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Developmental Theories

Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck formed the basis of today's developmental approach.
Life-course theories - view criminality as a dynamic process, influenced by a multitude of individual characteristics, traits, and social experiences. As people travel through the life course, they are constantly bombarded by changing perceptions and experiences, and as a result their behavior changes direction, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.
1. Problem behavior syndrome (PBS) - crime is one among a group of interrelated antisocial behaviors that cluster together and typically involve family dysfunction, sexual and physical abuse, substance abuse, smoking, precocious sexuality and early pregnancy, educational underachievement, suicide attempts, sensation seeking, and unemployment. The more risk factors that individuals suffer, the greater the likelihood that they will engage in antisocial behaviors; and the more they engage in antisocial behaviors, the more likely they are to develop risk factors.
  1. People who have a long and varied criminal career are more likely than others to die early and to have greater than average mortality rates.
2. Adolescent-limited offenders may be considered "typical teenagers" who get into minor scrapes and engage in what might be considered rebellious teenage behavior with their friends.34 As they reach their midteens, adolescent-limited delinquents begin to mimic the antisocial behavior of more troubled teens, only to reduce the frequency of their offending as they mature to around age 18.
3. life-course persisters who begin their offending career at a very early age and continue to offend well into adulthood. They display social and personal dysfunctions, including lower-than-average verbal ability, reasoning skills, learning ability, and school achievement.
4. Late bloomers - These persisters actually stay out of trouble in adolescence until late in their teenage years and then become violent chronic persisters. kids who started later in delinquency were actually the ones more likely to get involved in adult offending!
5. Age-Graded Theory - Robert Sampson and John Laub. discrete factors influence people at different stages of their development, and, therefore, the propensity to commit crimes is neither stable nor unyielding.
  1. Social capital - positive relations with individuals and institutions that are life-sustaining. people who fail to accumulate social capital are more likely to commit criminal acts.
    1. criminal careers are a dynamic process in which an important life event can (1) produce a transition in the life course and (2) change the direction of a person's life-course trajectory. They refer to these as important life events as turning points. Two critical turning points are marriage and career.
      1. children who grow up in two-parent families are more likely to have happier marriages themselves than children who are the product of divorced or never-married parents. 40–50 percent of first marriages, 67 percent of second marriages, and 74 percent of third marriages end in divorce.
latent trait theories (which are also called propensity theories ) believe that human development is controlled by a "master trait," present at birth or soon after, that, in the case of criminals, endows them with an increased propensity to commit crime.
1. A number of people in the population have a personal attribute or characteristic that controls their inclination or propensity to commit crimes. This disposition, or latent trait , may be either present at birth or established early in life, and it can remain stable over time. Suspected latent traits include defective intelligence, damaged or impulsive personality, genetic abnormalities, the physical-chemical functioning of the brain, and environmental influences on brain function, such as drugs, chemicals, and injuries.
2. Whereas the propensity to commit crime is stable, the opportunity to commit crime fluctuates over time. As a result, most people age out of crime. As they mature and develop, there are simply fewer opportunities to commit crimes and greater inducements to remain "straight."
3. General theory of crime - Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi link the propensity to commit crime to two latent traits: an impulsive personality and a lack of self-control.
  1. They have a here-andnow orientation and refuse to work for distant goals; they lack diligence, tenacity, and persistence. People lacking self-control tend to be adventure-some, active, physical, and self-centered. As they mature, they often have unstable marriages, jobs, and friendships. They are also more likely to engage in dangerous behaviors such as drinking, smoking, and reckless driving. All of these behaviors are associated with criminality
    1. parents who themselves manifest low-self control are the ones most likely to use damaging and inappropriate supervision and punishment mechanisms, such as corporal punishment.
      1. Children who suffer anoxia (oxygen starvation) during the birthing process are the ones most likely to lack self-control later in life, which suggests that impulsivity may have a biological basis
  2. the male crime rate is higher than the female crime rate because males have lower levels of self-control.
  3. Misreads human nature. According to Francis Cullen, John Paul Wright, and Mitchell Chamlin, the GTC makes flawed assumptions about human character. It assumes that people are essentially selfish, self-serving, and hedonistic and must therefore be controlled, lest they gratify themselves at the expense of others.
  4. Because criminality and other social problems are linked, early prevention efforts that reduce delinquency will probably also reduce alcohol abuse, drunk driving, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and family violence.
The factors that produce crime and delinquency at one point in the life cycle may not be relevant at another; as people mature, the social, physical, and environmental influences on their behavior are transformed.
Pathways to crime
1. Authority conflict pathway - begins at an early age with stubborn behavior. This leads to defiance (doing things one's own way, disobedience) and then to authority avoidance (staying out late, truancy, running away).
2. Covert pathway - begins with minor, underhanded behavior (lying, shoplifting) that leads to property damage (setting nuisance fires, damaging property). This behavior eventually escalates to more serious forms of criminality, ranging from joyriding, pocket picking, larceny, and fencing stolen goods, to passing bad checks, using stolen credit cards, stealing cars, dealing drugs, and breaking and entering.
3. Overt pathway - escalates to aggressive acts, beginning with aggression (annoying others, bullying), leading to physical (and gang) fighting and then to violence (attacking someone, forced theft).
Offense specialisation - Some offenders may specialize in the short term but engage in a wider variety of offenses when presented with opportunities to commit crime.
The seeds of a criminal career are planted early in life and that the early onset of antisocial behavior strongly predicts later and more serious criminality. the earlier the onset of criminality, the more frequent, varied, and sustained the criminal career.
programs are now employing multidimensional strategies and are aimed at targeting children in preschool through the early elementary grades to alter the direction of their life course. Many of the most successful programs are aimed at strengthening children's social-emotional competence and positive coping skills and suppressing the development of antisocial, aggressive behavior.

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Developmental Theories

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	Created by Wendy Frogley over 10 years ago