6.1: Why People Stop Committing Crimes

You may have noticed that many traditional criminological theories, such as Shaw and McKay’s (1942) theory of social disorganization, the theories about gang formation by Cohen (1955) and Cloward and Ohlin (1960), and the control theories by Reckless (1961) and others, have tended to focus on explaining juvenile delinquency or offending that occurs in adolescence. This is the case for two reasons. First, most offending begins during adolescence—the transitional phase that begins around puberty and ends at adulthood, so most theories assume that the causes of offending can be found during this phase of life. Second, delinquency is fairly common during the adolescent years. Put differently, it is pretty normal for pre-teens and teenagers to do things that are illegal and test the boundaries of what they can get away with.

During infancy and childhood, parents hold a great deal of responsibility over their children’s needs and behaviors. However, as children age, they become increasingly independent and responsible for their own behavior. Adolescence is often a period of experimentation, testing boundaries, and questioning figures of authority, including parents, teachers, and other adults. It is also the time when peers become much more important sources of influence and socialization. Research shows that adolescents are unique from adults in at least three ways: (1) they have lower levels of self-control; (2) they are less likely to consider the future; and (3) they are more sensitive to external influences, such as peers or incentives. All these factors may elevate adolescent involvement in risky behaviors such as delinquency and crime.

Recent developments in neuroscience tell us that adolescence is a uniquely risky period because the psycho-socio-emotional system (which governs the processing of emotions, risk-taking, and sensation-seeking behavior) has finished developing, but the cognitive control system (which governs decision-making and self-regulation) has not. In fact, the cognitive control system does not finish developing until around the mid-20s. What this means is that adolescents are more likely to make risky decisions under heightened emotional conditions. It is not until well past the age of legal adulthood (age 18 in most jurisdictions and circumstances) that individuals have the capacity to engage in adult decision-making. This reality is reflected in our crime statistics.

The Age-Crime Curve

As early as the 19th century, French statistician Adolphe Quetelet saw that the propensity for criminal behavior was greater among young people (ages 21–25) and lower among older people (Beirne, 1987). The age-crime curve refers to the relationship between age and crime that has been demonstrated in numerous datasets (Farrington, 1986) and is often displayed graphically. An example is shown in the figure below, which plots the age of individuals convicted of crime in 2021 using data gathered through the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). As you can see, the crime rate rises throughout adolescence, peaks during the 20s, and then declines on a steady basis thereafter.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): 2021 Offenders by age group per FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System. Image description available. Image description.

One explanation for kids being able to engage in delinquent behavior without becoming “lifelong criminals” comes from Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s (1964) drift theory. Drift theory explains that juveniles drift in and out of delinquency, especially when social controls like parental supervision are weak, and learn to justify their behavior in one of five ways. These justifications are known as techniques of neutralization, and they allow adolescents to avoid conflicting and uncomfortable feelings that can arise when your behavior does not match your beliefs (known in psychological terms as cognitive dissonance). Sykes and Matza (1957) identified five techniques of neutralization:

1. Deny responsibility: Juveniles learn to use this technique to deny that they are responsible for the criminal behavior they committed. This might look like, “It was not my fault; it was an accident or beyond my control.”
2. Deny injury: Juveniles learn to use this technique to deny the wrongfulness of their behavior or deny that their behavior caused any actual harm. This might look like, “It was only a prank; I didn’t hurt anyone” or “I just borrowed it; I didn’t steal it.”
3. Deny victim: Juveniles learn to use this technique to dehumanize or downplay the victim of their behavior. In other words, they neutralize their actions by claiming that they were acceptable because of who the victim was. Members of marginalized groups are easily targeted by this technique. This might look like, “The trans woman had it coming by wearing women’s clothing here.”
4. Condemn the condemners: Juveniles learn to use this technique to shift the blame to others, especially those who would disapprove of the behavior, as the juvenile sees them as hypocritical or corrupt. This might look like, “Who are they (parents) to tell me not to drink alcohol when they drink it themselves?”
5. Appeal to a higher loyalty: Juveniles learn to use this technique to justify their actions as necessary for a greater good or to maintain loyalty. This might look like, “I didn’t do it for me; I did it for God,” or “I did it to help a buddy out.”

While drift theory can help us understand how youth engage in delinquency without fully adopting definitions favorable to crime (learning theories) or embracing a subculture’s values (subcultural theories), it does not actually explain why or how juveniles stop committing crime.

The age-crime curve is one of the most consistent empirical facts in criminology and has been widely documented in Western countries such as the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, and Great Britain. It presents a criminological question that goes beyond whether or not the criminal justice system works: why do virtually all people who commit crimes ultimately desist from (slow down or completely stop) offending on their own? The majority of people who commit crimes when they are young stop committing crimes when they are in their 20s, and almost all of them stop by the time they reach their 40s, but why? Is it purely driven by age and physiological development, or are there other things at play? The developmental life course perspective may provide answers.

