Criminal Career Research: Its Value for Criminology*

In a recent paper published in this journal, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1986) 1 argue that the concepts of criminal careers, career criminals, selective incapacitation, prevalence, and incidence, and longitudinal studies all have little value for criminology. In our view their paper misrepresents these concepts and our research on these topics. We are pleased to have the opportunity in this paper to develop these concepts more clearly and to show their relevance for criminology.