be associated with antisocial behavior, but the empirical research on this topic is modest. The current study employs a multiple analytical approach to explore the association between aliases and career criminality in two large samples of adult offenders. We hypothesized that the use of aliases would not only be strongly associated with arrest history but this singular behavior would accurately classify a large proportion of habitual criminals. Results show that alias usage is robustly associated with career arrests net the effects of arrest onset, age, and sex in negative binomial regression models and was an excellent classifier (AUC = .82) of habitual criminality. Implications of the findings for forensic and criminal justice practitioners are offered.