Criminal behavior during the life course
Week 1................................................................................................................................... 3
1. Hoorcollege..................................................................................................................... 3
2. Literatuur......................................................................................................................... 5
2.1 Elder - Handbook of the lifecourse............................................................................5
2.2 Steffensmeier - Age and the distribution of crime......................................................8
Week 2................................................................................................................................. 11
1. Hoorcollege................................................................................................................... 11
2. Literatuur....................................................................................................................... 14
2.1 Moffitt - Adolescence limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior.............14
2.2 Chen - Are teen delinquency abstainers social introverts?......................................17
Week 3................................................................................................................................. 20
1. Hoorcollege................................................................................................................... 20
2. Literatuur....................................................................................................................... 25
2.1 Sampson & Laub - Turning points in the life course: Why change matters to the
study of crime................................................................................................................ 25
2.2 Sampson and Laub - A Life-Course View of the Development of Crime..................27
Week 4................................................................................................................................. 31
1. Hoorcollege................................................................................................................... 31
2. Literatuur....................................................................................................................... 33
2.1 Brantingham - The dimensions of crime (pp. 7-54)..................................................33
2.2 Ruiter - Crime Location Choice: State of the Art and Avenues for Future Research40
2.3 Wilcox - Crime-event criminology: an overview.......................................................42
Week 5................................................................................................................................. 43
1. Hoorcollege................................................................................................................... 43
2. Literatuur....................................................................................................................... 47
2.1 Van der Weijer - The intergenerational transmission of violent offending................47
2.2 Wright & Cullen - Parental efficacy and delinquent behavior: Do control and support
matter?.......................................................................................................................... 49
Week 6................................................................................................................................. 52
1. Hoorcollege................................................................................................................... 52
2. Literatuur....................................................................................................................... 56
2.1 Rees & Pogarsky - One bad apple may not spoil the whole bunch: Best friends and
adolescent delinquency.................................................................................................56
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, 2.2 Kranenbarg, Ruiter & Gelder - Do cyber-birds flock together? Comparing deviance
among social network members of cyber-dependent offenders and traditional offenders
...................................................................................................................................... 59
Week 7................................................................................................................................. 62
1. Hoorcollege................................................................................................................... 62
2. Literatuur....................................................................................................................... 67
2.1 Giordano - Gender, crime and desistance...............................................................67
2.2 Uggen - Work as a turning point in the life course of criminals: A duration model of
age, employment and recidivism...................................................................................68
2.3 Zoutewelle - Criminality and family formation: Effects of marriage and parenthood on
criminal behavior for men and women...........................................................................71
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,Week 1
1. Hoorcollege
Er zijn 4 vormen van criminal career:
1. Participation: mensen die meedoen in crime vs. de mensen die er niet aan mee
doen.
a. Age of onset: De leeftijd waarop het eerste criminele gedrag wordt vertoond.
Start of the criminal career.
2. Frequency: de mate waarin crime wordt uitgevoerd, number of offences
a. Lambda: dit is dus de rate of activity, wordt zo genoemd in de literatuur.
3. Seriousness: minor vs. serious escalation/de-escalation, specialization
a. For example: shoplifting compared to homicide
b. Escalation/de-escaliasation: wordt het uitvoeren van crimes erger of minder
erg.
c. Specialization: voert de offender maar een soort crime uit of doet die
meerdere soorten.
4. Duration: Length of the criminal activity
a. Desistance: Het is een belangrijk concept, het is het proces van het
beëindigen van criminele activiteiten.
There is a significant relationship between age and crime → Age-crime curve.
When you look at crime statistics, adolescents and young adults commit a disproportionate
amount of crime. Arrests peak in late teens/early 20s and Teens and young adults report
more criminal behavior than other age groups (self-report).
The age-crime curve tells us how crime is distributed across a population according to the
age of a population. Yet it isn't enough because it ignores the variations in the shape of the
age-crime curve e.g. gender, early vs. late starters, types of crimes.
