Third, our findings support the need to recalculate the costs of childhood CD to include adulthood health care alongside criminal justice and social welfare expenses; similarly, they suggest that the cost savings associated with effective CD interventions may be expected to accumulate through mid-life, a period through which most intervention studies have not yet followed study participants. The message from these electronic medical and administrative data summaries is clear – childhood conduct problems, especially those that persist, are a strong and early signal of high societal and individual costs across criminal justice, health-care, and social service sectors.
