John H. Laub

• University of Maryland, College Park

Criminologists are often frustrated by the disconnect between sound empirical research and public policy initiatives. Recently, there have been several attempts to better connect research evidence and public policy. While these new strategies may well bear fruit, I believe the challenge is largely an intellectual one. Ideas and research evidence mu...

The interplay among data, analytic tools, and theory has been a defining feature of life-course and developmental criminology. In this paper, we briefly consider the intellectual history of each component before focusing on the prospects for future advancement. What are the most promising data sources and methodological tools that will advance life...

The publication of Travis Hirschi's Causes of Delinquency in 1969 was a watershed moment in criminology. There are many reasons for the work's lasting influence. Hirschi carefully examined the underlying assumptions of extant theories of crime in light of what was known about the individual-level correlates of offending. He then developed critical...

This chapter turns to the age-graded theory of informal social control. This theory posits that crime is more likely to occur when an individual's bond to conventional society is weakened. This chapter briefly considers Sampson and Laub’s Crime in the Making before providing a summary of the revised version of the theory in Shared Beginnings, Diver...

In 1986, the National Research Council published a two-volume report, Criminal Careers and “Career Criminals.” This work generated fierce debates central to the field of criminology and pitted some of the biggest names in the business against one another. In this paper, we consider the last 30 years and ask whether the report was an intellectual tu...

This article reviews the current state of knowledge and perspectives on desistance from juvenile offending. It begins by locating juvenile delinquency and desistance within the context of adolescent development and then describes the conceptual and methodological challenges of studying desistance from juvenile offending. There is a small but growin...

Developmental/Life Course Theories of Offending, edited by David Farrington. The intellectual move we take in this paper is to elucidate the life-course implications of a general age-graded theory of crime. In doing so we depart from the modus operandi of most developmental criminological theory by looking at changes in criminal behavior through a...

Few empirical studies of crime have treated neighborhoods as dynamic entities, by examining how processes of growth, change, and decline affect neighborhood rates of crime. From a small yet burgeoning collection of dynamic research related to population migration- including population loss, gentrification, development and demolition of public housi...

Distinguishing trajectories of criminal offending over the life course, especially the prediction of high-rate offenders, has received considerable attention over the past two decades. Motivated by a recent study by Sampson and Laub (2003), this study uses longitudinal data on conviction histories from the Dutch Criminal Career and Life-Course Stud...

In this article we contest the idea that individual characteristics and experiences in childhood are sufficient to explain trajectories of adult criminality, whether theoretically or empirically. We propose instead an age-graded theory designed to account for stability and change in crime over the life course from childhood to old age. This theory...

Over the last two decades, research examining desistance from crime in adulthood has steadily increased. The evidence from this body of research consistently demonstrates that salient life events—in particular, marriage—are associated with a reduction of offending across the life course. However, previous studies have been largely limited to male s...

In this manuscript, we discuss the interdisciplinary influence of Glen Elder on the core ideas of life-course criminology and the role of serendipity in research discoveries. In describing the intellectual roots and evolution of this perspective we describe our long-term project on the life course of crime using a unique data archive—the Unraveling...

Without Abstract

Although marriage is associated with a plethora of adult outcomes, its causal status remains controversial in the absence of experimental evidence. We address this problem by introducing a counterfactual life-course approach that applies inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to yearly longitudinal data on marriage, crime, and shared cov...

In response to a devastating critique of the state of criminology known as the Michael-Adler Report, Edwin H. Sutherland created differential association theory as a paradigm for the field of criminology. I contend that Sutherland's strategy was flawed because he embraced a sociological model of crime and in doing so adopted a form of sociological...

This research focuses on a relatively unexplored phenomenon—black female juvenile offenders. Both theoretical and research work are weak or nonexistent regarding these offenders. This paper seeks to fill some of these gaps. In addition, this research effort draws on a source of data that has in frequently been adapted to study offenders, National C...

Prior research on victimization in the United States has generally neglected two key areas—victimization among juveniles and young adults and the connection between offending and victimization. The research presented here fuses these two concerns by examining the effect of delinquent lifestyles on the criminal victimization of teenagers and young a...

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In this article, the authors present a life-course perspective on crime and a critique of the developmental criminology paradigm. Their fundamental argument is that persistent offending and desistance—or trajectories of crime—can be meaningfully understood within the same theoretical framework, namely, a revised agegraded theory of informal social...

The authors respond to the commentaries of Michael Gottfredson and Lee Robins on their article “A Life-Course View of the Development of Crime.” They delve further into the effect of marriage on crime, potential problems with sampling and research design, and how their data speak directly to related hypotheses and theories.

