David P. Farrington - Integrated Developmental and Life-course Theories of Offending

This volume fills a glaring gap in the literature on criminological theories. Written in response to classical theories of crime (strain theory, differential association theory, and control theory), the principal issue is whether these and more recent theories address developmental and life-course aspects of crime. These developmental aspects include the transition between antisocial behavior and delinquency, the age-crime curve, a wide range of and developmental shifts in the putative causal factors in the individual, family, peer, school, and neighborhood, and an emphasis on protective factors as they affect individuals development of offending over time. Another expansion has taken place in the life periods studied, which now cover childhood to old age. In contrast to the earlier theories, both escalation and desistance processes are nowadays within the scope of criminological theorists. To varying degrees these topics are discussed in the chapters that follow, which present the major theories by Lahey and Waldman, Piquero and Moffitt, Farrington himself, Catalano and his colleagues, Le Blanc, Sampson, and Laub, Thornberry and Krohn, and Wikstrm.

A few important volumes on theories have appeared in recent years. They are worthy of mention here, because they have helped to develop the theme for this book and the types of chapters included in the current volume. Thornberry edited a volume entitled, Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency (Transaction, 1997), and more recently (with M. D. Krohn) Taking Stock of Delinquency (Kluwer/Plenum, 2003), while Lahey, Moffitt, and Caspi ambitiously edited Causes of Conduct Disorder and Juvenile Delinquency (Guilford, 2003). Each of these volumes contains specially commissioned chapters by researchers who carefully conducted longitudinal studies spanning many years. Even though each volume had several purposes, the integration of the chapters does not appear to have been the primary consideration, nor whether each author would address the same key theoretical questions. These three volumes can be contrasted with two other collective initiatives, that is the two OJJDP study groups led by David P. Farrington and myself, which culminated in the publication of Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions (Sage, 1998), and Child Delinquents: Development, Intervention and Service Needs (Sage, 2001). Although these edited volumes were more coordinated by the editors, they are limited in their theoretical coverage, other than expounding a public health approach to crime.

Why yet another volume on criminological theories? The editor of the present volume, David P. Farrington, rightly recognized that theories often pass like ghosts in the night (not his quote) or miscommunicate among themselves because they address very different outcomes, life periods, and processes. They often have limited ranges of explanatory factors and do not necessarily address processes that account for individuals escalation from minor to serious forms of delinquency, or their de-escalation from serious to minor delinquency, or even more interesting, their transition to non-offend-ing. As another example, the theories also vary in their ability to focus on selection processes in which certain populations of youth (and not others) move into to high-risk experiences or settings, such as gang involvement or drug dealing.

The present volume is a welcome and timely addition to the aforementioned books because its editor challenges the theorist contributors to address a common set of key developmental questions. Farrington masterly draws from his decades of experience in research on delinquency and crime to formulate these key questions (see his list in the first chapter of the book). He then challenged each author to expand on the issues, which he/she usually has addressed (and incorporated in his/her theory) and requested that he/she addresses, perhaps for the first time in criminological theory, the common set of key questions. Knowing Farrington a bit, it is his way of provoking answers from his colleagues on matters that they, in a less obvious manner, have been able to avoid for a long time. The ways that each of the contributors dealt with the common questions (or chose to highlight some questions over others) should be of great relevance to anyone working in criminology.