Age, Crime, and the Early Life Course

On the number and shape of developmental/life-course violence, aggression, and delinquency trajectories: A state-of-the-art review

“…Many studies have supported the existence of the "age-crime" curve, which displays the population-level crime trends across the life-course (Blumstein & Cohen, 1979Blumstein, Cohen, & Farrington, 1988;Blumstein et al, 1986;Cohen & Land, 1987;Farrington, 1986;Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990;Greenberg, 1985;Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1983, 1985Nagin & Paternoster, 1991;Nagin & Farrington, 1992;Piquero, Farrington, & Blumstein, 2003, 2007Sampson & Laub, 1990Shavit & Rattner, 1988;Steffensmeier, Allan, Harer, & Streifel, 1989;Steffensmeier, Streifel, & Shihadeh, 1992). Moffitt's taxonomy of crime applies a developmental perspective to criminal behavior, focusing on the decrease in criminality and delinquency as adolescents age (Moffitt, 1993).…”

4 Age–Crime Curve and Criminal Career Patterns

“…At issue was the fundamental way to approach the understanding and study of crimeis it general or developmental, or both? Some studies have generally supported their invariance and/or inexplicable hypotheses (Britt, 1992;Le Blanc, 1997a;Steffensmeier & Streifel, 1991;Shavit & Rattner, 1988;Tittle & Grasmick, 1997;Wikström, 1990) using various sources of data. Other studies were equivocal (Brame & Piquero, 2003;Marvell & Moody, 1991;Shavit & Rattner, 1988;Steffensmeier, Allan, Harer, & Streifel, 1989;Tittle & Grasmick, 1997) about the age-crime relationship, while others were more critical (Blumstein, Cohen, & Farrington, 1988a, 1988bFarrington, 1986;Greenberg, 1985).…”

age, social learning, and social bonding in adolescent substance use

“…They have challenged existing theory to come up with a good explanation of the well-known empirical relationship of delinquency and crime to age. They and others have addressed the issue of the shape of this relationship, whether it is an inverted-J curve or ts another pattern and whether or not it is invariant (Greenberg 1985(Greenberg , 1988(Greenberg , 1994Ste ensmeier et al 1989 ;Tittle 1995;Reed and Yeager 1996; see also Shavit and Rattner 1988;Gartner and Nash Parker 1990;Britt 1992 ;Jang and Krohn 1995). They have also, along with others (Greenberg 1988;Warr 1993;Sampson and Laub 1993;Tittle 1995;Bartusch et al 1997), addressed the issue of what, if any, theoretical perspective can account for whatever pattern of relationship can be shown to exist between age and criminal or deviant behavior.…”