Overview
One of the most consistent findings across studies on offending in different countries is the age-crime curve (Farrington 1986; Tremblay and Nagin 2005). The relationship between age and crime is of an asymmetrical bell shape, showing that the prevalence of offending (the percentage of offenders in a population) tends to increase from late childhood, peaks in the teenage years (around ages 15–19), and then declines from the early 20s, often with a long tail (Fig. 1). The sharp increase during adolescence in the curve reflects an increase in new delinquency recruits during that period, and the rate of recruitment tends to slow down subsequently (Smith et al. 2002). The age-crime differs from developmental trajectories (qv) of offending in that the age-crime curve indicates the prevalence of offending by age of populations of individuals, whereas developmental trajectories make distinctions between subgroups of offenders, such as life-course persistent offenders and...
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Loeber, R., Farrington, D.P. (2014). Age-Crime Curve. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_474
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