A recent and growing body of research has employed a semiparametric group-based approach to discover underlying developmental trajectories of crime. Enthusiasm for such latent class models has not been matched with robustness and sensitivity analyses to determine how conclusions from the method vary according to fundamental methodological problems...

In response to Nagin's comment on our paper, Methodological Sensitivities to Latent Class Analysis of Long-Term Criminal Trajectories, we reconsider the robustness and validity of group-based approaches to criminal trajectories and introduce additional issues for future research. We emphasize the limitations of typological approaches and the danger...

The field of criminology lacks a sense of its own history. To rectify this situation, I apply the concepts and framework of the life-course perspective to the development of criminology as a discipline. Examining criminology in the United States over the last 100 years, I discuss three eras (or life-course phases), intellectual continuities and tur...

Criminological research has emphasized the strong relationship between age and crime, with involvement in most crimes peaking in adolescence and then declining. However, there is also evidence of the early onset of delinquency and of the stability of criminal and deviant behavior over the life course. In this essay we reconcile these findings by sy...

Linking recently collected data to form what is arguably the longest longitudinal study of crime to date, this paper examines trajectories of offending over the life course of delinquent boys followed from ages 7 to 70. We assess whether there is a distinct offender group whose rates of crime remain stable with increasing age, and whether individua...

There is no shortage of explanations in the field of criminology for the onset of criminal behavior, which is typically assumed to occur in childhood or early adolescence. What is not known with much certainty is why some offenders stop committing crimes when they do, while others continue over large portions of the life course. What accounts for s...

This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Born in Boston in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these men were the subjects of the classic study Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950). Updating their lives at the close o...

The conventional wisdom in criminology is that adult onset of offending is a rare event. Closer examination of the extant literature that use official records, however, reveals that an average of 50 percent of adult offenders initiate offending at age eighteen or older. Although criminological research has investigated late onset offending in adole...

The conventional wisdom in criminology is that adult onset of offending is a rare event. Closer examination of the extant literature that use official records, however, reveals that an average of 50 percent of adult offenders initiate offending at age eighteen or older. Although criminological research has investigated late onset offending in adole...

The epidemic of youth violence in the United States peaked in 1993 and has been followed by a rapid, sustained drop. We assess two types of explanation for this drop-those that focus on "cohort" effects (including the effects of abortion legalization) and those that focus on "period" effects (including the effects of the changing crack-cocaine trad...

The study of desistance from crime is hampered by definitional, measurement, and theoretical incoherence. A unifying framework can distinguish termination of offending from the process of desistance. Termination is the point when criminal activity stops and desistance is the underlying causal process. A small number of factors are sturdy correlates...

Assesses what is known about the extent of racial and ethnic disparities in violent offending among juveniles, and provides a research agenda for the future aimed at addressing and providing better understanding of those disparities. A condensed version of Hawkins, Laub and Lauritsen (1998)

It is well established that until age 40 years, delinquent individuals have roughly twice the mortality of nondelinquent individuals and that the excess deaths are largely due to accidents, violence, and substance abuse. The present study examined if the increased mortality of delinquent subjects continues until age 65 years and, if so, why. The au...

Building on Sampson and Laub (1993), we draw an analogy between changes in criminal offending spurred by the formation of social bonds and an investment process. This conceptualization suggests that because investment in social relationships is gradual and cumulative, resulting desistance will be gradual and cumulative. Using a dynamic statistical...

The epidemic of youth violence that began in the mid-1980s has been demographically concentrated among black male youths: the homicide-commission rate for this group increased by a factor of about 4.5. A number of patterns stand out: one of every four or five serious crimes of violence, and one of ten homicides, are committed by juveniles who are l...

Assesses the empirical evidence in support of longstanding observations and beliefs regarding racial disparity in rates of serious violent crime and aggression among children and adolescents. Calls for new research protocols and theory making aimed at better understanding the causes of such group differences.

In 1950, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck published their now classic study, Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. One of the most frequently cited works in the history of delinquency research, the Gluecks sought to answer a basic and enduring question—what factors differentiate boys reared in poor neighborhoods who become serious and persistent delinquents f...

Linking historical context with macro-social opportunity over the life course, we examine the social mechanisms by which military service in the World War II era fostered long-term socioeconomic achievement. Our analysis draws on a classic longitudinal study of delinquency that brings together data on childhood differences (e.g., IQ, early antisoci...

It is a fact that the lives and works of female criminologists during the 20th century have not been explored with the same rigor as their male counterparts. Seeking to redress this imbalance, this paper describes the life and work of Eleanor Touroff Glueck. For this overview, we rely on published and unpublished papers found in the Glueck archives...

the motivation for this chapter stems from our attempt to integrate 3 diverse areas of research / [Ss were 10–17 yr old juvenile dilenquents & controls assessed at ages 17–25, 25–32, and 32–45 yrs] the 1st concerns families and delinquency / the 2nd area we explore relates to the effect of childhood and adolescent experiences on later adult outco...

