Criminal Behavior during the Life-Course
Summary
Contents
Lecture 1: Introduction 2
Lecture 2: Life course theories 5
Lecture 3: Situational theories 9
Lecture 4: Childhood 14
Lecture 5: Adolescence 17
Lecture 6: Adulthood 20
Article 1: The emergence and development of life course theory 24
Article 2: Age and the explanation of crime 28
Article 3: Age and the distribution of crime 34
Article 4: Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior 37
Article 5: Turning points in the life course: why change matters to the study of crime 47
Article 6: Crime-event criminology: an overview 51
Article 7: Crime location choice: state of the art and avenues for future research 54
Article 8: The development of physical aggression from toddlerhood to pre-adolescence 60
Article 9: Families and crime 64
Article 10: One bad apple may not spoil the whole bunch: best friends and adolescent
delinquency 71
Article 11: When is spending time with peers related to delinquency? 76
Article 12: Can persistent offenders help us understand desistance from crime? 80
Article 13: Desistance from crime during the transition to adulthood 85
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,Lecture 1: Introduction
When reading the articles you should focus on the key arguments, theories, concepts,
results and implications. As a kind of reading guide, you should ask yourself the following
questions:
- What are the authors’ main arguments?
- What are their main (theoretical) concepts?
- What did they test and what are the main results?
- What are the implications for theory/practice?
Pre-registration: the specification of a research design, hypotheses, and analysis plan prior
to observing the outcomes of a study. Pre-registration:
- Minimizes false positives;
- Improves quality and transparency of your research;
- Thoroughly think through analyses;
- Avoids harking.
Age and crime
Adolescents and young adults commit a disproportionate amount of crime.
- Official data show that arrests peak in late teens/early 20s.
- Self-report shows that teens and young adults report more criminal behavior than
other age groups.
- Victim surveys also show that the most commonly reported offenders are
teenagers/young adults.
From the 1970s/80s, there was a growing interest in criminal behavior over time, or
‘criminal careers’. Research from 1979 showed that a small percentage of offenders
account for a majority of the crimes, 6% of the offenders commit 52% of all crimes.
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,Hirschi & Gottfredson (1983) stated that the age-crime curve is one of the ‘brute’ facts of
criminology:
- They believed crime declines with age (maturational reform, aging-out).
- The age-crime curve is invariant;
- There are consistent explanations across age;
- There only is a difference in degree.
- So, criminal career and longitudinal research is not needed.
Steffensmeier et al (1989) thought it was important to look at why crime declines with age.
They suggested that this decline is because of changes in social roles and context.
- “Society at large is faced perennially with an invasion of barbarians, and every adult
generation is faced with the task of civilizing those barbarians”.
- They also stated that the age-crime curve depends on the type of crime.
A critique of the age-crime curves is that it ignores variations in the shape of the age-crime
curve.
- E.g. gender, early vs. late starters and crime types.
Life course research studies within-individual differences, more than between-individual
differences. Why does one’s criminal behavior differ at different ages?
Some life course concepts which we will focus on in this course are trajectories,
transitions and turning points.
- Age effects: as people get older, their behavior changes.
- Period effects: this is when you look at people getting older, in a given period. For
example, people had no higher chance of dying from alcohol poisoning while they got
older in the 1970s compared to when people get older in 2020.
- Cohort effects: here we look at the birth-cohort. For example, people who were born
in 1970 had a higher chance of dying from alcohol poisoning than people who were
born in 2000.
Social-historical context: when and where you are born matters. This includes your birth
cohort, historical context and social change.
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, Other important life course concepts are:
- Human agency: agency is the capacity to exercise control over our lives. Humans
intentionally make choices/actions, within societal constraints.
- Linked lives: individuals are linked with others (e.g. parents, peers, partners,
communities, etc.).
- Timing: the age at which events occur affects trajectories and transitions (e.g. timing
of arrest, interventions, incarceration, etc.).
Some key terms of life course research are:
- Cumulative continuity: past behaviors do influence future behavior. Events/actions
have a causal effect.
- Cumulative continuity is often related with disadvantage, say when you
commit a stupid crime when you were 15 and you were arrested, this then
have consequences for your education/career. This might cause a ‘snowball’
effect that causes you to commit another crime.
- Self-selection: traits/disposition explain behavior. A variation in traits then explains
variation in behavior.
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