In this article I focus on the meaning of the pathways imagery from a contemporary developmental perspective and examine the contribution of a developmental pathways approach to understanding how young people become involved in crime. From a developmental perspective a ‘pathway’ focuses attention on people's experiences. As a heuristic devise for interpreting life events, it allows researchers to make sense of how patterns of criminal behaviour start, progress and stop. Such a developmental perspective undergirds crime prevention strategies by supplying a general normative description of the life-course and a way of analysing both typical and atypical patterns of experience in relation to normative life periods. It allows criminologists to link prevention strategies to interindividual and intra-individual variability in patterns of behaviour that have been broadly discussed as ‘antisocial’.
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