Chapter 5: Society as Insulation and Origins of Control Theory

Control Theory

• Conformity cannot be taken for granted

  • Nonconformity (crime and delinquency) is to be expected

  • When social controls are less than completely effective

• Why do people conform?

• The main theoretical premise:

  • Crime is fun, enjoyable, and rewarding

  • If controls are absent, crime is possible and often does occur

• Why don’t we all just break the law then?

  • All about the presence/non-presence of controls

Durkheim’s Anomie Theory:

• Anomie Theory - Origin of contemporary control theories of crime and delinquency

• Anomie? What is it?

  • Technology and the rise of capitalism have led to an eroded sense of community

• Social Solidarity Maintained by Two Sets of Functions:

  1. Integration:

     • State of cohesion and faith in collective beliefs and practices

     • Leads to strong social bonds and the subordination of self to a common cause

     • Collective activity gives purpose and meaning

  2. Regulation:

     • Sum of social forces of constraint that bind individuals to norms

     • Regulative functions become more important in an urban society with a complex division of labor

• The Nature of “Man”

  • People are a blend of two aspects:

    1. Social Self

       • Product of socialization and cultivation of human potentials (“civilized”)

    2. Egoistic self (self absorbed)

       • Primal self that is incomplete without society

       • Full of impulses knowing no natural limits

  • Social solidarity based on integration and regulation

    • Allows primal self to become fully humanized in a life shared with others on moral common ground

Influence of the Chicago School

• Control theories were also influenced by the social disorganization perspective

• Two Chicago School themes remained central:

  1. The interpretations of human nature

  2. The nature of community

Concepts of Human Nature

Charles H. Cooley (1922)

• Chicago school of social psychology

  • Human offspring is dependent on other humans

  • Family is the main group primary group

    • Interaction is of an intimate face-to-face character leading to a we-feeling or sense of belonging and identification with the group

• Looking-Glass Self

  • Children develop a concept of who they really are

  • Imagine how they appear to others

  • How others interpret and evaluate what they perceive

  • Then form a sense of self based on that process

George Herbert Mead (1934)

• Divided the individual into the “I” and “Me”

  • “I”

    • Process of fundamental awareness

    • Focused in different ways

    • Leads to the development of the social self or “me”

  • “Me” - internalized expectations

  • Focusing occurs through a process of taking the role of the other

    • Unsuccessful socialization might lead to a personal disorganization (COME BACK)

Albert Reiss (1949)

• Predicting Juvenile Delinquency

  • Through explaining personal and social controls

    1. Personal Control - ability to refrain from meeting needs in ways which conflict with the norms and rules of the community

    2. Social control - ability of social groups or institutions to make norms or rules effective

Early Control Theorist: Albert J. Reiss

• Decline in the moral integration of the basic primary groups themselves was important to the early control theorist

  • Suggest not only social disorganization

  • Also personal disorganization resulting from fundamental problems in the formation of the personal self

• Delinquency results when:

  • Absence of internalized norms

  • Breakdown in previously established controls

  • Absence of or conflict in social rules

• Conformity results when the individuals has an acceptance of the rules or submits to them

• Considered from the “perspective of the person”

  • Social control is within the acceptance of or submission to the authority

    (COME BACK)

• Considered from the “the standpoint of the group”

  • Controls lies in the nature and strength of the norms of the institutions

    AND

  • Effectiveness of the institutional rules in obtaining behavior and conformity with the norms

• The delinquent peer group is viewed as

  • Functional consequence of the failure of personal and social controls

• Has to occur before any causes could be expected and necessary to produce delinquent effects

• Main concern as a predictor

  • The failure to submit to social controls and why?

• Delinquency and Recidivism

  • Viewed as a consequence of:

    • Failure of primary groups to provide youth appropriate nondelinquent roles

    • And to exercise social control over the youth so these roles are accepted/submitted to in accordance with needs

  • Key groups are the family, neighborhood, and school

    • Identify and accept

    • Without over-control or under-control

Early Control Theorist: F. Ivan Nye (1950s)

• Explaining conformity, rather than nonconformity

• Why is delinquent and criminal behavior not more common?

