The Origins of Criminology

Criminology—the study of crime—emerged largely as a by-product of the Enlightenment, an era that celebrated the use of reason to understand human affairs and to direct public policy. Two great traditions, one arising in the 1700s and one arising in the 1800s, established the foundation of modern criminology. These were the Classical School and the Positivist School.

Cesare Beccaria is credited with the founding of the Classical School. In 1764, when just 26 years of age, Beccaria published On Crimes and Punishments. This short tract, authored by this scholar from Milan, would have profound effects, sending reverberations across Europe and beyond. Beccaria's focus was on legal reform. The criminal justice system of his day was wracked by injustice and inhumanity. Common practices included torture and coerced confessions, unfettered judicial discretion, favoritism in sentencing, and wildly cruel sanctions such as amputation, branding, whipping, and capital punishment for minor offenses. In opposition, Beccaria argued for criminal offenses and their penalties to be inscribed in the law, for equal justice, and for sanctions to be only severe enough to achieve deterrence.

We take the rule of law for granted today, but this was not the case in the 1700s. In fact, Beccaria initially published On Crimes and Punishments anonymously because he feared retribution. He was challenging the power of monarchs and princes to use the criminal law without interference and as a means to protect their advantage. His reform also comprised an implicit critique of the church's authority. For underlying the Classical School's legal theory was the view that crime was, in essence, a rational choice governed by pains and pleasures. The law thus could be calibrated to serve as a rational tool to achieve deterrence; legal punishments simply had to be harsh and certain enough to outweigh the reward a crime might bring. The death penalty was seen as unnecessary in most instances, because it over-punished the offense—it imposed pains unneeded to deter the act and hence was unjust. These ideas called into question the church's view that crime and sin were synonymous. It suggested that the control of crime was a secular rather than a sacred matter that would best be handled by fashioning a rational legal system.

The Classical School would be advanced further by Jeremy Bentham, the English utilitarian philosopher who passed away in 1848. Similar to Beccaria, he voiced the view that human choice was regulated by pains and pleasures, and that laws achieved most utility when they were just harsh enough to deter wrongdoing. Again, his system embraced the Enlightenment in rejecting religious views of crime and in arguing for the rational administration of criminal justice.

The Classical School, however, had a fatal flaw. Its proponents were moral philosophers or legal [Page xxxii]theorists who were, as has been said, “armchair criminologists.” They focused on crime and its punishment—again, often in profound ways—but at the expense of having contact with and developing detailed knowledge of criminals. The Classical School, in fact, implicitly assumed that all humans made decisions the same way: self-interest based on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Thus, how individuals differed from one another was irrelevant to the choice of crime. Holding this view, there was no compelling impetus for studying offenders. The Positivist School rejected this perspective.

The Positivist School also was a child of the Enlightenment in the sense that it, too, trumpeted the secular over the sacred and the use of reason to understand crime and to guide its control. Unlike the Classical School, however, this perspective argued that the key to unlocking the mystery of crime was scientific study that would generate “positive” or empirical facts about offenders. The organizing premise was that those who commit crimes differ from those who do not—and that it is these individual differences that cause criminal conduct. Early positivists thus did not sit in armchairs philosophizing about crime but examined, probed, measured, drew diagrams of, photographed, and autopsied thousands of criminals in hopes of discovering “why they did it.”

Cesare Lombroso is viewed as the founder of the Positivist School. Lombroso was a physician who eventually joined the faculty of the University of Turin, where he established the study of “criminal anthropology.” As an army physician in 1864, he first observed that wayward soldiers’ bodies were marked by tattoos. Subsequently, as he conducted the post-mortem examination of Vilella, a famous Italian brigand, he noticed an indentation on the base of the skull. In what he called a “revelation,” Lombroso suddenly made the connection that this trait also was found in lesser creatures. In turn, this led to the thesis that offenders were “atavistic reversions” or throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage—much like a savage, an ape, or an inferior animal. If this were true, then he reasoned that offenders would have bodily stigmata or characteristics that differed from non-criminals. Thus, he went about the task of comparing thousands of criminals with conventional members of society. He would publish his findings in 1876 in Criminal Man, a book he would revise multiple times before his death in 1909.

