All Developmental and Life-Course Theories

Theories that trace offending across a person's life span rather than at one fixed point, asking why offending typically rises in adolescence and falls with age, and why some people persist while most desist, represented here by the Life-Course Theory of Crime. Belongs here: any theory whose central claim concerns the onset, persistence, escalation or desistance of offending over the course of a life, such as Sampson and Laub's age-graded informal social control or Moffitt's developmental taxonomy, neither yet a separate live entity in this atlas. Does not belong here: theories explaining a single offending decision or a static social position rather than a trajectory across a life span, grouped under the other subcategories here. This subcategory currently holds one live entity; a future mint wave is expected to grow it rather than needing a new subcategory, since developmental and life-course criminology is a large and active school of the discipline.