Department of Psychology

Developmental psychologists have long known that life transitions can be challenging times, characterized by high stress, instability, and confusion about social roles and responsibilities.  Think of the time you transferred from public school to middle school; or when you entered or exited university or college.

Among criminal offenders, understanding the relationships between developmental transitions (such as from childhood to adolescence or adolescence to adulthood) and patterns of offending is of considerable interest to psychologists, criminologists, and social policymakers.  This is the aim of the research by Dr. Day and his colleagues.  He has been following the criminal behaviour of 378 male offenders over a 12-year period, from ages 15-27.  Their criminal activity data were obtained from two provincial ministries and the RCMP, for Canada-wide offences.  What we found is that the nature of their criminal activity changes in some interesting ways from adolescence to adulthood.  For example, the types of offences in which they engaged changed over time; in early adolescence, they tended to engage mostly in property crimes.  However, beginning at age 17, the rate of property offences declined, as the rate of other types of offences, including violent offences, increased.  In addition, when we count the number of offences they committed at each age, we observed that this figure rose sharply in early adolescence and then dropped off markedly at age of 17.  However, the severity of their offending and the number of different types of offences in which they engaged did not peak until 6 years later, at age 23.

How do we explain these patterns?  Perhaps as individuals become increasingly entrenched in a criminal lifestyle, it becomes more difficult to remove themselves from their circumstances.  As well, when crime begins at an early age and persists over time, it is all too easy to become disengaged from the kinds of opportunities that allow people to become self-sufficient (e.g., access to education, employment, and stable relationships).  The bottom line of this work is that investment in prevention and early intervention programming can yield considerable savings in the long run in terms of personal, social, and financial costs.