Lombroso's most controversial claim, which he tempered as the years passed, was that most offenders were “born criminals”—a phrase, we might add, that was coined by Enrico Ferri, his student. Influenced by evolutionary thought (Darwin's writings preceded his), Lombroso was persuaded that criminals were akin to lesser species—more degenerate and not as civilized as “normal” societal members. In the long run, however, his particular claims were less important than how he shaped the future study of crime. As Rafter points out in The Criminal Brain, Lombroso's enduring legacy was in effecting a “paradigm shift.” in particular, he made two critical contributions. First, he advanced the idea that individual differences separated criminals from non-criminals. Again, this rejected the Classical School's assumption that human nature varied little across people. Second, by presenting scientific evidence, he challenged others to produce data that would prove his theory wrong.

In the century to follow, criminology would eventually reject Lombroso's theory but, more significantly, would come to embrace his scientific or positivist paradigm. Scholars would embark on a search for the “criminal man” (and eventually woman) in which the Holy Grail would be finding which factors were most influential in distinguishing offenders from conformists. Importantly, the wealth of criminological theories that would follow comprised efforts to illuminate these causal factors.

Transition to Modernity

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States was marked by major transformations—migration and immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and westward expansion. The end result would be the nation's emergence as a world power. But in the process, America would face new and enormous social problems. In an era of increasingly rapid change, the question emerged as to how order would be possible as the United States made this transition to modernity.

Scholars in or associated with the new sociology department at the University of Chicago took up this issue. These scholars were predominantly raised in small Midwestern farming communities. [Page xxxiii]They found in the city of Chicago sources of both endless fascination and disquieting manifestations of social pain. The city had only 4,100 residents at its incorporation in 1833. By 1890, this figure had risen to over 1 million, which then rapidly doubled to 2 million by 1910. The urban core was beset by the influx of diverse immigrant groups, crowded into tenements in impoverished areas. The title and content of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle captured the nature of this social environment.

Scholars studied diverse features of urban life, including crime and delinquency that led to the Chicago School of Criminology. The most influential contribution was made by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. As with other members of the Chicago School, they came to the city from rural communities. Importantly, they saw urban neighborhoods not as mere receptacles for society's biologically deficient and dangerous citizens but as producers of crime. Indeed, they witnessed social conditions that, in comparison with the towns in which they were raised, were marked by “social disorganization.” The press of racial and ethnic heterogeneity, population transience, and poverty undermined these neighborhoods’ social integration and social institutions. Two criminogenic conditions were the result.

First, Shaw and McKay believed that the inner city, which they called the “zone in transition,” experienced social disorganization or a breakdown in social institutions (e.g., broken families). As a result, neighborhoods in this area were unable to achieve common goals, such as preventing crime. In more concrete terms, the residents were unable to exercise informal social control over delinquent youths and other wayward populations. Second, as time passed, criminal influences in disorganized communities gained strength (e.g., delinquent gangs, vice activities, criminal markets). Criminal values or traditions emerged that rivaled conventional culture. These traditions were transmitted from one generation to the next.

Thus, Shaw and McKay believed that crime was high in disorganized neighborhoods because of the lack of control and the presence of criminal values. In the years ahead, these two insights would divide into two separate lines of theoretical inquiry, becoming, in fact, bitter rivals. One perspective, social control theory, would receive its most compelling statement by Travis Hirschi who, in 1969, published Causes of Delinquency. In this classic book, Hirschi presented his social bond theory. He offered the simple but powerful argument that youths that lacked ties or bonds to conventional society were most likely to be delinquent. Alternatively, conventional bonds “controlled” the natural desire to want to satisfy gratification easily and immediately, such as by stealing or becoming inebriated. Thus, youths who were attached to their parents, committed to school, involved in social activities, and believed in the moral legitimacy of the law were too invested emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally to risk being delinquent.

The second perspective, differential association theory, was advanced by Edwin H. Sutherland, a member of the early Chicago School. He built on two of Shaw and McKay's ideas: (1) that two cultures—criminal and conventional—existed in inner-city areas, and (2) that criminal values are transmitted or learned in these areas. Rejecting the theorizing of Lombroso and others who linked crime to biology or individual pathology, Sutherland argued that criminal conduct is learned—just as any other conduct is learned—through social interaction. Given that two cultures exist, it is possible to learn one more than the other. Sutherland called this the “principle of differential association.” Thus, the key determinate of crime is when an individual comes into contact with more definitions favorable than unfavorable to law violation. Later, Ronald Akers would elaborate Sutherland's perspective with his social learning theory. Notably, although friends, Akers and Hirschi would wage a theoretical battle for more than three decades regarding the relative merits of social learning theory versus social control theory.

