Results that emerged from this study provide modest support for the idea that offenders have crime preferences in relatively narrow time periods, but they also transition over time, which suggests a tendency to aggregate to versatility. Though indications in previous research are that generality is the norm when offending is viewed over the (long-term) criminal career, empirical work has detected specialization in the short-term. Other investigations have demonstrated that shifting opportunity structures and social contexts influence these preferences for particular crime patterns in relatively narrow time brackets. To reconcile these research findings, it was proposed that offenders favor certain offense types during the short-term, largely because of opportunity structures, but that because of changing situations and contexts over the life-course, their offending profiles aggregate to versatility over the criminal career. It was also proposed that a particular analytic technique, latent transition analysis (LTS), is well-suited for investigating this premise. To demonstrate the utility of this method this study investigated the tenability of this view of specialization from life-event history self-report data on offending garnered from incarcerated felons. Tables, figures, references, and appendix