The Most Influential Theories of Crime Causation - Essay Example

Edwin Hardin Sutherland and his theories in Theoretical Criminology _________________________________ Affiliation: _____________________________ A theory is an assumption that attempts to explain why or how things are related to each other. A theory of crime attempts to explain why or how certain things are related to criminal behavior. Criminology theory is important because most of what is done in criminal justice is based upon criminological theory, whether we or the people who propose and implement policies based on the theory know it or not. Technically, criminological theory not only refers to explanations of criminal behavior but also to explanations of police behavior and the behavior of attorneys, prosecutors, judges, correctional personnel, victims and other actors in the criminal justice system. This essay is based upon one of the most celebrated criminologists of the twentieth-century and his theories: Edwin Sutherland. He was born August 13, 1883 in Gibbon, Nebraska and died in 1950. He grew up and studied in Ottawa, Kansas, and Grand Island, Nebraska. In 1904 he received the B.A degree from Grand Island College, and after that, he taught Latin, Greek, history, and shorthand for two years at Sioux Falls College in South Dakota. In 1906 he left Sioux Falls College and entered graduate school at the University of Chicago from which he received his doctorate. (Gaylord, 1988:7-12) There, he changed his major from history to Sociology. Much of his study was influenced by Chicago school's approach to the study of crime that emphasized human behavior as determined by social and physical environmental factors, rather than genetic or personal characteristics. After completing graduate studies he was employed at the University of Minnesota between 1926 and 1929 and solidified his reputation as one of the country's leading criminologists. During this period, his focus was on Sociology as a scientific enterprise whose goal was the understanding and control of social problems, including crime (Gaylord, 1988:13). Later he moved to Indiana University and became the founder of the Bloomington school of Criminology at Indiana University. During that time, he published 3 books, including Twenty Thousand Homeless Men (1936), The Professional Thief (1937), and the third edition of Principles of Criminology (1939). In 1939 he was elected president of the American Sociological Society, and in 1940 was elected president of the Sociological Research Association. According to him, "Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding delinquency and crime as a social phenomena. It includes within its scope the process of making laws, breaking laws, and of reacting toward the breaking of laws. These processes are three aspects of a somewhat unified sequence of interactions. The objective of Criminology is the development of a body of general and verified and principles and of other types of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and reaction to crime." (1974: 3) He was the first twentieth century criminologist to forcefully argue that criminal behavior was learned. His theory of differential association, developed in 1934 and 1947, was that persons who become criminal do so because of contacts with criminal patterns and isolations from non-criminal patterns. Differential association theory was Sutherland's major sociological contribution to Criminology; similar in importance to strain theory and social control theory. These theories all explain deviance in terms of the individual's social relationships. Sutherland's theory departs from the pathological perspective and biological perspective by attributing the cause of crime to the social context of individuals. "He rejected biological determinism and the extreme individualism of psychiatry, as well as economic explanations of crime. His search for an alternative understanding of crime led to the development of differential association theory. In contrast to both classical and biological theories, differential association theory poses no obvious threats to the humane treatment of those identified as criminals." (Gaylord, 1988:1) Sutherland argued that the concept of differential association and differential social organization could be applied to the individual level and to aggregation (or group) level respectively. While differential association theory explains why any individual gravitates toward criminal behavior, differential social organization explains why crime rates of different social entities are different from each other's. The first explicit statement of the theory of differential association appears in the 1939 edition of Principles of Criminology and in the fourth edition of it, he presented his final theory. His theory has nine basic postulates: 1. Criminal behavior is learned. This means that criminal behavior is not inherited, as such; also the person who is not already trained in crime does not invent criminal behavior. 2. Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication. This communication is verbal in many cases but includes gestures. 3. The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups. Negatively, this means the impersonal communication, such as movies or newspaper play a relatively unimportant part in committing criminal behavior. 4. When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very simple; (b) the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes. 5. The specific direction of the motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favorable or unfavorable. This different context of situation usually is found in US where culture conflict in relation to the legal code exists. 6. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law. This is the principle of differential association. When people become criminal, they do so not only because of contacts with criminal patterns but also because of isolation from anti criminal patterns. Negatively, this means that associations which are neutral so far as crime is concerned have little or no effect on the genesis of criminal behavior. 7. Differential association may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity. Priority seems to be important principally through its selective influence and intensity has to do with such thing s as the prestige of the source of a criminal or anti criminal pattern and with emotional reactions related to the association. These modalities would be rated in quantitative form and mathematical ratio but development of formula in this sense has not been developed and would be very difficult. 8. The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning. Negatively, this means that the learning of criminal behavior is not restricted to the process of imitation. A person who is seduced, for instance, learns criminal behavior by association, but this would not be ordinarily described as imitation. 