Developmental and Life Course Perspective

The developmental life course perspective looks at criminal behavior over the course of someone’s lifetime. According to this perspective, criminality cannot be understood by studying people at a single point in time or by assuming that people are unchanging. Instead, to truly understand criminal behavior, it is important to follow individuals over time. This perspective seeks to understand why offending starts in the first place (i.e., onset), why it continues or even escalates in severity or frequency (i.e., persistence), and why it declines or slows down (i.e., desistance) at different stages of life course. In this manner, we can understand the life events and turning points that affect both short- and long-term patterns of criminal behavior. This perspective emphasizes a person’s individual development and life history.

Before we discuss the developmental life course perspective more thoroughly, let’s explore a little bit of developmental psychology. Jean Piaget (1930, 1932), a developmental psychologist, studied childhood development and focused on children’s cognitive growth. He believed that thinking is a central aspect of development and that children are naturally inquisitive. However, he said that children do not think and reason like adults and that their cognitive abilities develop through specific stages. He posited that it was not until the final stage, starting around age 11, when kids can begin using abstract and logical thinking. Similarly, Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) theorized that development of moral judgment occurred in six stages. When he studied people who had committed crime, he found that they scored lower in moral judgment, and he concluded that their criminality could be explained by their failure to properly move through all the moral development stages. These ideas about the stages of development and their impact on future behavior is a thread woven throughout developmental life course theories.

In criminology, the developmental life course perspective has been studied and adjusted by a few influential scholars. First, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1957), completed one of the largest longitudinal studies in criminology with their report Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. The Gluecks began their study in 1939 by identifying 500 youths who had gone through the juvenile justice system (all of whom were White boys ages 10–17) from the Massachusetts correctional system. Each youth was matched to a comparable “non-delinquent” youth in the Boston public school system who shared the same age, ethnicity, neighborhood, and IQ. This means they tracked 1,000 participants over a couple of decades. This is very hard to do. The Gluecks gathered a variety of data on these 1,000 youths at three points in time: at approximately ages 14, 25, and 32. They collected data from interviews with the youths, their family members, teachers, employers, neighbors, and representatives of the criminal justice and the social welfare systems, in addition to archival data from police records.

This was a giant collection of data by the time they were done, and it has been used by several scholars to examine how behavior changes over the course of someone’s life. The Gluecks’ study was the first to investigate questions that would later become of central importance to developmental life course criminology. These include the relationship between age and crime, the focus on long-term patterns in criminal behavior, and the examination of unique causes of crime initiation, continuance, and desistance.

The second group, in examining developmental life course approaches, also tracked a large group of youth for several years. Marvin Wolfgang, Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin (1972) published a study titled Delinquency in a Birth Cohort that examined the arrest records of 9,945 boys who were born in 1945 and resided in Philadelphia from ages 10–18. Wolfgang and his colleagues found that 35% of these boys became delinquent—defined as having official police contact for something other than a traffic violation—by their eighteenth birthday. Collectively, these 3,475 boys were responsible for 10,214 police contacts over that period. A small group—about 6% of the whole group and 18% of the delinquents—were identified as “chronic recidivists” because they had recorded at least five police contacts by age 18. This small group was responsible for over half of all offenses and two-thirds of all violent offenses. Like the Gluecks’ earlier research, Wolfgang and his colleagues emphasized the importance of examining longer-term patterns in offending to truly identify more serious offenders, as opposed to just looking at single events.

The third major study in the developmental life course perspective was conducted through the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. They put together a Panel on Research on Criminal Careers to focus on the study of individual patterns of criminal offenses over time that occur across a person’s life. They called this someone’s criminal career. You have the option to read the resulting report, titled Criminal Careers and “Career Criminals (National Research Council, 1986), which introduced four key dimensions of the criminal career: (1) participation, (2) frequency, (3) seriousness, and (4) career length.

Participation refers to whether or not someone has ever participated in crime, and frequency refers to how often someone participates in criminal activity. The National Research Council said these two concepts were important to identify because they had different potential causes and required different policy responses. For example, preventing participation in crime in the first place would likely involve some type of programming outside of the criminal justice system, such as interventions for at-risk youth. To combat the frequency of offending, however, there would likely need to be more direct involvement of the juvenile or criminal justice system through some type of punishment.

During the 1980s, policymakers were particularly interested in using the idea of a criminal career to identify career criminals. They wanted to find that small percentage of individuals who commit a disproportionate share of crimes. They hoped that it would be possible to identify these so-called career criminals at the start of their criminal careers and selectively incapacitate them (lock them up) during their crime-prone years to limit their ability to commit crimes. The problem with this idea is that it means locking up kids for crimes they might commit instead of something they already did. This is something that not only happened at the time of this developmental life course research – it is still happening. Youth can still be detained for risk of future criminal offending. Efforts to identify which youth will turn into career criminals have been notoriously inaccurate and frequently result in false positives or the misidentification of kids who are not actually at risk of committing crime.

