Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift

Explaining too Much Delinquency: The Critique of Positivism and Subculture Theories

Matza's main purpose in Delinquency and Drift is to “question and modify the positivist portrait” of the delinquent (p. 1). He believes that, since the time of Cesare Lombroso, positivism has dominated criminological thinking, even more than it has other branches of social science. “Modern criminology,” he writes, “is the positive school of criminology” (p. 3, emphasis added). But there are three crucially problematic assumptions in the dominant criminological positivism, all of which represent overreactions against the assumptions of the earlier Classical School.

The first of those problematic assumptions is what Matza calls the “primacy of the criminal actor rather than the criminal law” (p. 3) in the explanation of crime. Modern positivist criminology, unlike the Classical School, looks for the explanation of delinquency in the motivation, character, and background of offenders. Oddly, however, despite its emphasis on the social institutions that influence the delinquent, positivist criminology leaves out one of the most important of them—the law itself. The relationship between legal institutions and delinquency, he argues, is complex, but crucial, since delinquency is, after all, an infraction—a violation of law—not simply an action. Indeed, committing infractions is the defining characteristic of the delinquent, and delinquency cannot be understood outside of that socio-legal reality. Hence, a key task of Delinquency and Drift is to “bring the legal system back in” as a crucial part of the explanation of delinquency.

The second problematic characteristic of positive criminology is its commitment to what Matza [Page 587]calls a “hard” version of determinism—a view that, he argues, has been largely abandoned in most of the rest of social science. Hard determinism assumes that delinquents break the law because they are powerfully compelled to do so by some factor or set of factors—whether those factors are biological, social, or cultural. This leads modern criminology to reject altogether the element of choice in the explanation of delinquency, and to embrace a vision of the criminal as entirely “constrained.” Against this, Matza poses what he calls a “soft” determinist view. Human beings possess “some leeway of action.” The delinquent is not simply pushed around by compelling forces, whether internal or external: “He acts, and his acts are variably free” (p. 11).

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