Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency by Terence Thornberry

Author:Terence Thornberry [Thornberry, Terence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765808301
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 2053104
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

This paper is based on research supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation SBR-9311014 and the Central Investment Fund for Research Enhancement, University of Iowa. We thank Kathleen Anderson for research assistance and helpful comments and Terence P. Thornberry for helpful comments and suggestions.

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A Generic Control Theory of the Criminal Phenomenon: The Structural and Dynamic Statements of an Integrative Multilayered Control Theory

Marc Le Blanc

Introduction

Over the last forty years, criminology has not witnessed any major theoretical innovations. Numerous theories were available: social disorganization, strain, control, cultural deviance, differential association, social learning, labelling, deterrence, and so on. In addition, these theories were elaborations of ideas of nineteenth-century theorists such as Quetelet, Durkheim, Marx, and Tarde. Over the last four decades, we have witnessed enormous theoretical activities that take the form of theoretical elaboration, integration or modelling. This situation is particularly true of Hirschi's bonding theory; a theory formulated in 1969.

Bonding theory is an elaboration of the more general control perspective. Control theories have been presented by such theorists as Thrasher (1927), Freud (1963), Reiss (1951), Nye (1958), and Reckless (1961), to name a few. While these theorists outlined different constructs, they accepted the same basic assumptions concerning human nature (see Empey 1978 and Kornhauser 1978, discussions). Over the last few decades, bonding theory has become, and remains, the most prominent, empirically based criminological theory for the explanation of juvenile delinquency. During that same period, criminology was also entering a new era of theoretical questioning in which the theoretical perspective was viewed as more important than the content or structure of the theory. Social control, radical, structural, social learning, cultural deviance, labelling, deterrence, rational choice, and so on are theoretical perspectives that discuss guidelines for understanding the criminal phenomenon. In that context of competing of perspectives, empirically oriented criminologists pursued two research directions: testing bonding theory and confronting that theory with existing theories.

In the first direction, empirical studies of control theory were numerous; Kempf (1993) reports more then seventy investigations. However, studies that made an exact replication of bonding theory with the variables employed by Hirschi were few. In addition, a situation of near anarchy in the operationalization of key concepts characterized the verification of bonding theory. This anarchy meant that researchers referred to the constructs of the theory, but without a clear consensus on the measures to operationalize them. In the second direction, there were numerous attempts to integrate bonding theory with other theories, particularly differential association or social learning theory, but mainly at the level of empirical model building. This approach gave rise to controversy about the usefulness of theoretical integration, as shown in Theoretical Methods in Criminology (Meier 1985) and at the Albany Conference on Theoretical Integration (Messner et al. 1989). Because there was much more interest in empirical modelling, the content of the theory was not a major focus of attention. As a consequence, bonding theory remained stagnant for nearly twenty years. Neither the internal consistency nor the structure of the theory was the object of major challenges from empirical data.

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