6.5.1 Age and Crime

You may have noticed that many traditional criminological theories, such as Shaw and McKay’s (1942) theory of social disorganization, the classic strain theories of Cohen (1955) and Cloward and Ohlin (1960), and the control theories of Hirschi (1969) and others have tended to focus on explaining juvenile delinquency, or offending that occurs in adolescence, with lesser emphasis on early childhood and later adulthood. This is for two reasons. First, most offending begins during adolescence, so most theories assume that the causes of offending can be found during this phase of life. Second, delinquency is pretty common during adolescent years and many young people participate in delinquent behaviors. Put differently, it is pretty normal for pre-teens and teenagers to do things that are illegal and test the boundaries of what they can get away with.

Adolescence refers to the transitional phase that begins around puberty and ends at the transition to adulthood. It is significant because it marks the phase of the life course when young people begin to transition away from being children. During infancy and childhood, parents hold a great deal of responsibility over their children’s needs and behaviors, but as children age they become increasingly independent and responsible for their own behavior.

Adolescence is often a period of experimentation, testing boundaries, and questioning figures of authority including parents, teachers, and other adults. It is also the time when peers become much more important sources of influence and socialization. Eventually, adulthood marks the period when individuals become autonomous and independent, forming their own households and families, and legally responsible for their own behaviors.

Research shows that adolescents are unique from adults in at least three ways: (1) they have lower levels of self-control; (2) they are less likely to consider the future; and (3) they are more sensitive to external influences, such as peers or incentives. All of these factors may elevate adolescent involvement in risky behaviors such as delinquency and crime. Recent developments in neuroscience tell us that adolescence is a uniquely risky period because the psycho-socio-emotional system (which governs the processing of emotions, risk-taking, and sensation-seeking behavior) has finished developing, but the cognitive control system (which governs decision-making and self-regulation) has not. In fact, the cognitive control system does not finish developing until around the mid-twenties. What this means is that adolescents are more likely to make risky decisions under heightened emotional conditions.

Another way of thinking about adolescence is through an often-used analogy. Imagine decision-making is represented by a car in which the psycho-socio-emotional system is represented by the gas pedal and the cognitive control system is represented by the brake pedal. Adolescence is like a car with a fully functioning gas pedal but a faulty brake pedal. It is not until well past the age of legal adulthood (usually age 18 in most jurisdictions and circumstances) that individuals have the capacity to engage in adult decision-making. This reality is reflected in our crime statistics.

Figure 6.2 2021 Offenders by Age Group per FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System.

As early as the nineteenth century, French statistician Adolphe Quetelet (discussed in Chapter 3) saw that the propensity for criminal behavior was greater among young people (ages 21–25) and lower among older people (Bierne, 1987). The age-crime curve refers to the relationship between age and crime that has been demonstrated in numerous datasets (Farrington, 1986) and is often displayed graphically (see figure 6.2). This curve shows that crime is concentrated during adolescence and early adulthood and declines steadily throughout the adult years.

An example is shown in figure 6.2, which plots the age of individuals convicted of crime in 2021 from data gathered through the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) program you learned about in Chapter 2. As you can see, the crime rate rises throughout adolescence, peaks during the twenties, and then declines on a steady basis thereafter. The age-crime curve is one of the most consistent empirical facts that has been shown in criminology and has been widely documented in Western countries such as the U.S., Canada, Netherlands, Australia, and Great Britain.

6.5.2 Early Origins of Developmental, Life-Course Perspective

The developmental, life-course (DLC) perspective is interdisciplinary, drawing on developmental psychology (Patterson, Debaryshe, & Ramsey, 1992) and sociology (Elder, 1994). In criminology, DLC has its origins in several early studies. First, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck completed one of the largest longitudinal studies in criminology with their 1950 study Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. The Glueck’s began their study in 1939 by identifying 500 officially-adjudicated delinquents (all White males ages 10–17) from two reform schools in the Massachusetts correctional system. Each youth was matched to a comparable non-delinquent youth in the Boston public school system who shared the same age, ethnicity, neighborhood, and intelligence. The Glueck’s then gathered a variety of data on these 1,000 youths at three points in time: approximately ages 14, 25, and 32. The main sources of data included interviews with the youth, their family members, teachers, employers, neighbors, and representatives of criminal justice and the social welfare systems, in addition to archival data from police records.

