Understanding Offending Across the Life-Course: Current Theories and Conceptions
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Understanding Offending Across the Life-Course: Current Theories and Conceptions Paul Mazerolle 1 & Tara Renae McGee 1 Published online: 1 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
We are delighted to present the latest special issue for the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (JDLCC). Our early planning for the JDLCC included a commitment to explore opportunities for showcasing current research on developmental and lifecourse criminology across various thematic areas. We have produced several special issues over recent years and it is timely to illuminate some of the current theories and theoretical debates available for informing understanding of criminal offending across the life-course. Theories provide the foundation, indeed the lifeblood for advancing knowledge and understanding about crime across the life-course. Over the past 30years, we have observed considerable growth in the range of theoretical contributions examining crime across the lifecourse. Indeed, the depth and breadth of theories that have emerged over this time are impressive. As research findings about criminal offending have accumulated, so too has the range of significant questions and queries about dynamic offending sequences and stages of offending behavior across the life-course. The expanded collection of research findings has magnified the need and importance of furthering the theoretical foundations for explaining and understanding criminal behavior across the life-course. What has emerged is a range of approaches, from general theories to typological theories, from static to dynamic approaches, as well as various combinations (Paternoster et al. 1997). The advance of developmental and life-course criminology over time stems from the convergence of a range of related activities. For example, while the relationship between age and crime is often viewed as one of the “brute facts” of criminology, it has only been over the past 30 years that major debates and disagreements have emerged over the nature and interpretation of this important relationship (Blumstein et al. 1988; Hirschi and Gottfredson 1995; Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990; Sampson and Laub 1995). Vigorous debates over the age-crime relationship and its interpretation were occurring at a time when the criminal career paradigm for partitioning and predicting correlates of dimensions of offending behavior (onset, persistence, escalation, desistance, etc.) were highly prevalent. Moreover, at this time, researchers were increasingly able to access longitudinal data sets and were
* Paul Mazerolle [email protected]
1
Griffith, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
154
P. Mazerolle and T. R. McGee
examining processes of offending continuity and change over time. The expansion of research opportunities assessing dynamic offending processes, the accumulation of research findings, and the contrasting interpretations of the relationships between age, development, and crime fueled important advancements in theoretical development and debate (Moffitt 1993; Samps
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