Have We Got the "Teen Brain" All Wrong? (Part Deux)

One thing that is commonly accepted as a truism in the USA is that crime, especially violent crime, is a young person's (and especially a young man's) vice.  It typically rises rapidly in the mid-teens and peaks around the late teens and very early twenties before rapidly and then gradually declining from then on, and it is often said that "the best cure for crime is a 30th birthday."  The statistics do indeed bear this out, but it is often accepted without question that the causes of this phenomenon are biological (particularly neurological and/or hormonal) as opposed to socioeconomic or cultural ones.

Well, a new study by researchers at Penn State seems to put the lie to the biological determinist theory.   While previous studies tended to look only at Western cultures (which all show a similar age pattern for crime), this one compared the USA to Taiwan instead.  If brain development (or lack thereof) is the cause, then the age pattern for crime should be pretty much the same worldwide, but it turns out that this was not the case for Taiwan.  Over there, crime peaked in the late twenties and early thirties, roughly a decade later than in the USA.  Thus, the researchers concluded that cultural factors, not biological/neurological ones, are primarly responsible for the crime patterns by age.   Notably, this is true even though the drinking age in Taiwan is 18, compared to 21 in the USA.

These findings also dovetail rather nicely with a 2015 study by renowned sociologist and youth-rights activist Mike Males.  Using crime data from California, he found that while the typical Western age-crime pattern for homicide (peaking at age 19) held true at first without controlling for poverty, once poverty was controlled for, that pattern basically vanished for all but the poorest communities, a group in which young people just so happen to be grossly overrepresented (and not just in California either).  And while some other studies have disagreed with such findings, those previous studies have generally failed to disentangle age, period, and cohort effects, greatly confounding the results.  Thus, especially in light of the Taiwan study, we can conclude that the traditional Western age-crime pattern is largely (if not entirely) a function of poverty, not age.  Which is actually good news, given that poverty is a much easier problem to solve (at least for a wealthy and Monetarily Sovereign nation like the USA) than any neurological issues or deeply-ingrained cultural factors could ever be.

It is very rare that a single study (or two) can overturn such an apparent mountain of evidence. Unless, of course, that "mountain" turned out to be a molehill all along--and a rather shaky one at that.