Beyond the Chicago School and its theoretical descendants, one other perspective dominated thinking in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century: anomie/strain theory. In 1938, Robert K. Merton published “Social Structure and Anomie,” an essay that, despite being merely 10 pages long, would become one of the most cited works in sociology and criminology. Ironically, although being raised in a Philadelphia slum, Merton did not find his childhood surroundings to be excessively criminogenic. Rather, when he came to formulate his explanation of crime and deviance, he looked beyond neighborhood boundaries to probe what was uniquely problematic about America.

In his view, the United States suffered from an inherent contradiction. The American Dream served as a cultural mandate that instructed everyone to pursue the goal of material success. An inherent contradiction arose, however, because the class structure provided differential opportunity to achieve success goals. In short, the cultural goal to seek success—to seek upward mobility—was universal but the means to achieve this goal were limited only to some. Merton asserted that this disjunction or gap between what Americans were taught to desire and what they could actually attain was criminogenic for two reasons. First, it strained the cultural norms that people were expected to follow in seeking success (e.g., hard work, obtain an education). This condition of normative erosion was called “anomie.” In turn, as the norms regulating conduct weakened, people were free to use the technically most efficient means—including criminal means—to achieve success. Second, the disjunction made many individuals feel strain if they personally were thrown back in their attempt to grasp the American Dream. When one's hopes were dashed in the legitimate opportunity structure, innovation was possible. One could attempt to relieve strain by seeking success through criminal means.

Notably, Albert Cohen, in his book Delinquent Boys in 1955, and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, in their book Delinquency and Opportunity in 1960, applied Merton's ideas to the study of youth gangs and their subcultural values. Although their theories differed somewhat, these authors argued that the frustrations experienced by lower-class urban males had serious consequences. Cut off from conventional avenues of success at school and in the workplace, these youths adapted by creating gangs and embracing antisocial subcultural values. In providing this insight, Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin helped to integrate Merton's theory with the Chicago School. In essence, they maintained that anomie/strain theory explained why delinquent subcultures emerged and that the Chicago School explained why contact with these criminal traditions led youths into crime.

America in Crisis

As the United States turned into the 1970s, three schools of thought thus dominated criminology: control theory, differential association theory, and anomie/strain theory. This theoretical trinity was said to comprise “mainstream” criminology. The perspectives earned this label for two reasons. First, as stated, they were the major theories of crime that all scholars knew well and that most empirical work addressed. Second, they were, at most, only mildly critical of the existing social order in America. They pointed to conditions in society that could be altered to reduce crime, but they did not argue that the United States was marked by intolerable injustices in need of radical reform. There was no call, in short, to take to the streets so as to change “the system.”

The events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, created a social context conducive to more radical or critical thinking about crime, sometimes called the “new criminologies.” At the beginning of the 1960s, the nation was hopeful, as President Kennedy promised a “new frontier” and President Johnson promised a “great society.” But these hopes ran aground on the shores of harsh realities. In the intervening decade or so, John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Civil rights marchers were attacked by thugs and by police dogs, and riots left inner-city neighborhoods ablaze and in ruins. Protests abounded, as the Civil Rights movement spawned the Women's Movement. Anti-business attitudes led to campaigns for greater protections for consumers against unsafe products and for the public against environmental toxins. Most significant, the intractable Vietnam War, which was taking a mounting toll in soldiers’ blood and in the public's treasury, spawned massive protests. The shooting of student protesters at Kent State University galvanized anti-war sentiments. Watergate was the straw that broke the camel's back, resulting in skepticism toward the government. Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider showed that taken together, these events led to a “confidence gap,” as the public's trust in those in power—from the state to big business—plummeted.

In this context—with America in crisis—many scholars were prepared to think differently about their world, including about crime. Suddenly, mainstream theories struck many scholars as tepid. These perspectives seemed to ignore what contemporary events showed were integral features of social life: corrupt state power and entrenched [Page xxxv]inequality. Three important schools of criminology thus flourished in this period, each of which highlighted a potential cause of crime omitted by mainstream approaches.

