The Generality of Deviance

Travis Hirschi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351294423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

First Published in 2018. The Generality of Deviance advances the idea that all forms of deviant, criminal, reckless, and sinful behavior have one thing in common: the tendency to pursue immediate benefits without concern for long-term costs. The editors argue, and the contributors confirm, that such disparate behaviors as smoking, auto accidents, burglary, and rape are similar in that they all involve disregard for their inevitable consequences: poor health, injury, loss of freedom, shame, or disrepute. The chapters here show how various forms of deviance relate to one another and can be explained by a common theory involving self-management.The editors illustrate how the idea of self-control challenges the psychological concept of aggression and provides a more useful alternative for understanding deviant behavior. They also apply the theory to the family, showing how this institution is central to crime control. Other contributors bring fresh perspectives to a variety of topics: the uncanny similarities between victims of car accidents and perpetrators of crime; the connection between drugs and crime; feminist explanations of rape; gender differences in crime rates; drunk drivers among high school students; and the progression of a delinquent's life from adolescence to adulthood.In short, this book makes a convincing case that it is a waste of intellectual effort and public funds to treat different forms of crime and deviant behavior as distinct problems. Studied collectively, various crimes may be seen to have the same causes and, hence, one cure. The Generality of Deviance will be a significant and provocative addition to the libraries of criminolegists, psychologists, and sociologists, those attempting to solve as well as to identify problems.

1

The Generality of Deviance

Travis Hirschi and Michael R Gottfredson

Theories in criminology are typically tested by examining their ability to provide conceptual and empirical explanations of forms of crime or deviance, but they are not restricted to this role alone. In fact, theories of crime may also act as guides to public policy, as bases for assessment of the functioning of social institutions, and even as sources of insight into the practices of academic disciplines. The more general a theory, the more diverse the topics to which it can be applied. With this thought in mind, the chapters in this volume assess the empirical adequacy and conceptual utility of the theory of self control advanced in our book, A General Theory of Crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990). The topics covered are correspondingly diverse, ranging from such concrete forms of deviance as rape, drug use, and accidents to such abstract issues as versatility, aggression, and even “positivism.” In all cases the goal is the same: to explore the generality of the theory, its applicability to a variety of questions of interest to criminology.

Although none of the essays is based on data collected with the theory explicitly in mind, each explores the applicability of the theory to a particular institution, conceptual issue, social problem, or form of risky behavior. Collectively, then, the works in this volume are meant to illustrate and even test the generality of the theory, a theory explicitly designed to encompass the full range of criminal, deviant, and reckless behavior.

The theory, simply stated, is this: Criminal acts are a subset of acts in which the actor ignores the long-term negative consequences that flow from the act itself (e.g., the health consequences of drug use), from the social or familial environment (e.g., a spouse’s reaction to infidelity), or from the state (e.g., the criminal justice response to robbery). All acts that share this feature, including criminal acts, are therefore likely to be engaged in by individuals unusually sensitive to immediate pleasure and insensitive to long-term consequences. The immediacy of the benefits of crime implies that they are obvious to the actor, that no special skill or learning is required. The property of individuals that explains variation in the likelihood of engaging in such acts we call “self-control.” The evidence suggests to us that variation in self-control is established early in life, and that differences between individuals remain reasonably constant over the life course. It also suggests, consistent with the idea of self-control, that individuals will tend to engage in (or avoid) a wide variety of criminal and analogous behaviors—that they will not specialize in some to the exclusion of others, nor will they “escalate” into more serious or skillful criminal behavior over time.

Both the stability of differences between individuals and the versatility of offenders can be derived from the fact that all such acts follow a predictable path over the life course, peaking in the middle to late teens, and then declining steadily throughout life. If children who offend by whining and pushing and shoving are the adults who offend by robbing and raping, it must be that whining and pushing and shoving are the theoretical equivalents of robbery and rape. If robbery and rape are theoretical equivalents, they should be engaged in by the same people. They are engaged in by the same people (putting the lie to the idea that each of them is peculiarly motivated). If deviant acts at different phases of the life course are engaged in differentially by the same individuals, the underlying trait must be extremely stable over time. If the same individuals tend to engage in serious and trivial acts, these acts must satisfy equivalent desires of the actor.

