Rethinking one of criminology’s ‘brute facts’: The age–crime curve and the crime drop in Scotland

Abstract

Examining annual variation in the age–crime curve as a way to better understand the recent crime drop, this paper explores how the age distribution of convicted offending changed for men and women in Scotland between 1989 and 2011. This analysis employs shaded contour plots as a method of visualizing annual change in the age–crime curve. Similar to recent findings from the USA, we observed falling rates of convicted offending for young people, primarily owing to lower rates of convicted offending for young men. In contrast to the US literature we also find increases in the rate of convicted offending for those in their mid-twenties to mid-forties, which are relatively greater for women than men. Analysis of annual change shows different phases in the progression of these trends, with falls in prevalence during the 1990s reflecting lower rates of convictions for acquisitive crime, but falls between 2007 and 2011 being spread across multiple crime types. Explanations of the crime drop in Scotland and elsewhere must be able to account for different patterns of change across age, sex, crime type and time.

Participation and Frequency in Criminal Convictions across 25 Successive Birth Cohorts: Collectivity, Polarization, or Convergence?

“…The male offender population has decreased from comprising 40% of the cohorts born in the early 1960s to 25% of the cohorts born during the early 1980s. In the Swedish case, this decline is most evident during late adolescence, which to some extent has led to an increasingly flat age-crime curve across successive cohorts (see also Matthews & Minton, 2018).…”

“…With respect to the age-crime relationship, Matthews and Minton (2018) recently argued that the task has shifted from that of explaining an increasingly peaked age-crime curve to instead having to explain a curve that has become increasingly flat (p. 314; see also Ulmer & Steffensmeier, 2014). While the crime drop generally appears to have involved a decline in male youth crime (Andersen et al, 2016;Berg et al, 2016;Matthews & Minton, 2018), our results are only partly consistent with the notion of a flatter age-crime curve. The male participation curves display decreases across almost the entire age range across successive cohorts, but a disproportionately large decrease during late adolescence, which is indeed supportive of a flattening tendency.…”

“…Farrell et al, 2015) have shown that the crime-drop is first and foremost a decline in male adolescent offending. As Matthews and Minton (2018) argue, the task of research, therefore, appears to have shifted from that of explaining an increasingly peaked age-crime curve to explaining one that has become increasingly flat (p. 314). Their own analyses suggest that this trend is particularly evident among males, which has in turn led to the typical age-crime curve becoming increasingly similar among males and females over time.…”

“…Among males, both participation and frequency in these ages have decreased over birth cohorts, whereas for females they have increased. The age-crime curve among males has thereby become flattened during late adolescence (see also Matthews & Minton, 2018), but among females it has become increasingly skewed towards earlier ages.…”

“…In this respect, the usage of longitudinal multicohort conviction data allows us to distinguish between participation and frequency, which is informative to theoretical controversies surrounding the crime drop since mechanisms may work via either one of these concepts (Berg et al, 2016). Relatedly, Matthews and Minton (2018) argued that the extent to which the typical age-crime relationship has changed across successive birth cohorts, and how such a change relates to gender and crime types, ought to provide highly relevant pieces of the crime-drop puzzle (see also Matthews, 2016).…”