Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control

Becoming a Criminologist

Cohen was born in a Jewish neighborhood in Boston on June 15, 1918, and attended college in nearby Cambridge, at Harvard University, while living at home with his parents. He was initially a political science major until he took an introduction to sociology course with Pitirim Sorokin. “By the end of the first class meeting, I had been converted,” says Cohen (Cavender, 1994, p. 154). He also had courses with Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, both of whom would have a significant influence on Cohen's writing.

Graduating in 1939 at age 21, Cohen headed to Bloomington, Indiana, to begin his graduate work at Indiana University. He applied to a dozen other graduate programs, complete with a sterling record and letters of recommendation from Parsons and Merton, but received numerous rejections, including overt references to his Jewish background as an obstacle to admittance (Cavender, 1994). Finally, he received a telegram from Edwin H. Sutherland, a leading criminologist at the Chicago School, offering an assistantship at Indiana. Under Sutherland's tutelage, Cohen became exposed to criminology and theories of differential association.

Sutherland also arranged an internship for Cohen at the Indiana Boy's School at Plainfield, giving him at opportunity to work directly with delinquent youths. In 1942, the 24-year-old Cohen completed his master's thesis, titled The Differential Implementation of Criminal Law, and took a position at the school as the Director of Orientation. This position allowed him to interview the boys as they came into the facility and explore the applications of differential association theory. However, Cohen's work was interrupted by World War II. Later that year he was enlisted by the army to serve in Alabama in the Chemical Warfare Service.

In 1946, Cohen returned to Harvard to begin his doctoral work with the question “Where does delinquent culture come from?” (Cavender, 1994, p. 161). Working with Parsons and Robert Freed Bales, he began to explore a general theory of subcultures that would explain the distribution of delinquency. As an ABD, Cohen returned to Indiana University as a faculty member and completed his dissertation, Juvenile Delinquency and the Social Structure, for Harvard in 1951.

The theoretical basis of his dissertation served as the foundation for his classic text, Delinquent Boys, in 1955. The book represents a detailed expansion of Merton's 1938 article, “Social Structure and Anomie.” What would later be known as strain theory began with an observation—perhaps influenced by his work at the Boy's School—that Merton's anomie theory does not explain why delinquency is disproportionately a young male phenomenon. Cohen's sociological background led him to a cultural analysis of working-class boys.

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