Crime refers to an offense that is legally recognized as deserving punishment. The most common form of legal punishment is the detention of an individual in a prison. In contemporary detention facilities, such people are incarcerated: this works for both adult and delinquents. Delinquents are persons aged below 17 years and who according to the law are still minors. In most cases, they persist in crime despite the numerous efforts to rehabilitate them back into the society. This, therefore, culminates the question, is it true that crime can be traced through an individual’s life back to their younger years. Contemporary criminologists believe in what is called a life course developmental theory.
Life course developmental theory charts a visible course through one’s life that increases the probability of persistence in crime throughout the life of a person. It, therefore, states that the likelihood and persistence of crime can be traced back to the childhood risk factors of the individual’s environment. The theory suggests that there is a way to predict whether a child will indulge into crime as an adult or not. Studies were conducted from research to validate this theory, and most studies showed that children who were regarded as antisocial or engaged in antisocial behavior were destined to commit and probably persist in crime. The risk factors that determined whether a child would engage in crime were traced through familial bonds, friendship bonds, and societal bonds: the weaker they were, the stronger the possibility of engaging in persistent criminal activities and vice versa. However, this was from data analyzed in clusters of test subjects. A close look at the criminal life of each revealed conflicting data.
The likelihood of children developing into career criminals is not a fact written in stone. Sampson and Laub (2005) did a thorough analysis into the claim of developmental theory in criminology and found a few flaws of the absolute. They fundamentally discovered two deterrent facts that challenged the absolute: that is, human agency and turning points in life. Human agency is the set of choices an individual’s makes in life. However much the sum of a person's choices may point to a fixed trajectory in criminal life, it only takes one choice to change that trajectory away from crime. Therefore, an individual may persist in crime from the tender age in delinquency through middle age and suddenly stop indulging in crime at old age due to the life choices he/she makes. On the other hand, as an individual grows older, there are the inevitable human experiences that they may go through: take for instance employment and marriage. Getting a regular source of income has had a dampening effect on the lives of most criminals who secure employment. Studies show that most of the persistent criminals will turn away from crime effectively transforming their lives. Likewise, marriage also had a similar effect on the life of a criminal. In fact, the stronger the marriage bonds, the faster the individuals turned away from crime. In other cases, it was also discovered that despite the criminal’s deviance to commit a crime in spite of his marriage, the general trend of crime fell gradually.
In conclusion, the life course developmental theory into crime deserves merit as it shows the broad curve in the lives of particular individuals into crime. These people are destined to venture into crime due to the high-risk factors of the environments(s) in which they grew. Therefore, that makes it possible to trace probability of crime into childhood and also predict what caliber of children will venture into crime. However, studies also depict two mitigating realities of life – human agency and turning points in life – that effectively refute the concept of a fixed trajectory into a life of crime from a predisposed childhood
References
Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: a developmental taxonomy. Psychological review, 674.
Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (2005). A life-course view of the development of crime. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 12-45.