Examines the distinguishing features of a life-course perspective on crime. Integrated with an age-graded theory of informal social control, the authors argue that the nuts and bolts of life-course inquiry, especially aging (social and biological), stability and change, human agency, cohort, and historical period, yield powerful insights directly r...

Reflecting a diversity of thought and intellectual power, this unique volume provides undergraduate students with an important historical context and demonstrates the continuity of many issues in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American Society of Criminology, this volume contains previo...

This paper reanalyzes data from the Gluecks classic study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents reared in low-income neighborhoods of central Boston. Based on a general theory of informal social control, we propose a 2-step hypothesis that links structure and process: family poverty inhibits family processes of informal social control, in turn...

This paper reanalyzes data from the Gluecks' classic study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents reared in low-income neighborhoods of central Boston. Based on a general theory of informal social control, we propose a 2-step hypothesis that links structure and process: family poverty inhibits family processes of informal social control, in turn...

This article examines conceptual issues relating to continuity and change in crime over the life course. Building on past efforts, we first distinguish self-selection from a cumulative, developmental process whereby delinquent behavior attenuates adult social bonds (e.g., labor force attachment, marital cohesion). We then conceptualize various type...

This explanation of crime and deviance over the life course is based on the re-analysis of a classic set of data: Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's mid-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 non-delinquents from childhood to adulthood. More than five years ago, Robert Sampson and John Laub dusted off 60 cartons of the Gluecks' data that had been store...

In this paper we review the existing longitudinal research on violent criminal behavior. Although interested in comparative research on this topic, we found that virtually all of the longitudinal studies comprised individuals from Western societies. The primary issue we examine concerns the extent to which there are universal patterns of violent be...

This article develops a macrolevel framework on inequality and juvenile court processing by integrating ideas drawn from conflict theory, research on urban poverty, and recent race-specific trends in drug enforcement. Using 1985 data for more than 200 U.S. counties, we examine how structural context-especially racial inequality and the concentratio...

While age is one of the most important correlates of an individual's risk of violent victimization, research regarding the victimization of adolescents is relatively meager. Using two well-known national data sources and an analytical framework guided by lifestyle/routine activities theories, we describe the relationships between activity involveme...

During the 1930s, Edwin Sutherland established the sociological model of crime as the dominant paradigm in criminology and as a result became the most influential criminologist of the 20th century. This article examines Sutherland's debate with Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck about the causes of crime and the proper focus of social science resear...

Analyzing the natural histories of two samples of boys that differ dramatically in childhood delinquency, we test a model of crime and deviance over the life course. The first hypothesis is that childhood antisocial behavior predicts problems in adult development across a wide variety of dimensions. Second, we argue that social bonds in adulthood--...

Until recently, one of the most neglected areas in research methodology was the secondary analysis of existing data. Attention to the potential strengths and weaknesses of secondary data analysis is especially important at this time in light of recent calls in the field of criminology for conducting more longitudinal research (see Farrington, Ohlin...

One of the most influential studies in the history of criminological research is Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks' Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (UJD) (1950). The research design of the UJD study was strong, but the conceptual and statistical analyses performed by the Gluecks were ofen lacking in both methodological and theoretical rigor. As a result,...

This paper uses a heretofore untapped source of information in the National Crime Survey (NCS) victimization data—the interviewer narratives—to explore school-related victimizations among adolescents. These narrative reports provide important information bearing on lifestyle and routine activity theories of victimization that is simply not availabl...

One of the most important changes in juvenile justice systems over the last twenty years has been the introduction and expansion of the role of prosecutors in the juvenile court process. This paper reports the results of a study investigating the role of the prosecutor in the juvenile court process in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. This jurisdict...

Our main purpose is to project the volume of juvenile crime and of child abuse over the next 10 to 15 years. Such projections are necessary as a guide to planning capacity changes in the juvenile court and corrections.

This paper explores an often overlooked area in the analysis of juvenile justice policy — the influence of changing conceptions of adolescence. It is our view that over time juvenile delinquents have been defined as either victims (and hence, not responsible for their actions) or offenders (and hence, at least in part responsible). This shifting co...

Despite the profound demographic and socioeconomic changes characterizing family life in recent years, youth crime rates have remained more or less constant since 1971. This finding is of interest given the intense public concern regarding the welfare of children. It also serves as a convenient basis for projecting the future volume of youth crime.

Although the level of crime varies dramatically across the urban-rural dimension, little research has been directed at the issue of the patterns of offending across this dimension. Using National Crime Survey (NCS) victimization data, this paper examines to what extent the patterns of offending by particular age, race, and sex subgroups are similar...