Developmental and Life-Course Criminology

Researchers who study how offending itself changes over the course of an individual life, from the onset of delinquency in childhood through its peak, persistence or desistance in adulthood, using long-term longitudinal studies that follow the same individuals over years or decades. This group gathers the pioneering longitudinal researchers of juvenile delinquency, the theorists who distinguished offenders whose antisocial conduct begins in early childhood and persists from those whose offending is confined to adolescence, the age-graded account of how informal social bonds in adulthood explain desistance from crime, and later researchers studying criminal careers, risk factors and desistance narratives through the same developmental, over-time lens. It excludes control theorists whose central claim is about the strength of social bonds or self-control at a single point in time rather than about change over the life course, who belong under Social Control and Self-Control Theory, even though the two traditions are closely related and some theorists appear in both.