Hirschi & Gottfredson
Age-crime curve is invariant (het hangt niet af van verschillende variabelen): it hasn't
changed in 100 years. They thought that you could use their explanations at any point in
time to understand crime. So you don’t have to use sociological explanations, to understand
it.
But why does crime decline with age?
● Changes in social roles and contexts over time
● Depends on the type of crime (Commiting fraud asks for different skills and
knowledge than burglary).
Steffensmeier et al. Is against the critique of Hirschi.
● One of the main critique points is that they took data (crime rates over age) for the
US and investigated how different the age-crime curve was in comparison to the
burglary curve. Some forms of crime have a traditional age-crime curve, yet not all of
them are the same.
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, Gambling and fraud are older crimes. The peak for fraud is in a later stage in life then
burglary.
↳ So there are variations in age-crime curves, and we should explain why.
Dunger et al. is against Hirschi
Dunger et al. Is a later paper that went on about how Hirschi was wrong. They found big
differences between and in genders. So there is not one peak, you have late starters,
chronics, early starters. Also between gender there is a big difference in attendance, the
crime curve for women is much flatter.
Life course research
Life course research
At the basis of life course research is the difference in which we look at behavior.
There is a separation between: between-individual differences vs. within-individual
differences.
In normal life, we as humans all follow pathways. Depending on the social structures or
social system you live in. This social pathway is a determinant for the opportunities you have
and get. Social structures determine social pathways.
Trajectories: the path you follow (for example: your bachelor programme)
Transitions: these are the connections to trajectories (for example from middelbare school to
uni)
Age effects: age effect is how old you are.
Period effects: what’s happening in the period right now and how does it affect you? Periods
effect across age and cohorts. It influences the trajectories, transitions and opportunities.
Cohort effects: cohort effect is the kind of group / age group you are born in (gen z or gen x).
The cohort effect will interact with age.
● A young cohort will be affected by a coronavirus (period effect) different from an older
cohort. So eldery people have to be more careful than younger people.
There are 4 principles of life course:
1. Social-historical time and place: when and where you are born matters
○ Birth cohort
○ Historical context
○ Social change
2. Life-span
3. Human agency: the capacity to exercise control over our lives
○ Intentional choices / actions
○ Made within societal constraints
○ Ze kiezen iets anders binnen een bepaalde context.
4. Linked lives: Individuals are linked with each other (not only direct links, but also
networks)
○ Parents, peers, partners, siblings, communities
5. Timing: The age at which events occur affects trajectories and transitions.
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, ○ Timing of arrest, interventions, parental incarceration, negative life events
Key terms
● Cumulative continuity (of disadvantage)
○ Events/actions have causal effects.
○ So one event or action influences another.
○ Action in the past can cause change in actions in the future.
● Self-selection
○ Traits/disposition that can explain behavior
○ Variation in traits → variations in behavior
○ All of the events happening in a personal life can be explained by a stable
trait. There is some kind of trait or disposition causing criminal behavior.
2. Literatuur
2.1 Elder - Handbook of the lifecourse
Elder Jr., G.H., Johnson, M.K., Crosnoe, R. (2003). The emergence and development of life course theory. In J.T. Mortimer &
M.J. Shanahan (eds.), Handbook of the Life Course (pp. 3-19). Kluwer Academic/Plenum: New York.
By the mid-1920s, Thomas was emphasizing the vital need for a “longitudinal approach to
life history” using life record data. Disruptive societal events, such as the Great Depression
and WWI, and the pre-war lack of financial support for the social and behavioral sciences all
contributed to this neglect of life histories and trajectories.
The contextual challenge
Unlike today, the study of human lives was once exceedingly rare in sociology and
psychology, especially in relation to socio-historical context. How could a vigorous era of
research arise from such seemingly infertile ground?
The answer to this question lies in five major trends of the 20th century:
1. The maturation of early child development samples;
2. The rapidity of social change;
3. Changes in the composition of the U.S. and other populations;
4. The changing age structure of society;
5. The revolutionary growth of longitudinal research over the last three decades.
Pioneering psychologists of the early 20th century launched key longitudinal studies of
young people. Such studies were designed to follow the developmental patterns of children
and were not meant to extend past childhood, but eventually the studies were extended into
the adult years. The United States served as a crucible for the study of diversity. The
salience of such diversity on a social level emphasized the need to understand diversity on
an individual level—how the trajectories of individual lives differ across social groups.
