ABSTRACT
Of all facets of crime, perhaps none has received as much research attention as age. The relationship between age and crime is one of the most well-documented (Quetelet 1831; Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983) and contentious (Steffensmeier et al. 1989; Britt 1992) of all criminological findings. Researchers studying the relationship between age and crime have typically observed that the aggregate pattern is such that criminal activity tends to peak in the late teens (in early cohorts) through the mid twenties (in contemporary cohorts), then declines throughout adulthood.