  • Locate social control factors that restrain nonconformity and made crime and delinquency (COME BACK)

• Family could generate:

  1. Direct Control - external forces through agents

  2. Internalized control - internal forces conscience

  3. Indirect control - extent of affect and identification with authority figures

  4. Control through alternative means of need satisfaction: “delivery of goods” in a legitimate way

• These types of control are mutually reinforcing

Containment Theory: Walter C. Reckless (1960s)

• Search for self-factors that would explain:

  • Why some individuals succumbed to social pressures leading to crime and delinquency

    • Some remained law abiding

  • Resiliency - face criminogenic risk factors and resist crime

  • Central Problem: explaining differential responses

• The Social Psychology of the Self

  • Social Transformation

    • Simple life to the city life

    • Different set of pressures on the individual and society

  • “New pitch”: Freedom allows people to not be connected to one another

  • “Individualization of the self”: people can separate themselves from others

• Pushes and Pulls

  • Factors might “push” a person towards committing a crime

    • social conditions, psychological, etc

  • Factors might “pull” one towards misbehavior

    • illegitimate opportunities

  • Despite pushes and pulls:

    • Conformity remains the consensus

  • Containment is the insulator

    • Weakening impacts conformity

• Factors in Outer Containment

  • External containment model for urban/modern city

    • Reasonable limits

    • Meaningful roles and activities

    • Complimentary variables

      • Reinforcement, supportive relationships, acceptance, sense of belonging and identity

• Factors in Inner Containment

  • Controls the individual regardless of environment

• Key Factors:

  • Self-concept: “good boys” had insulated self-concepts

  • Goal orientation: Direction in life towards legitimate goals

  • Frustration tolerance: Ability or inability to cope with frustration

  • Norm Retention: Acceptance of norms, laws, values, and customs and legitimate means

• Minimal empirical studies 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 the test

Early Control Theorist: Summary

• Increase in crime was a product of modern world

• Regarded the moral order as:

  1. More fundamental than economic order

  2. Concerned with what it took to be the problem of the individual in a complex society

  3. Desires, unable to tolerate denial, no senses of (COME BACK)

Neutralization and Drift Theory

Sykes and Matza (1957)

• If the social pressures are so powerful…Why are the worst offenders conventional and conforming people in other ways?

• Why did most not continue criminal behavior (COME BACK)

• Delinquency not confined to inner city slums

  • Occurs everywhere

• Linking crime to slum subcultures or blocked opportunity opportunity unable to explain middle class delinquency

• Challenged the view that:

  • Delinquents were different from “the rest of us”

• Techniques of Neutralization

  • Retained commitment to conventional society and its standards of behavior

  • Know right from wrong

• Delinquency would be possible if they could escape the control that conventional society had over them

• Conventional social norms consisted of:

  • Learning of excuses or techniques of neutralization

  • Norms could be temporarily suspended and their controlling effects neutralized

  • Free to deviate without rejecting the norms

• 5 Techniques of Neutralization

  1. Denial of responsibility (i.e. “wasn’t my fault”)

  2. Denial of injury

  3. Denial of the victim

  4. Condemnation of the condemners (i.e. “lost of people steal from the grocery store”)

  5. Appeal to higher loyalties (i.e. “it needed to be done”)

• Denied two cultures existed

  • Conventional culture vs criminal culture

  • Subcultural theorist do not see the complexity of the conventional culture - “hard work pays off”

  • Subterranean values lurk beneath the surface

    • Thrills, money

    • Conspicuous consumption (materialism)

    • Masculine manifestations of violence and aggression

Drift Theory

• Criminals no more committed to crime than to conventional behavior

  • Matter of “drift” or “Subterranean convergence”

    • Techniques of neutralization + ideologies of those who represent the official moral order

    • Authorities often excuse violations

      • Blame the parents, cite provocation of the victim, accept self-defense explanations, and so on

• Crime is dangerous - something more than the loss of control/neutralization is necessary to explain it

  • Preparation: Process by which the person discovered that:

    • Crime could be pulled off by someone (COME BACK)

  • Desperation:

    • Central force is a profound sense of fatalism

      • Feeling overwheled with the need to violate rules of the system to reassert individuality

    • Combination of preparation and desperation creates will to offend

      Control Theory In Context

• 1950s

  • Marked by a time of relative social conformity

  • 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 made control theory much popular

• 1960s

  • Nation was seen as being torn apart and social consensus as being eroded completely

  • Characterized by the loss of self-control

  • Needed a perspective linking crime to the breakdown of control