Age and Criminal Activity
Lecture 6 – Troubles of Youth
Lecture Outline
• Importance of Childhood
– Perceptions and Realities
• Age-Crime Curve
– Underlying Distributions
• Perspectives on the Process of Aging
– Trajectories or Pathways?
• Persistent Heterogeneity
• State Dependency
• The Study of Criminal Careers
– Onset, Duration and Desistance
Importance of Childhood
• Upbringing, early childhood and even pre-natal
factors seen by many as either
– A key factor in determining personality
– A signal of underlying deviant personality (see
Farrington, Moffitt)
• Others (see Furedi) argue that “parental
determinism” is overstated, and used to justify a
interventionist and judgmental attitude to the
family -> “Paranoid Parenting”
Proportion of 10- to 25-year-olds offending in the last 12 months (2005 OCJS)
45
40
35
Percentage
30
25
20
Male
15
Female
10
5
0
11
13
15
17
19
21
23
25
Age
• Young men offend at higher rates than
young women
• Evidence, though, that gender differential
narrowing
• “Peak age of offending” lower for women
Hirschi and Gottfredson
• Central thesis
– “invariant” age distribution of crime
• across types of crime
• across social settings
– Current criminological theory cannot explain
onset and desistance
– Age needs to be recognised, but other
criminological causal theories do not need to
be ‘thrown out’
Problems with existing theories
• Physical maturation? - the peak age of
offending precedes full physical maturation
• Social Bonding: the age at which deviant
groupings are at the strongest, coincides with
the decline in offending
• How is it that social bonding becomes
strengthened?
• Why is the ‘desistance curve’ smooth, and the
effects the same between 19-24 as, say 29-34?
Investigating the Age- Crime Curve:
Two (or more?) distinct groups?
Adolescent Limited Offenders
Lifetime Persistent Offenders
Trajectories v. Pathways
• Trajectories
– the level of criminal propensity is determined early in life:
persistent heterogeneity
– Research Aim: identify risk factors that predict criminal
propensity
– Policy aim: inhibiting the development of criminal potential in
early stages of individuals’ lives
• Pathways
– criminal behaviour is the result of decisions and turning points
throughout life: state dependency
– Research Aim: identify how ‘events’ in people’s lives can change
chances of offending
– Policy Aim: crime reduction effort targeted throughout life course
Key Considerations
• A need to address how offending ‘careers’
progress
• Onset of offending
• Duration of offending
• Desistance of offending
Considerations
• Teenage offending: increased numbers of
offenders, or increased rates of offending?
• Changing characteristics of offending
across age groups? Types and range of
crime committed?
• Correlation between offending at different
ages? Why?
• How do these considerations affect policy
and practice?