The developmental life course perspective looks at criminal behavior over the course of someone’s lifetime. According to this perspective, criminality cannot be understood by studying people at a single point in time or by assuming that people are unchanging. Instead, to truly understand criminal behavior, it is important to follow individuals over time. This perspective seeks to understand why offending starts in the first place (i.e., onset), why it continues or even escalates in severity or frequency (i.e., persistence), and why it declines or slows down (i.e., desistance) at different stages of the life course. In this manner, we can understand the life events and turning points that affect both short- and long-term patterns of criminal behavior. This perspective emphasizes a person’s individual development and life history.

Learn More: Celebrity Case Studies

When someone is famous for something they do well as an adult, it is easy to forget that their life was not always this way. Quite a few celebrities got in trouble with the law when they were younger and made significant changes as they grew older to become the people we know them as today. To illustrate this point, let’s look at Lindsey Lohan, Mark Wahlberg, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (figure 7.4).

Lindsey Lohan went from child star and model to county jail and probation. Lohan got her first modeling contract at 3 years old and her first acting job at age 10, and she has been in the public eye ever since. She moved to Los Angeles alone at age 15. There, she faced several challenging years battling an eating disorder and drug and alcohol addiction. She was repeatedly arrested for driving under the influence, cocaine possession, theft, and driving on a suspended license. Lohan served multiple court-ordered stints in rehabilitation facilities over a span of 6 years and remained on probation for even longer. After roughly 8 years of legal troubles, Lohan moved overseas and worked to treat her substance abuse disorder. She has since returned to acting.

Mark Wahlberg has a history of hostile behavior and hate crimes. As a teenager, he had more than one lawsuit filed against him, including a civil rights lawsuit for harassing Black children with racial slurs while throwing rocks at them. In the late 1980s, he pled guilty to assault after he nearly killed two men, one of whom he attacked while using anti-Asian slurs. The victims of Wahlberg’s actions have since been interviewed and have different opinions on whether or not he deserves forgiveness. Ultimately though, Wahlberg’s criminal past has had little impact on his career as an actor and business owner.

Dwayne Johnson, better known as “The Rock,” turned his juvenile arrests for fighting, theft, and check fraud—all of which happened before age 17—into a career that allowed him to build on his strengths and support others to do the same. Johnson was noticed and recruited by his high school football coach, which Johnson points to as the beginning of his personal transformation. He later followed the professional wrestling career path of his father, then expanded into acting and producing. Perhaps most importantly, he now visits prisons to encourage those in custody to turn their lives around as well.

Imagine how each of these individuals’ lives would look if you only saw them at one point in time instead of reading about their more complete story. When we see celebrity success stories, it can be easy to forget about unfavorable or even violent past behavior. For the everyday person, however, they might feel forever defined by their law violation(s). The developmental life course perspective is interested in explaining the events in one’s life that changed the trajectory of their behavior, such as Lohan’s international move, Wahlberg’s system involvement, or Johnson’s football career, and considers the entire life course rather than focusing on a small snapshot of someone’s story.

Before we discuss the developmental life course perspective more thoroughly, let’s explore a little bit of developmental psychology. Jean Piaget (1930, 1932), a developmental psychologist, studied childhood development and focused on children’s cognitive growth. He believed that thinking is a central aspect of development and that children are naturally inquisitive. However, he said that children do not think and reason like adults and that their cognitive abilities develop through specific stages. He posited that it was not until the final stage, starting around age 11, when kids can begin using abstract and logical thinking. Similarly, Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) theorized that development of moral judgment occurred in six stages. When he studied people who had committed crime, he found that they scored lower in moral judgment, and he concluded that their criminality could be explained by their failure to properly move through all of the moral development stages. These ideas about the stages of development and their impact on future behavior is a thread woven throughout developmental life course theories.