First, labeling theory questioned whether arresting and stigmatizing offenders made them less criminal. This was the position of deterrence theory, which asserted that harsh and certain punishment scared offenders straight. Instead, labeling theory proposed that treating offenders as though they were “criminals” had the unanticipated consequence of stabilizing their lawlessness. Thus, attaching criminal labels to people prompted them to develop a criminal identity. Legal interventions, especially imprisonment, caused beginning offenders to associate with serious criminals and to be cut off from conventional society (e.g., loss of jobs and family relations). As a result, offenders became increasingly trapped in criminal roles that led them deeper into crime. They became “career criminals.”

This theory was popular because it resonated with the public's growing mistrust in the state. In its view, through its most powerful instrument—the criminal justice system—the government was not making society safer but exacerbating the problem. Most disquieting, the use of state power to disproportionately arrest and imprison minorities meant that labeling effects were felt most profoundly in impoverished neighborhoods.

Second, critical or radical theory blamed capitalism, especially the extreme form found in the United States, for high crime rates—a thesis that made sense to many scholars radicalized by the sixties. This approach argued that capitalist America exposed its less fortunate citizens to what Jonathan Kozol has called “savage inequalities.” These conditions were the root causes of street crime. For those at the top of the class structure, opportunities to break the law were ubiquitous. Political corruption, corporate illegality, and other types of white-collar lawlessness robbed the public of enormous sums of money and, unbeknownst to most citizens, also injured, sickened, and killed them (e.g., unsafe products, hazardous work conditions, dumping of pollutants into the environment). But these upper-world offenders, observed radical theorists, were insulated against prosecution because they controlled which harms in society were criminalized. In capitalist America, as Jeffrey Reiman commented, “the rich get richer and the poor get prison.”

Third, feminist theory critiqued mainstream criminology for formulating theories written by men about men. As the Women's Movement gained force, scholars argued that ignoring women, as offenders and as victims, was inexcusable. Influential theorists such as Freda Adler and Rita Simon proposed that the growing social and economic gender equality in American society would create growing gender equality in crime. Other scholars suggested that the cause of female criminality was their exclusion from, and thus marginalization within, the economy. Still others argued that female criminality might have gender-specific origins, including the sexual abuse of girls that might cause psychological damage and/or drive them into the streets as runaways. Feminist criminologists also called attention to the special ways in which women were victimized, blaming it on the persistence of patriarchal values. Thus, they demanded that the criminal justice system no longer ignore women's rape, sexual abuse, and victimization by domestic violence.

Again, these lines of inquiry reflected the social times in that each offered a critique of American society. Thus, labeling theory questioned the justice and effectiveness of the state's use of power through its criminal justice system; radical theory questioned the capitalist system and the way it unfairly impoverished the poor and allowed the advantaged to enrich themselves in shady ways and with impunity from prosecution; and feminist theory questioned the legitimacy of a patriarchal system that treated women as second-class citizens, showed little interest in the sources of their criminality, and ignored their victimization at the hands of male assailants. However, a fourth innovative perspective arose that was not tied directly to the prevailing crisis in American society: routine activity theory. This approach, however, also contended that mainstream criminology was limited and had omitted an important factor in the explanation of crime.

In 1979, routine activity theory was formulated by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson. They noted that mainstream criminology placed a near-exclusive focus on what motivated some people but not others to break the law. An actual criminal act, however, did not simply involve the presence of a motivated offender. For this act to occur, the offender had to have access to the opportunity to [Page xxxvi]undertake the behavior in question. Cohen and Felson then made a significant advance in elucidating the concept of opportunity. They divided this construct into two components: (1) the presence of suitable or attractive targets (e.g., a television set to steal, a person to rob), and (2) the absence of capable guardianship (e.g., a burglar alarm, friends escorting one home). They proposed that a criminal act thus ensues only when a motivated offender intersects in time and space with an attractive target that lacks capable guardianship.

Cohen and Felson's perspective had two important implications—one theoretical and one practical. Theoretically, their work suggested that increases in crime rates were not always due to deteriorating circumstances (e.g., rise in unemployment or in neighborhood social disorganization). Thus, growing affluence could create more goods under less monitoring to steal (e.g., in department stores). Equal rights for women could result in more burglary (due to fewer women at home during the day guarding their residences) and in more rape (due to more women alone in public spaces, such as traveling home from work in evening hours). In short, crime was tied not simply to bad social conditions that might produce motivated offenders but to good social conditions that affected daily routine activity or lifestyles that, in turn, increased opportunities to victimize.

