· The concept of turning points in the life course as applied in the social sciences and more recently in the area of developmental criminal careers has increased our understanding of events and processes that may trigger a redirection of a life pathway over time (e.g., desistence of criminal activity) and may be similarly valuable when applied to drug use …
· From Criminal Careers to the Life Course; The Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Reflections on the Future of Life-Course Criminology; Conclusion; Notes; ... Turning Points and the Future of Life-Course Criminology. Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 2016 53: 3, 321-335
· For our 1993 book, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life, we analyzed these data and developed a theory to explain childhood antisocial behavior, adolescent delinquency, and early adult criminal infractions. We took off from the basic insight that crime is more likely to occur when an individual’s ties to society are weak – and we …
· For our 1993 book, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life, we analyzed these data and developed a theory to explain childhood antisocial behavior, adolescent delinquency, and early adult criminal infractions. We took off from the basic insight that crime is more likely to occur when an individual’s ties to society are weak—and we …
Turning Points A turning point is a time when major change occurs in the life course trajectory. It may involve a transformation in how the person views the self in relation to the world and/or a transformation in how the person responds to risk and opportunity.
Turning points set into motion events that impact experiences across the life course that can “push” individuals into crime and encourage recidivism or “pull” individuals out of criminality and encourage desistance.
Moffitt's Theory of Delinquency This theory argues that life-course-persistent anti-social behaviour originates early in life, when the difficult behaviour of a high-risk young child is exacerbated by a high-risk environment.
Life course theory has five distinct principles: (a) time and place; (b) life-span development; (c) timing; (d) agency; and (e) linked lives. We used these principles to examine and explain high-risk pregnancy, its premature conclusion, and subsequent mothering of medically fragile preterm infants.
Overview. Life course theory (LCT) is an emerging interdisciplinary theory that seeks to understand the multiple factors that shape people's lives from birth to death, placing individual and family development in cultural and historical contexts.
Sampson's and John H. Laub's Age Graded Theory or Theory of Turning Points describe the change in the crime load of individuals as a function of biographical events. For this purpose, they use the so-called 'Turning Points', which can either strengthen, weaken or interrupt criminal behaviour.
Life course theory argues that specific events in one's life motivate one to desist from crimes, and this eventually prompts an individual to lead a normal life.
Developmental and life-course criminology are both concerned with the study of changes in offending and problem behaviors over time. Although these two theoretical approaches share some common features, they also differ in the concepts that they deem to be of focal concern.
Within criminology, the life course perspective is an effort to offer a comprehensive outlook to the study of criminal activity because it considers the multitude of factors that affect offending across different time periods and contexts (Thornberry, 1997).
The life course perspective recognizes the importance of timing of lives not just in terms of chronological age, but also in terms of biological age, psychological age, social age, and spiritual age.
The life course perspective looks at how chronological age, relationships, life transitions, and social change shapes the life from birth to death.
The life course approach examines an individual's life history and investigates, for example, how early events influenced future decisions and events such as marriage and divorce, engagement in crime, or disease incidence.
Turning points is a key concept in the life course approach, which emphasizes long-term developmental patterns of continuity and change in relation to transitions in terms of social roles (e.g., parent, employee, drug offender) over the life span [2].
Developed by Cohen and Felson (1979), routine activities theory requires three elements be present for a crime to occur: a motivated offender with criminal intentions and the ability to act on these inclinations, a suitable victim or target, and the absence of a capable guardian who can prevent the crime from happening ...
Substantive criminal law is primarily concerned with what? Crime and Punishment.
Early-onset offenders—those offenders who start before the age 12—are at high risk of developing persistent criminal behavior across the life-course (Loeber & Farrington, 2000; Loeber, Slot, van der Laan, & Hoeve, 2008; Snyder, 2001).
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Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: rsampson@wjh.harvard.edu
Constructive turning points life tend to have several features – they cut off negative past experiences and thrust people into new situations where they experience stronger supervision and positive social pressures along with new opportunities for social support and growth. Constructive turning points also involve changes in routine activities toward greater stability and structure – and they provide opportunities for identity transformation, allowing people to think of themselves in new, more constructive ways, such as taking on the identity of “father providing for his family.”
The idea that adult criminality is the inexorable result of childhood traits and troubles is a dominant theme in the science of criminology and media coverage of crime. Connections between childhood and adult behavior certainly do exist, but our research has been premised on the realization that findings about crime can be distorted when scholars start with adult offenders and then ask about their childhoods. In this retrospective approach, adult criminals regularly turn out to have been troubled children with early histories of delinquency. It is easy to jump to the simple, seductive conclusion that “bad boys grow up to become bad men.”
Our findings show that stable social ties and institutional connections make a difference. Yes, delinquent children sometimes become life-long repeat offenders. But experiences in adolescence and adulthood can redirect life trajectories in either positive or negative ways.
The idea that adult criminality is the inexorable result of childhood traits and troubles is a dominant theme in the science of criminology and media coverage of crime.
In this first part of our project, we reconstructed data from archives containing detailed records from the Gluecks’ three-wave prospective study of juvenile and adult criminal behavior. Their data started in 1940 with a sample of 500 delinquent boys ages 10-17 plus data on 500 additional boys of the same age who were not delinquents.