In criminology, the developmental life course perspective has been studied and adjusted by a few influential scholars. First, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1957), completed one of the largest longitudinal studies in criminology with their report Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. The Gluecks began their study in 1939 by identifying 500 youths who had gone through the juvenile justice system (all of whom were white boys ages 10–17) from 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 IQ. This means they tracked 1,000 participants over a couple of decades. This is very hard to do. The Gluecks gathered a variety of data on these 1,000 youths at three points in time: at approximately ages 14, 25, and 32. They collected data from interviews with the youths, their family members, teachers, employers, neighbors, and representatives of the criminal justice and the social welfare systems, in addition to archival data from police records.

This was a giant collection of data by the time they were done, and it has been used by several scholars to examine how behavior changes over the course of someone’s life. The Gluecks’ study was the first to investigate questions that would later become of central importance to developmental life course 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.

The second group to dive into studying developmental life course approaches also tracked a large group of youth for several years. 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. Collectively, these 3,475 boys were responsible for 10,214 police contacts over that period. A small group—about 6% of the whole group and 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 the Gluecks’ earlier research, Wolfgang and his colleagues emphasized the importance of examining longer-term patterns in offending to truly identify more serious offenders, as opposed to just looking at single events.

The third major study in the developmental life course perspective was conducted through the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. They put together a Panel on Research on Criminal Careers to focus on the study of individual patterns of criminal offenses over time that occur across a person’s life. They called this someone’s criminal career. You have the option to read the resulting report, titled Criminal Careers and “Career Criminals” [Website] (National Research Council, 1986), which introduced 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 how often someone participates in criminal activity. The National Research Council said these two concepts were important to identify because they had different potential causes and required different policy responses. For example, preventing participation in crime in the first place would likely involve some type of programming outside of the criminal justice system, such as interventions for at-risk youth. To combat the frequency of offending, however, there would likely need to be more direct involvement of the juvenile or criminal justice system through some type of punishment.

During the 1980s, policymakers were particularly interested in using the idea of a criminal career to identify career criminals. They wanted to find that small percentage of individuals who commit a disproportionate share of crimes. 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 (lock them up) during their crime-prone years to limit their ability to commit crimes. The problem with this idea is that it means locking up kids for crimes they might commit instead of something they already did. This is something that not only happened at the time of this developmental life course research, it is actually still happening. Youth can still be detained for risk of future criminal offending. Efforts to identify which youth will turn into career criminals have been notoriously inaccurate and frequently result in false positives or the misidentification of kids who are not actually at risk of committing crime.

Sampson and Laub’s Age-Graded Theory

Several theories have been created under the umbrella of the developmental life course perspective. 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. The age-graded theory of informal social control looks at the age and delinquent or criminal behavior, in addition to what is going on in the individual’s life at the time of that behavior. Specifically, they looked at things like the youth’s family life, school, employment, and other relationships that change over time. These scholars reanalyzed the data that were gathered by the Gluecks to look for specific patterns. Their analysis revealed patterns of both continuity and change among the Glueck sample.

They found childhood delinquency was a strong predictor of adult criminal behavior. However, they also discovered that a substantial portion of children who engaged in delinquency stopped any criminal behavior during the transition to adulthood. For those who did continue exhibiting criminal behavior into adulthood, Sampson and Laub found links to both pre-existing characteristics of childhood delinquency (what made them commit crime as youths still made them commit crime as adults) and cumulative disadvantages that occurred over time (challenges and struggles like poverty, family dysfunction, and addiction).

They said the factors that were linked to both the onset of delinquency and desistance from offending were related to the social bond. For example, kids who committed acts of delinquency were often experiencing familial factors that included low parental supervision, erratic and harsh discipline, and parental rejection and neglect. Also, they found these family factors were linked to broader societal disadvantages, such as low socioeconomic status or unemployment. Then, they found that quality jobs and good marriages in adulthood became positive turning points for these same individuals, leading many of them away from a life of crime.

