1. Age and Criminal Activity
Lecture 6 – Troubles of Youth

2. Lecture Outline Importance of Childhood Age-Crime Curve
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

3. 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 -> “Paranoid Parenting”

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

5. 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’

9. 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 as, say 29-34?

10. Investigating the Age- Crime Curve: Two (or more?) distinct groups?
Adolescent Limited Offenders
Lifetime Persistent Offenders

11. Trajectories v. Pathways
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 people’s lives can change chances of offending
Policy Aim: crime reduction effort targeted throughout life course

12. Key Considerations A need to address how offending ‘careers’ progress
Onset of offending
Duration of offending
Desistance of offending

13. 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?