Do typical criminal careers exist?

In criminological research the strong dependency of criminal behaviour on the age of the offender is generally described as the “age crime curve”. This correlation is considered to be invariant, as it is hardly determined by socio-cultural factors and varies only slightly amongst different offences. However, it is a controversial issue how this curve is composed with regard to the trajectories of individual offenders. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law analysed data of the Freiburg Cohort Study by applying the group based trajectory model.