In 1986, the National Research Council published a two-volume report, Criminal Careers and “Career Criminals.” This work generated fierce debates central to the field of criminology and pitted some of the biggest names in the business against one another. In this paper, we consider the last 30 years and ask whether the report was an intellectual turning point. Our answer is that while the report did change the methodological direction of criminology, it lacked a theoretical explanation of the dynamics of crime. After the report was published, several efforts attempted to fill this breach. We reflect on the role that the Criminal Careers report played in our own work, from the time of the report’s release to the development and assessment of what is now known as the age-graded theory of informal social control and the broader field of “life-course criminology.”
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