Sampson and Laub’s Age-Graded Theory

Several theories have been created under the umbrella of the developmental life course perspective. One of the most well-known is the age-graded theory of informal social control developed by Robert Sampson and John Laub in the 1990s. The age-graded theory of informal social control looks at the age and delinquent or criminal behavior, in addition to what is going on in the individual’s life at the time of that behavior. Specifically, they looked at things like the youth’s family life, school, employment, and other relationships that change over time. These scholars reanalyzed the data that were gathered by the Gluecks to look for specific patterns. Their analysis revealed patterns of both continuity and change among the Glueck sample.

They found childhood delinquency was a strong predictor of adult criminal behavior. However, they also discovered that a substantial portion of children who engaged in delinquency stopped any criminal behavior during the transition to adulthood. For those who did continue exhibiting criminal behavior into adulthood, Sampson and Laub found links to both pre-existing characteristics of childhood delinquency (what made them commit crime as youths still made them commit crime as adults) and cumulative disadvantages that occurred over time (challenges and struggles like poverty, family dysfunction, and addiction).

They said the factors that were linked to both the onset of delinquency and desistance from offending were related to the social bond. For example, kids who committed acts of delinquency were often experiencing familial factors that included low parental supervision, erratic and harsh discipline, and parental rejection and neglect. Also, they found these family factors were linked to broader societal disadvantages, such as low socioeconomic status or unemployment. Then, they found that quality jobs and good marriages in adulthood became positive turning points for these same individuals, leading many of them away from a life of crime.

In a follow-up study of the original delinquent boys, Sampson and Laub (2003) continued to revise their theory and gathered data on arrest records through age 70 for all 500 original participants and conducted life history interviews with a small group of them. These studies provided additional insights about the processes of continuing in or stopping criminal behavior in later adulthood. For example, they found one of the reasons why good marriages and jobs led to desistance from criminal behavior was because they changed participants’ routine activities, reducing the time they spent with friends who may have been a bad influence. In other words, they emphasized the importance of life transitions, such as marriage, employment, military service, the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one, in altering life trajectories. Also, many of the individuals they interviewed showed considerable independence and responsibility, taking an active, willful role in their efforts to desist from criminal offending. In other words, they wanted a crime-free life, so they did what they needed to do to get the type of life they wanted.

Moffitt’s Dual Taxonomy of Antisocial Behavior

One of the most influential theories in the developmental life course perspective comes from psychology and is a theory of antisocial behavior, also known as dual taxonomy of antisocial behavior. In an early article, Terrie Moffit (1993) described two types of offending patterns in the population: adolescence-limited and life-course persistent. Adolescence-limited offending is the more common pattern, and it means that any offenses someone committed were only during the individual’s adolescent years. This represents almost all teenagers who did something illegal but did not turn into someone who commits crimes for most of their life. Testing boundaries and breaking rules is something most people grow out of naturally. According to Moffitt, this is all part of growing up as approximately 90% of the juveniles she studied engaged in some form of delinquency.

However, Moffitt acknowledged the maturity gap between a teenager’s biological and social ages. As youth go through puberty, they begin to develop and mature into adulthood. At the same time, they are still treated as children by the broader society, lacking full rights and responsibilities. This gap between their biological and social maturity leads them to act out in ways that make them feel more adult and in control of their own lives. Peer associations, thrill-seeking, and rebelliousness contribute to delinquency. Once these adolescents transition into actual adult roles and responsibilities, the motivation to engage in delinquent behaviors disappears, and they desist from their criminal offending.

The other offending pattern identified by Moffitt, the life-course-persistent pattern, is somewhat rare. People who follow this pattern are similar to Wolfgang’s chronic recidivists—that is, they are the small number of career criminals who commit the biggest portion of offenses and most of the more serious offenses, including violence. People in this pattern begin their criminal or delinquent offending during early childhood and continue offending throughout adulthood. Their criminal behavior is considered pathological (i.e., they cannot stop) and they possess numerous traits consistent with antisocial personality disorder, such as dishonesty and a lack of concern for the rights of others.

According to Moffitt, life-course-persistent offending can be caused by a combination of neuropsychological deficits and environmental factors supportive of crime, such as poverty and abuse. Moffitt’s theory is an example of a modern approach to incorporating biological factors into a theory of crime, but she identifies multiple risk and protective factors that are psychological, biological, or social in nature. Moffitt pointed to three factors that make it particularly difficult for people to escape delinquency: drugs, gangs, and jail. Prevention, rather than treatment, is the key to stopping chronic, lifetime offending according to Moffit. Incarceration, the traditional criminal justice system approaches, can interfere with natural desistance from crime.

