| Over the last twenty years, research in criminology has expanded beyond a focus on adolescence to examine crime and deviance over the life-course. As a result, more attention has been paid to desistance or the process of ceasing criminal behavior. This work has revealed a large number of factors that are related to desistance, including marriage, employment, psychosocial development and individuals' identity. To date, these explanations for desistance seem to have been perceived as mutually exclusive and/or competitive.;Interestingly, while research on desistance from crime has been a recent focus in criminology, certain work had examined crime over the life-course as far back as the early 20th century. In particular, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck offered one of the earliest 'theories' of desistance, arguing that maturation causes individuals to settle down and cease offending. Their "maturation theory" was somewhat tautological and not well-specified, which is a large part of why it has generally been relegated to the criminological dustbin.;However, the Gluecks were clear that further work was needed in order to specify what maturation meant and how it possibly related to crime. In this dissertation, I articulate five domains of maturation, drawing on the literature in the life-course and developmental fields. In the first set of analyses, an examination of crime and maturation over time is conducted, using empirical growth curves. These analyses show that crime follows the classic age-crime curve, while maturation increases over time though not always linearly. Second, in the main analyses, I examine how maturation relates to crime over time, focusing specifically on desistance. The analyses reveal that three of the five domains (as well as the average maturation measure) predict crime over time. Third, I examine varying specifications of the maturation-crime relationship, including maturation gaps and possible conditional relationships between maturation domains. The results show that adult social role maturation (employment, romantic relationships) has a larger effect when other maturation levels are low. In sum, maturation has a generally strong and complex relationship to crime. The implications of the findings in terms of theory and policy are discussed in the final chapter. |
