The Craft of Criminology by Travis Hirschi

Author:Travis Hirschi [Hirschi, Travis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781351484350
Google: zxwuDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T04:34:57+00:00

9

Age and the Explanation of Crime

Travis Hirschi

Michael R. Gottfredson

This article marked the beginning of the “age-crime debate.” In one form or another, this debate continues to the present day, and several of the pieces in this collection are tied directly to it. Interestingly enough, although few scholars have come down on the side of Hirschi and Gottfredson in this dispute, several articles written against them are now routinely interpreted as providing evidence for their position (e.g., David P. Farrington, 1986; Steffensmeier et al. 1989). It seems that in one sense the age-crime debate existed even before the appearance of the article. The original contained many lengthy footnotes addressing the concerns of journal editors and referees. I have cut most of them on the grounds that it is no longer necessary to demonstrate the contentiousness of this issue, and that it is too late to hope that it can be resolved by logical argument.—JHL/TH

According to a recent criminology textbook (Allen, Friday, Roebuck, and Sagarin 1981: 235), age is the easiest fact about crime to study. In one sense, the statement is true: the age of the offender is routinely recorded, and age distributions of crime covering a variety of contexts over a long period are not hard to find. As a result, no fact about crime is more widely accepted by criminologists. Virtually all of them, of whatever theoretical persuasion, appear to operate with a common image of the age distribution. This distribution thus represents one of the brute facts of criminology. Still, the statement that age is an easy fact to study is decidedly misleading. When attention shifts to the meaning or implications of the relation between age and crime, this relation easily qualifies as the most difficult fact in the field. Efforts to discern the meaning of the large amount of research on the topic in terms supplied by those doing the research have turned out to be futile (e.g., Wootton 1959: chap. 5; see also Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin 1972: 105), as have efforts to explain the relation in statistical terms (Rowe and Tittle 1977).

Faced with this intransigent fact, the response in criminology has been apparently scientific and logical. Theorists are frequently reminded that their explanations of crime must square with the age distribution, and theories are often judged by their ability to deal with “maturational reform,” “spontaneous remission,” or the “aging-out” effect. Although some theories fare better than others when the age criterion is invoked, no theory that focuses on differences between offenders and nonoffenders avoids altogether the complaint that it provides an inadequate explanation of the age distribution. Given the persuasiveness of the age criticism of traditional theories, it is not surprising to find recent explanations of crime explicitly tailored to fit the accepted variability in crime by age (Matza 1964; Greenberg 1979; Trasler 1980). In fact, there is reason to believe that age could replace social class as the master variable of sociological theories of crime (see Empey 1978; Glaser 1978; Greenberg 1979).

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