Practically, Cohen and Felson's focus on opportunity as a key ingredient for crime held profound implications for reducing crime. Thus, beyond trying to lower people's motivation to commit crime—whether through rehabilitation programs or tougher laws aimed at deterrence—public safety could be enhanced by limiting opportunities to offend. This would be accomplished by making targets less attractive or by increasing guardianship. Consistent with this thinking, Ronald Clarke developed his theory of situational crime prevention. Clarke argued that the most effective way to prevent victimization was not to focus on crime's root causes but on situational factors that might be manipulated so as to make offending more difficult (e.g., placing locks on doors, requiring exact fares on bus rides so drivers handled no money, placing tags on merchandise that set off an alarm if taken outside a store). Notably, in the ensuing years, but especially since the inception of the current century, opportunity theories and opportunity reduction have become important ways of explaining and preventing criminal behavior.

Revitalizing Older Theories

The last two decades of the 20th century proved to be fertile soil for the criminological imagination in the United States. Many of these fresh theories, however, proved to be old wines in new bottles. A number of scholars returned to traditional theories. They saw in these older approaches key insights that illuminated crime. However, they also argued that these approaches were limited and needed to be updated and elaborated. In short, they called for a revitalization of these older theoretical paradigms. Four developments are worthy of special mention. These theoretical works are significant because they were widely read and generated a host of empirical studies. Indeed they have shaped criminology in fundamental ways.

First, scholars returned to the Chicago School and to Shaw and McKay's social disorganization theory. A number of community-level theories were proposed. The most influential was collective efficacy theory advanced by Robert Sampson and colleagues. Consistent with Shaw and McKay, Sampson et al. argued that structural characteristics, especially concentrated disadvantage, determined a neighborhood's organization and thus crime rate. Collective efficacy theory, however, differed in two ways from social disorganization theory. On one hand, this newer perspective linked levels of crime to the presence (efficacy) rather than to the absence (disorganization) of a neighborhood condition. On the other hand, it focused on a factor that was active rather than passive. For Shaw and McKay, social disorganization was an entrenched or static feature of certain communities. For Sampson and colleagues, however, collective efficacy was a dynamic resource that could be mobilized to solve problems. In particular, when neighbors trusted one another and were willing to exercise informal social control, they could bind together to address issues that might prove criminogenic (e.g., stop unruly youths from hanging out on a street corner, shut down a “crack house” serving as a drug marketplace). By contrast, communities in which residents were mistrustful and not socially integrated lacked the socio-political “efficacy” to fight crime when the need arose.

Second, Merton's anomie/strain theory inspired two prominent theories. Thus, in Crime in the American Dream published in 1994, Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld developed institutional-anomie theory. They extended Merton's original anomie theory, which had focused only on the interaction between the American Dream's prescription for everyone to pursue economic success and the class structure's restriction on upward mobility. They argued that beyond social class, the American Dream's overemphasis on economic goals also frayed the ability of other social institutions to exercise social control. For example, families often were less effective in socializing and supervising children because parents worked long hours, including on weekends, and moved around the country so as to achieve material success. Similarly, students entered colleges not for intellectual growth and to refine their moral sensibilities but to acquire skills and credentials that would “get them a job.”

At virtually the same time (1992), Robert Agnew presented a second elaboration of Merton's paradigm through his general strain theory. He argued that Merton had elucidated one important source of strain—blockage from desired goals—but that other criminogenic strains existed. In addition, individuals might have desired stimuli removed from them (e.g., loss of a job or intimate relationship) or have noxious stimuli forced on them (e.g., victimization, life in a dangerous and physically unpleasant neighborhood). Agnew also identified factors that made a criminal response to strain more likely (e.g., weak controls, antisocial peers) or less likely (e.g., people to give a person social support, intelligence). He called these “conditioning variables.”

Third, there has been a renewed interest in what we refer to as theories of the criminal sanction. In the half century following 1920, America's incarceration rate had remained largely stable. In fact, in the early 1970s, the state and federal prison population was under 200,000. Suddenly, the number of offenders behind bars jumped upward, escalating sevenfold in the next four decades. In this context of unprecedented punitiveness, it is understandable why interest grew in the effects of criminal sanctions, especially of harsh laws and imprisonment. This expanded focus included deterrence theory and, to a less extent, labeling theory. Most significant were attempts to move beyond these perspectives to explore the conditions under which criminal sanctions increased or decreased offending.

