Criminological Theory Chapter 14

What do developmental ad life-course criminology attempt to make sense of

- of different patterns of criminal behavior over time

- research shows that members of certain age groups are more actively involved in criminal behavior than members of the other age groups

- criminal activity in general peaks in adolescence and then declines gradually in older age groups

- some individuals show remarkably consistent levels of criminal behavior throughout their lives while others demonstrate equally remarkable variability in their criminality as they age, active in criminal behavior during some periods or stages and inactive during other periods or stages in their lives

What is the goal of life-course criminology

- to better understand the stability as well as the changes in criminal behavior, both within the same individual over time and between different individuals at different ages or life stages

- sometimes identified as a distinct theoretical explanation

- devoted to describing the complexities of age-related patterns of crime, tracing various pathways or "trajectories" of various types of offenders over their lifetimes or criminal careers, discovering factors that serve as "turning points" in these trajectories either toward and away from crime, and identifying risk and/or protective factors at various age or life stage as the central focus of criminology in much the same way that Marxist and conflict theories focus on class and race and feminist theorists focus on gender

What did Laub argue about life-course criminology

- that criminology should adopt life-course criminology as its paradigm for the causes and dynamics of crime and that this paradigm should be the "soul" and "core" of criminology around which all of the facts, research agendas and theories of the entire field can be organized

What are the central theoretical questions that are germane to DLC

1. What is the key construct underlying offending

2. What factors encourage offending

3. What factors inhibit offending

4. Is there a learning process

5. Is there a decision-making process

6. What is the structure of the theory?

7. What are operational definitions of theoretical constructs

8. What does the theory explain

9. What does the theory not explain

10. What findings might challenged the theory (Can it be tested)

11. Crucial tests: How much does the theory make different predictions from another theory

What is the serial list of the specific empirical research questions on which DLC research primarily focuses on

1. Why do people start offending

2. How are onset sequences explained?

3. Why is there continuity in offending from adolescence to adulthood?

4. Why do people stop offending

5. Why does prevalence peak in the teenage years

6. Why does an early onset predict a long criminal career

7. Why is there versatility in offending and antisocial behavior

8. Why does co-offending decrease from adolescence to adulthood

9. Why are there between individual differences in offending

10. What are the key risk factors for onset and desistance and how can they be explained

11. Why are there within-individual differences in offending (long term and short term)

12. What are the main motives and reasons for offending

14. What are the effects of life events on offending

What is one of the most indisputable facts of criminology

- the relationship between age and crime

What is the origin of the age-crime debate largely attributed to

- to Hirschi and Gottfredson when they expressed their discontent with the "misapplication" of the age-crime distribution in order to advocate for longitudinal methods over cross-sectional methods

- they argued that the effect of age on crime is invariant across time, place, social and cultural conditions and crime type

What was Farrington's criticism of the age-crime curve

- that it is reflective of age variation in the prevalence of offenders rather than in the incidence of offending (how frequently individuals are committing crime or how much offending is taking place in a given age group)

- crime does not always decrease with age for all offenders

- while aggregate age-crime curves may appear to be comparable, their measures of dispersion can in fact, and often do, vary across time, place, social and cultural conditions and crime type

What is the age-crime curve

- the crime rate typically increases from early adolescence and peaks in the mid- to late teenage years followed by a decline in early adulthood

What did the criminal careers paradigm largely emerge from

- from the age-crime debate in the 1980s, although early criminal careers research can certainly be identified in the pioneering works of Adolphe Quetelet's (1831) Research on the Propensity for Crime at Different Ages, Clifford Shaw's (1930) The Jack ROller, Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck's (1950) Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency and Wolfgang, Figlio and Sellin's (1972) Delinquency in a Birth Cohort

What does modern-day criminal career research as it relates to criminological theory primarily focus on

- focuses on explaining if, how and why certain factors may affect the initiation of criminal activity, the continuation and escalation of criminal activity and/or the desistance or termination of criminal activity

- relevant to these theoretical questions are the criminal career dimensions of prevalence, frequency, age of onset and age of desistance and criminal career length

What does the prevalence of offending refer to

- to participation or how many individuals are involved in offending at a particular period of time

- offending prevalence differentiates between those who are criminally active and those who are not

What does prior research show about the prevalence or participation rates

- these rates to be as high as 96% in self-reports and 40% in official conviction records by age 30 among participants in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development in London

- Moffit et al. have reported prevalence estimates of 91% and 86% for self-reported offending by age 18 for males and females respectively, relying on data from a birth cohort of over 1,000 individuals in Dunedin, New Zealand

