This working paper provides a theoretical literature review of the concept of agency in relation to criminal behavior over the life course, written in 2008 as a graduate seminar paper for SOC 8551 Social Structure and the Life Course at the University of Minnesota. This paper contains a theoretical literature review only. The paper examines existing theoretical explanations of criminal behavior over the life course through the lens of agency — how individual decision making interacts with social structures to produce observed patterns of criminal behavior. Of particular importance is the paper's early theoretical attention to how the developmental trajectory of strength over the life course has a potential role in explaining the age crime curve. This paper is significant as a dated record of theoretical thinking that was later developed more fully in Arnold (2016), The Criminological Puzzle, where I show that the age crime curve is probably the result of an interaction between the strength and intelligence trajectories over the life course. This also connects to the broader empirical work in Arnold (2009), The Nonlinear Dynamics of Criminal Behavior, where I show that adult offender risk is declining slowly and linearly over time. This paper is archived here to preserve the intellectual timeline of this body of work.
Thomas K. Arnold (Mon,) studied this question.
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