Life-Course Criminology
Definition
The study of offending as a trajectory across a person's life, focused on onset, persistence, escalation and desistance rather than on a fixed offender trait.
Related terms
- Adolescence-Limited Offender
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, an offender whose antisocial conduct begins and ends within adolescence, driven by peer context rather than by an early-emerging...
- Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control
- Sampson and Laub's theory that the strength of a person's bonds to family, school and work shapes offending at every stage of...
- Integrated Theory
- A theory that deliberately combines constructs from two or more existing theories, such as strain, control and social learning, into a single...
- Life-Course-Persistent Offender
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, an offender whose antisocial conduct begins in early childhood and tends to continue, in some form, across the life...
- Turning Point
- A life event, such as a stable marriage, military service or steady employment, that redirects an offending trajectory by creating new social...