Aging Out
Definition
The empirical tendency of most offenders to stop committing crime as they move through their twenties, largely independent of formal punishment.
Related terms
- Adolescence-Limited Offending
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, antisocial behaviour that emerges in the teenage years, driven by peer context and the gap between physical and social...
- Age-Crime Curve
- The graph of offending rate against age, which rises through adolescence, peaks in the late teens and declines through adulthood in almost...
- Desistance
- The process by which an individual stops offending, usually gradual rather than a single event, and typically tied to changes in routine,...
- Life-Course-Persistent Offending
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, antisocial behaviour that begins in early childhood, rooted in neuropsychological deficits and disrupted parenting, and that tends to continue...
- Maturation Reform
- An older criminological label for the same aging-out pattern, used before modern life-course research identified the social mechanisms, such as work and...