International and Historical Variation in the Age–Crime Curve

Our goals were to assess competing narratives within criminology about contextual variation in the age–crime curve (ACC)—most prominently, whether the ACC shows constancy or difference across societies and historically and whether the prevalence of adolescent lawbreaking is high, with a majority of teens committing crime, contributing to a steep peak followed by rapid, continuous descent among adjacent adult age groups. We analyzed historical and cross-national evidence from numerous sources that revealed significant variance in ACCs. Strongly at odds with invariance projections of an adolescent peak and rapid descent, the predominant age–crime patterns outside the United States were postadolescent peaks and spread-out age distributions. Teen prevalence was typically much lower than the projection that a majority of teens commit crime, whereas the prevalence of adult crime was often sizable and serious. We illustrate using understudied societies how a socio-cultural framework that draws on age-graded expectations, social control practices, age-structured crime opportunities and stressors, and resultant lifestyle differences across significant life stages (adolescence, young adulthood, midlife) can apply to understanding cross-national differences in the age–crime relationship. Methodological challenges and future areas of research are discussed.