Abstract
This article examines the well-documented relationship between early initiation or onset of criminal behavior and a heightened risk of involvement in offending. Previous research examining this question conducted by Nagin and Farrington (Criminology 30:235–260, 1992a; Criminology 30:501–523, 1992b) used data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development and found that: (1) onset age was correlated with offending involvement; and (2) the correlation could be explained by stable individual differences in the propensity to offend rather than a causal effect of early onset age. In this study, similar analytic methods are applied to data from the Second Philadelphia Birth Cohort. This data set consists of all 13,160 males born in Philadelphia in 1958 who resided in the city continuously from ages 10 to 18, slightly more than half of whom were non-white. Information from each of the youths was collected from schools, juvenile justice agencies, other official sources and surveys. In a model that mimics previous analyses, we initially found that an early age of onset is associated with greater subsequent involvement in delinquent behavior. When unobserved criminal propensity was controlled, however, we found that a late rather than an early onset of delinquency was related to future offending. In finding a state dependent effect for age of onset, our findings are contrary to propensity theory in criminology. In finding that it is late rather early onset which puts youth at risk for future offending, our findings are contrary to developmental/life course theory. Our results are more compatible with traditional criminological theory that is friendly to state dependence processes, though they too have not to date articulated why a late onsetting of offending might be particularly criminogenic.
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Notes
There is likely a fourth theoretical position as well. For taxonomic theories like Moffit’s (1993) and Patterson (Patterson 1996; Patterson and Yoerger 1993) the early onsetting of delinquency is a flag or marker for one type of offender—the life-course-persistent and early starting offender). For these youth, their early initiation into crime is due to a combination of biological and family/environmental factors that is manifested at each subsequent stage of life. The positive correlation between prior and subsequent offending, then, is a manifestation of population heterogeneity and is spurious. For the adolescent-limited and late starting offender, however, criminal offending in one period is predicted to have causal significance for offending in the subsequent period in a process harmonious with state dependence.
The police contact data actually goes all the way back to age 5 but we thought it was not credible that any “real” offenses could be committed before age 8 so age 8 was the first year we used in the analysis and we followed them up through age 17.
Police contact is the only offending information in the 1958 Philadelphia dataset that suits our need for criminal activity information for all respondents over all ages. There is self-reported information included in the Philadelphia data but it was only collected one time during adulthood and it was based on a quota sample that tends to overweight the active offenders and underweight the non-offenders.
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Bacon, S., Paternoster, R. & Brame, R. Understanding the Relationship Between Onset Age and Subsequent Offending During Adolescence. J Youth Adolescence 38, 301–311 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-008-9322-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-008-9322-7