Hypothetically, explanations of crime can better predict criminality if they combine concepts from many different previous theories. This combination could hypothetically explain crime with much more accuracy than any single theory by itself. It would be difficult to combine theories that have contradictory assumptions, but it's possible to take concepts from these competing theories and modify assumptions to make them compatible.


Some of the existing combined theories have taken aspects of theories like social control, learning, and stain and conceptualized the manner in which all of those factors relate to the others. These theories sometimes explain criminality better than the original theories, but not always.