Although the magnitude of the study was underappreciated by many in criminology at the time (Laub & Sampson, 1991), the Glueck’s study was the first to investigate questions that would later become of central importance to DLC criminology. These include the relationship between age and crime, the focus on long-term patterns in criminal behavior, and the examination of unique causes of crime initiation, continuance, and desistance.

Second, Marvin Wolfgang, Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin (1972) published a study titled Delinquency in a Birth Cohort that examined the arrest records of 9,945 boys who were born in 1945 and resided in Philadelphia from ages 10–18. Wolfgang and his colleagues found that 35% of these boys became delinquent—defined as having official police contact for something other than a traffic violation—by their eighteenth birthday. These 3,475 boys collectively accounted for 10,214 police contacts over that time period. A small group—about 6% of the total birth cohort (18% of the “delinquents”)—were identified as “chronic recidivists” because they had recorded at least five police contacts by age 18. This small group was responsible for over half of all offenses and two-thirds of all violent offenses. Like Glueck’s earlier study, this study emphasized the importance of examining longer-term patterns in offending to identify more serious offenders.

Third, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences put together a “Panel on Research on Criminal Careers” to focus on the study of individual criminal careers. They defined these as the pattern of criminal offenses over time that occur across a person’s life. The resulting report, titled Criminal Careers and “Career Criminals” (1986), introduced a new paradigm to the study of crime. Specifically, the panel outlined four key dimensions of the criminal career: (1) participation, (2) frequency, (3) seriousness, and (4) career length.

Participation refers to whether or not someone has ever participated in crime, and frequency refers to the rate of criminal activity among those who do participate in crime. They argued that these concepts were important to distinguish because they had different potential causes and policy responses. For example, preventing participation in crime would likely involve more universal prevention approaches outside of the criminal justice system (such as interventions for at-risk youth), whereas reducing the frequency of offending would more directly involve the criminal justice system through deterrence, incapacitation, or rehabilitation.

During this time, policymakers were interested in using the criminal career paradigm to identify “career criminals”—that is, the small percentage of individuals who commit a disproportionate share of crimes (similar to Wolfgang’s “chronic recidivists”). They hoped that it would be possible to identify these so-called career criminals at the start of their criminal careers and selectively incapacitate them during their crime-prone years so they could limit their ability to commit crimes. Unfortunately, efforts to identify this group of individuals have been notoriously inaccurate and frequently result in false positives or misidentifying individuals who are not at risk of committing crime.

6.5.3 Sampson and Laub’s Age-Graded Theory

Several theories have been conducted in the developmental, life-course tradition. One of the most well-known is the age-graded theory of informal social control developed by Robert Sampson and John Laub in the 1990s. These scholars reanalyzed the data that were gathered by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck for their 1950 book Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. Although the original design of the study was longitudinal, few analytic methods were available during the Glueck’s era. Sampson and Laub drew on two theoretical frameworks in studying the Glueck sample: Hirschi’s classic social bond theory (discussed in Chapter 4), and Glen Elder’s life course perspective (1994).

The resulting study was published in their 1995 book Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life. The authors found patterns of both continuity and change among the Glueck sample. Specifically, childhood delinquency was a strong predictor of adult criminal behavior, however, a substantial portion of delinquents desisted from (stopped) criminal behavior during the transition to adulthood. Continuing criminal behavior was linked to both pre-existing characteristics of childhood delinquents, as well as cumulative disadvantages that occurred over time. The factors that were linked to both the onset (beginning) of delinquency and desistance (end) from offending were related to the social bond. For example, childhood delinquency was influenced primarily by family factors such as low parental supervision, erratic and harsh discipline, and parental rejection and neglect, which were linked to broader societal disadvantages (such as low socioeconomic status or unemployment). In adulthood, quality jobs and good marriages served as positive turning points, leading many of the original delinquents away from a life of crime.

