MULTIPLE ROUTES TO DELINQUENCY - A TEST OF DEVELOPMENTAL AND GENERAL THEORIES OF CRIME

General and developmental theories take very different approaches to t he study of crime. General theories, like Gottfredson and Hirschi's re cent theory of self-control, assume that crime can be explained with r eference to a single or very limited set of explanatory factors. In ad dition, some general theories, like Gottfredson and Hirschi's, adopt a very static approach to causality. They presume that prior offending has no causal effect on current offending once time-stable criminal pr opensity is controlled, and they assume that the relationship between changes in life events and changes in offending are spurious. Recent d evelopmental theories, like those proposed by Moffitt and Patterson, s tand in stark contrast to Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory. These deve lopmental theories are far more complex because they relax: the assump tion of general causality and adopt a more dynamic position about the relationship between changes in life circumstances and changes in crim e. In this article we examine whether the added complexity of a develo pmental theory of crime is preferable to the more parsimonious general /static theory of Gottfredson and Hirschi. We find that the evidence i r not faithful to either a pure static/general model or a pure develop mental model of crime Our findings appeal to a theoretical middle grou nd that assumes that pathways to crime are more similar than different and that allows for a causal effect of past offending and life experi ences on future criminality. When viewed in the context of previous st udies that have assessed offending over the life course, our results s uggest that further theoretical development can profit from studying i ssues of measurement and sample composition.