Rapid growth of the oldest segment of society—the aging of the United States—assigned
greater significance to problems of the aged. Efforts to study such problems led to
increasing interest in the relation of earlier phases of life to later phases, from childhood to
adulthood, and the power of larger social forces to shape the lifelong developmental
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,trajectories of individuals. The final push towards a more complex treatment of human lives
came from the longitudinal research projects that began in the 1960s.
Responses to the challenge
Yet a variety of conceptual and methodological tools were still needed in order to study life
patterns and their dynamics in time. The life course as a theoretical orientation came from
this desire to understand social pathways, their developmental effects, and their relation to
personal and social-historical conditions.
Early models of social pathways generally centered on a single role sequence like that of a
life cycle. Children mature, marry, and have children who then grow up and start a family as
the cycle continues into another generation. The concept of “career” was another way of
linking roles across the life course. These careers are based on role histories in education,
work, or family.
In pursuit of models of the life course that would reflect historical and biographical context, a
number of useful concepts have been developed.
Social pathways are the trajectories of education and work, family and residences that are
followed by individuals and groups through society. These pathways are shaped by historical
forces and are often structured by social institutions. Individuals generally work out their own
life course and trajectories in relation to institutionalized pathways and normative patterns.
Trajectories; or sequences of roles and experiences, are themselves made up of transitions;
changes in state or role. The time between transitions is known as a duration. Transitions
often involve changes in status or identity, both personally and socially, and thus open up
opportunities for behavioral change. Turning points involve a substantial change in the
direction of one’s life, whether subjective or objective.
Age, Timing, And the Life Course
Generation-based models viewed individual lives in terms of the reproductive life cycle and
intergenerational processes of socialization. But it suffered from a loose connection to
historical time. Locating people in cohorts by birth year provides more precise historical
placement. People of different ages bring different experiences and resources to situations
and consequently adapt in different ways to new conditions.
● Cohort effect: when historical change differentiates the lives of successive birth
cohorts, it creates a cohort effect.
● Period effect: history can also take the form of a period effect when the impact of a
social change is relatively similar across successive birth cohorts.
Much effort to understand historical influence on lives has been devoted to examining
variations in age-related change across successive birth cohorts (e.g., Nesselroade &
Baltes, 1974). The historical experience of people in a specific birth cohort may vary
significantly. Variation can occur at both macro- and micro-levels.
↳ One macro-level example of within cohort variations concerns
geography, from a longitudinal study that is following 12th grade students
(1983–1985) from fifteen regions of the former Soviet Union up to 1999
and beyond (Titma & Tuma, 1995).
↳ A micro-level example of within cohort variation concerns individual
roles and personal attributes.
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,In addition to the link between age and historical time, age as a social construction also
differentiates the life course. The social meanings of age can structure the life course
through age expectations, and informal sanctions, social timetables, and generalized age
grades (such as childhood or adolescence). A normative concept of social time specifies an
appropriate age for transitions such as entry into school, marriage, and retirement, leading to
relatively “early” and “late” transitions. Thus, age represents not only a point in the life span
and a historical marker (Ryder,1965) but also a subjective understanding about the temporal
nature of life.
Paradigmatic principles in life course theory
1. The Principle of Life-Span Development: Human development and aging are lifelong
processes.
↳ Adults can and do experience fundamental changes—biological,
psychological, social—that are developmentally meaningful.
2. The Principle of Agency: Individuals construct their own life course through the
choices and actions they take within the opportunities and constraints of history and
social circumstance
↳ Children, adolescents and adults are not raised passively due to
social influence and structural constraints. Instead, they make
choices and compromises based on the alternatives that they
perceive for them.
The planning and choice-making of individuals, within the particular limitations
of their world, can have important consequences for future trajectories.
