How did the cited studies try to argue causality?
In other words, it is expected that certain behaviour (drug use, “criminal lifestyle”) both causes time spent in prison and lowered life expectancy. Just correlating time spent in prison and life expectancy does not cut the cake.
You would need some kind of randomized control group. For example: Suppose the judges responsible for granting parole were assigned on a last-name basis. Different judges have different statistics on granting parole. Then you compare life-expectancy vs last name of delinquents.
I would rather see the doomsday argument as a version of sleeping beauty.
Different people appear to have different opinions on this kind of arguments. To me, the solution appears rather obvious (in restrospect):
If you ask a decision theory about advice on decisions, then there is nothing paradoxical at all, and the answer is just an obvious computation. This tells you that “probability” is the wrong concept in such situations; rather you should ask about “expected utility” only, as this is much more stable under all kind of anthropic arguments.