11th Annual IGSS Conference • September 24, 2020

Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences 2020

Aging out: biological age and its role in the criminal career

Peter Tanksley, School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati

The relationship between age and crime is more complicated than is acknowledged by criminological theories. Traditionally, age has been viewed as a strictly temporal construct. Developmental/life-course criminologists have argued about where to place age in theories of crime causation; however, these debates were typically argued by a) those who saw age as scientifically uninteresting or b) those who saw age as little more than proxy for the timing of socially important events in the lives of offenders. Both of these perspectives argue that age has some influence on crime, but neither has considered the opposite possibility-that crime might, in turn, influence age. Recent developments in the field of geroscience has shown that age is more than simply a temporal state and is, instead, best thought of age a biological process. Drawing on the developments in the quantification of biological age, this study uses data from the Dunedin Longitudinal Study and the Health and Retirement Study to explore the interplay between the criminal career and biological age.

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