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This volume is the comprehensive synthesis of the empirical findings of seven important ongoing longitudinal studies of delinquency. It aims to examine the extent to which these studies answer the basic question of the origins of delinquent and criminal careers despite their varying guiding theories, methods, and settings. This book is an important resource for criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, and students on juvenile delinquency, criminology, developmental psychology, and deviant behavior.
In Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency, Terence P. Thornberry and his contributors show that criminal behavior is not a static human attribute, but ebbs and flows over the life course of the individual. Criminal behavior tends to follow a distinct psychological pattern. It is relatively uncommon during childhood, is initiated by most offenders during adolescence, flourishes during late adolescence and early childhood, and usually diminishes or disappears by the mid-twenties. This pattern is not characteristic of all people--some never commit crimes and others become career criminals--but it is a general description of the developmental pattern of criminal offenders. This pattern ...
Developmental and life-course criminology aims to provide information about how offending and antisocial behavior develops, about risk and protective factors at different ages, and about the effects of life events on the course of development. This volume advances knowledge about these theories of offender behavior, many of which have been formulated only in the last twenty years. It also integrates knowledge about individual, family, peer, school, neighborhood, community, and situational influences on offender behavior, and combines key elements of earlier theories such as strain, social learning, differential association, and control theory.Contributors Benjamin B. Lahey and Irwin D. Waldm...
How to best generate theoretical growth in the contemporary study of deviance and crime has been the source of much debate. This book represents a diverse range of viewpoints concerned about theoretical integration and its benefits. The chapters encompass both discussion of the requisites for integrating theories and examinations of methodological strategies to test these theories. By providing a source for those grappling with the issue of theoretical integration, the book is sure to stimulate further theoretical development in the sociology of deviance and in criminology.
Most major crime in this country emanates from two major data sources. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports has collected information on crimes known to the police and arrests from local and state jurisdictions throughout the country. The National Crime Victimization Survey, a general population survey designed to cover the extent, nature, and consequences of criminal victimization, has been conducted annually since the early1970s. This workshop was designed to consider similarities and differences in the methodological problems encountered by the survey and criminal justice research communities and what might be the best focus for the research community. In addition to comparing and contrasting the methodological issues associated with self-report surveys and official records, the workshop explored methods for obtaining accurate self-reports on sensitive questions about crime events, estimating crime and victimization in rural counties and townships and developing unbiased prevalence and incidence rates for rate events among population subgroups.
This is a follow-up study to "Delinquency in a birth cohort", the 1972 study which traced the development from birth to age 18 of male delinquents in the Philadelphia birth cohort of 1945. This study follows a sample from the original cohort up to age 30 and extends the analytic strategies of the previous work. More than 60 per cent of the subjects were interviewed at age 25. Their attitudes, values, experiences as crime victims, self-reported involvement in crime, and other facets of their lives are used to round out the picture developed from official sources. Among their findings, the authors show that : there is little offense specialization, even during adult years; that the seriousness of offenses increases with age, but that the actual number of crimes committed decreases. In other aspects -- such as the intervals between arrests and differences between white and non-white arrest patterns -- the adult data sometimes replicate juvenile results and sometimes offer new insights into offender patterns.
The wide-ranging scope of the Handbook of Life-Course Criminology covers genetics and environment, child offenders and late bloomers, the impact of school and peers, lifelong and time-limited criminal careers, and qualitative and quantitative methodologies. This unique Handbook is further set apart by its dual coverage of the leading edge of current research and innovative directions for future work in the field. Pathways to crime have been a central concept of criminology from its inception. Accordingly, a lifespan approach to the field has replaced earlier biological and sociological perspectives with a more nuanced understanding of offender behavior and a wider lens of study. The contribu...
Malcolm W. Klein Center for Research on Crime and Social Control University of Southern California 1. BACKGROUND In June of 1988, approximately forty scholars and researchers met for four days in the Leeuwenborst Congres Center in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, to participate in a workshop entitled Self-Report Metho dology in Criminological Research. The participants represented 15 nations and 30 universities and research centers, a diversity that was matched by the experiences and focal interests in self-report methods among the participants. This volume is the result of the workshop process and in particular of the invitations to participants to prepare pre-conference papers for distrib...
When approached by Plenum to put together a volume of social science research on the topic of "youth and justice," I found the interdisciplinary challenge of such a project intriguing. Having spent 2 years as Director of the Law and Social Science Program at the National Science Foundation, I was well aware of the rich diversity of research that could fit within that topic. I also knew that excellent research on youth and justice was coming from different communities of researchers who often were isolated from each other in their respective disciplines as psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, or policy analysts. I saw this project as an opportunity to break down some of this isolation...