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Objective This study examines the age‐crime relationship among terrorist offenders. Method This study relies on a data set of over 600 American terrorism offenders inspired by one of three Islamist groups: Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda. Results We find that the pattern of violent Islamist crime in the United States departs from the standard age‐crime curve in significant ways. Violent action among terrorist offenders peaks at a later age and occurs across a broader age range than is the case for ordinary violent crimes.

The research aimed to develop and test a new dynamic approach to preventive risk assessment of violent extremists. The well-known New York Police Department four-phase model was used as a starting point for the conceptualization of the radicalization process, and time-stamped biographical data collected from court documents and other public sources on American homegrown Salafi-jihadist terrorism offenders were used to test the model. Behavioral sequence patterns that reliably anticipate terrorist-related criminality were identified and the typical timelines for the pathways to criminal actions estimated for different demographic subgroups in the study sample. Finally, a probabilistic simulation model was used to assess the feasibility of the model to identify common high-frequency and high-risk sequential behavioral segment pairs in the offenders' pathways to terrorist criminality.

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