The Criminologic Transition Model: The Evolution of the Nature of Crime

The Criminologic Transition Model (CTM) provides an organizing framework for understanding how the nature of crime covaries with the character of social relations as societies develop. Societal evolution shifts the axes around which humans organize and interact, profoundly changing families, cities, nations, and weltanshauung. Technology progresses, there are revolutions in economic drivers, states increase control over citizens and commerce, and human rights mature. Families become smaller, adolescence is extended, population mobility increases, and people live longer. Surely victim, offender, and event characteristics – which in combination I label crime morphology – are part of these foundational transformations and thus follow systematic trajectories over time. I outline the need for and domain of CTM, describe its basic properties and theoretical lineage, define the elements and structure of the model, outline CTM’s general hypotheses, and summarize historical evidence that suggests centuries-long trajectories of specific victim, offender, and event characteristics during societal development.