THE AGE-CRIME RELATIONSHIP ACROSS TIME AND OFFENSE TYPES: A COMPARISON OF THE UNITED STATES AND TAIWAN
Open Access
- Author:
- Zhong, Hua
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 10, 2005
- Committee Members:
- Darrell J Steffensmeier, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Eric Silver, Committee Member
Jeffery Todd Ulmer, Committee Member
Rukmalie Thalani Jayakody, Committee Member - Keywords:
- time-series analysis
culture
youth
development
age-crime relationship - Abstract:
- Although scholars agree that crime tends to rise and peak in adolescence or early adulthood and decline afterwards, there is a contentious debate in the criminological literature about whether and to what extent the shape or form of the age-crime curve varies across historical periods, geographic locations, and crime types. The invariancy view, most strongly articulated by Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983), is that the age-crime relationship is universal and invariant across all social and cultural conditions and all social groups at all times. Writers holding the variancy position contend (e.g., Greenberg 1985; Steffensmeier, Allan, Harer and Streifel 1989; Tittle and Grasmick 1998) that there is fact considerable variation across crime types and across countries or historical periods. A central feature of this debate concerns whether development increases youth crime involvement and then changes the age-crime distribution. The present study addresses these issues by examining the age-crime relationship in Taiwan over the period of 1961-1991. Taiwan is a strategic research site mainly because it has undergone considerable development over the past several decades and, in fact, has moved from being classified as a developing nation to a developed nation. Specifically, four hypotheses guide the research: (1) comparing age-crime distributions in Taiwan over the entire1960-1990 time frame, the distributions shift to a younger distribution with development; (2) based on both Taiwan and US arrest data, the age-crime curves in both nations should move to a younger distribution and peak earlier in the process of development; (3) due to cultural differences, there might be variations between Taiwan’s age-crime curves and the United States’ age-crime curves even at similar level of development; (4) markers of development predict changes (if they have occurred) in the age-crime distribution over the 1960-1990 period. Descriptive techniques and advanced time-series analysis are applied to examine these hypotheses. Overall, the results indicate that for general property offenses (except typical adult crime such as fraud), Taiwan’s age-crime curves have shifted to a younger age distribution over this time period as predicted by the variancy position. Moreover, the forces of development are especially useful for explaining these shifts. Such shifts and effects of development are not found for violent offenses and total offenses, which may be at least partially due to the continuity of traditional Chinese culture.