Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency

Terence Thornberry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351522397
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency, Terence P. Thornberry and his contributors show that criminal behavior is not a static human attribute, but ebbs and flows over the life course of the individual. Criminal behavior tends to follow a distinct psychological pattern. It is relatively uncommon during childhood, is initiated by most offenders during adolescence, flourishes during late adolescence and early childhood, and usually diminishes or disappears by the mid-twenties. This pattern is not characteristic of all people--some never commit crimes and others become career criminals--but it is a general description of the developmental pattern of criminal offenders. This pattern has profound implications for theories of crime and delinquency. Not only does it explain initiation into, maintenance of, and desistance from involvement in crime, it offers insight into why crime flourishes during adolescence. Traditional theories of crime and delinquency have often failed to distinguish among different phases of criminal careers. They tend to ignore developmental changes that occur across a person's life course, changes that coincide with and can explain the causes and patterns of criminal behavior. This paperback edition of the seventh volume of the distinguished series Advances in Criminological Theory moves us from static identifications of the criminal by presenting a broad range of developmental explanations of crime. Each contributor articulates a developmental or life course perspective in explaining how people become involved in delinquency and crime. Each covers a wide range of theoretical territory and reveals how a developmental perspective enhances the explanatory power of traditional theories of crime and delinquency. This volume is an invaluable tool for criminologists, sociologists, psychologists, and other professionals seeking to teach how crime and violence can be understood in our culture.

1

Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Offending: A Complementary Pair of Developmental Theories

Terrie E. Moffitt

Introduction

There are marked individual differences in the stability of antisocial behavior. Many people behave antisocially, but their antisocial behavior is temporary and situational. By contrast, the antisocial behavior of some people is very stable and persistent. Temporary, situational antisocial behavior is quite common in the population, especially among male and female adolescents. Persistent, stable antisocial behavior is found among a relatively small number of mostly males. The central tenet of this essay is that temporary versus persistent antisocial persons constitute two qualitatively distinct types of persons. In particular, I suggest that juvenile delinquency conceals two qualitatively distinct categories of individuals, each in need of its own distinct theoretical explanation.

A Typology that Addresses the Shape of the Curve of Crime Over Age

When official rates of crime are plotted against age, the rates for both prevalence and incidence of offending appear highest during adolescence; they peak sharply at about age seventeen and drop precipitously in young adulthood. With the advent of alternate measurement strategies—most notably self-reports of deviant behavior—we have learned that arrest statistics merely reflect the tip of the deviance iceberg (Hood and Sparks 1970). Actual rates of illegal behavior soar so high during adolescence that participation in delinquency appears to be a normal part of teen life (Elliott, Ageton, Huizinga, Knowles, and Canter 1983). The majority of criminal offenders are teenagers; by the early twenties, the number of active offenders decreases by over 50 percent; by age twenty-eight, almost 85 percent of former delinquents desist from offending (Blumstein and Cohen 1987; Farrington 1986). With slight variations, this general relation between age and crime obtains among males and females, for most types of crimes, during recent historical periods, and in numerous Western nations (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983).

Until recently, research on age and crime has relied on official data, primarily arrest and conviction records. As a result, the left-hand side of the age-crime curve has been censored. Indeed, in many empirical comparisons between early onset and late onset antisocial behavior, “early” has been artifactually defined as mid-adolescence on the basis of first police arrest or court conviction (Farrington et al. 1990). However, research on childhood conduct disorder has now documented that antisocial behavior begins long before the age when it is first encoded in police data banks. Indeed, we now know that the steep decline in antisocial behavior between ages seventeen and thirty is mirrored by a steep incline in antisocial behavior between ages seven and seventeen (Loeber, Stouthamer-Loeber, Van Kammen, and Farrington 1989; Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin 1972). Further, we may extend the left-hand tail of the age-crime curve by adding developmental psychologists’ reports of childhood aggression (Pepler and Rubin 1991), and mental health researchers’ reports of conduct disorder (Kazdin 1987), to criminologists’ studies of self-reported delinquency and official crime. So doing, it becomes obvious that manifestations of antisocial behavior emerge very early in the life course, and remain present thereafter.

Although there is widespread agreement about the curve of crime over age, there are few convincing explanations for the shape of the curve. The typology presented here addresses this issue by drawing attention to two trajectories concealed within the curve of crime over age. Timing and duration of the course of antisocial involvement are the defining features of the two proposed types of offenders.

Evidence for a Life-Course-Persistent Type

In this typology, a small group of persons engages in antisocial behavior of one sort or another at every stage of life; they make up the childhood and adulthood tails of the age-crime curve, and participate during adolescence too. I have labelled these persons life-course-persistent, to reflect the continuous course of their antisocial behavior.

Is there any evidence that a small number of persons in the general population show antisocial behavior that is life-course-persistent? To begin, epidemiological research has shown that there is remarkable uniformity in the prevalence rates of different manifestations of severe antisocial behavior: Regardless of their age, fewer than 10 percent of males warrant an official antisocial designation. For example, about 5 percent of preschool boys are considered by their parents or caretakers to be “very difficult to manage” (McGee, Partridge, Williams, and Silva 1991). The prevalence of Conduct Disorder among elementary-school-aged boys has been found to be between 4 percent and 9 percent in several countries (Costello 1989). About 6 percent of boys are first arrested by police as preteens (Moffitt and Silva 1988a; Wolfgang et al. 1972); such early arrest is important because it is the best predictor of long-term recidivistic offending. The rate of conviction for a violent offense in young adult males is between 3 percent and 6 percent (Moffitt, Mednick, and Gabrielli 1989), and about 4 percent of male adolescents self-report sustained careers of serious violence (three or more violent offenses per year for five years; Elliott, Huizinga, and Morse 1986). Finally, the prevalence of adult men with antisocial personality disorder is estimated at about 4 percent to 5 percent (Robins 1985).

