The main tenets of life-course criminology can be categorized into different dimensions, namely onset, desistance, duration, frequency, termination, and seriousness. In the first aspect, the concept bases its idea on the premise that crime originates from informal family and school social controls, which serve as a prerequisite factor for delinquency in childhood and adolescence (Samson & Laub, 2017). The second theme of this concept is that there is the antisocial behavior exhibited in the childhood years that persist through one’s adulthood. Another tenet of this theory is that the informal social control used in adulthood provides insights into criminal behavior over a person’s life span (McGee et al., 2020). Primarily, this concept asserts that a child’s susceptibility to crime and conformity relies on adult social bonds. According to Samson and Laub, once born a criminal, then one is likely to commit a crime for the rest of their lives since the weak bonds to the society persist throughout adulthood (Samson & Laub, 2017). They noted that desistance depends on an individual’s antisocial behaviors during childhood years. However, every criminal eventually desists from crime. This observation originates from an individual choice, along with the situational contexts and structural influence (Samson & Laub, 2017). Here, one argues that desistance is a continuous process that occurs at individual, communal, and situational levels. Besides, turning points contribute to this outcome, and they include family, work, or military service. When people go through situations that require them to be responsible in adult life, they are likely to change their behaviors. Marriage, for example, is one of the turning points. Here, an adult has a chance to connect with people in their social circles and thus, reducing the chances of offending. Besides, marriage gives a person a sense of responsibility and thereby changing their approach to crime. Most criminals eventually choose to stop crime due to the changes in their environment (Barak, Leighton, & Flavin, 2010). This outcome is explained using the random developmental noise, which claims that the interaction between a person and the environment results in changes in the DNA setting.
References
Barak, G., Leighton, P., & Flavin, J. (2010). Class, race, gender, and crime: the social realities of justice in America . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
McGee, T. R., Whitten, T., Williams, C., Jolliffe, D., & Farrington, D. P. (2020). Classification of patterns of offending in developmental and life-course criminology, with special reference to persistence. Aggression and Violent Behavior , 101460.doi:10.1016/j.avb.2020.101460
Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (2017). A general age-graded theory of crime: Lessons learned and the future of life-course criminology. In Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending (pp. 165-182). Routledge.
