Techniques of Neutralization

GRESHAM SYKES and David Matza (1958) articulated five techniques of neutralization that were derived from observing recently arrested juvenile delinquents. Neutralizations represent common justifications or excuses for wrongful behavior prior to committing it, in order to alleviate moral guilt. They are: 1) denial of injury (no harm was really done); 2) denial of victim (no crime occurred because the entity against whom the act was committed deserved it); 3) denial of responsibility (it was not the actor's fault); 4) condemnation of condemners (penalizers are hypocrites); and 5) appeals to higher loyalties (the act was done because of an allegiance to a more important principle, like loyalty to a group).

Donald Cressey's classic 1953 work on embezzlers, Other People's Money, anticipated by several years the ideas of Sykes and Matza when he found that his subjects had to counteract the criminal nature of the theft before they could steal. Carl Klockars added another neutralization in 1974, the metaphor of the ledger (there are many more good behaviors than bad ones on an individual's behavior balance sheet). Unlike the neutralizations of Sykes and Matza, Klockars's metaphor of the ledger admits that a behavior is wrong. But, it nevertheless shares the fundamental aspect of the other neutralizations—it is an attempt to reduce personal moral guilt. The concept of neutralization makes a plausible contribution to the understanding of many kinds of business crime because most business criminals are generally law-abiding and do not want to think of themselves as immoral.

The term neutralization should not be confused with the term rationalization, although the two are often used interchangeably. If the excuses described by Sykes and Matza and Klockars are invoked before the offense to repress feelings of guilt, they are neutralizations. If the excuses are used after the offense to repress feelings of guilt, then they are rationalizations. Of the two concepts, only neutralizations can help to explain an offense because they occur prior to the illegal act.

Researchers almost always record these justifications after the crime is committed. This makes it impossible to determine whether a subject used an excuse to neutralize her crime before it was committed, or whether the excuse was created after the crime as a rationalization to avoid self-embarrassment. White-collar criminals have been documented numerous times using denial of injury, especially in defrauding or embezzling from a government or another wealthy entity. In many cases of embezzlement, the thief tries to believe that there is[Page 798] no harm because the money is merely being “borrowed.” Corporate criminals also use denial of injury when victimizing the public at large. In such cases, the harm inflicted is mild and diffuse when spread over so many individuals (for example, stockholders), so the perception by the criminal is that there is little discernable injury to any single person.

Denial of victim will be used to defend a crime when there is a sense of injustice, such as workers who believe that they are underpaid. Denials of responsibility have been documented in statements such as: “The tax laws are too complex for me to understand,” and “It's not the organization's fault that our employees committed crimes.” Condemnation of condemners is used when it is believed that a contemplated victim is in no position to render judgment, such as the water polluter who validates the offense by asserting that government officials are corrupt.

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