A Life-Course View of the Development of Crime

Abstract

In this article, the authors present a life-course perspective on crime and a critique of the developmental criminology paradigm. Their fundamental argument is that persistent offending and desistance—or trajectories of crime—can be meaningfully understood within the same theoretical framework, namely, a revised agegraded theory of informal social control. The authors examine three major issues. First, they analyze data that undermine the idea that developmentally distinct groups of offenders can be explained by unique causal processes. Second, they revisit the concept of turning points from a time-varying view of key life events. Third, they stress the overlooked importance of human agency in the development of crime. The authors' life-course theory envisions development as the constant interaction between individuals and their environment, coupled with random developmental noise and a purposeful human agency that they distinguish from rational choice. Contrary to influential developmental theories in criminology, the authors thus conceptualize crime as an emergent process reducible neither to the individual nor the environment.

The Adolescence–Adulthood Transition and Desistance from Crime: Examining the Underlying Structure of Desistance

“…Marriage, parenthood, and employment are key examples of essential turning points that typically constitute powerful informal social controls that can impact routine activities, criminal opportunities, and reduce offenders decisions to continue offending into adulthood (e.g., [43,73]). From this perspective, it is not solely the presence of these life events and turning points, but their quality and stability involving strong prosocial ties in different contexts (e.g., at home and at work) with prosocial peers that disapprove of deviant behaviors while promoting prosocial ones that influence desistance (e.g., [40]).…”

“…Researchers, however, somewhat disagree as to how long a significant non-offending state needs to be to be indicative of desistance (i.e., 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years; e.g., [74]). The intermittency of offending for some offenders [73,67], therefore, may lead to issues of false negatives or the false identification of someone as a desister, when in fact, with a longer follow-up period, these individuals do reoffend [9]. Methodologically, desistance from crime as an event is the least sophisticated operationalization.…”

Patterns of criminal achievement in sexual offending: Unravelling the “successful” sex offender

“…Since the publication of the "Criminal Careers and Career Criminals" (Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986), research on this issue has evolved around three main themes: (a) the modeling of offending, the longitudinal sequence of crimes, crime PATTERNS OF CRIMINAL ACHIEVEMENT IN SEXUAL OFFENDING 4 specialization, and the study of the "chronic offender" (e.g., Farrington & Loeber, 1998); (b) the understanding of criminal persistence by examining the role of formative years, early life stages and the study of the "early onset" offender (e.g., Moffitt, 1993), and; (c) the life events, life transitions, informal controls, and the study of the "desistor" (e.g., Sampson & Laub, 2005). A fourth theme emerged more recently, as research on the sociology of crime and criminal achievement, the role of mentorship, criminal networks, and professionalization has helped garnered information about the "successful criminal" (e.g., Bouchard & Nguyen, 2010;McCarthy & Hagan, 2001;Nguyen & Bouchard, 2011;Tremblay & Morselli, 2000;Morselli & Tremblay, 2004;Tremblay, 2010).…”

Analyzing Criminal Trajectory Profiles: Bridging Multilevel and Group-based Approaches Using Growth Mixture Modeling

“…Research on the relationship between age and criminal behavior continues to play a prominent role in the criminological literature (for overviews see Sampson and Laub 2005a;Piquero et al 2003;Piquero 2007). The increasing availability of individual-level longitudinal data in criminology (e.g., Elliot 1985;Tracy et al 1990;Farrington and West 1993;Nieuwbeerta and Blokland 2003) has led to a larger number of empirical papers in recent years with individual ''criminal careers'' as the outcome of interest.…”