ABSTRACT
Age is one of the strongest predictors of crime (Farrington 1986). After a sudden peak in offending in the late adolescent years, with age follows a more gradual decrease. While some variation exists for different types of crime, this general pattern appears robust across historical time, geographical and cultural location, and across different types of data criminologists have used to study the development of crime over the life-course. The robustness of the age-crime relationship across different contexts has led some researchers to conclude that no contextual factors can explain why crime declines with age, because this would imply that the configuration of these contextual factors needs to be highly similar across time and place as well (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983). In response, these researchers have turned inward and have explained the winding down of crime with age as a product of the maturation of the individual. Contrarily, the vantage point of life-course criminology is that criminal development cannot be understood in complete isolation from the individual’s larger life-course. Instead, life-course criminologists claim that transitions and trajectories in life-course domains other than crime can alter the likelihood of offending (Blokland and Nieuwbeerta 2010). In as far as these transitions bring about a decline in offending and their age trend matches the age trend in crime, these transitions can account for the reduced offending found in adults.
