Age, life course transitions, and criminal behavior: Advancing the debate with event history analysis

The origin of recent controversies over the stability and change in an individual\u27s propensity to crime can be traced back to Hirschi and Gottfredson\u27s (1983) provocative arguments on the impact of age on criminal behavior, which triggered a series of heated debates between them and the advocates of longitudinal studies of crime. Unfortunately, however, their arguments have rarely been examined rigorously in the social and historical contexts that are widely different from those of the United States and other Western nations. Also, key concepts of their arguments were hard to operationalize, which have made it difficult to test their arguments against empirical data. This study aims at advancing the debate on the relationship between age and crime into a more substantive discussion on the possible impact of life-course transitions on individual offense trajectories, by reformulating the arguments of Hirschi and Gottfredson with event history analysis models and by looking at data from a nonwestern nation. The analysis of juvenile offense histories of two Japanese birth cohorts indicated that a steep decline in age-specific offense rates in late teens could be seen as characteristic to Japan in recent years, which ran counter to the allegedly “invariant” effect of age on criminal behavior. As to the impact of life-course variables on individual offense histories, graduation from junior high school was found to have a negative, statistically significant interaction effect, with maladjustment to school, on the hazard of repeating an offense. The relevance of life-course transitions to the offense histories of Japanese youth was also demonstrated in a supplementary survey of juvenile offenders. These results indicate that Hirschi and Gottfreson\u27s “general theory” on the impact of age on criminal behavior, as well as some of the traditional and common understandings of crime in Japan, are both contrary to evidence, and that an explanation based on time-and-place-specific implications of life course transitions may be a better alternative