What does the frequency of offending describe

- the number of offenses committed by active offenders in a given time period and is typically denoted by the Greek letter lambda

What does prior research show about the frequency of offending

- Piquero, Farrington and Blumstein provided a comprehensive review and illustrated that offense frequency generally peaks at age 16 for self-reports and ages 17 to 20 for official convictions, followed by a gradual decline throughout late adolescence and early adulthood

- the average offender commits approximately 8 crimes per year during the time period where he or she is actively offending and offenders with prior incarcerations report an even higher level of offense frequency as they report committing between 30 to 50 crimes per year

- the probability of reoffending can range between 0.79 and 0.91 from the third to the tenth offense committed; therefore, continuity and continuation in offending is more the norm than the exception of once a high level of offending frequency has been observed

What are two important observation points in criminal careers research and are used to calculate an individual's criminal career length or duration

- age of onset, or the age at which the first crime is committed and the age of desistance, or the age at which the last offense is committed

What has research indicated about the age of offending onset

- typically ranges from 13 to 19, with an earlier age of onset being observed in self-reports and a later age of onset documented in crime records

What different ages of onset for specific crimes did Farrington identify

- found that minor forms of offending such as shoplifting peaked at ages 13 and 14, whereas more serious forms of offending, including assault, peaked at ages 17 to 19

- an earlier age of onset is related to higher offending frequency and a longer criminal career

- certain forms of deviant/criminal behavior (such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and white-collar crime) do not peak in the adolescent years, and white-collar crime is more likely in older groups, than in younger groups

Why does much controversy exist over methods for identifying the "true" age of desistance

- just because previously active offenders were not active in a particular year at the latest follow-up does not necessarily mean that they have truly ceased offending for the remainder of their life-course

What have a better ability to accurately estimate the age of desistance and assess criminal career length

-studies based on considerably lengthy follow-up periods

What is the average age of desistance and criminal career length

- the average age of desistance ranged from ages 20 to 29 and the average criminal career length from first to last conviction was 10.4 years when one-time offenders were excluded and 7.1 years when one-time offenders were included

- relying on data from the California Youth Authority, Piquero, Brame and Lynam found that the average length of a criminal career was 17.3 years when measured from first police contact to last arrest

- Laub and Sampson estimated that the average criminal career length of Glueck and Glueck's delinquents followed up to age 70 was 25.6 years for all crime, 9.2 years for violent offending, and 13.6 years for property offending

- most offenders had desisted by middle adulthood

Who is Terrie Moffit

- conducted one of the first efforts to identify different patterns of criminality at different ages or developmental stages in the life course

- developmental taxonomy

- identified two distinct groups of offenders whose offending trajectories vary markedly

What are the two distinct groups of offenders whose offending trajectories vary markedly

- adolescence-limited offenders

- life-course persistent offenders

Who are adolescence-limited offenders

- exhibit changes in criminal activity over time, with an onset of delinquency occurring in early adolescence and desistance from delinquency occurring as the ring in early adolescence and desistance from delinquency occuring as the adolescent matures into young adulthood

Who are life course-persistent offenders

- display conduct disorders at a very early stage of infancy or chidlhood and continue to engage in increasingly serious forms of misconduct and law-violating behavior throughout adolescence and well into adulthood

What was Moffitt's typology drawn from

- from concepts in neuropsychology and developmental psychology

- the causes of childhood antisocial behavior and persistance into adulthood are low verbal ability, hyperactivity and impulsive personality

- Moffitt argued that at least some of the differences between life-course persistent and adolescence-limited delinquents are biologically or genetically based and recent research lends support to that argument

Who does peer influence affect, LCP or AL?

- peer influence for life-course-persistent offenders is slight

- the adolescence-limited offender is more strongly influenced by peer associations (social mimicry)

- this agrees in part with the models previously developed by Patterson that peer influence is apt to be more important for late starters, but the two differ in that Patterson allowed for significant peer influence also for the early-onset offenders

What does Patterson's social learning coercion model propose

- that for both early- and late-onset offenders, the "persistance and desistance of offending in adulthood cannot be explained fully by individual characteristics and environmental influences in early childhood or adolescence

- age-graded changes in adulthood have to be considered as well

- found that exposure to delinquent peers and parental variables had similar effects on both early- and late-onset delinquency

What did the recent evidence from a systematic review revel an overwhelming amount of support for

