Name: Bagaoisan Clfford jay G

Yr&Sec:1st Year College Score

ACTIVITY 10
DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES OF CRIME CAUSATION

Discuss briefly the following:

1. Developmental and life-course theories
2. Latent trait theory
3. Interactional theory
4. Age-graded life-course theory
5. Social development theories
6. Control-balance theory
7. General theory of crime
8. Differential coercion theory 

DEVELOPMENTAL AND LIFE-COURSE THEORIES

Developmental and life-course theories of crime are collectively characterized by their goal of
explaining the onset, persistence, and desistance of offending behavior over the life-course.
developmental and life-course theories of crime, the more influential and empirically tested ones
include Sampson and Lab’s age-graded informal social control theory and Moffitt’s typological
model of life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited offending. While developmental and
life-course criminology has come to be viewed a single type or grouping of criminology, there
are distinctions between the more sociological life-course perspectives and the more
psychological developmental perspectives. These are a result of the disciplinary training of the
individuals working in the field and are reflected in the types of variables examined and the
theoretical explanations developed and applied to explain the relationships
Therefore the life-course perspective within criminology focuses on the examination of criminal
behavior within these contexts. Given its sociological origins, life-course theoretical explanations
tend to focus more on social processes and structures and their impact on crime.
Collectively, developmental and life-course criminology allow for the examination of: within-
individual changes over time; the impact of critical life events; the importance of the social
environment; and pathways, transitions and turning points.
LATENT TRAIT THEORY
Latent Trait Theory was proposed by Rowe, Osgood, and Nice wander to explain crime over the
life cycle. The idea being that a lot of people have a personal attribute or characteristic that
controls the inclination to criminal behavior. Because latent traits are stable, just as biology is
stable, offending over time is based on opportunities to commit crime and not on propensity, the
propensity is stable. As people age through the life course this latent trait is always there and
always a stable presence in the background, directing behavior and subsequently shaping the
course of their lives. Some view latent trait theories as incorporating trait theory (personality and
temper) and rational choice theory (opportunity and suitability of targets). 
Latent trait theory seeks to provide a reason for crime. The theory states that certain people have
a personal characteristic that is responsible for their need to commit crime. The individual is
often not responsible for what they do because their impulses are controlled by this specific trait.
Also, the individual does not commit crime unless there is opportunity. This means that unless
the individual is secure in the fact that they will be successful, they will not commit crime. So the
trait only prompts the individual to crime when the environmental conditions are right.
Latent trait model that simultaneously accounts for both participation in crime and the frequency
of crimes, phenomena that the criminal career model attributes to different causal processes. The
criminal career model is predicated on a categorical distinction between active offenders and no
offenders, but the latent trait model assumes a continuous distribution of propensity to offend.
Our specific statistical model relates a relatively stable and general latent propensity to engage in
crime to the frequency of criminal behavior.
INTERACTIONAL THEORY
Interactional theory offers a broad explanation for the causes and consequences of involvement
in antisocial behavior. When first proposed by Thornberry in 1987, it primarily focused on
delinquency and drug use during adolescence and early adulthood. The theory was subsequently
expanded in two major directions.
Interactional theory's hypothesis that these variables are involved in reciprocal causal
relationships that have the potential of propelling a person along an increasingly delinquent
behavioral trajectory. Finally, it discusses the theoretical and policy implications of the empirical
results.
AGE-GRADED LIFE-COURSE THEORY
The state dependence theory of Sampson and Laub assumes that the causal relationship between
early delinquent offending and later adult deviant behavior is not solely a product of individual
characteristics; social events may change some individuals while others continue to offend. Their
theory contains three main components. First, the micro-level structural context is mediated by
informal family and school social controls, which can explain delinquency in childhood and
adolescence. Next, there is continuity in antisocial behavior from childhood through adulthood in
a variety of life domains. Finally, informal social bonds to family and employment during
adulthood explain changes in criminality over the life span despite early childhood propensities
(Laub and Sampson 1993: 7). Sampson and Laub's research and subsequent replications of their
work substantiate their hypotheses (Sampson and Laub 1993; Paternoster and Brame 1997; Laub
et al. 1998; Sommers et al. 1994; Horney et al. 1995). (y)
Most important for the current study, Sampson and Laub find that attachments or social bonds in
adulthood increase some individuals' social capital, leading to desistance from most types of
deviant behavior, with the exception of men involved in drunkenness and violence. This paper
links job and marital attachments in a side-by-side fashion to Bowlby's construct of infant-parent
attachment. Men who become attached to coworkers or a spouse will increase their self-control;
alternatively, as Gottfredson and Hirschi hypothesize, constraints in the form of job or marital
attachments may prevent those with low self-control from offending.
Combining attachment theory with the general theory of crime and life-course theory -- by
linking the constructs of parental emotional investment to attachments and social bonds -- may
