Abstract
Examining annual variation in the age–crime curve as a way to better understand the recent crime drop, this paper explores how the age distribution of convicted offending changed for men and women in Scotland between 1989 and 2011. This analysis employs shaded contour plots as a method of visualizing annual change in the age–crime curve. Similar to recent findings from the USA, we observed falling rates of convicted offending for young people, primarily owing to lower rates of convicted offending for young men. In contrast to the US literature we also find increases in the rate of convicted offending for those in their mid-twenties to mid-forties, which are relatively greater for women than men. Analysis of annual change shows different phases in the progression of these trends, with falls in prevalence during the 1990s reflecting lower rates of convictions for acquisitive crime, but falls between 2007 and 2011 being spread across multiple crime types. Explanations of the crime drop in Scotland and elsewhere must be able to account for different patterns of change across age, sex, crime type and time.
Highlights
The age–crime curve (ACC) has a long history in criminology
The results presented above show substantial change in the aggregate ACC in Scotland between 1989 and 2011, becoming flatter as overall conviction levels fell, and provide a number of insights regarding the development of the crime drop in Scotland
The analysis presented in this paper has extended the literature using variation in the ACC to understand the development of the crime drop
Summary
The age–crime curve (ACC) has a long history in criminology. First described in the 1830s by Adolphe Quetelet (2003 [1831]), this relationship has been characterized as ‘one of the brute facts of criminology’ (Hirschi and Gottfredson, 1983: 555). Recent years have seen a number of new analyses of change in the ACC (Blumstein, 2006; Cook and Laub, 2002; Farrell et al, 2015; Kim et al, 2015) that represent a different approach to the study of the ACC, using change in this distribution as a way to unpick trends in macro-level crime rates This contrasts with previous work, which was primarily concerned with the description and explanation of the micro-level relationship between a person’s age and propensity to offend (for example, Greenberg, 1985; Hirschi and Gottfredson, 1983). This analysis finds substantial change in the aggregate ACC over this period primarily owing to declines in youth convictions, and with different patterns of change between men and women, during different periods and between different types of crime
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