In a follow-up study of the original delinquent boys, Sampson and Laub (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 provided additional insights about the processes of continuing in or stopping criminal behavior in later adulthood. For example, they found one of the reasons why good marriages and jobs led to desistance from criminal behavior was because they changed participants’ routine activities, reducing the time they spent with friends who may have been a bad influence. In other words, they emphasized the importance of life transitions, such as marriage, employment, military service, the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one, in altering life trajectories. Also, many of the individuals they interviewed showed considerable independence and responsibility, taking an active, willful role in their efforts to desist from criminal offending. In other words, they wanted a crime-free life, so they did what they needed to do to get the type of life they wanted.

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, also known as dual taxonomy of antisocial behavior. In an early article, Terrie Moffit (1993) described two types of offending patterns in the population: adolescence-limited and life-course persistent (figure 7.6). Adolescence-limited offending is the more common pattern, and it means that any offenses someone committed were only during the individual’s adolescent years. This represents almost all teenagers who did something illegal but did not turn into someone who commits crimes for most of their life. Testing boundaries and breaking rules is something most people grow out of naturally. According to Moffitt, this is all part of growing up as approximately 90% of the juveniles she studied engaged in some form of delinquency.

However, Moffitt acknowledged the maturity gap between a teenager’s 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 make them feel more adult and in control of their own lives. Peer associations, thrill-seeking, and rebelliousness contribute to delinquency. Once these adolescents transition to actual 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 somewhat rare. People who follow this pattern are similar to Wolfgang’s chronic recidivists—that is, they are the small number of career criminals who commit the biggest portion of offenses and most of the more serious offenses, including violence. People in this pattern begin their criminal or delinquent offending during early childhood and continue offending throughout adulthood. Their criminal behavior is considered pathological (i.e., they cannot stop) 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, life-course-persistent offending can be caused by a combination of neuropsychological deficits and environmental factors supportive of crime, such as poverty and abuse (figure 7.7). Moffitt’s theory is an example of a modern approach to incorporating biological factors into a theory of crime, but she identifies multiple risk and protective factors that are psychological, biological, or social in nature. Moffitt pointed to three factors that make it particularly difficult for people to escape delinquency: drugs, gangs, and jail. Prevention, rather than treatment, is the key to stopping chronic, lifetime offending according to Moffit. Incarceration, the traditional criminal justice system approach, can actually interfere with natural desistance from crime.

Activity: Applying the Developmental Life Course Perspective to Your Life

This is a thinking exercise that you may choose to share or keep to yourself. Read the guide on building resilience from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child [Website]. Taking the previous sections into consideration, what transitions or trajectories have you seen in your life that support a developmental life course model to understanding crime? When were you most influenced by your parents, guardians, immediate family, or caretaker? When were you most likely to test boundaries and break rules? What events in your life encouraged offending behavior or inhibited it? What risk or protective factors were present for you? What helped you build resiliency?

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Licenses and Attributions for Developmental and Life Course Perspective

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“Developmental and Life Course Perspective” by Mauri Matsuda and Taryn VanderPyl is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Revised by Jessica René Peterson.

“Activity: Applying the Developmental Life Course Perspective to Your Life” by Jessica René Peterson is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Figure 7.7. Graphic by Jessica René Peterson is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

“Developmental and Life Course Perspective Question Set” was created by ChatGPT and is not subject to copyright. Edits for relevance, alignment, and meaningful answer feedback by Colleen Sanders are licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Paragraph in “Developmental and Life Course Perspective” adapted from “Cognitive Theory of Development” Psychology 2e, OpenStax, by Rose M. Spielman, William J. Jenkins, Marilyn D. Lovett which is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Modifications by Jessica René Peterson, licensed under CC BY 4.0, include brief adaptation to a criminological context.

Figure 7.5 A. “Lindsay Lohan in a video for Allure in 2023” by Condé Nast is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Figure 7.5 B. “Mark Wahlberg 2, 2012” by Eva Rinaldi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Figure 7.5 C. “Dwayne Johnson 2, 2013” by Eva Rinaldi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Figure 7.6. Photo of Terrie E. Moffit from Duke University is included under fair use.