An Examination of Age-Crime Relationship

• In Event: Poster Session I

Abstract

Gottfredson and Hirschi proposed an age-crime relationship showing that individuals’ crime involvement reaches its peak during mid- to late-teen period and declines with age, and claimed that the crime-age curve is universal and invariant over time. The present study examined the age-crime curve by analyzing the arrest data from UCR between 1995 and 2015. Although the general shape of age-crime curve remains consistent with Gottfredson and Hirschi’s proposition, the peak age has been gradually increasing from the age of ‘late-teens’ to ‘early 20s’ during the past 20 years. The patterns are similar for both violent crime and property crime. The findings suggest that, although the general shape of age-crime curve may be invariant over time, the increasing peak age may reflect changes in various societal and environmental factors in the U.S. Several plausible explanations/speculations were introduced.

Author

• Young S Kim, Eastern Michigan University