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	Criminal Career Paradigm	Age-Crime Curve Modeling
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	1986	1983
Originator	Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffrey Roth & Christy Visher	Travis Hirschi & Michael Gottfredson; David Farrington
Type	Conceptual framework for decomposing offending over the life course	Nonlinear regression modeling of the age distribution of offending
Seminal source	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	Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. (1983). Age and the explanation of crime. American Journal of Sociology, 89(3), 552–584.
Aliases	Criminal Careers Framework, Career Criminal Paradigm, Offending Career Approach, Blumstein Criminal Career Model	Age-Crime Relationship Modeling, Age-Offending Curve, Aggregate Age-Crime Distribution, Crime-Age Profile Modeling
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.