- for the identification of the two offender groups hypothesized by Moffit, along with other offender groups that bear relevance for DLC theorizing, including low-level chronic offenders, late-onset offenders, and others

What does the dual taxonomy proffered by Moffitt contain

- contains some explanatory elements, particularly for the early-onset or life-course persistent offenders, but for the most part it remains largely descriptive

What have Rolf Loeber and colleagues proposed

- have proposed a developmental pathways theoretical model and typology of offenders

- relying on an in-depth examination of the overt and covert behaviors exhibited by over 11,000 children

- identified what they referred to as three distinct developmental pathways toward criminal behavior

- have also recognized the potential for youth to progress through more than one specific developmental pathway

What are the three distinct developmental pathways toward criminal behavior identified in Loeber's Developmental Model

- overt developmental pathway

- covert developmental pathway

- authority conflict developmental pathway

What is the overt developmental pathway

- characterized by a youth displaying a low level of aggressive behavior initially (such as bullying behavior) and then subsequently escalating that tendency into more aggressive forms of behavior to include physical fighting

- youth in this pathway ultimately become involved in serious and violent behavior

What is the covert developmental pathway

- youth in this pathway typically initiate their offending behavior prior to age 15 and demonstrate early life-course involvement in minor covert criminal activities such as lying and shoplifting

- following their participation in these minor crimes, their offending behavior does soon escalate to property damage and fraud before also moving into more serious delinquency including theft and burglary

What is the authority conflict developmental pathway

- best characterized by an early onset (prior to age 12) of stubborn, defiant and disobedient behavior primarily often targeted toward both parents and teachers

- this behavior subsequently escalates to other activities indicative of authority avoidance such as running away, staying out late and skipping school

How can youth progress through more than one specific developmental pathway

- early authority conflict behaviors at times may serve as a precursor to escalating into more serious delinquency and evincing the behaviors consistent with the overt (interpersonal violence) and/or covert (property crime) developmental pathways

- there is a linkage between an early onset of problem behavior or delinquency and the faster and more serious escalation of overt and covert delinquent behaviors

What have empirical research conducted thus far testing Loeber et al's developmental pathways theoretical model and typology from at least four different large-scale and longitudinal studies yielded

- have yielded support for the identification of the overt, covert and authority conflict pathways

- much more research is needed before definitive statements can be made regarding the veracity of this DLC perspective

What is Gottfredon and Hirschi's Self-control theory

- proposes that individuals whose parents neglected to engage in effective supervision, recognition and correction of childhood misconduct will fail to develop sufficient levels of self-control, a consequence that has far-reaching effects on future criminal behavior

- often been invoked for its ability to explain life-course persistence in criminality

What is the result of levels of self-control being largely set by the age of eight and are unlikely to increase in subsequent years as individuals age

- those with low self-control by age eight are highly likely to engage in various forms of misconduct, both criminal and noncriminal, throughout their lifetimes

- at all times, even when criminal involvement is at its lowest levels, those with less self-control are more likely to be engaged in criminal behavior than those with more self-control

What is population heterogeneity

- the phenomenon of stability in criminality relative to others over the life course

- criminality is accounted for by individual differences in criminal propensity and this relative heterogeneity persists or remains stable over time, even when absolute levels of criminality rise or fall among groups that differ in levels of self-control

What do Gottfredson and Hirschi focus on

- on the relative stability of criminal behavior or other forms of misconduct over time within individuals low in self-control

What are Robert Sampson and John Laub concerned with regarding criminality over a life span

- more concerned with explaining the changes in criminality that occur across the life span

- their position is that the onset, persistence and desistance from crime over the life course depend on certain events that occur in the individual's life that either enhance of diminish the risk of criminal behavior

What is state dependence

- the onset, persistence and desistance from crime over the life course depends on certain events that occur in the individual's life that either enhance or diminish the risk of criminal behavior

- changes in criminality and conformity over time are dependent on these events

What is Sampson and Laub's Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social control

- draws heavily on Hirschi's social bonding theory

- proposed that abrupt turning points and gradual changes that come with growing older, such as getting married and finding stable employment, increase social bonds to society

- explains why most who were delinquent at a younger age discontinue law violations later in life, whereas others continue offending

- those who do not experience these changes or have disruptive family or employment experiences are more likely to persist in offending

- the stability of causative factors in the social environment as one ages produces stability of behavior; changes in those same factors produce changes in behavior through the life course primarily through their effects on informal social control

What did Sampson and Laub do to test their Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

