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	Age-Crime Curve Modeling	Criminal Career Paradigm
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1983	1986
Originator	Travis Hirschi & Michael Gottfredson; David Farrington	Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffrey Roth & Christy Visher
Type	Nonlinear regression modeling of the age distribution of offending	Conceptual framework for decomposing offending over the life course
Seminal source	Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. (1983). Age and the explanation of crime. American Journal of Sociology, 89(3), 552–584.	Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., Roth, J. A., & Visher, C. A. (Eds.). (1986). Criminal Careers and 'Career Criminals' (Vols. 1–2). National Academy Press. ISBN: 9780309036887
Aliases	Age-Crime Relationship Modeling, Age-Offending Curve, Aggregate Age-Crime Distribution, Crime-Age Profile Modeling	Criminal Careers Framework, Career Criminal Paradigm, Offending Career Approach, Blumstein Criminal Career Model
Related	4	4
Summary	Age-crime curve modeling fits statistical functions to the well-known relationship between age and offending: crime rises sharply in adolescence, peaks in the late teens or early twenties, and declines through adulthood. Brought to prominence by Hirschi and Gottfredson's 1983 claim that this curve is invariant, and elaborated by Farrington, the modeling task is to capture its characteristic skewed, single-peaked shape and to debate what it implies about the causes of crime.	The criminal career paradigm is a framework for studying offending as a longitudinal sequence in an individual's life rather than as undifferentiated aggregate crime. Codified by Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, and Visher in the 1986 National Academy of Sciences report, it decomposes crime into distinct dimensions — whether someone offends (participation), how often active offenders offend (frequency, λ), and the onset, seriousness, and duration of the career — each potentially with different causes.