By their self-confidence, intellectual investment, and dependability, which
together define planfulness, adolescents can “better prepare themselves for
adult roles and will select, and be selected for, opportunities that give them a
head start”. But planfulness and its behavioral expression depend on context
and its constraints.
3. The Principle of Time and Place: The life course of individuals is embedded and
shaped by the historical times and places they experience over their lifetime
↳ As Gieryn (2000) observes, a place possesses three essential
features: geographic location; a material form or culture of one kind
or another; and investment with meaning and value.
4. The Principle of Timing: The developmental history and consequences of life
transitions, events, and behavioral patterns vary according to their timing in a
person’s life.
↳ For example, Harley and Mortimer (2000) find that very early
transitions to adult statuses, like leaving the parental home at a
relatively young age, entering marriage or a cohabiting relationship,
and becoming a parent, have harmful effects on mental health.
These different experiences in the transition to adulthood explain
the emergence of a socioeconomic gradient in mental health in
early adulthood through cumulative advantages and disadvantages.
5. The Principle of Linked Lives: Lives are lived interdependently and socio-historical
influences are expressed through this network of shared relationships.
↳ Often, individuals are affected by larger social changes through
the impact that such changes have on their interpersonal contexts
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, within more micro-level settings. The initiation of new relationships
can shape lives as well, by fostering “turning points” that lead to a
change in behavior or by fostering behavioral continuity. Because friend and
mate selection tends to follow the homophily principle, the crucial factor for
youth with delinquent histories is managing to circumvent this tendency and
form relationships with more conventional individuals.
2.2 Steffensmeier - Age and the distribution of crime
Steffensmeier, D.J., Allan, E.A., Harer, M.D., & Streifel, C. (1989). Age and the distribution of crime. American Journal of
Sociology, 94(4), 803-831.
The proposition that involvement in crime diminishes with age is one of the oldest and most
widely accepted in criminology. However, while a decline in criminality is common to all age-
crime distributions over time or across localities, the parameters of the distributions may be
quite different (Mannheim 1965). The traditional sociological explanation of the tendency for
crime to decline with age (whether sharply for some crimes or slowly for others) rests on the
Hobbesian assumption that human behavior is not inherently conforming and that the
"problem of social order" facing any society is a recurring one.
Recently, Hirschi and Gottfredson have disputed the traditional sociological view of the age-
crime relationship, arguing instead that the age distribution of crime is essentially invariant
across time and space, regardless of offense (invariance hypothesis).
Disadvantages Hirschi and Gottfredson:
1. Propositions are overstated and misleading; most of the evidence is sparse. They
don’t provide any statistical tests and their age-crime plots are so compressed that is
difficult, if not impossible, to make a distinction whether, in fact, any differences in
age distribution do exist
2. The studies examining the age-crime relationship have had modest success in
identifying social causes, despite Hirschi and Gottfredson's claim to the contrary
Expectations prior to the research:
1. Most crimes peak in adolescence or early adulthood, then decline fairly steadily;
2. Crime types vary in peak ages of criminality and in rates of decline from the peak;
3. Because of the effect of industrialization, peak ages have become younger over the
past four decades,and the descent of the age curve from the peak has become
steeper
Both labeling theory and social-control theory can contribute to an understanding of these
general patterns. Also strain theory, opportunity theory and differential
association/reinforcement can explain age-crime patterns.
It is also expected that there will be clear differences across offense types in the age
distribution of arrests. In comparison with adults, juveniles have more sources of
reinforcement for involvement in low yield, high-risk types of behavior represented by such
offenses as burglary, robbery, and vandalism.
For most juveniles, they are also "low-yield" or exploratory offenses that, like the drug and
alcohol offense categories, provide "thrills" and peer acceptance as much as or more than
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,real financial gain. Because such crimes are low yield and high risk, their age-specific rates
will peak at an early age and drop off quickly during the transition from adolescence to
adulthood. Those who remain unscathed by negative labels will have noncriminal identities
confirmed at the same time as their stakes in conformity are increasing.
