ABSTRACT
There is virtually an endless supply of criminological theories designed to explain the various factors that ultimately lead to the development of criminal, delinquent, and antisocial behaviors. These theories are remarkably different in the factors that are identified as being salient to the etiology of criminal behavior. Some theories, for example, focus on parental socialization, some focus on neighborhood-level factors, some focus on subcultures, others focus on peer group socialization, and so on. The common theme cutting across virtually every single dominant criminological theory is that social factors are the be-all and end-all when it comes to explaining crime and other forms of antisocial behavior. If theories are to be judged on their predictive ability and their ability to organize known correlates into a coherent and unified framework, then the existing mainstream criminological theories do not have much merit. For the most part, these theories are not very good at explaining crime nor are they very good at predicting who will eventually become a criminal. To illustrate, rarely do multivariate regression models reveal that a single variable derived from a criminological theory explains more than 10–20 percent of the variance, with most explaining less than 10 percent of the variance. Even when multiple indicators of a theory or of competing theories are simultaneously entered into a regression equation, the total amount of variance explained is typically far less than 30 percent. The point is that whether theoretically informative variables are examined in isolation or cumulatively, they leave most of the variance in antisocial behaviors unexplained.