Our findings show that stable social ties and institutional connections make a difference. Yes, delinquent children sometimes become life-long repeat offenders. But experiences in adolescence and adulthood can redirect life trajectories in either positive or negative ways.
This special issue took a comprehensive look at the idea of criminal careers and the research that has emerged from it. In particular, it started with the origins and intellectual history of the 1986 “Criminal Careers and Career Criminals” report and its objectives and then considered the influence of that work on aspects of criminological theory, research methods and design, data analysis, and policy and practice. This concluding paper offers a brief summation of these essays and the scholarship on which they are based. In doing so, this forward-looking review offers a comment on the past, present, and future of research on criminal careers to underscore its contribution to the discipline, mark any areas where opportunities may have been missed, and present an agenda for the next generation of research.
We suggest that Bernard, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck routinely applied Alfred Adler’s general psychological concepts to specific instances of criminological theory without proper attribution. We offer several levels of support: (1) we contrast the Freudian terminology within Bernard Glueck’s early writings and Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s influential book Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (1950) with the Adlerian constructs of their respective criminological works; (2) we describe the enduring similarity between life-course theory of crime and Adler’s original theory; and (3) we speculate as to how this apparent but non-attributed Adlerian influence occurred. Overall, the article exposes a circumstantial evidence of neglect in the criminology literature: Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s silence on Adler’s contribution and their own ostracization by mainstream criminology. We conclude that acknowledgment of the Gluecks’ contribution and their debt to Adler could continue to reinvigorate criminology today.
Qualitative findings from a reentry mentoring program evaluation demonstrate the importance of establishing and maintaining relationships with specific characteristics during the process of successful transition of returning citizens from prison to their communities. Significant gaps in knowledge of this process include understanding of the experience of the returning citizen as they navigate this extremely challenging transition, and their experiential knowledge of what they need to enhance successful reentry. The men who participated in group and individual mentoring activities during their stay in an adult transition center and after their release to supervision in the community, shared their experiences of the mentoring. Qualitative data collection and analysis, as a component of the evaluation, produced a thematic narrative describing and explaining, from the experiential perspective of the participants, how they perceived and valued the mentoring relationships. The findings suggest the importance and complexity of supportive relationships during the reentry transition, and how such relationships can potentially lead to crystallization of revised identity and an increased capacity to desist from behavior responsive to a negative or crime-saturated identity. Development and maintenance of such supportive relationships are recommended throughout the reentry process to enhance effective use of services and a successful transition.
The interplay among data, analytic tools, and theory has been a defining feature of life-course and developmental criminology. In this paper, we briefly consider the intellectual history of each component before focusing on the prospects for future advancement. What are the most promising data sources and methodological tools that will advance life-course inquiry in criminology? Above all, what are the key questions and theoretical ideas for moving the field forward? Our argument is that by integrating new directions in data, tools, and ideas—especially (1) testing an augmented theory of turning points, (2) examining cohort differences in aging and crime that arise from macro level changes, and (3) designing criminal justice interventions that are both developmentally appropriate and socially supportive while not compromising public safety—the future of life-course and developmental criminology will be as bright, if not brighter, than the rich legacy of its past.
This chapter assesses the reciprocal relationship between theory and policy in criminology. The central argument of the chapter is that good policy needs good theory and that good theory finds its ultimate test in its application to policy and practice. The chapter argues that there is a solid foundation for strengthening the reciprocal relationship between theory and policy in criminology and builds on past work that has attempted to lay that foundation. It examines two key intersections of theory and policy in criminology and discusses how each benefitted from the intersection. The examples here provide an assessment of the reciprocal relationship between theory and policy. The chapter places the theory–policy intersection in a broader scientific context, noting the expanded approach to this nexus in other disciplines. It concludes with observations about the future prospects of applied theory in criminology and current developments in translational and public criminology.
The understanding of vulnerability in this chapter is informed by Ten Have’s approach to the concept. We consider how children and prisoners which are seen as vulnerable groups by researchers, have “double vulnerability” in common and explore the interrelated factors which impact their external and internal conditions of vulnerability. This is followed by a pragmatic consideration of the ethical aspects of doing research with these groups. We conclude the chapter highlighting the importance of including children and prisoners in research.
The main study to test the validity of the life-course theory was conducted by Laub and Sampson, who extraordinarily were able to follow the participants for an extremely long period of time which is a difficult task to accomplish in the social science field.
The life course perspective is a broad approach that can be used in a variety of subject matters such as psychology, biology, history, and criminology. As a theory, the denotation establishes the connection between a pattern of life events and the actions that humans perform s.
With this project, Sampson and Laub ultimately ended up contradicting one of criminology’s most popular theorists, Travis Hirschi, by stating “criminality is not a constant, but affected by the larger social forces which change over a life-course” (Yeager).
When putting the theory into practice, key assumptions should be acknowledge. An assumption made continually by life- course theory supporters regards human behavior as being affected by nurture rather than nature.
As a result of this conclusion, the term ‘theoretical integration’ is often used when discussing life-course theory.
From a criminological stance, the aspect of Mannheim’s discovery on the importance of influence is the primary focus. Although Mannheim’s research helped expand the life-course approach, generally in the social sciences field W.I Thomas and F. Znaniecki are the two sociologists credited to having ignited the broad theory.