Social Learning and Life Course Criminology.

Criminology has always included age as a variable in crime and deviance and has long been interested in careers in crime and career criminals. Over the past two decades these issues have become encapsulated in life course criminology. The rapidly expanding literature in life course criminology has been spurred in part as a reaction to self-control theorists' argument that there is no explanation for age variations, critiques of longitudinal studies and, in part, by the effort to improve on the way in which we understand issues of age, development, and changes in crime over time. Whatever its genesis, life course criminology has clearly assumed a central place in criminology. By focusing on age variations, careers, and trajectories in criminal and deviant behavior it has done for age what Marxist and conflict approaches have done for class and race and feminist approaches have done for gender. This has been important and worthwhile for criminological studies and research and has spurred efforts at theoretical integration, but has life course criminology introduced any new theory or explanatory variables for crime and deviance that goes beyond extant theory? This question is explored, and the central claim in the paper is that extant general theory, especially social learning theory, is capable of accounting for differences in crime by age and the trajectories and patterns of criminal and deviant behavior over the life course. I do not expect this claim to be controversial because social learning variables and explanations are already common, but often unacknowledged, in life course criminology. The paper is based on and develops further my previous work on this issue. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]