Criminal Lives

This book uses historical data to directly address modern criminological debates. There is currently a huge growth of interest in histories of crime and intellectual conversations and connections between historians and criminologists are becoming much more frequent. However published work which uses historical data to this extent is rare. This book's aim is to draw a wide audience from the worlds of criminology history and social policy and engage in a genuinely interdisciplinary debate. This book addresses a number of important questions about offenders' persistence in or desistance from crime and questions the current theoretical frameworks that are given to explain why some people stop or slow down their offending and why offenders' children become involved in crime.