Age and Criminal Activity

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Age and Criminal Activity

• Lecture 6 Troubles of Youth

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Lecture Outline

• Importance of Childhood
• Perceptions and Realities
• Age-Crime Curve
• Underlying Distributions
• Perspectives on the Process of Aging
• Trajectories or Pathways?
• Persistent Heterogeneity
• State Dependency
• The Study of Criminal Careers
• Onset, Duration and Desistance

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Importance of Childhood

• Upbringing, early childhood and even pre-natal
  factors seen by many as either
• A key factor in determining personality
• A signal of underlying deviant personality (see
  Farrington, Moffitt)
• Others (see Furedi) argue that parental
  determinism is overstated, and used to justify a
  interventionist and judgmental attitude to the
  family -gt Paranoid Parenting

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• Young men offend at higher rates than young women
• Evidence, though, that gender differential
  narrowing
• Peak age of offending lower for women

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Hirschi and Gottfredson

• Central thesis
• invariant age distribution of crime
• across types of crime
• across social settings
• Current criminological theory cannot explain
  onset and desistance
• Age needs to be recognised, but other
  criminological causal theories do not need to be
  thrown out

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Problems with existing theories

• Physical maturation? - the peak age of offending
  precedes full physical maturation
• Social Bonding the age at which deviant
  groupings are at the strongest, coincides with
  the decline in offending
• How is it that social bonding becomes
  strengthened?
• Why is the desistance curve smooth, and the
  effects the same between 19-24 as, say 29-34?

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Investigating the Age- Crime CurveTwo (or
more?) distinct groups?
Adolescent Limited Offenders
Lifetime Persistent Offenders
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Trajectories v. Pathways

• Trajectories
• the level of criminal propensity is determined
  early in life persistent heterogeneity
• Research Aim identify risk factors that predict
  criminal propensity
• Policy aim inhibiting the development of
  criminal potential in early stages of
  individuals lives
• Pathways
• criminal behaviour is the result of decisions and
  turning points throughout life state dependency
• Research Aim identify how events in peoples
  lives can change chances of offending
• Policy Aim crime reduction effort targeted
  throughout life course

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Key Considerations

• A need to address how offending careers
  progress
• Onset of offending
• Duration of offending
• Desistance of offending

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Considerations

• Teenage offending increased numbers of
  offenders, or increased rates of offending?
• Changing characteristics of offending across age
  groups? Types and range of crime committed?
• Correlation between offending at different ages?
  Why?
• How do these considerations affect policy and
  practice?