The age–crime curve is dead, long live the age–crime curve! An examination of the FBI’s 2024 arrest data

Once assumed to be invariant, the universality of the adolescent-peaked age–crime curve has increasingly come into question. The most recent years of arrest data in the United States suggest that the peak age of arrest has gotten older (32) in 2024. The current study addresses the shift in the aggregate, cross-sectional age–crime curve toward a more ‘symmetrical,’ or less adolescent-peaked, distribution. The peak age of arrest remains near historical norms for some ‘Part I’ offenses (murder, robbery, motor vehicle theft, and rape), but not others (aggravated assault, burglary, and larceny-theft). The findings in this study suggest that the older peak age of offending for burglary and larceny-theft is due to differences between cohorts in overall propensity toward offending, rather than more fundamental changes in age-related patterns of offending/desistance. However, the evidence for a cohort-explanation of the changes in aggravated assault age distribution is more ambiguous. Overall, while the absolute rate of offending among youth appears to be diminished, desistance in offending after teenage years still appears within recent cohorts for most offenses, suggesting a continuity of the adolescent-peaked age–crime curve in the United States.