strengthen the predictive power of each perspective. The development of self-control may be
explained without attempting to reconcile the competing assumptions of these distinctive
theories. Further, Bowlby's prediction that early secure attachment precludes deviant behavior
resonates with Sampson and Laub's findings that later attachments to work or to a partner explain
desistance. Linking these perspectives through Bowlby's attachment theory may better explain
crime and desistance over the life course.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT THEORIES
The defining feature of developmental criminology is its focus on offending in relation to
changes over time in individuals and their life circumstances, with most research being focused in
practice on childhood and youth. Developmental criminologists are concerned with questions of
continuity and change in behavior, including the onset of and desistance from offending, and patterns of
offending over time
Velopmental criminology has its roots in mainstream criminology and positivist social science and studies
the relationship between biological, psychological, and social factors and offending across the life course,
from conception to death. A foundation assumption is that the ‘baggage’ people carry from the past – the
continuing effects of earlier experiences such as a happy childhood or sexual abuse – affect the ways they
behave in the present. Thus developmental criminologists reject traditional approaches that emphasize
between-group differences in favors of a study of within-individual changes in offending in relation to
changes in many other factors. The field has been dominated by quantitative methods that aim to measure
relationships between developmental processes and offending. Developmental critics of this view argued
that crime trajectories or pathways, known as criminal careers, are far more varied than this simple model
suggests, and that it is necessary to have separate models for exploring such processes as age of crime
onset, participation levels, frequency, duration, and desistance from crime, recognizing the different
influences at various life phases and stages of criminal careers. Social and psychological factors after the
early years, including peer influences and parenting practices, exert strong effects, with a failure to
exercise self-control being only one risk factor. Consequently developmental criminology has had
little to say about wider influences on life course outcomes such as the global impact of re-
structured labor markets on national and local employment opportunities. Finally it has been too
uncritical of government policies, failing to recognize that major risk factors for offending can be
imbedded unintentionally in new programs when these fail to comprehend the complex realities
of the lives of children and young people growing up in disadvantaged communities.
CONTROL- BALANCE THEORY
Control balance theory endeavors to account for variation in individual deviance, as well as the
seriousness of these actions. Unlike many other theories, control balance seeks to explain not
only adolescent delinquency and other street-crime types of deviance, but also the deviance of
powerful actors, often called white-collar crime or elite deviance. In addition, control balance
theory also addresses variation in deviance across population aggregates, but this aspect of the
theory has received little attention. Tittle 1995 provides a new definition of deviant behavior and
an accompanying typology by which different deviant acts can be categorized according to
whether they are repressive or autonomous, as well as their seriousness within these types.
Deviance is portrayed as instrumental behavior that is employed in an effort to improve the
actor’s control ratio. The crux of the theory is that deviance will increase as control ratios
become increasingly imbalanced. This results from the effect of control ratios on other causal
process variables, particularly deviant motivation and constraints on deviant acts. In this original
formulation of the theory, control ratio imbalances are also theorized to affect the seriousness of
the deviance that individuals perform, a provision that is removed in Tittle 2004, a major
revision (cited under Major Revision) and replaced by the idea of “control balance desirability.
GENERAL THEORY OF CRIME
A General Theory of Crime (1990), which defined crime as “acts of force or fraud undertaken in
pursuit of self-interest.” Arguing that all crime can be explained as a combination of criminal
opportunity and low self-control, Gottfredson and Hirschi hypothesized that a child’s level of
self-control, which is heavily influenced by child-rearing practices, stabilizes by the time he
reaches the age of eight. Thus, they identified parenting as the most decisive factor in
determining the likelihood that a person will commit crimes. Children reared in settings of
neglect or abuse, for example, will be more likely to commit criminal acts, while children raised
in supervised homes, where punishment is a consequence of bad behavior, will be more likely to
withstand temptations toward criminal conduct. In addition to criminal and delinquent acts, low
self-control is manifested in tendencies to be “impulsive, insensitive, physical, risk-oriented,
shortsighted, and nonverbal.” Although Hirsch’s theories were criticized for being, among other
things, tautological, paternalistic, and definition ally flawed, they were widely popular among
American criminologists.
DIFFERENTIAL COERCION THEORY
Differential coercion theory is a theory in criminology that explains the relationship between
coercion and the likelihood of committing a crime. Developed by sociology professor Mark
Colvin in the year 2000, the theory is based on the idea that juveniles who are exposed to
negative experiences in their homes and social lives are more likely to lack in certain social and
psychological areas. This increases their chances of committing a crime in the future.
Differential, in this context, means varying in consistency of exposure. Some juveniles might
experience coercion only a few times in their daily life. It might only come from one source, or it
might not be that serious. For others, it might be something they encounter daily and come from
multiple aspects of their environment.