ABSTRACT
Age has been a key variable in the study of ‘conventional’ criminality and in criminological theorising at least since the Chicago School focused attention on migration, socialisation, and the young offender. Young people still predominate among those caught for conventional offending in the west, and the young were for many years the most popular subjects of ethnographic work. In spite of this, age has remained under-theorised in criminology, a last bastion, perhaps, of positivist categorisation (Cain 2003), long after ‘race’, ‘gender’, and ‘sex’ have all earned their postmodern quotation marks. Ageing as duration has been studied in relation to rates of desistance, but age as a social construction and ageing as a social process have played little part in our understanding of the phenomena of victimisation, crime, and punishment. Thus, in order to begin to theorise the relation of older people or ‘elders’ to these processes we have first had to recognise that for the ‘old’ as well as the ‘young’ very little is pre-given. We and our contributors have had to suspend our common sense upon the subject. Once this suspension is achieved, the relationship of older people to crime emerges as complex and varied, and as amenable to explanation in terms of what are by now normal post-modern theoretical categories such as subjectivity, identity construction, agency, and risk, as well as the interplay between these categories and what Powell and Wahidin (this book, pp. 17–34) have called the political economy of ageing. Before going deeper into our argument let us just point out that while domestic violence against elderly women (aged 65–74 and 75 years+) is reportedly less than it is for younger women, the rate is still higher than the rate for men in those age groups (Simmons et al. 2002): victimisation of the aged remains gendered. Also, there is an increasing number of both older women and older men in prison (aged 50 years+) with the vast majority being men (Wahidin this book, pp. 171–93), and a disproportionate number of the older women are black (Phillips, in this book, pp. 53–70): imprisonment of the aged is both sexed and raced. There are reasons why understanding older people may need a particular elaboration of theory, but there are also many instances where the social patterns for older people do not require a different theorisation from the patterns for the rest of us.
