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.