Life-Course Criminology
Definition
The branch of criminology, associated chiefly with Sampson and Laub, that studies how social institutions and adult life events, not just early traits, continue to shape offending across a person's whole life.
Related terms
- Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control
- Sampson and Laub's theory that the institutions capable of bonding a person to conformity change with age, from family and school in...
- Integrated Theory
- A theory that deliberately combines constructs from two or more existing theories, such as strain, control and social learning, into a single...
- 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...
- Adolescence-Limited Offenders
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, the majority of adolescent offenders, who have no early conduct-problem history and stop offending by their early twenties once...
- Developmental Taxonomy
- Moffitt's 1993 model treating the age-crime curve as a composite of two etiologically distinct offender groups rather than one shared process.
- Interactional Theory
- Thornberry's 1987 model that makes the causal links between weak bonds, peer association and delinquency reciprocal and lets their relative weight shift...
- 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...
- Life-Course-Persistent Offenders
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, a small group whose antisocial behaviour starts in early childhood and continues in an age-appropriate 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...
- Turning Points
- Adult events, such as a good marriage or stable employment, that restructure daily routines and supervision enough to redirect an offending trajectory...
Explained in these topics
- Life-Course and Integrated Theories (UGC-NET Unit IV)
- Life-Course, Developmental and Integrated Theories of CrimeThe 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.