2025/03/13 by Bianca E. Bersani, Danny Dorling, Glen O’Hara +5 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Communism, Protests, Social Movements
paper · doi:10.1093/bjc/azae066
openalex publication_date 2025/03/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The life course paradigm brought a focus on continuity and change in offending across the entire life span to criminology. Early research evolved to capture individual-level variation and the events, experiences and opportunities that functioned to spur change and alter behavioural trajectories. Though the notion that ‘lives change in a changing society’ (Elder et al. 1994: 11) is fundamental to the life course paradigm, the principle of historical time and place has received relatively scant empirical attention in criminology. This is largely due to the lofty data and analytic demands required for this sort of inquiry. One must have a long breadth of data to capture different moments in history and then have longitudinal data on individuals to model changing people in changing places. However, with the creative rethinking of data and the adoption of innovative methodologies, criminology is experiencing an upswell in research aimed at locating people in historical moments and investigating how history shapes the criminal offending trajectories of individuals. Clearly, when you are born matters, but why? Are the dimensions of the criminal career altered by changing age norms (Bersani and Doherty 2024), unstructured socializing (Baumer et al. 2021) or social change linked to legal system practices (Neil and Sampson 2021)?