- located the data from a cohort of white male delinquents and a matched sample of nondelinquents who had originally participated as adolescent boys in a famous study by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck

Where did the Gluecks get their data information

- began data collection with subjects who were born between 1924 and 1935 at ages spanning roughly 10 to 17

- collected additional data in later years when subjects had reached the age of 25 and again when they had reached the age of 32

- criminal history data between ages 32 to 45 were added to the already massive amount of information on these men

What did Sampson and Laub do with the data from the Gluecks

- they were able to track stability and change in both criminality and proposed causes of criminal behavior over the course of more than 20 years in the lives of these participants

- after analyzing the data, they tracked down as many subjects as they could locate and reinterviewed them at a time when some had reached the age of 70

- found support for their age-graded theory of informal social control

What support was found for the age-graded theory of informal social control

- the Glueck data supported it

- using other longitudinal data, Piquero et al found that marriage and full-time employment lowered official recidivism among parolees in emerging adulthood

- Uggen also found that employment lowered recidivism but he found that work has this effect among ages 27 and older but not the younger age group

What are the limitations of the Glueck and Laub and Sampson study

- consisted solely of white males who reached adulthood in the 1950s

- could be argued that the age-graded informal social control theory may not apply to female offenders, offenders of different racial or ethnic backgrounds, or even offenders who reach adulthood in more contemporary times

- little research has been conducted to test the age-graded informal social control theory with offenders from other sociodemographic groups

What did Giordano et al's study examining data originally collected from serious juvenile offenders, both male and female, with an average age of 16 and followed up the sample 13 years later find

- did not support the age-graded informal social control theory for either males or females

- neither job stability not attachment to an intimate partner was associated with desistance from crime

- this was a young sample and later follow-ups well into middle age might reveal findings more consistent

- found some gender differences in turning points associated with desistance

- women were more likely than men to cite "religious transformations" and the presence of children as responsible for changes in their criminal behavior

- men were more likely than women to attribute changes in their criminal behavior to time in prison or the correctional treatment they received

What did Laub and Sampson's later analysis of data on the men into old age find

- confirmed and extended their earlier work

- they included detailed life-history information and interviews so that, in addition to an analysis of trajectory groups exhibiting various patterns of onset, persistence and desistance, they reported individual variations within groups

- the findings raise serious questions about identifying and defining criminal typologies and developmental models such as Moffitt's that project qualitatively different life-course trajectories for different types of offenders

- all of the men would qualify in adolescence as life-course-persistent, but virtually all desisted at some point

What did Warr differ from Sampson and Laub on about the age-graded theory of informal social control

- that marriage is followed by a dramatic decline in time spent with friends as well as reduced exposure to delinquent peers and that these factors rather than formation of preventive social bonds largely explain the association between marital status and delinquent behavior

- he found that the dramatic increases in delinquent behavior from the early to later teenage years were explained by dramatic increases in exposure to delinquent peers

Why do Simons et al maintain that both bonding and learning processes are involved in the age-graded theory of informal social control

- because the relationship between early antisocial behavior and later adolescent delinquency disappears when parenting effects, school and peer variables are taken into account

- Akers and Lee found that both sets of variables had an effect on the development of adolescent substance use, but the social learning variables of peer association, definitions and differential reinforcement had a stronger effect than the social bonding variables of attachment, commitment and beliefs

What did Krohn et al find about participation in a gang as an adolescent's effect in the future

- negatively effects the person later successfully taking on conventional occupational and family roles, often resulting in continued criminal behavior as an adult

What did Laub and Sampson add to their theory of age-graded informal social control

- added various nuances to the model by explicitly referring to and drawing on concepts and variables from, other general criminological theories

What is the most common denominator among the different theories that are utilized in life-course denominators

- the effort to explain similarities, differences, and changes in criminal and deviant behavior at different ages, stages of development or periods of the life-course

What are criminologists who employ a life-course perspective concerned with

- with identifying the processes whereby childhood disruptive behavior escalates to delinquency and crime, and with discovering the factors that enable some antisocial children to assume a more conventional lifestyle during adolescence

- are responding to more than just the issue of whether there are different types of offenders who begin committing law violations at different times in life and follow different behavioral trajectories as they age

- most are responding to the theoretical challenges made by Gottfredson and Hirschi regarding the age-crime relationship

- strong disagreement on how invariant the curve is

What is not generally accepted from Hirschi and Gottfredon's age-crime relationship

- the argument that age is a direct, unmediated cause of crime

- critics point out that there is both persistance and change in deviant, delinquent and criminal behavior and theorize that age-related variables can explain both

