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Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber were born in the Netherlands in 1942, met at Leiden University in 1967, and, from then on, worked and lived together until Rolf’s death half a century later. Their first faculty appointment was at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States, after having published seminal papers on the stability of antisocial behavior and the first meta-analysis of predictors of delinquency. The Loebers had major impacts on the science of violent behavior development and on the translation of this scientific knowledge into improved public policy. They pioneered the articulation and expansion of developmental and life-course criminology. They clarified the formulation of key concepts, and initiated as well as maintained two landmark longitudinal studies which started in childhood and continued with regular assessments into early adulthood: The Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS) and The Pittsburgh Girls Study. The latter was the first major large-scale study in the United States on the development of female delinquency between childhood and early adulthood. The Loebers were the first to have the data to study youths who are at highest risk to commit homicide or become victims of homicide. They showed that the processes leading to homicide were often in place during late childhood.
Throughout the 1990s many countries around the world experienced the beginnings of what would later become the most significant and protracted decline in crime ever recorded. Although not a universal experience, the so-called international crime-drop was an unpredicted and unprecedented event which now offers fertile ground for reflection on many of criminology's key theories and debates. Through the lens of developmental and life-course criminology, this Element compares the criminal offending trajectories of two Australian birth cohorts born ten years apart in 1984 and 1994. It finds that the crime-drop was unlikely the result of any significant change in the prevalence or persistence of early-onset and chronic offending, but the disproportionate disappearance of their low-rate, adolescent-onset peers. Despite decades of research that has prioritized interventions for at-risk chronic offenders, it seems our greatest global crime prevention achievement to date was in reducing the prevalence of criminal offending in the general population.
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