How does the proposition that “state intervention is criminogenic” “hold up” to scrutiny in labeling theory?
Chapter 5
Society as Insulation:
The Origins of Control Theory
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Introduction: Control Theory
Control theory takes the position that because conformity cannot be taken for granted, nonconformity, such as crime and delinquency, is to be expected when social controls are less than completely effective
The question asked by control theorists:
Why do people conform?
Forget crime, crime is an outlier. Most people conform.
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Introduction: Control Theory
The main theoretical premise:
Because crime is fun, enjoyable, and rewarding, when controls are absent, crime is possible and often does occur
When controls are present, crime does not occur
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Forerunners of Control Theory: Durkheim’s Anomie Theory
The origins of contemporary control theories of crime and delinquency are to be found in part in the work of Durkheim’s anomie theory
Anomie: The destruction of the fundamental bonds uniting individuals in a collective social order so that each person is forced to go it alone
Technology and the rise of capitalism has led to an eroded sense of community
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Forerunners of Control Theory: Durkheim’s Anomie Theory
Social solidarity was maintained by two sets of functions:
Integration: A state of cohesion amounting to a common faith sustained by collective beliefs and practices leading to strong social bonds and the subordination of self to a common cause
Collective activity gives purpose and meaning
Regulation: The sum of social forces of constraint that bound individuals to norms
Constraining regulative functions become more important in an urban society with a complex division of labor
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Forerunners of Control Theory: Durkheim’s Anomie Theory
The nature of “man” argues that any person is a blend of two aspects:
The social self or the aspect of self that looks to society and is a product of socialization and cultivation of human potentials (the “civilized” member of a community)
The egotistic self or the primal self that is incomplete without society and that is full of impulses knowing no natural limits
Social solidarity based on integration and regulation allowed the more primal self to become fully humanized in a life shared with others on moral common ground
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Forerunners of Control Theory: The Influence of the Chicago School
Control theories were also influenced by the social disorganization perspective
Two Chicago school themes remained central:
The interpretations of human nature
The nature of community
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Forerunners of Control Theory: The Influence of the Chicago School
Conceptions of Human Nature
Charles H. Cooley--Chicago school of social psychology
Human offspring is dependent on other humans
Family is the main primary group where interaction is of an intimate face-to-face character leading to a we-feeling or sense of belonging and identification with the group
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Forerunners of Control Theory: The Influence of the Chicago School
Looking-Glass Self
The child develops a concept of who he or she really is by imagining how he or she appears to others and how others interpret and evaluate what they perceive and then by forming a sense of self based on that process
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Forerunners of Control Theory: The Influence of the Chicago School
George Herbert Mead (1934)
Divided the individual into the “I” and “Me”
“I” represents a process of fundamental awareness that becomes focused in different ways, leading to the development of the social self or “me”
The focusing was said to occur through a process of taking the role of the other, which is how socialization occurred
Unsuccessful socialization might lead to personal disorganization--a self lacking in integration and consistency
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The Study of Community
The decline in the moral integration of the basic primary groups themselves was important to the early control theorists
Suggested not only social disorganization but also personal disorganization resulting from fundamental problems in the formation of the personal self
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Early Control Theorists: Albert J. Reiss
Attempted to predict juvenile delinquency by explaining personal and social controls
Personal control: The ability of the individual to refrain from meeting needs in ways which conflict with the norms and rules of the community
Social control: The ability of social groups or institutions to make norms or rules effective
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Early Control Theorists: Albert J. Reiss
Delinquency results when there is a relative absence of internalized norms, a breakdown in previously established controls, and an absence of or conflict in social rules
Conformity results when the individual has an acceptance of the rules or has a submission to them
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Early Control Theorists: Albert J. Reiss
Considered from the “perspective of the person,” social control was held to lie in the acceptance of or submission to the authority of the institution and the reinforcement of existing personal controls by institutional controls
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Early Control Theorists: Albert J. Reiss
Considered from “the standpoint of the group,” control was said to lie in the nature and strength of the norms of the institutions and the effectiveness of the institutional rules in obtaining behavior and conformity with the norms
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Early Control Theorists: Albert J. Reiss
The delinquent peer group is viewed as a functional consequence of the failure of personal and social control
Trying pin down those factors that had to occur before any causes could be expected to produce delinquent effects
Chief concern as a predictor was the failure to submit to social controls
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Early Control Theorists: Albert J. Reiss
Delinquency and delinquent recidivism may be viewed as a consequence of the failure of primary groups to provide the child with appropriate nondelinquent roles and to exercise social control over the child so these roles are accepted or submitted to in accordance with needs
Key groups are the family, neighborhood, and school
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Early Control Theorists: F. Ivan Nye
Sought to explain why delinquent and criminal behavior is not more common
Locate social control factors that inhibited nonconformity and made crime and delinquency a possibility
Family is the most important social control over adolescents
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Early Control Theorists: F. Ivan Nye
The family could generate:
Direct control: External forces
Internalized control: Internal forces or conscience
Indirect control: Extent of affection and identification with authority figures
Control through alternative means of need satisfaction: “Delivery of goods” in a legitimate way
These types of control are mutually reinforcing
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Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless
Search for self-factors that would explain why some individuals succumbed to social pressures leading to crime and delinquency, whereas others remained relatively law abiding in the same circumstances
