ABSTRACT
Most traditional research on crime has been directed toward offend ers and how they become involved in criminal activity. The criminal careers perspective, with its focus on individual offenders, considers not only the onset of offending, but also the frequency of offending, the seriousness of offending, and the length of offending careers (Blumstein et al., 1986). Important questions about individual continu ity and change in offending have been raised by researchers taking a life-course perspective, who have studied age-graded transitions in criminal behavior (Sampson and Laub, 1990; Sampson and Laub, 1993). In all of these approaches the individual offender is the unit of analy sis, criminal acts are typically counted and sometimes categorized by crime type, but, for the most part, the situations in which criminal acts occur are ignored.
