Demography

Age

One noteworthy debate surrounds the relationship between age and crime. Criminologists generally agree that criminal offending increases during adolescence and peaks in early adulthood, declining thereafter as people get older. Some have argued that this pattern is universal or invariant. In other words, the general shape of the age-crime relationship is regarded as the same across social status (e.g., gender and race) and across geographical location (e.g., nations). Proponents of the thesis of “age invariance” conclude that the widely observed “desistance” from crime as people age reflects nothing more than the biological aging of the human organism.

Critics of “age invariance,” however, have raised several objections. They observe that the age-crime relationship varies for different offenses. They also claim that this relationship has changed over time. In addition, various scholars have claimed that no single age profile adequately describes the offender population; different types of offenders can be identified based on distinctive trajectories of offending.

Another important debate related to age involves the persistence of antisocial behavior over the life span. A well-established finding is that misbehavior in childhood is a powerful predictor of adult deviance and criminality. Two influential interpretations of this relationship have been advanced. One, the latent trait perspective, maintains that the propensity to commit crime is developed at a young age and that this propensity remains reasonably stable throughout life. Continuity in antisocial behavior reflects the stable differences in criminal propensities across individuals.

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