What did Michael Benson reiterate is central to the life-course perspective

- that both continuity and change in criminal behavior

What is continuity based on

- on both cumulative continuity, in which behavior and events at one time have an effect on later opportunities and behavior, and self-selection of similar behavior at both earlier and later stages in life consistent with persistent individual traits present at both times

What is change based on

- on both developmental changes and changes in circumstance

What does Benson argue

- that biological and early childhood effects on criminal behavior later in life are relatively weak

- there are different trajectories of offending careers (short term, long term, high rate, low rate) and each stage in the life course (childhood, adolescence, adulthood) presents factors that are conducive to or inhibit antisocial or criminal behavior

- pointed to theoretical diversity in the field and how difficult it is to apply any life-course perspective to both street crime and white-collar crime

What does cumulative economic and social disadvantage contribute to

- to persistence in offending from adolescence into adulthood, whereas marriage, family, children and employment promote desistance; and of course, antisocial behavior, in turn, can have a negative effect on employment and marriage

Has life-course criminology produced new general theories or does it represent ways of pulling concepts and propositions from existing theories at different ages or stages of life

- hard to identify any new explanatory variables introduced by the life-course perspective

- life-course criminologists lean heavily on concepts and propositions from biosocial, developmental, social bonding, social learning and other extant theories

What are the empirical findings for life-course perspectives

- that the strong explanatory variables from existing theories, such as peer associations, attitudes and social bonds, account for delinquent and criminal behavior both during the adolescent years and in later years, with some variation in strength of effects

- these same variables at one stage of life are predictive of outcomes in later stages of life

What is Goridano's life-course perspective on social learning

- posit that given the underlying assumption that learning definitions favorable to the law increase the potential for someone to engage in crime, then it is reasonable to also assume that what they refer to as "redefinitions" can be influential in the desistance process

- argue that the definitions favorable/unfavorable to crime that are learned through socialization experiences can be redefined over time given new social or intimate interactions and relationships that can serve to generate re-definitions that in turn govern criminal or conforming behavior

What did Gioradano reveal evidence on when relying on data drawn from 89 qualitative interviews conducted with participants in the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study, Giordano et al

- revealed evidence supporting the notion that new (and different) social experiences can foster redefinitions that are related to changes in attitudes and behavior

What is Farrington's Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

- focuses on between-individual differences to account for the development of offenders and also aims to explain why offenders may commit crime in certain situations over the life-course but not in other circumstances

What is antisocial potential

- central to Farrington's ICAP theory

- a propensity to exhibit antisocial and/or criminal behavior

- crime is a by-product of short term and long-term AP, with short-term AP being affected primarily by immediate situational factors and criminal opportunities and long-term Ap being influenced and shaped more by cognitive and developmental factors

What does crime occur due to according to Farrington

- due to a combination of both forms of AP; that is, the situation matters, the individual matters, and so too does the interaction between the situation and the individual

How does the ICAP theory represent an integrated developmental and life-course theoretical model for explaining crime

- in that it draws from many criminological theories such as strain, social control, social learning, labeling and rational choice in its formulaiton

- Farrington identifies inadequate parenting, impulsivity, poor social skills and poor school performances as risk factors that may affect the formation and expression of long-term AP

What is the empirical evidence of ICAP theory

- very few examinations

- preliminary studies have shown that long-term AP risk factors are significantly related to delinquency and that the inclusion and addition of short-term AP risk factors improve the model's explanatory power for serious delinquency

What are the 10 most widely accepted conclusions that have emerged from DLC theoretical development and empirical research thus far

1. the prevalence of offending peaks in the late teenage years

2. The peak age of onset of offending is between 8 and 14, and the peak age of desistance from offending is between 20 and 29

3. An early age of onset predicts a relatively long criminal career duration

4. there is marked continuity in offending and antisocial behavior from childhood to the teenage years and to adulthood

5. A small fraction of the population (chronic offenders) commits a large fraction of all crimes

6. Offending is versatile rather than specialized

7. the types of acts defined as offenses are elements of a larger syndrome of antisocial behavior

8. Most offenses up to the late teenage years are committed with others, whereas most offenses from age 20 on are committed alone

9. The reasons given for offending up to the late teenage years are quite variable, including utilitarian, for excitement or enjoyment, or because people get angry

10. Different types of offenses tend to be first committed at distinctively different ages

What are the policy implications of developmental and life-course theories

- focus early on prevention and intervention