John H. Laub - Böcker

Reflecting a diversity of thought and intellectual power, this unique volume provides undergraduate students with an important historical context and demonstrates the continuity of many issues in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American Society of Criminology, this volume contains previously published articles by the society's president-many of whom are the leading thinkers in the field. Articles examine the philosophy of punishment, policing, the politics of crime and crime control, criminological theory, drug use, white-collar crime, female crime, the study of deviance, parole, prediction studies, and criminal justice policy.

This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Born in Boston in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these men were the subjects of the classic study Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950). Updating their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date. John Laub and Robert Sampson's long-term data, combined with in-depth interviews, defy the conventional wisdom that links individual traits such as poor verbal skills, limited self-control, and difficult temperament to long-term trajectories of offending. The authors reject the idea of categorizing offenders to reveal etiologies of offending--rather, they connect variability in behavior to social context. They find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community.By uniting life-history narratives with rigorous data analysis, the authors shed new light on long-term trajectories of crime and current policies of crime control.

This new explanation of crime over the life course provides an important foundation for rethinking contemporary theory and criminal justice policy. It is based on the reanalysis of a classic set of data: Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks’ mid-twentieth-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents from childhood to adulthood. Several years ago, Robert Sampson and John Laub dusted off sixty cartons of the Gleucks’ data that had been stored in the basement of the Harvard Law School. After a lengthy process of recoding and reanalyzing these data, they developed and tested a theory of informal social control that acknowledges the importance of childhood behavior but rejects the implication that adult social factors have little relevance.

Life-course criminology has generated new energy and provoked sharp debate over competing ideas about the fundamental relationship between age and crime.  A major catalyst for this debate – a 2003 American Society of Criminology (ASC) conference session entitled "Age, Crime, and Human Development: The Future of Life-Course Criminology," chaired by the editors of this issue – provided a springboard for this special issue of The Annals. 

With an eye to the future, this special issue provides critical debate on patterns of age and crime across the full life course – from infancy to late adulthood.  Criminal career topics such as onset, continuation, termination, and career length are also discussed, along with the viability of developmental and taxonomic theories of crime, the suitability of existing data archives to test theories, and the prospects for marrying longitudinal and experimental studies.

The distinguished papers that appear in this compelling collection include the full set of presentations from the inaugural Albany Symposium on Crime and Justice: "Developmental Criminology and Its Discontents: Offender Typologies and Trajectories of Crime," which took place in April 2005 and built upon the questions raised at the ASC conference session. In addition to the revised original papers and commentaries from the Albany symposium, this journal also includes never-before-published responses to the commentaries by each of the papers' authors.  An overview by Alfred Blumstein of the central issues raised at the symposium and a book-review essay by Hans-Jürgen Kerner rounds out the volume and collectively provides a comprehensive representation of the provocative discussion ignited by these intriguing session panels.

Centered on the fundamental discussions raised by the life-course paradigm in criminology, this historical issue of The Annals will potentially shape the theoretical and research agenda for years to come. It is an essential resource for scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of criminology, sociology, psychology, criminal justice, aging, human development, and social policy. 

With a diverse set of viewpoints, this well-rounded and in-depth look at age, crime, and human development is a valuable contribution to existing studies and will serve as a foundation for future research into this lively topic.