But, since the motivation and the opportunity for different kinds of crime are age related, it is
not plausible to expect every offense category to follow a pattern of early peak age and rapid
decline. The effects of social contingencies may vary for different crimes and age groups; if
so, criminological theory must address these variations, and a single "global" explanation of
the age-crime relationship may be unrealistic.
The data that they used in the research are; the arrest statistics of the Uniform Crime
Reports; these are the number of arrests in a given year, the offenses for which suspects
have been arrested, and the ages of the suspects.
There are some disadvantages to the data they used:
● The way arrests are reported to the FBI has changed: first fingerprint cards, then
arrest reports.
● The classification of offenses has changed: their analysis of trends in the age-crime
relationship therefore, is limited to those offense categories for which arrest data
have been collected continuously.
● There have been slight differences in the definition of age groups
Two types of calculations have been performed on the data:
1. The age-specific arrest rates were calculated.
2. The second type of calculation is based on the age-specific rates and measures the
timing of crimes across the lifespan.
The following findings have been found in the contemporary age distribution of crime by type
of crime.
● The total rates are very low before age 13, after which they rise sharply in the teens
and then decline gradually among older age groups. In other words, while the sharp
rise in total arrest rates among teens approximates the proposed invariance pattern,
the much more gradual decline does not.
● Within each of the four offense-type groupings there are some offenses that peak
early and decline quickly but others that peak later and decline more slowly:
○ Teen years and decline slowly: Robbery, auto theft and vandalism
○ Late 20s or older and decline slowly: Forgery, fraud and gambling
In other words; for property crimes, there are at least two distinct types of age
distributions, which we may characterize as "young" and "old."
● Among the substance abuse crimes, the timing of crime is younger and considerably
more skewed for liquor and drug violations than it is for public drunkenness and
driving under the influence.
● Age distributions for most offenses are quite different from the pattern for burglary.
Only four of the offense categories (auto theft, vandalism, larceny and robbery) are
homogeneous with burglary in the age distribution of arrests.
All of these results are inconsistent with the invariance hypothesis. Instead they demonstrate
that there is considerable heterogeneity in the age distribution of arrests across offense
categories.
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, All of the findings change over time, so there is a difference between data from the 40’s and
now.
● One-half peak descending (shows the age at which half the peak crime rate is
reached on the decreasing side of the curve): the common pattern is a decline in age
of offending, in that offenders in 1940 and in 1960 tended to be more spread out
across the age distribution according to the distance between the peak and the half-
peak descending.
● Overall, the curves for most offenses have become progressively less symmetrical,
or more skewed to the right, from 1940 to 1960to 1980. Only five offenses are
strongly skewed to the right across all three periods: burglary, robbery, auto theft,
prostitution, and larceny.
Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the changes over time include changes in
the basic shape of the age-crime curve and are not limited to changes in the peak age,
which Hirschi and Gottfredson dismiss as "quite insignificant in contrast to the stability of the
major parameters of the age-crime distributions."
In sum, the direction and magnitude of shifts in the age distribution of crime over the 1940-
80 timespan suggest two cleartrends.
1. The shape of the age curve is more peaked in 1980 than in earlier periods, for all
offences except gambling.
2. The shift towards more peaked distributions is greater for some type of offenses than
for others.
There are some disadvantages to the observed differences:
● Self report data do not support the distinction between person and property offences;
they show instead that both types of offense peak at the same time and decline at
the same rate with age
● Comparison is also hampered by the vagueness and trivial nature of the self-report
“assault” item.
● Changes in law enforcement and data collection may provide a plausible explanation
of increases in youth crime over the 1940-80 time span.
The conclusion of the Steffensmeier et. al paper is:
● They reject the hypothesis that the age distribution of crime is invariant (=
onveranderbaar) across crime types and over time.
● The consistency of these findings for the differences in the data of developed and
advanced nations supports the position that industrialization has played an important
role in changing the age-crime relation
● More profitable property crimes with lower risks, as well as most person crimes,
public-order offenses, and alcohol abuse, all have much flatter age curves and a
slower drop-off in rates of offending
○ Thus, there is not a single age pattern, as suggested by Hirschi and
Gottfredson, but several.
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