Causes of delinquency
Travis Hirschi
- 28 Jul 2017
6.5K
TL;DR: In Causes of Delinquency, Hirschi attempts to state and test a theory of delinquency, seeing in the delinquent a person relatively free of the intimate attachments, the aspirations, and the moral beliefs that bind most people to a life within the law.
read more
Abstract: In Causes of Delinquency, Hirschi attempts to state and test a theory of delinquency, seeing in the delinquent a person relatively free of the intimate attachments, the aspirations, and the moral beliefs that bind most people to a life within the law. In prominent alternative theories, the delinquent appears either as a frustrated striver forced into delinquency by his acceptance of the goals common to us all, or as an innocent foreigner attempting to obey the rules of a society that is not in position to make the law or define conduct as good or evil. Hirschi analyzes a large body of data on delinquency collected in Western Contra Costa County, California, contrasting throughout the assumptions of the strain, control, and cultural deviance theories. He outlines the assumptions of these theories and discusses the logical and empirical difficulties attributed to each of them. Then draws from sources an outline of social control theory, the theory that informs the subsequent analysis and which is advocated here. Often listed as a "Citation Classic," Causes of Delinquency retains its force and cogency with age. It is an important volume and a necessary addition to the libraries of sociologists, criminologists, scholars and students in the area of delinquency.
read more
Chat with Paper
AI Agents for this Paper
Find similar papers on Google Scholar, PubMed and Arxiv
Write a critical review of this paper
Analyze citations of this paper to find unaddressed research gaps
Citations
Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy.
TL;DR: It is suggested that delinquency conceals 2 distinct categories of individuals, each with a unique natural history and etiology: a small group engages in antisocial behavior of 1 sort or another at every life stage, whereas a larger group is antisocial only during adolescence.
The Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2): Development and Preliminary Psychometric Data
TL;DR: In this article, a revised Conflict Tactics Scales (the CTS2) is proposed to measure psychological and physical attacks on a partner in a marital, cohabiting, or dating relationship.
6.9K
Risk and protective factors for alcohol and other drug problems in adolescence and early adulthood: Implications for substance abuse prevention.
TL;DR: The authors suggest that the most promising route to effective strategies for the prevention of adolescent alcohol and other drug problems is through a risk-focused approach.
Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a general strain theory of crime and delinquency that is capable of overcoming the criticisms of previous strain theories, and argue that strain has a central role to play in explanations of crime/delinquency, but that the theory has to be substantially revised to play this role.
4.5K
•Book
Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives
Shadd Maruna
- 01 Oct 2000
TL;DR: Maruna as discussed by the authors argues that to truly understand offenders, we must understand the stories that they tell - and that in turn this story-making process has the capacity to transform lives, and provides a fascinating narrative analysis of the lives of repeat offenders who, by all statistical measures, should have continued on the criminal path but instead have created lives of productivity and purpose.
3.4K
References
Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.
TL;DR: In the 1966 paperback edition of a publication which first appeared in 1963 has by now been widely reviewed as a worthy contribution to the sociological study of deviant behavior as discussed by the authors, and the authors developed a sequential model of deviance relying on the concept of career, a concept originally developed in studies of occupations.
3.2K
Poverty, Parenting, and Children's Mental Health.
TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship among current poverty, length of time spent in poverty, maternal parenting behaviors, and children's mental health using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data set.
871
•Book
Criminological Theories: Introduction and Evaluation
Ronald L. Akers
- 01 Jan 1994
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors defined a set of criteria for evaluating a criminal justice system: logical consistency, scope, and parsimony testability, and the concept of Causality and Determinism.
583
Delinquency as the failure of personal and social controls.
TL;DR: This article found that students from the farming and blue-collar groups had a better chance of having their college education postponed or interrupted by a work experience than students coming from the white-collar group.
449
Related Papers (5)
Delbert S. Elliott,David Huizinga,Suzanne S. Ageton +2 more
- 01 Mar 1985
Robert K. Merton
- 01 Jan 1938
Edwin H. Sutherland
- 01 Jan 1992