Sutherland, Edwin H. (1883–1950)

Edwin Sutherland is widely considered the dean of American criminology. Contemporary criminological research is impossible to imagine without the theory, methods, and substance of his work. Born in Gibbon, [Page 1447]Nebraska, he received a bachelor's degree in 1904 at Grand Island College, where his father, George, was president. From 1906 to 1913, he was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), W. I. Thomas (1863–1947), Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), and John Dewey (1859–1952), all of whom emphasized the creation of culture through human interaction.

After receiving his PhD in 1913, Sutherland taught at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, until 1919 and then at the University of Illinois from 1919 to 1926. There in 1924, he wrote the first edition of his enduring Criminology textbook, which was published through many editions long after his death. From 1926 to 1929, he taught at the University of Minnesota and then at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1935. After a year of full-time research at the Bureau of Social Hygiene in New York City, Sutherland moved to Indiana University in Bloomington in 1935 and remained there until his death in 1950.

In 1937, he published The Professional Thief, emphasizing the culture of careers that involved crimes such as picking pockets, shoplifting, and confidence games. Later, he emphasized social interaction and the creation of corporate culture in his famous book White Collar Crime (1949), just a year prior to his death. Here, Sutherland discussed the crimes committed by American corporations and executives. So famous is the book that its title has become a permanent part of the English language, this in spite of the fact that the book's publisher insisted that Sutherland remove the names of all the corporations whose illegal activities he analyzed. In both books, Sutherland largely ignored the economic system in which these crimes exist and looked instead to the culture and associations that create motives favorable to these activities. He also eschewed biological and psychiatric explanations of criminal behavior.

These two books are consistent with Sutherland's famous differential association theory of criminal behavior, which seems most responsible for his prominence. He presented the final version of this theory in the fourth edition of Criminology, published in 1947. According to this theory, people learn criminal behavior through communication in intimate personal groups.

Such learning depends on the frequency, duration, and intensity of such associations. They learn criminal techniques and motives, as well as even legal definitions that may favor activity that would lead to law violation. In general, the process of learning criminal behavior is the same as that involved in other learning.