Politics, Social and Economic Change, and Crime: Exploring the Impact of Contextual Effects on Offending Trajectories*

• Author: Emily Gray,Stephen Farrall,Phil Mike Jones
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329220942395
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220942395

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(3) 357 –388

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220942395

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Article

Politics, Social and Economic

Change, and Crime: Exploring

the Impact of Contextual

Effects on Offending

Trajectories*

Stephen Farrall, Emily Gray, and Phil Mike Jones

University of Derby

Abstract

Do government policies increase the likelihood that some citizens will become

persistent criminals? Using criminological concepts such as the idea of a “criminal

career” and sociological concepts such as the life course, this article assesses the

outcome of macro-level economic policies on individuals’ engagement in crime. Few

studies in political science, sociology, or criminology directly link macroeconomic

policies to individual offending. Employing individual-level longitudinal data, this

article tracks a sample of Britons born in 1970 from childhood to adulthood and

examines their offending trajectories through the early 1980s to see the effects of

economic policies on individuals’ repeated offending. A model is developed with data

from the British 1970 Birth Cohort Study that incorporates individuals, families, and

schools and takes account of national-level economic policies (driven by New Right

political ideas). Findings suggest that economic restructuring was a key causal factor

in offending during the period. Criminologists are encouraged to draw on ideas from

political science to help explain offending careers and show how political choices in

the management of the economy encourage individual-level responses.

Keywords

criminal careers research, Birth Cohort Study 1970, life course perspective,

Thatcherism, economic restructuring

Corresponding Author:

Stephen Farrall, Department of Criminology, College of Business, Law, and Social Sciences, University of

Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 1GB, England.

Email: s.farrall@derby.ac.uk

*This special issue of Politics & Society titled “Societies under Stress” features an introduction by David

Garland and four articles that were presented as part of the workshop series held at the University of

Southern Denmark, December 2017, organized by Marianne Ulriksen and Peter Starke, and at The Ohio

State University, November 2018, organized by Sarah Brooks, Sarah Berens, and Georg Wenzelburger

and partly funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Ref 30.18.0.134.PO.

942395PASXXX10.1177/0032329220942395Politics & SocietyFarrall et al.

research-article2020

358 Politics & Society 48(3)

Research into criminal careers is a mainstay of criminological, sociological, and psy-

chological endeavors. Early research into why people start offending has developed

into research on why offenders continue to offend and, more recently, why they desist

from offending.1 Criminologists have identified an increase in levels of offending dur-

ing the teenage years, “peaking” in the late teens and early to mid-twenties, followed

by a slow “decay” in engagement in crime. Generally speaking, those who start to

offend earliest and most frequently tend to be engaged in offending for longer periods,

in some cases decades. Research into criminal careers has been dominated by quantita-

tive researchers, although the literature is replete with many examples of qualitative

research, and, of late, qualitative research into offending trajectories has seen a resur-

gence. Numerous theories, drawing on thinking derived from sociology, psychology,

or psychiatry,2 have been developed since the early twentieth century. Research into

criminal careers has made considerable contributions to public policies in both North

America and Europe.3

Outlining the Life Course Perspective

As many have come to recognize,4 the life course perspective has had a dramatic

impact on thinking within criminology, especially since the early 1990s. Indeed, a very

large part of contemporary criminology’s theoretical apparatus is derived from the

work of life course scholars.5 A key aim of the life course perspective is to draw links

between macro-level social history and social structures and the lives of individuals

and communities. The life course perspective aims to explore “pathways through the

age differentiated life-span,” and it is “manifested in expectations and options that

impinge on decision processes and the course of events that give shape to life stages,

transitions and turning points.”6 Two concepts central to the perspective are the notions

of “trajectory” and “transitions.” The first refers to a line of development over the life

course (e.g., an employment career); the second refers to events (e.g., first job, promo-

tion) that shape a trajectory. Robert Sampson and John Laub describe the perspective

as focusing on “the duration, timing and ordering of major social events and their

consequences for later social development.”7 As Elder, Modell, and Parkes note, rapid

social change has the ability to rearrange the timing and sequence of events in the

transition to adulthood.8

Glen Elder and Janet Giele also note the importance of locating people (particular

individuals, subgroups, or cohorts) in specific communities and at specific historical

moments.9 Such thinking forces one to recognize that individuals do not exist in isola-

tion; they are embedded in wider social, economic, and political contexts and relation-

ships. Similarly, individuals are key constitutive parts of what is termed the

“family-cycle,” whereby people move from being children to leaving the parental

home, forming partnerships, rearing their own children, and surviving into old age.

These events are not strictly age-defined, so the typicality of any form of such cycle

has waxed and waned (as age of marriage, age at first childbirth, and rates of step-

families have fluctuated). As individuals exert agency, the combination of people and

wider social structures brings forth the possibility of what Elder and Giele refer to as

Farrall et al. 359

a “loose-coupling” between age-graded life courses and individual choice.10 Norms

exist, but individuals are able to depart from them or to adapt them to suit their own

circumstances. This highlights the extent to which variations in the timing and

sequence of life course events may produce substantive differences in outcomes (or

result from other differences).

The focus on wider social and economic structures in the work of Elder and others

highlights the ways in which individuals’ lives are linked to one another.11 Events and

long-term trajectories in the lives of parents in a family may alter the life courses of

their offspring. As the individuals who make up families age, they form an aging social

network, referred to as a “social convoy”:12 a group of interconnected people who

move through time together. As Phyllis Moen and Elaine Hernandez note,13 an indi-

vidual’s resources, deficits in those resources, strains on them, increases in them, and

so on, become drivers of transitions or turning points not just in the lives of the indi-

viduals themselves, but also in the lives of those people who are in some way related

to them (either socially or biologically). For example, the loss of work for a parent on

whom a family had relied affects not just the individual concerned but their depen-

dents. As Elder remarks, “Each generation is bound to fateful decisions and events in

the other’s life course.”14 Similarly, the individual’s social network may be affected by

the individual’s loss of work or divorce. Thus the concept of a social convoy can be

extended from family members; school mates, coworkers, acquaintances, loosely

engaged strangers, and so on are potential members of such convoys. Similarly, a lot

of attention has been devoted to the idea of timings and to different types of “time.”

Duane Alwin distinguishes between historical time (essentially the historical era in

which one lives) and biographical time (the life course of the individual concerned)

and shows how they may interact.15 Meanwhile, Elder introduces the concept of social

timing (the duration, incidence, and sequence of age-related expectations and beliefs).16

Critiquing Life Course Criminology

One of the debates haunting life course studies is the need for answers to pressing

social challenges now. Immediate answers are not always possible. Implicit in this

critique is the idea that the social and cultural processes, economic forces, and political

ideas that shape the experiences of one generation may not be the same as those which

will affect future generations. In short, societies change, and as they change, different

drivers to such changes may come to have different impacts over time. Some cultural

forces may die out and cease to have any purchase on individuals’ life courses, whereas

others may grow in importance. Such thinking, of course, recognizes the problem of

age, period, and cohort effects.17 The institutions that shape lives may change or cease

to exist, yet few criminologists have recognized that the changes in such institutions

have been dramatic in some societies. Michael Benson argues that those “working in

the life course tradition have not yet devoted as much effort to understanding the con-

textual effects on trajectories in crime as they have to studying the parameters of

careers at the individual-level.”18 Since Benson’s critique, others have started to

explore the role of neighborhood factors.19 However, even that misses the macro-level