9. While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values since non-criminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values. Thieves generally steal in order to secure money, but likewise honest laborers work in order to get money. The attempts to explain criminal behavior by general drives and values such as the money motive have been, and must completely to be, futile, since they explain lawful behavior as completely as they explain criminal behavior. They are similar to respiration, which is necessary for any behavior, but which does not differentiate criminal from noncriminal behavior. (Sutherland, 1974: 75-76) Together with it's more recent modifications, his theory remains one of the most influential theories of crime causation. It is unanimously approved by many sociological scholars of criminal behavior that this is the single-most important innovation in the past five decades, largely because it is centered in Sociology. The influence of Sutherland's theory is made all the more important by virtue of the recent reemergence of classical Criminology, stressing insufficient punishment as the cause of crime, and by the even more recent resurfacing of claims emphasizing genetic origins of criminal behavior, thus implying biological initiations in crime control. Another achievement of Sutherland is his is the way he dealt with psychological theories of crime causation. The idea that crime is the product primarily of people of low intelligence was popular in the United States from about 1914 to almost 1930. It received some attention again during the mid-1990s. The belief requires only a slight shift in thinking from the idea that criminals are biologically inferior to the idea that they are mentally inferior. In 1931, Sutherland reviewed approximately 350 studies on the relationship the results of about 175,000 criminals and delinquents. He concluded from the review that although intelligence varies, the distribution of the intelligence scores of criminals and delinquents is very similar to the distribution of the intelligence scores of the general population. For the next 40 years or so, the issue of the relationship between intelligence and crime and delinquency appeared resolved. However, in the mid-1970s, two studies were published that resurrected the debate. Those studies found that IQ was an important predictor of both official and self-reported juvenile delinquency, as important as social class as race. Both studies acknowledged the findings of Sutherland's earlier review. Both also noted that a decreasing number of delinquents had been reported as being of below-normal intelligence over the years. However, in both studies, it was maintained that the difference in intelligence between delinquents and non-delinquents had never disappeared and had stabilized at about eight IQ points. The studies failed to note, however, that the eight-point IQ difference found between delinquents and non-delinquents was generally within the normal range. The authors of the studies surmised that IQ influenced delinquency through it's effect on school performance. At this time, we can not conclude with any degree of confidence that delinquents as a group is less intelligent than non-delinquents, we also do know that most adult criminals are of below-normal intelligence. Obviously, low-level intelligence cannot account for the dramatic increase in the crime rate over the last couple of decades, until recently, unless one is prepared to conclude that the population of offenders is getting less intelligent. Low-level intelligence certainly cannot account for complex white collar and political crimes. Nevertheless, to the degree if any, that crime is caused by low-level intelligence, the policy implications are the same as for theories of biological inferiority: isolate, sterilize or execute. Intelligence is believed to have a genetic component. Moreover, Sutherland's presidential address in 1939 on "White Collar Criminality" was one of the few such addresses that received front-page publicity in the daily newspapers. It was published in the American Sociological Review in February, 1940, Volume V, No. 1, and developed later into the volume on White Collar Crime. Here Sutherland has analyzed "white collar crime" to augment his hypotheses attributing the causes of crime to social phenomena rather than to "receive" biological and emotional characteristics within the criminal. In this address the argument was made that many business and professional men commit crimes which should be brought within the scope of the theories of criminal behavior. Evidence concerning the prevalence of such white collar crime was secured in an analysis of the decisions by courts and commissions against the seventy largest industrial and mercantile corporations in the United States under four types of laws, namely: antitrust, false advertising, National Labor Relations, and infringements of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. This resulted in the finding that 547 adverse decisions were made, branding the behavior in question as illegal, yet only 49 (9 per cent) of the total were made by criminal courts and were ipso facto decisions that the behavior was criminal. In his analysis of the remaining 498 adverse decisions, Sutherland concluded by logical exposition that 473 of them involved criminality according to abstract criteria generally regarded by legal scholars as necessary to define crime, namely, legal description of an act as socially injurious, and legal provision of a penalty for the act. This differential implementation 'of the law in regard to the crimes of corporations in these 473 cases eliminated or at least minimized the stigma of crime. Sutherland says that it may be excellent policy to eliminate the stigma of crime in a large number of cases, but that the question at hand is why the law has a different implementation for white collar criminals than for others. In short, after a series of publications and findings, Sutherland further expanded the horizons of the Classic Chicago School of interactionists. In the process he founded Criminology as a separate area of research located within Sociology. His work was inspired by strong moral concerns and a sense of the needs of society for social order. He is especially known for applying his theory to criminal behavior within occupational groups. No one theory can perfectly explain every aspect of crime and deviant act. It needs to incorporate various theories for better explanation. However, even though with its some defects, Sutherland's differential association theory has many strengths. Other social learning theories have been influenced by differential association and many scholars are continuously trying to test empirically the usefulness and validity of Sutherland's theory. Through these efforts, Sutherland's theories are still being modified and are being developed in order to explain the variety of deviances. References: Sutherland. (1974). Criminology. J.B. Lippincott Company Sutherland. (1961). White-collar Crime. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc Sutherland. (1937). The Professional Thief. The university of Chicago. Gaylord, Mark S and J ohn F. Galliher. (1988). The Criminology of Edwin Sutherland. Transaction, Inc Robert M. Bohn, Keith N. Haley (1990s). Introduction to Criminal Justice. McGraw-Hill Inc Frank Schmalleger. Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the Twenty-First Century. Prentice Hall Publications Read More