Preventing Chronic Delinquency: The Search for Childhood Risk Factors Together, these findings on the characteristics of chronic delinquency suggest that one important way to decrease overall crime rates among youths is to prevent chronic delinquency, and that early childhood may be an important developmental period to target for its prevention. The remainder of this article explores how and whether chronic delinquency can be prevented. This requires answering three interrelated questions: (1) Are there risk factors in early childhood which increase the probability of later chro