It is possible, of course, that the persons who constitute these epidemiological statistics at different ages are all different individuals. But the longitudinal data suggest otherwise: it is more likely that the remarkable constancy of prevalence rates reflects the reoccurrence of the same life-course-persistent individuals in different antisocial categories at different ages. Robins (1966, 1978) has shown that there are virtually no cases of adult antisocial personality disorder that did not also have conduct disorder as children. White, Moffitt, Earls, Robins, and Silva (1990) found notable continuity from disobedient and aggressive behavior at age three to later childhood conduct disorder, and then to arrest by police in the early teen years. Loeber (1982) reviewed research that pinpoints a first arrest between ages seven and eleven as particularly important for predicting long-term adult offending. Hare and McPherson (1984) have reported that a conviction for violence in the early twenties is characteristic of almost all men who later become diagnosed with antisocial (psychopathic) personality disorder.

In his analysis of a sample of third-grade boys, Patterson (1982) found that the most aggressive 5 percent of the boys constituted the most persistent group as well; 39 percent of them ranked above the ninety-fifth percentile on aggression ten years later, and 100 percent of them were still above the median. Similarly, Loeber (1982) has reviewed research showing that stability of youngsters’ antisocial behavior across time is linked with stability across situations, and that both forms of stability are characteristic of a relatively small group of persons with extremely antisocial behavior. This point is illustrated in a longitudinal investigation of a representative cohort of 1037 New Zealand children born in 1972–73. In this sample, I identified a group of boys whose antisocial behavior was rated above average at each of seven biennial assessments (ages three, five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, and fifteen). The boys were also rated as very antisocial by three different reporting agents (parents, teachers, and self). Five percent of the boys in the sample met these selection criteria. As a group, their mean antisocial ratings were more than a standard deviation above the norm for boys at every age. A disproportionate amount of the measured stability in the New Zealand sample could be attributed to these few boys; when they were excluded from calculations, the 8-year stability coefficient for teacher ratings was reduced from .28 (R² = .078) to .16 (R² = .025), indicating that 5 percent of the sample accounted for 68 percent of the sample's stability. (If antisocial behavior had been a stable characteristic throughout the sample, with most boys retaining their relative standing in the group across time, then excluding the top 5 percent of the sample should not have affected the stability coefficient.)

In a test of this taxonomy conducted recently by Nagin and colleagues (Nagin and Land 1993; Nagin, Farrington, and Moffitt, 1995) a group of males whose history of criminal conviction resembles the life-course-persistent pattern was identified among the 411 members of the sample studied by Farrington and West (1990). The group, which contained 12 percent of this working-class London sample and was labelled “high-rate chronic offenders” by Nagin and Land, showed a distinctive pattern of the lambda index of individual offending rate that remained high and stable from age ten to thirty-two, with only a small peak near age eighteen.

There are still gaps in the epidemiological data base; each of the above-cited studies connected only two or three points in the life course. Nonetheless, the consistency is impressive: A substantial body of longitudinal research consistently points to a very small group of males who display high rates of antisocial behavior across time and in diverse situations. The professional nomenclature may change, but the faces remain the same as they drift through successive systems aimed at curbing their deviance; schools, juvenile-justice programs, psychiatric-treatment centers, and prisons. The topography of their behavior may change with changing opportunities, but the disposition to act antisocially persists throughout the life course.

Evidence for an Adolescence-Limited Type

In contrast to the small group of life-course-persistent antisocials, a larger group of persons fills out the adolescent peak of the age-crime curve with crime careers of shorter duration. Consistent with this notion, English and American studies have shown that the adolescent peak reflects a temporary increase in the number of people involved in antisocial behavior, not a temporary acceleration in the offense rates of individuals (Farrington 1983; Wolfgang, Thornberry and Figlio 1987). I have labelled these persons adolescence-limited, to reflect their more temporary involvement in antisocial behavior. The brief tenure of their delinquent participation should not obscure their prevalence in the population, or the gravity of their crimes.

By contrast with the rare life-course-persistent type, adolescence-limited delinquency is ubiquitous. Several studies have shown that about one-third of males are arrested during their lifetime for a serious criminal offense, while fully four-fifths of males have police contact for some minor infringement (Farrington, Ohlin and Wilson 1986). Most of these police contacts are made during the adolescent years. Indeed, numerous rigorous self-report studies of r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Editors
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Editor's Note
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Some Advantages of Developmental and Life-Course Perspectives for the Study of Crime and Delinquency
• Chapter 1. Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Offending: A Complementary Pair of Developmental Theories
• Chapter 2. Life-Course Contingencies in the Development of Adolescent Antisocial Behavior: A Matching Law Approach
• Chapter 3. Stability and Change in Crime over the Life Course: A Strain Theory Explanation
• Chapter 4. A Life-Course Theory of Cumulative Disadvantage and the Stability of Delinquency
• Chapter 5. A Symbolic Interactionist Theory of Role-Transitions, Role-Commitments, and Delinquency
• Chapter 6. A Generic Control Theory of the Criminal Phenomenon: The Structural and Dynamic Statements of an Integrative Multilayered Control Theory
• Chapter 7. Crime and Capitalization: Toward a Developmental Theory of Street Crime in America
• Chapter 8. Developmental Aspects of Adult Crime
• Comment
• Name Index
• Subject Index