Abstract
Numerous studies have identified a late-onset pattern of offending, yet debate remains over whether this pattern is real or attributable to measurement error. The goal of the present study is to identify whether this late-onset trajectory exists. We used prospective longitudinal data from the Rochester Youth Development Study and group-based trajectory modeling to identify distinct developmental patterns in self-reported incidence of general delinquency from approximately ages 14 to 31. We then examined and compared the means of general, violent, street, and property offending for individuals belonging to late bloomer, chronic, and low-level offending trajectories across three periods: (1) pre-onset (ages 14–17), (2) post-onset (ages 29–31), and (3) for a subset of participants participating in a follow-up study, post-trajectory (ages 32–40). Results confirmed the existence of a distinct late bloomers offending trajectory characterized by low rates of delinquency throughout adolescence and high levels throughout adulthood. Furthermore, late bloomers had similar mean levels of delinquency as low-level offenders and they were considerably lower than chronic offenders in the pre-onset period and similar means of offending as chronic offenders that were considerably higher than low-level offenders in the post-onset and post-trajectory periods. Comparisons of these three groups on adolescent risk and protective factors indicated that late bloomers were more similar to individuals in the low-level trajectory and had fewer risk and more protective factors than individuals following a chronic trajectory. Contrary to prior work which attributes late-onset offending to reliance on official data which fails to detect adolescent offending, late bloomer offending appears to be a genuine phenomenon. These results lend greater support to dynamic theories of crime.
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Notes
But, see Steffensmeier et al. (2017) who showed that the age-crime curve may differ in societies with more collectivist/less individualistic cultures.
Among males, they ranged from 9.2 to 44.2%; among females, they ranged from 3.1 to 4.9%.
Joliffe et al. (2017) reported that late-onset offenders had lower rates of offending than adolescence-limited or life-course persistent offenders throughout their criminal careers in seven samples reviewed in their study and rates of offending equal to or greater than adolescence-limited (although still less than life-course persistent) in four samples.
The group-based trajectory model has been widely used in studies of late-onset offending and criminal career trajectory patterns (Piquero, 2008).
At wave 1, for example, participants who scored in the top 10% of the frequency distribution (n = 94) reported an incidence of general delinquency ranging from 20 (90th percentile) to 250 (100th percentile). These participants had their scores recoded so that they were equal to 20. This was done for all fourteen waves. Although we experimented with other recoding strategies (e.g., recoding at the 95th percentile), we had issues with model convergence when such extreme outliers were included.
Although general delinquency measured from pre-onset to post-onset is used to identify our trajectory groups as well as examine offending mix, we include it for two reasons. First, we examine this measure at separate developmental periods captured during (pre-onset, post-onset) and after (post-trajectory) the trajectory is estimated. Second, general offending is included as a baseline to compare various subtypes of offending (i.e., violent, street, property). We note, however, that including this measure as an outcome (during the pre-onset and post-onset periods) may be somewhat tautological.
We also observed a late bloomer group in both the 7-group and 8-group models. In the 7-group model, the mixture probability for the late bloomer group was virtually identical to that of the 6-group model (n = 12.3%). In the 8-group model, the mixture probability for the late bloomer group was 8.6%.
Although both “chronic” groups appear to have desisted from offending between early and later adulthood, we use the term “chronic” to refer to this group because they have engaged in the most frequent offending over the life course, particularly when compared to other groups.
We also estimated a series of nonparametric rank-sum tests which tested the null hypothesis that the distribution of delinquency is the same between groups. In general, results were substantively similar.
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Acknowledgements
Support for the Rochester Youth Development Study has been provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA020195, R01DA005512), the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (86-JN-CX-0007, 96-MU-FX-0014, 2004-MU-FX-0062), the National Science Foundation (SBR-9123299), and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH56486). Technical assistance for this project was also provided by an NICHD grant (R24HD044943) to the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University at Albany. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the funding agencies.
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Matsuda, M., Thornberry, T.P., Loughran, T.A. et al. Are Late Bloomers Real? Identification and Comparison of Late-Onset Offending Patterns from Ages 14–40. J Dev Life Course Criminology 8, 124–150 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-022-00189-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-022-00189-9