Why men commit crimes (and why they desist)

Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983) claim that the relationship between age and crime is similar in all social and cultural conditions and that no current sociological or criminological theory can account for this similarity. We introduce the new field of evolutionary psychology and extend Daly and Wilson’s (1988) work on homicide to construct a general theory of male criminality, which explains why men commit violent and property crimes. The theory can also explain the age-crime curve. It might also account for some empirical anomalies such as why physically smaller boys are more delinquent, and why violent criminals desist more slowly. In their highly influential 1983 article “Age and Explanation of Crime, ” Hirschi and Gottfredson claim that the relationship between age and crime is invariant across all social and cultural conditions at all times. In every society, for all social groups, for all races and both sexes, at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other analogous, risktaking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off during middle age. Figure 1 presents the typical age-crime curve ~Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983: Figures 1, 5