Revisiting age and crime: examining the age characteristics of the criminal population in Courtney/Comox, BritishColumbia

The relationship between age and crime, specifically the finding that crime peaks in late adolescence, has become an accepted fact of criminological research. The consistency of this finding over time and across jurisdictions has led to the common conception that crime is a 'young man's game'. However, this common conception of the age-crime relationship is generally based on past cross-sectional and historical longitudinal data, and fails to consider current criminal populations and contemporary youth. In order to reassess the relationship between age and crime, an analysis was undertaken examining the age characteristics of the criminal population and the associated involvements in criminal activity from the community of Courtenay/Comox, British Columbia, Canada over a one-year period. This analysis focused on both age-distributions of current involvements in crime events and data from the offenders‟ criminal histories. The findings indicated that offenders aged 25 and over were responsible for a considerable proportion of the crime problem; a fact generally not accounted for in the traditional understanding of age and crime. Furthermore, there appears to be the potential for a shift away from the youth concentrated peaks typical to age-crime distributions, refuting claims of an invariant causal relationship in favour of alternative explanations for the relationship. Continued study of age and its role in crime is warranted, as there are several unresolved issues surrounding this enduring topic in criminology.