In a follow-up study of the original “delinquent” boys, Laub and Sampson (2003) continued to revise their theory and gathered data on arrest records through age 70 for all 500 original participants and conducted life history interviews with a small group of them. These studies revealed additional insights about the processes of persistence in and desistance from criminal behavior in later adulthood. For example, one of the reasons why good marriages and jobs led to distance was because they changed participants’ routine activities, reducing time spent with peers. Also, many subjects displayed considerable independence and responsibility—a concept similar to TRDM—taking an active, willful role in their efforts to desist from criminal offending.

6.5.4 Moffitt’s Dual Taxonomy of Antisocial Behavior

One of the most influential theories in the developmental, life-course perspective comes from psychology and is a theory of antisocial behavior. In an early article, Terrie Moffit (1993) described two types of offending patterns in the population: (1) adolescence-limited and (2) life-course persistent. Adolescence-limited offending is the more prevalent pattern, meaning any offenses they committed were only during their adolescent years. Individuals who follow this pattern constitute the overwhelming majority of individuals who engage in crime. Furthermore, their offending is relatively normal for adolescents. For adolescence-limited offenders, offending is temporary and stops at the transition to adulthood.

What causes adolescence-limited offenders to engage in crime during adolescence? According to Moffitt, it is the maturity gap between their biological and social ages. As youth go through puberty, they begin to develop and mature into adulthood. At the same time, they are still treated as children by the broader society, lacking full rights and responsibilities. This gap between their biological and social maturity leads them to act out in ways that fulfill the adult role, such as delinquent behaviors. This occurs in a process of social mimicry where adolescents copy the behaviors of older, more delinquent youth. Once these youth transition to adult roles and responsibilities, the motivation to engage in delinquent behaviors disappears and they desist from their criminal offending.

The other offending pattern identified by Moffitt, the life-course-persistent pattern, is relatively rare. Individuals who follow this pattern are similar to Wolfgang’s chronic recidivists—that is, they are the small number of “career criminals” who commit a disproportionate share of offenses and a greater share of more serious offenses (including violence). Unlike those following the adolescence-limited pattern, those following the life-course-persistent pattern begin offending early (during childhood) and continue offending throughout adulthood. Their offending is considered pathological and they possess numerous traits consistent with antisocial personality disorder, such as dishonesty and a lack of concern for the rights of others. According to Moffitt, causes of life-course-persistent offending can be found in the prenatal period and during infancy. They are linked to a combination of neuropsychological deficits (some of which may be inherited) and environmental factors conducive to crime, such as poverty and abuse. Moffitt’s theory is an example of a modern approach to incorporating biological factors into a theory of crime.

6.5.5 Concepts and Methodologies of Developmental, Life-Course Criminology

Although not embraced by all criminologists (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1986), the DLC perspective has led to a paradigm shift in criminology, creating new research questions, concepts, and methodologies. Where traditional criminological theories argued for a relatively simple perspective, focusing on factors that distinguish individuals who commit crime from those who do not, DLC explores the dynamic processes that lead individuals into and out of criminal behavior across the full lifespan, from early childhood development through adolescence and then later adult life.

Traditional theories tend to focus on between-individual differences such as low levels of social control, low social bonds, association with delinquent peers, the presence of strains, and so-on. However, developmental, life-course theories examine factors both between-individuals (which distinguishes between people) and within-individuals (personal patterns of continuity and change). This latter approach focuses on trajectories, or age-graded patterns, of criminal behavior, emphasizing that individuals experience numerous transitions, life events, and turning points that affect the life course. Research on criminal careers caused a shift not only in thinking about the causes of crime, but also in how research studies on criminal behavior were carried out. Traditionally, criminological research has been designed to capture data at a single point in time. This research is appropriate for examining between-individual differences.

On the other hand, research on criminal careers requires longitudinal studies, which collect data on individuals at multiple points in time. This research can examine whether and how individuals change over time and what factors might be linked to patterns of stability or change in criminal behavior. This moves the research agenda in criminology from simply asking why people do or don’t offend to more complex questions such as why offending starts (what is referred to as onset), why it continues or even escalates in severity or frequency (what is referred to as persistence), and why it declines or slows down (what is referred to as desistance) at different stages of the life course.