Theory Integration

Some contemporary theorists combine select aspects of foundational theories to form brand new explanations for criminal behavior based on ever-changing environmental, social, psychological, economic, and political events. These theorists will take a little bit of classical theory, mix it with some positivist, splash it with some neoclassical, and voila! Because there is no absolute when it comes to which theory is correct, criminologists are able to mix and match multiple theories into a cohesive hodgepodge to suit their needs—as long as the data supports the validity and reliability of the theory, of course.

You might be thinking, haven’t many of the theories discussed in this book already done this? It is true that there is overlap between many of the theories we have covered. However, often a theory will focus strictly on the macro-level (e.g., neighborhoods) or micro-level (e.g., individual characteristics) or will only apply to certain types of crime (e.g., street crime). In the 1980s, many criminologists advocated for the integration of multiple existing theoretical frameworks and components to better account for complex human behavior. But theory integration is not as simple as slapping together a couple different ideas. Rather, there are different ways in which theories can be carefully and thoroughly integrated. These include end-to-end, side-by-side, up-and-down, and conceptual integration, all of which are explained in the table below (Tibbetts, 2015). Those in favor of theory integration also argue that theories should be multidisciplinary to advance the field of criminology.

Type of theory integration	Description
End-to-end integration	Theories are merged “one after another,” indicating that one occurs before the other. For example, a theory might state that weak social bonds lead to negative peer associations and then to crime.
Side-by-side integration	Theories are considered parallel explanations that might apply based on which type of situation is being explained. For example, impulsive theft might be explained by a theory of low self-control, while white-collar crime might be explained by rational choice theory, as both have elements of control and opportunity involved.
Up-and-down integration	Theories are integrated by increasing the level of abstraction of one theory so that others can be incorporated into it. In other words, one theory’s concepts may be broad enough that other theories can fit within it.
Conceptual integration	Key concepts from different theories that have similarities, even if different terms are used, can be integrated if they share similar meaning or operationalization.
Type of theory integration	Description

Some common forms of criminological theory integration (Tibbetts, 2015).

There are many examples of integrated theories, some of which we have already discussed in previous chapters, but some focus heavily on the integration of concepts from multiple theories. American criminologist Delbert Elliott and colleagues provide one example with their integrated perspective on delinquent behavior. This approach combines components of strain, social learning, and social control theories and identifies two primary paths to delinquency. Although Elliott and colleagues recognized multiple different paths to delinquency, both primary paths in their theory involve juveniles who have weak social bonds, which can partly be a result of blocked opportunities and strain, and delinquent peer groups. One goal of their integrated approach was to eradicate the class bias that they saw in the traditional theories, where delinquency was assumed and linked only to lower-class juveniles (Elliott et al., 1979).

Another prime example of theory integration is Australian criminologist John Braithwaite’s (1989) theory of reintegrative shaming. Shame and informal social control are central to Braithwaite’s theory. He said that societies “will have a lot of violence if violent behavior is not shameful, high rates of rape if rape is something men can brag about, endemic white-collar crime if business people think law-breaking is clever rather than shameful” (Braithwaite, 2000). Braithwaite claims that societies must effectively communicate shame about crime in order to prevent it, as shame can become stigmatizing, which will increase crime. Effective shaming, or reintegrative shaming, involves communicating disapproval of behavior while maintaining respect for the individual. In other words, reintegrative shaming treats the person who committed a crime as a good person who did a bad thing but needs forgiveness, while stigmatization degrades, humiliates, and treats the individual as a bad person.

The theory of reintegrative shaming primarily borrows concepts from labeling theory and control theories, with some nods to deterrence theory. It applies to crimes against property and people in which there is a general social consensus that the behavior is wrong. The theory is very much in line with a restorative justice approach to crime control, meaning the goal is to repair harm caused by crime and restore the well-being of both perpetrators and victims rather than just punish those who have offended.

The integration of theories is a contentious topic among criminological scholars. While some support integration as a way of improving our theoretical understandings and getting closer to an accurate explanation of crime, others see major drawbacks to the process. Some theorists claim that the best way for theories to advance is for them to compete against one another to encourage their continued testing. Those opposed to theoretical integration also argue that it is not possible to integrate theories that have opposing assumptions. For example, social control theories assume people are naturally inclined to commit deviant behavior, while learning theories typically assume that people are non-criminogenic prior to learning the behavior from someone else (Krohn & Eassey, 2014). Nonetheless, criminological ideas and concepts continue to be assessed, altered, and integrated. The theories help shape current practice in social control from law enforcement to the court system.