Life-span Offending Trajectories of Women, Ages 12 to 72.

Our knowledge of offense patterns over the life-course has increased sharply in recent years. There are now detailed datasets following young people to adulthood, as well as statistical methods created to do justice to these datasets. However, women and girls have largely been absent from this burst of knowledge. Most studies include only boys and men, and even when girls and women are included, their numbers are often too small for detailed analysis. In addition, the length of followup history is usually short, to age 40 at the oldest. This may confound analysis by gender. For example, if the life-course pattern of some women began in their 30s and ended in their 60s, we would need to follow them through their sixties in order to describe accurately their life-span trajectory. Fortunately, there exists a dataset with a large number of women and men that follows people to age 80, the Criminal Career and Life-course Study (CCLS). This paper presents analysis of life-course offending patterns of 424 girls and women, compared to 4191 boys and men, in the CCLS. Sampled from all 1977 CJ contacts in the Netherlands and followed prospectively from 1977 to 2003 and retrospectively to their initial CJ contact, the CCLS includes data on each CJ contact from age 12 through age 72 (given age in 1977), as well as basic data on social characteristics over time. We describe patterns of onset, frequency and offense type changes over the lifespan, career duration, and desistance. We then discuss implications of these findings for developmental and life-course theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]