John Braithwaite's Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) was the most influential of these works. Braithwaite observed that sanctions could either be stigmatizing or reintegrative. Much as labeling theorists had argued, he held that stigmatizing reactions knife off ties to conventional society, drive offenders toward criminal opportunities and subcultures, and increase their commitment to crime. By contrast, reintegrative shaming “hates the sin but not the sinner.” Criminal acts are condemned, but offenders are welcomed back into the community if they take responsibility for their crimes, apologize to victims, and compensate victims and the community for the harms they have caused. Braithwaite's criminological theory would prove to be an important impetus for the expansion of restorative justice programs aimed at harm reduction and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Further, it revitalized interest in theorizing about the effects of labeling and the contingencies under which sanctions exacerbate or reduce criminal involvement.

Fourth, there was a renewed interest in control theory. A variety of perspectives were advanced, such as John Hagan's power-control theory and Charles Tittle's control-balance theory. However, perhaps the most significant theoretical contribution of this era was self-control theory authored in 1990 by Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi. In their General Theory of Crime, Gottfredson and Hirschi embraced the traditional control theory assumption that humans by nature were self-interested and craved immediate, easy gratification. The issue thus was not to explain why people commit crimes—everyone is sufficiently motivated by our natures to do that—but rather to answer this question: “Why don't we do it?” The traditional control theory answer is that humans would “do it” except for the presence of controls that, much like a dam containing surging waters, holds back our surging criminal motivations. What differentiates control theories is the specific type of control whose presence restrains and whose absence permits motivations to actualize into criminal behavior.

As might be recalled, in Causes of Delinquency, Hirschi had argued that “social bonds” serve to restrain criminal motivations. Writing two decades later with Gottfredson, he proposed that the key [Page xxxviii]factor was “self-control.” For Gottfredson and Hirschi, those with low self-control are impulsive, risk-taking, insensitive to others, and unconcerned about long-term consequences. They are ideal candidates for crime, because the vast majority of criminal acts require little planning, are easy to commit, and provide immediate gratification.

This shift to self-control theory stood social bond theory on its head. Previously, Hirschi had placed the existence of control in the quality of social relationships. Strong bonds to conventional society made crime unappealing because, for example, parents would be disappointed or promising futures sacrificed. Gottfredson and Hirschi now proposed that the locus of control was internal, not social. Self-control was a propensity—or a trait—that individuals carried with them. Self-control, in fact, not only prevented criminal involvement but also created social bonds. People with self-control both avoided crime and succeeded at school, were employed, and had good marriages. Those without self-control committed crime and were incapable of establishing bonds to society. By implication, the relationship of social bonds to crime—the core of Hirschi's original theory—was now seen as spurious, not causal; both the quality of social bonds and participation in crime were viewed as caused by the level of self-control.

Social bond theory also assumed that involvement in crime was not stable but varied over time. During their lives, bonds might weaken, such as in adolescence when conflicts with parents occurred, or strengthen, such as when individuals made the transition to adulthood by taking jobs and getting married. This is why youths experienced legal troubles while juveniles but matured out of crime as they became young adults. But as a propensity or trait theory, self-control theory asserted that individual differences in self-control were permanent. Noting that childhood conduct problems predicted later criminal behavior, Gottfredson and Hirschi further contended that a person's level of self-control was established early in life—by age 8 or 10. Child-rearing practices determined whether the capacity to resist immediate gratification was inculcated. Thus, children would develop self-control if they were fortunate to have parents who cared enough to monitor them, could recognize wayward conduct when it occurred, and had the ability to punish misconduct effectively.

Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory had three important implications. First, it called into question virtually every sociological theory of crime, including (as noted) Hirschi's own social bond theory. It argued that the causal relationship of social conditions to crime were in fact spurious. Thus, delinquent peer groups did not cause crime through differential association; rather it was a matter of “birds of a feather flocking together.” Second, their theory focused attention on childhood. Criminologists had mainly constructed theories of delinquency, assuming that events during adolescence were key to criminal involvement at that age. Gottfredson and Hirschi showed that criminal careers began not in the teenage years but in childhood. And third, self-control theory suggested that, beyond the mere fact of aging, all social experiences after childhood—from adolescence to the grave—were irrelevant to explaining crime. These bold assertions would reframe how scholars would think about crime and inspire fresh theoretical contributions.