Resiliency: People who, despite facing many criminogenic risk factors, resist crime
Central problem lay in explaining differential responses
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Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless
The Social Psychology of the Self
The social transformation from life in fairly simple societies to complex environments placed a different set of pressures on the individual and the social order
“New pitch”: Society that emphasizes freedom and allows people to not be connected to one another
“Individualization of the self”: People are separate and distinct from the mass of others
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Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless
Pushes and Pulls
A variety of factors might “push” a person toward crime and delinquency, and other factors might “pull” one toward misbehavior
Despite the various criminogenic pushes and pulls, whatever they may be, conformity remains the general state of affairs
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Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless
To commit crime or delinquency , the individual must break through a combination of outer containment and inner containment that together tend to insulate the person from both the pushes and pulls
A risk theory: Each weakening containment increased the odds of nonconformity
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Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless
Factors in Outer Containment
Concentrating on the external containment model for the urban, modern society, he stressed:
Reasonable limits
Meaningful roles and activities
Several complimentary variables
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Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless
Factors in Inner Containment
Tends to control the individual to some extent no matter how the external environment changed
The key factors of inner containment include:
Self-concept: Good boys had insulated self-concepts
Goal orientation: Sense of direction in life toward legitimate goals
Frustration tolerance: Ability to cope with frustration
Norm retention: Acceptance of norms, laws, values, and customs; acceptance of legitimate means
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Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless
Minimal empirical study after the mid-1950s due to three reasons:
Theory is complex
Empirical criminology was in its beginning stages
Hirschi’s social bond theory was easier to understand and test
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Early Control Theorists: Summary
The increase in crime was a product of the modern world
Regarded the moral order as more fundamental than the economic order and concerned itself with what it took to be the problem of the individual in a complex society
Boundless desires, little capacity to tolerate denial, and no sense of direction or commitment to traditional rules
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Sought to explain that if the social pressures causing delinquency were so powerful, why was it that even the worst of the delinquents seemed to be fairly conventional people, actually conforming in so many other ways?
Also, why did most not continue law-violating behavior beyond a certain age?
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Delinquency not confined to inner-city slums but occurred throughout the class structure
Theories linking crime to slum subcultures or blocked opportunity seemed incapable of explaining middle-class delinquency
Challenged the view that delinquents were different “from the rest of us,” whether that was due to individual pathology or subcultural membership
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Techniques of Neutralization
Argued that delinquents retained a commitment to conventional society and its standards of behavior; they knew right from wrong
Delinquency would be possible if youths could escape the control that conventional society had over them
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Conventional social norms consisted of the learning of excuses or techniques of neutralization by which those norms could be temporarily suspended and their controlling effects neutralized
Free to deviate without rejecting the norms
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Five Techniques of Neutralization
Denial of responsibility
Denial of injury
Denial of the victim
Condemnation of the condemners
Appeal to higher loyalties
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Denied two cultures existed
Nation was marked by consensus over conventional culture
Subcultural theorists do not see the complexity of conventional culture
Subterranean values lurk beneath the surface
More private but still recognized and accepted by many located mainly in the leisure and focus on thrills, big money scores, conspicuous consumption, and masculine manifestations of violence and aggression
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Subterranean values are glorified so long as they lead to appropriate behavior in the right circumstances
When acted upon by immature individuals, it can lead to wayward acts
Delinquency can reflect not outright criminal values but widely accepted conventional subterranean values such as the pursuit of “kicks, big time spending, and rep”
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Delinquents were no more committed to their delinquency than to conventional enterprises
Delinquency was a matter of “drift” facilitated by the existence of “subterranean convergence” between their own techniques of neutralization and certain ideologies of authorities who represented the official moral order
Authorities often excuse violations
Blame parents, cite provocation of victim, accept self-defense explanations, and so on
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Because delinquency may involve unfamiliar and dangerous behaviors, something more than the loss of control/neutralization is necessary to explain it
Preparation: A process by which the person discovered that a given infraction could be pulled off by someone, that the individual could do it himself, and that the fear of apprehension could be managed
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Neutralization and Drift Theory: Sykes and Matza
Desperation: The central force is a profound sense of fatalism, a feeling that the self was overwhelmed, with a consequent need to violate rules of the system to reassert individuality
The combination of preparation and desperation creates the will to offend
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Control Theory in Context
Context of the 1950s
This time was marked by a time of relative social conformity, so much so, the United States was seen as a nation of sheep
Thus, delinquency seen as a result of departures from the conventional order
The onslaught of the 1960s was to make control theory much more popular
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Control Theory in Context
The Context of the 1960s
The 1960s had massive social change which seemed to many to signal the complete collapse of personal and social control
The civil rights movement
Militant feminism
The Vietnam war protests
The counter-culture movement
Psychedelic drugs
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Control Theory in Context
The Context of the 1960s
The social turmoil seemed to many to signal the complete collapse of personal and social control
Nation was seen as being torn apart and social consensus as being eroded completely
The decade was characterized by the loss of self-control
The times were ripe for acceptance of a perspective linking crime to the breakdown of control if it could be formulated in appropriate theoretical terms
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