Pathways to Crime: Age, Development and Crime

Monday, 29 October 2007

Lecture Outline

• Age-crime curve

• Hirschi and Gottfredson: invariant relationship

• Terrie Moffitt: Adolescent limited v. career criminal

• Sampson and Laub: Pathways in and out of crime

Aging and Crime

John Braithwaite’s “13 facts about crime” Braithwaite (1989)

7 relate to young people

– Crime is perpetrated disproportionately by 15–25 year olds.

– Crime is committed disproportionately by unmarried people.

– Young people who are strongly attached to their school are less likely to engage in crime.

– Young people who have high educational and occupational aspirations are less likely to engage in crime.

– Young people who do poorly at school are more likely to engage in crime.

– Young people who are strongly attached to their parents are less likely to engage in crime.

– Young people who have friendships with criminals are more likely to engage in crime themselves.

Patterns of Youth Offending

Peak age of offending by offence type

Persuasive Theories

• Subcultural Theory

• Control Theory

• Neutralization and Drift Theory

• Crime requires skills and abilities associated with aging

Problems with existing theories

• Physical maturation: the peak age of offending precedes 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?

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’

Terrie Moffitt

2 ‘types’ of offenders: Adolescence-Limited & Life-Course-Persistent

Sampson and Laub

• Methodology tending towards “childhood determinism”

– “It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then maintain that in their youth they were little butterflies” (George Valliant, 2002)

– Start with adult offenders, you will find childhood deviance

– However, start with childhood deviants, you will find a variety of pathways

– Methodological problems confounded by cultural beliefs about childhood

• Followed up participants in Glueck & Glueck’s classic study “Unravelling Juvenile Delinquency”

• 500 men aged c. 70; born Boston, 1920’s & 1930s

• Balance between “reductionism” and “wholism”

• “Turning points” are key: changes in life circumstances (e.g. jobs, marriage, fatherhood)

• Desistance can be a conscious, or unconscious decision

• Desistance draws on structured routines, social bonds, formal and informal supervision

• What is different about persistent offenders?

– Not one factor

– A life characterised by instability and chaos

– Dangers of over-determinism

• over-predictive

• self-fulfilling prophecy

• stigmatising

Trajectories v. Pathways

• Trajectories

– the life course of criminal behaviour is determined early in life

– Aim: inhibiting the development of criminal potential in individuals

– Response to risk factors

• Pathways

– criminal behaviour is the result of decisions and turning points throughout life

– Aim: crime reduction effort targeted throughout life course

Key Reading (all on Wikisite)

• Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson (1983) ’Age and the Explanation of Crime’ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 89, No. 3.

• John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson (2001) ‘Understanding Desistance from Crime’ Crime and Justice Vol. 28

• Terrie E. Moffitt (1993) ‘Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy’ Psychological Review, Vol. 100, No. 4.