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Criminal offenders compose a heterogeneous population. Criminal trajectory research aims to capture this heterogeneity in terms of the frequency or severity of offending. This chapter describes the concept a criminal trajectory and the statistical technique used to derive trajectories from longitudinal data. Both the semiparametric group-based trajectory modeling (SGBTM) and latent growth mixture modeling (GMM) approaches are described in nontechnical terms, and the differences between them are noted. Despite some similarities, these approaches are also distinguished from conventional growth curve modeling. Guidelines and factors to consider in building and testing trajectory models are discussed. Last, extensions of SGBTM and GMM are presented.

This chapter proposes a theoretical model to make sense of how any human being can face future challenges at the present through cultural signs: which particular forms the sign-construction takes, how deep (or shallow) the hierarchical structure of semiotic mediation is, and how temporary or quasi-permanent it might be. The model is rooted in Vygotsky's focus on the dialectical nature of human development, and elaborated in life-course psychology by TEM (Trajectory Equifinality Model of Tatsuya Sato). The making of individual purposes is a process of anticipating the future relations with the changing context. Novelty is the ever-present—transitory—link between what these future relations are, and how they relate with the already known. Human development takes place on the borderline of the past and the future—creating the notion of the present as if it were a solid state of being, rather than an ephemeral state of eternal becoming.

Modern control theory doubts the effectiveness of criminal sanctions to affect the crime rate substantially. This view is contrasted with the expectations of the criminal career perspective, a leading view on the nature of crime and the role of the criminal justice system in controlling crime by deterrence and incapacitation. The contrast is illustrated with differing expectations about how age is related to crime (including serious offending), the importance of the versatility effect for offending, and evidence about how changes in incarceration levels are expected to be related to crime rates. On all counts, the results of competent contemporary research support the expectations of the general theory of crime over the expectations of criminal career/career criminal traditions. The research on statistical modeling and offender typologies in the criminal careers tradition has not provided consistent or replicated results demonstrating that criminal sanctions effectively incapacitate or deter offending. Control theory is inconsistent with mass incarceration, with the belief that increasing severity of sanctions reduces crime rates either by incapacitation or by deterrence, and notes that crime tends overwhelmingly to decline with age for all offenders beginning in early adulthood.