Social Variation, Social Explanations

T he relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime. They also reveal a long-term trend toward younger age-crime distributions in more modern times. Today, the peak age-crime involvement (the age group with the highest age-specific arrest rate) is younger than 25 for all crimes reported in the FBI’s UCR program except gambling, and rates begin to decline in the late teenage years for more than half of the UCR crimes. Even the median age (50% of all arrests occurring among younger persons) is younger than 30 for most crimes. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), self-report studies of juvenile and adult criminality, The Age and Crime Relationship