**4. Conclusion**

The dynamic concept of criminal careers empowered researchers to develop a whole new way of looking at crime. Traditional criminological theories offered a rather static explanation of one's criminal conduct, while criminal career concept offered a view on criminal conduct that can be used to explain crime on an individual and group level. Furthermore, based on that, a new set of criminological theories emerged based on that concept, a Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, which emphasise a more dynamic approach to the aetiology and phenomenology of criminal conduct.

The main advantage of the criminal career concept regarding criminal conduct is that it offers a different perspective on criminality which can be used as a "bridge" between theoretical criminology and policy-relevant research. As we have shown on the example of perpetrators of sexual offences, there are differences in the development and peculiarities of the criminal career of these perpetrators. What the theories based on the concept of criminal career can offer are different explanations of the aetiology and phenomenology of these perpetrators about the particularities of their individual criminal careers. In this way, perpetrators can be viewed in terms of similarities and differences in the dimensions of a criminal career which can have multiple benefits. Specifically, although it is the same group of criminal offences, it is possible to have different theoretical explanations for the emergence and development of particular subgroups of perpetrators of certain criminal offences. In this way, specific prevention policies can be created that can be more effective because they identify not only the factors that influence the occurrence and development of certain types of crimes, but also the dynamics of the relationship between risk and protective factors that contribute to it. In this way, interventions at any level in terms of prevention and rehabilitation of offenders can be more successful.

Another great advantage of the concept of criminal career is that it allows the creation of new explanations of the origin and development of certain crimes, which contributes to the development and emergence of new criminological theories and concepts that, taking into account traditional explanations of crime and achievements of criminological research, could contribute to a new theory by erasing the understanding of committing crimes within the concepts of "traditional" and "newer" theories, but finding new ones that can merge all previous concepts into one that best suits the specifics of a particular crime or perpetrator.

It appears that only fractions of the concept and DLC theories are seldomly studied, causing the lack of comprehensive theory and resulting in some aspects of criminal careers not being researched enough while other areas are receiving more focus. This is true if we look at the types of crimes that are the focus of research under the concept of criminal career. The commission of sexual offences is now relatively unexplored and research to date has covered a small number of countries, mostly in the developed countries of the west. Therefore, the findings mentioned in the chapter need to be considered from the context of these countries. We hope that there is going to be more international collaboration and more scholarly focus on this topic in the years to come.

*Identifying Criminal Career Patterns of Sex Offenders DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93972*
