The Criminal Career Perspective as an Explanation of Crime and a Guide to Crime Control Policy: The View from General Theories of Crime

Students of criminal careers seek distinct longitudinal sequences of offenses committed by individual offenders. Their approach is explicitly theory free: It assumes that meaningfully different careers may be identified by close examination of the criminal activity of individuals over extended periods of time. They first locate in justice system records a set of careers defined by such parameters as length, trajectory, and specialization in particular crimes. Once the various types have been shown to be sufficiently abundant—explanation, prediction, and policy are expected automatically to follow. By some standards, the criminal career perspective has been successful. It has been assimilated by the life-course perspective and has generated a large body of research. Our alternative approach takes theoretically based research as its guide to explanation of crime and crime prevention policy. In particular, it focuses on the implications for theory and policy of the versatility of offenders, the relative stability of their tendency to offend, and the general invariance of the age effect on crime. On all counts, the evidence sides with general theory and its advocacy of research and crime prevention outside the criminal justice system.