A queer criminal career

Since the publication of Moffitt’s (1993) important research on adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent offending, there has been a renewal of the often tacit goal of criminology of identifying the individual factors that facilitate and inhibit deviant behaviour. In focusing on early childhood biological, genetic and psychological development, and considering social environment only as a mediating factor, these approaches miss some of the queer pathways to crime. We argue that examining offending by queer people inevitably destabilises taken-for-granted ideas about offending and desistance from offending. Moreover, given the increasing numbers of young people identifying as queer, and that they are more likely to be sanctioned by criminal processing systems, we highlight the importance of exploring the experiences of queer young people. A queer criminological lens can offer up an alternative, queer criminal career, which starts not with bio-psychological dysfunctioning, but with social exclusion and criminalisation of identity.