Abstract
This paper assesses the state of life-course criminology and argues that its major limitation to date is the general failure to incorporate social change. Invoking the concept of cohort differences in aging because of macro-level change, I discuss some of the watershed changes of recent times, including the historic crime decline, the technological revolution, massive immigration and urbanization, rises in inequality, and the Great Recession. I then introduce a new study from Chicago that attempts to link individual development and pathways of crime to some of these large-scale social changes, capitalizing on a cohort sequential design from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. I conclude with implications for global criminology, especially the role of urbanization, ethnic diversity, and inequality in Asia.
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Notes
For a recent assessment of the status of the age-graded theory of informal social control, see Laub et al. (2015, forthcoming).
The following section draws from Sampson (2015).
To date, there have been over 450 publications based on the PHDCN data, the first three waves of which are publicly available at the University of Michigan’s ICPSR. For further information on data access and publications, see http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/PHDCN/.
Amy Tsang is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Harvard University, and author of “Who is an ‘Urban Person’? Subjective Identification versus Official Classification of Place-Status in Contemporary China,” unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology.
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Data collection procedures performed in the PHDCN involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional review board and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Sampson, R.J. Crime and the Life Course in a Changing World: Insights from Chicago and Implications for Global Criminology. Asian Criminology 10, 277–286 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-015-9220-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-015-9220-3