The Life-Course Paradigm

In 1993, Robert Sampson and John Laub published Crime in the Making. This landmark book was important for two reasons. First, the authors based their book on data collected by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck on 500 white boys ages 10 to 17 from Massachusetts reformatories and a matched sample of 500 youths from the Boston area. These boys were born in the Depression and followed until age 32. In 1987, the authors found the boxes of the Gluecks’ original data in the basement of the Harvard Law School library. They transformed this information into a modern data set that could be analyzed by computer. Notably, the design of the Gluecks’ investigation was longitudinal, making it possible to track the respondents from childhood into adulthood. Sampson and Laub realized that this would enable them to study continuity and change in offending over time. As a result, they could develop a life-course theory of crime.

Second, their work directly challenged self-control theory. Ironically, Gottfredson and Hirschi had been Sampson and Laub's professors in graduate school. In making sense of the Gluecks’ data, they decided to rely on Hirschi's original social bond theory, developing an age-graded social [Page xxxix]bond theory. Although they agreed with Gottfredson and Hirschi that individual propensities, such as self-control, had important effects over time, they rejected their former mentors’ assertion that crime across the life course was marked by stability. Rather, their data showed not only continuity but also change in offending. The early onset of conduct problems in childhood certainly predicted later offending, but childhood difficulty did not consign a person to a criminal career. For example, Sampson and Laub showed that among adult offenders, a quality marriage or a quality job could be a turning point that bumped them off a criminal trajectory and into conformity.

In 1993, another influential life-course theory was published by Terrie Moffitt. Moffitt argued that crime should be seen as a developmental process. According to Moffitt, the normative pathway involves youths avoiding problem behavior before and after the juvenile years. That is, their criminality is largely “adolescence-limited.” More disquieting, however, a small group of children become trapped in a developmental pathway that leads them to become “life-course-persistent” offenders. While in the womb, their development is compromised (e.g., mothers smoking or taking drugs), and thus they suffer neuropsychological deficits. Born with a difficult temperament to parents who are often young and impoverished, they typically receive harsh and erratic socialization. Manifesting conduct problems and lower intellectual skills, they are ill-prepared for school, where they fail academically and are rejected by other students. They are then candidates to self-select into delinquent peer groups, where they secure support for more serious offending. And on and on, deeper and deeper into crime. Moffit calls this process “cumulative disadvantage” and argues that, as this developmental sequence continues, the individuals are ensnared in life-course-persistent offending.

The perspectives of Gofftredson and Hirschi (who theorized continuity in offending due to self-control), Sampson and Laub (who theorized continuity and change in offending depending on the strength of social bonds), and Moffitt (who theorized continuity or change in offending depending on which developmental pathway a child was in) diverged in important ways. But taken together, they were unified in showing the importance of studying how events in childhood affect criminal pathways through life. The power of their collective theorizing also was a turning point in criminology. From the early 1990s until this day, the life-course paradigm has dominated theoretical and empirical scholarship. It is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

In this regard, a final theoretical development has contributed further to the view that crime can only be understood by examining the twists and turns of individuals’ lives over time: biosocial criminology. Following World War II, biological approaches were dismissed by scholars because of the dominance of sociological thinking and because of their use in Nazi Germany to justify the exclusion and murder of Jewish and other non-Aryan peoples. In the Untied States, these approaches have been employed to legitimize the eugenics movement (including the sterilization of offenders) as well as racist policies and views toward African Americans and other minorities. This dismal history made the embrace of biological theories dis-reputable—and rightly so.

In recent years, however, biology as a field has experienced a dramatic revolution, with more sophisticated tools to unpack human nature (e.g., DNA testing). More generally, biosocial research has been undertaken on a variety of social domains that has yielded potentially progressive policy recommendations (e.g., early intervention with children, helping at-risk expectant mothers to have healthy pregnancies). Further, the clear reality is that humans enter the world not as blank slates on which society writes a script but with individual differences that shape how they react to the world and how the world reacts to them. Biosocial processes thus cannot be ignored in achieving a complete understanding of how humans develop across the life course, including whether a person is trapped in a criminal trajectory. Our biology encapsulates us and is like a suitcase that we carry with us wherever we go in our travels in life. This observation is not to embrace the crude biological determinism of past eras. But it is to say that biosocial theorizing will become an increasingly important part of criminology in the time ahead.