Developmental Theorists

Developmental theorists help in explaining career offenders by helping the participants in understanding the career choice development theory and how it’s applied in dealing with the offenders. This comes with recognizing the four theories of development which consist of learning, transition, developmental and trait and factor. (nicic.gov) Developmental theories claims that antisocial behaviors like crime usually develop in a person and not manifested.   Patterson’s Coercion theory shows that parental monitoring determines a child’s behavior. Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy shows that the highest level of criminal activity is caused by adolescence limited offenders and the most threatening criminal activities are committed by life course persistent offenders. Robert Sampson and John Laub's age-graded theory shows that informal social controls like work, family, peer and school contributions also lead to delinquent behaviors. Thornberry’s interaction theory is another important theory that states that human behaviors like criminal activities occur due to social interactions

Theorist explain that criminal offenders tend to be varied and the factors that mostly cause these variations include; offender’s age at the time of crime, offender’s level of participation in the crimes, the frequency of the offender’s participation in crimes, time that the offender is involved in the crime, psychological factors and social factors. The theorist further shows that disruptions that occur in a person’s life may be destructive but they can as well promote criminality. These disruptions start with the family relations at childhood, school and peer relations at adolescence stage and vocational or marital relations at an adult stage. Other factors that may lead to career criminality include; unemployment, racism, poverty, mental diseases, educational failure, drug use and sensational seeking.  .  (Terence 213)

The theories explain that factors that cause a person to get involved in crimes are connected to pressure from the peers, childhood upbringing, family factors and the environment a person is exposed to. To lessen career criminal occurrences, community prevention interventions, rehabilitative strategies, counseling and social help strategies should be put into place.