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

Stephen Farrall, Emily Gray and Phil Mike Jones

Politics & Society, 2020, vol. 48, issue 3, 357-388

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329220942395 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:48:y:2020:i:3:p:357-388

DOI: 10.1177/0032329220942395

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().