Age and Crime
Age and crime refers to the relationship between a person's age and their likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior. Research consistently shows that crime rates are highest among young people, peaking in late adolescence and early adulthood, and then declining as individuals age. This pattern is known as the age-crime curve and is a key concept in understanding the dynamics of criminal behavior.
7 Key excerpts on "Age and Crime"
eBook - ePubThe Craft of Criminology
Selected Papers
- Travis Hirschi(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...When attention shifts to the meaning or implications of the relation between Age and Crime, this relation easily qualifies as the most difficult fact in the field. Efforts to discern the meaning of the large amount of research on the topic in terms supplied by those doing the research have turned out to be futile (e.g., Wootton 1959: chap. 5 ; see also Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin 1972: 105), as have efforts to explain the relation in statistical terms (Rowe and Tittle 1977). Faced with this intransigent fact, the response in criminology has been apparently scientific and logical. Theorists are frequently reminded that their explanations of crime must square with the age distribution, and theories are often judged by their ability to deal with “maturational reform,” “spontaneous remission,” or the “aging-out” effect. Although some theories fare better than others when the age criterion is invoked, no theory that focuses on differences between offenders and nonoffenders avoids altogether the complaint that it provides an inadequate explanation of the age distribution. Given the persuasiveness of the age criticism of traditional theories, it is not surprising to find recent explanations of crime explicitly tailored to fit the accepted variability in crime by age (Matza 1964; Greenberg 1979; Trasler 1980). In fact, there is reason to believe that age could replace social class as the master variable of sociological theories of crime (see Empey 1978; Glaser 1978; Greenberg 1979). On the research side, the age effect has been instrumental in the rise of the longitudinal study to its current status as the preferred method of criminological research. The major studies of the past decade, including several now under way, have used this design (Wolfgang et al. 1972; West and Farrington 1973; Elliott, Ageton, and Huizinga 1978; McCord 1979; Wadsworth 1979)...
eBook - ePub- Azrini Wahidin, Maureen Cain, Azrini Wahidin, Maureen Cain(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Willan(Publisher)
...Chapter 1 Ageing, crime, and society: an invitation to a criminology Azrini Wahidin and Maureen Cain How did it happen? Age has been a key variable in the study of ‘conventional’ criminality and in criminological theorising at least since the Chicago School focused attention on migration, socialisation, and the young offender. Young people still predominate among those caught for conventional offending in the west, and the young were for many years the most popular subjects of ethnographic work. In spite of this, age has remained under-theorised in criminology, a last bastion, perhaps, of positivist categorisation (Cain 2003), long after ‘race’, ‘gender’, and ‘sex’ have all earned their postmodern quotation marks. Ageing as duration has been studied in relation to rates of desistance, but age as a social construction and ageing as a social process have played little part in our understanding of the phenomena of victimisation, crime, and punishment. Thus, in order to begin to theorise the relation of older people or ‘elders’ to these processes we have first had to recognise that for the ‘old’ as well as the ‘young’ very little is pre-given. We and our contributors have had to suspend our common sense upon the subject. Once this suspension is achieved, the relationship of older people to crime emerges as complex and varied, and as amenable to explanation in terms of what are by now normal post-modern theoretical categories such as subjectivity, identity construction, agency, and risk, as well as the interplay between these categories and what Powell and Wahidin (this book, pp. 17–34) have called the political economy of ageing. Before going deeper into our argument let us just point out that while domestic violence against elderly women (aged 65–74 and 75 years+) is reportedly less than it is for younger women, the rate is still higher than the rate for men in those age groups (Simmons et al. 2002): victimisation of the aged remains gendered...
eBook - ePubUnderstanding Youth Crime
An Australian Study
- Mark Lynch, John S. Western, John S. Western(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 3 Age and Offending: Characteristics and Criminological Factors Mark Lynch, Emma Ogilvie, Wing Hong Chui Introduction The aim of this chapter is to examine the relationship between age and offending by focusing on the kinds of criminal behaviour reported by the Sibling Study respondents at different stages in adolescence. Age is often advanced as a crucial determinant of young people’s behaviour and involvement in crime. Emler and Reicher argue that ‘the age distribution is the single most conspicuous feature of recorded criminal offences’ (1995:73). The nature of this age distribution has led some researchers to argue that youth is the most ‘criminogenic ’ 1 age (Shoemaker 1996, Farrington 1997, Mukherjee 1997, Muncie 1999, Jenson, Potter and Howard 2001). One plausible explanation for adolescence possibly being an especially criminogenic stage of life is that adolescence is the transition from childhood to adulthood and as such is widely accepted as a period of some ‘storm and stress’ (see Bessant, Sercombe and Watts 1998, Coleman and Hendry 1999). During adolescence, most young people are engaged in a process of ‘carving out’ for themselves a degree of material and emotional independence. For some, this process may be marked by the pursuit of illegitimate excitement and the thrill of rebellion. In Australia at least, it is not uncommon for young people to be involved at some point in relatively minor criminality or anti-social behaviour such as underage drinking, graffiti, shoplifting and fighting—though they may not necessarily be either caught or prosecuted (see Rutter, Giller and Hagell 1998). An alternative, but equally plausible explanation for apparently high levels of offending among young people, is that their ‘visibility’ in public spaces leads to heightened levels of ‘stops and searches’ by police (Finnane 1994, White 1994)...
