ABSTRACT
The life-course perspective has played a critical role in pointing to the possibility of long-term change in criminal behavior. If traits are assumed to predispose people to criminal behavior and to be relatively stable across the life course, there is then a strong inclination to attribute observed stability in behavior to the existence of such traits. Shifting the methodological emphasis from cross-sectional to longitudinal data collection, these perspectives have highlighted the dynamic nature of criminal behavior across the life course. Criminology benefits from borrowing from a wide array of disciplines, but frequently the borrowing is from one stream of thought within a discipline, with competing perspectives ignored. Important as the applications of behavioral principles to treatment have been, the chapter explains about how the basic behavioral principle of stimulus control has been related to developments in a very different area of psychology-personality theory.
