ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of how different types of life course studies have addressed the challenges. It explains how the approaches are helping to forge new directions in criminological research, including a new zemiological focus on harms. Developmental criminology, an approach centering on the role of individual psychological development in the shaping of a ‘criminal career’, has been a core – if contested – component within life course criminology. The chapter explores the contributions that life course approaches have made to criminological understandings of the processes that shape onset, persistence and desistance. Life course criminology explores the factors driving onset into criminality, desistance from criminality and persistence of criminality. It typically identifies risk factors and often recommends practical means of mitigating these. Life course approaches have informed criminal justice and social policy initiatives, particularly around early interventions within families and around interventions to encourage desistance among adolescent and adult offenders.