eBook - ePubUnderstanding Criminal Behaviour
Psychosocial Perspectives on Criminality and Violence
- David Jones(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...They are better able to hold in mind several different dimensions of a topic at the same time and so generate more alternatives in their decisions making…. During adolescence, there is a marked increase in emotional introspection together with a tendency to look back with regret and to look forward with apprehension. That is, not only do young people become increasingly able to consider the long-term consequences of their actions, they also tend to consider the long-term consequences more in terms of their own sense of responsibility and with increased awareness of the effects of their actions on other people. (Rutter et al. 1998: 28) Rutter et al. (1998) also suggest that developing capacities to experience and understand guilt and shame might also be significant. The difficulty with many of these concepts is that they do not necessarily lend themselves to easy measurement and the provision of concrete answers. A number of these particular issues are taken up in the next section that seeks to understand why it is that so many young people, rather than older adults, seem to commit offences. If we can begin to understand this, perhaps we can also begin to tease out the most significant developmental or social factors that underlie the association between Age and Crime. Why do young people commit crime? There is a strong association in the public’s mind between ‘youth’ and ‘crime’. A case can be made that this link has been made for a couple of centuries at least (Shore 2000). Indeed, the facts on the relationship between age and offending seem to be rather robust (Muncie 2015). As the longitudinal studies analysed in Chapter 3 demonstrate, there do seem to be strong correlations between age and offending. The peak age of occurrence of a first recorded offence is around 12–13 years of age (MORI 2004 suggest the peak age for first-time offending is 11–12)...
- David P. Farrington, David P. Farrington(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 A General Age-Graded Theory of Crime: Lessons Learned and the Future of Life-Course Criminology Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub The intellectual move we take in this chapter is to elucidate the life-course implications of a general age-graded theory of crime. In doing so we depart from the modus operandi of most developmental criminological theory by looking at changes in criminal behavior through a common theoretical lens that we have built through a longstanding inquiry (Sampson & Laub, 1993; Laub & Sampson, 2003). The growing tendency in developmental criminology is for greater specificity, not generality, manifested most noticeably in moves to subdivide the offender population and characteristics of the so-called criminal career, apportioning bits and pieces to different theoretical positions and different causal influences. Hirschi (1979) once called this the end–to-end or side-by-side strategy of theoretical integration. Considering that the pieces of the developmental criminological pie are large, this temptation is understandable. Farrington (2003), for example, notes key results developmental criminology ought to explain, such as the onset of delinquency, versatility, escalation, co-offending, persistence, and desistance, to name a few. With all the complexity implied, it follows that one might need to posit a theory for onset and another for continuation, or one theory for violent crime and another for property crime, and so on and so forth. The list is endless and indeed many have argued for just such an approach. Or even more likely and increasingly attractive to many, one might divide up the offender population into different types, asserting that some factors uniquely explain persistent offenders whereas another set of causal factors explain desistance...
eBook - ePub- Janet Wilmoth, Andrew London, Janet M Wilmoth, Andrew S London(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...We then examine the most well-developed theories in life-course criminology. Next, we consider how and why the extant criminological literature on peer effects has produced compelling observational evidence but maintain that causal evidence in this field remains somewhat limited. In a brief methodological aside, we discuss the importance of causal estimates for the development of policies related to adolescent peer influences and prevention. To illustrate these concepts, we provide a brief review of a few of the most well-known intervention strategies proposed for and evaluated among adolescents. Finally, we conclude with a proposal for a renewed policy emphasis on prevention strategies that focus on peer relations in adolescence. Our proposal includes a call for a reinvigorated effort to demonstrate empirically the causal effects of peers on delinquent outcomes among adolescents. The Age–Crime Curve and Life-Course Criminology One of criminology’s most consistently demonstrated findings is the rapid development and concentration of criminal behavior in young adulthood, or the age–crime curve. The relationship between Age and Crime varies somewhat across time, space, demographic groups, and different crime types. However, it tends to follow a unimodal distribution with a rapid increase in criminal involvement beginning in early adolescence that peaks in the late teens to early twenties (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990; Steffensmeier et al. 1989; Moffitt 1993). Although this pattern is generally observed, the degree of desistance with age varies, and there is some evidence that criminal behavior has relatively recently become even more concentrated in adolescence and young adulthood (Steffensmeier et al. 1989). Building from the empirical foundation of the age–crime curve, criminology has developed a strong life-course perspective...
eBook - ePub- Elaine Cassel, Douglas A. Bernstein(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Like adults, most adolescent criminals commit nonviolent offenses involving theft, burglary, destruction of property, and drugs (FBI, 2004a ; L. Siegal & Walsh, 2006). Most of the adolescents who do commit violent crimes showed aggressiveness in childhood (Heide, 1998), but as noted in our discussion of pathways to crime in chapter 7, some do not display aggres sion and violence until they are teenagers (Loeber & Stouthaimer-Loeber, 1998). Only a small minority of adult offenders have no history of aggression or violence earlier in life (Farrington, 1994). Adolescence: Challenges and Risks The word adolescence comes from the Latin meaning “growing up” or “coming to maturity.” Although adolescence normally refers to the teenage years, our discussion includes children who are a year or two younger than 13. Aristotle and Plato were the first to identify adolescence as a developmental stage distinct from childhood and adulthood, but it would be 2,500 years before anyone systematically studied it. In the Middle Ages, children and adolescents were regarded as miniature adults who had not yet been taught to behave like adults (Arnett, 2004). During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, teenagers were—like younger children— still being treated as immature versions of adults, and capable of working like adults. Eighteenth century philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were the first to consider people from a developmental perspective, but it was not until the early 20th century—when sociology appeared as a discipline and when child labor laws were enacted—that psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists focused serious attention on adolescence as part of their efforts to understand the biological, psychological, and social development of individuals throughout the life span. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1904) was the first to use the term adolescence to describe the teenage years...