Evidence for a “latent trait” that somehow causes deviant behavior thus comes from two primary sources. The first is the statistical association among diverse criminal, deviant, or reckless acts. Because these acts are behaviorally heterogeneous, because they occur in a variety of situations, and because they entail different sets of necessary conditions, it seems reasonable to suppose that what they have in common somehow resides in the person committing them. The second is the stability of differences between individuals over time. Because individuals relatively likely to commit criminal, deviant, or reckless acts at one point in time are also relatively likely to commit such acts at later points in time, it seems reasonable to ascribe these differences to a persistent underlying trait possessed in different degrees by those whose behavior is being compared.

The standards described are well-known as tests of internal consistency and test-retest reliability (or stability). When applied to measures of crime, they offer compelling evidence that a stable trait of personality underlies much criminal, deviant, and reckless behavior (Greenberg 1991; Rowe, Osgood, and Nicewander 1990; Osgood 1990; Osgood et al. 1988; Olweus 1979; Nagin and Farrington 1992).

If the evidence requires that we grant the existence of reliable differences among individuals in the tendency to commit deviant acts, the evidence it seems to us also requires that we conceptualize this “latent trait” in particular ways. For example, we cannot make it conducive to specialization in some deviant acts rather than others, because that would be contrary to its generality (we cannot easily conceptualize it as “internalization of norms,” because that would suggest the possibility of internalizing some norms and not others, an idea also contrary to the finding of generality); we cannot make it akin to aggressiveness, because that would be contrary to its often passive, furtive, or retreatist consequences; we cannot make it a positive force requiring for its satisfaction the commission of clearly criminal acts, because it is not conducive to persistence in a course of action but is instead conducive to momentary satisfaction of transient desires. Reasoning in this way, and from examination of the diverse acts produced by or consistent with this “latent trait,” we concluded that it was best seen as self-control, the tendency to avoid acts whose long-term costs exceed their momentary advantages.

Natural Sanctions

This conception of the trait underlying criminal, deviant, and reckless behavior solves several problems. A persistent problem in this area is extinction, the tendency of responses created and maintained by sanctions to evaporate in the absence of continued reinforcement. How is self-control maintained when there are no obvious social or legal supports for it? It is not hard to find examples of people who continue to “conform” during very long periods in which their behavior is not observed by other people or subject to the sanctions of the criminal law. In our view, self control is resistent to extinction because its ultimate sources are natural sanctions that by definition do not require continued input from others. Socialization, in this sense, may be seen as a process of educating individuals about the consequences of their behavior. Once they have such knowledge and the habit of acting on it, no further reinforcement is required. In fact in most areas natural sanctions so exceed in strength social or legal sanctions that the latter are not really necessary to explain the conformity of most people. The mystery is, rather, how some people can ignore or misapprehend the automatic consequences of their behavior, both positive and negative, and thus continue to act as though these consequences did not exist.

For example, opportunities to drink are virtually unlimited for all members of the population. Alcohol in one form or another is relatively cheap and is widely available. For many people, normative control is for all intents and purposes absent. They lead essentially private lives, or those around them do not really care about their consumption. The pleasures of alcohol are known and acknowledged by a large majority of the population. Yet self control predicts consumption of alcohol in both public and private settings over the life course. It must be that self-control is maintained by the natural consequences of behavior including but by no means limited to the reactions of others. Consistent with this argument, alcohol consumption also declines with age, suggesting that consumption is governed more by its physiological than by its social consequences.

Self control is highly efficient precisely because it is effective in a variety of settings, many of which lack social or legal surveillance, but few of which lack natural sanctions. People with self control do not risk accidents on lonely mountain roads even though no one is there to see them exceed the speed limit. They do not steal goods belonging to others despite countless opportunities to do so because such actions are inconsistent with prospects for success (prospects that do not allow a record of criminal behavior, but are otherwise independent of social or legal sanctions).

The idea of self control suggests that the origin of all sanctions or norms is to be found in natural sanctions, the rewards and punishments that follow automatically from particular acts or lines of behavior. Many natural sanctions are of course physical or physiological, affecting the health or well-being of the body—producing injury, disease, deterioration, or even death. Excessive use of drugs, interpersonal violence, promiscuous sexual behavior, and theft of all sorts can yield such consequences. As a result, normative and legal systems evolve to draw attention to these consequences (the difficulty we have in saying precisely what these systems are up to suggests that they have many sources and functions). The relation between natural and normative sanctions helps account for the universality of norms governing those behaviors with the most serious consequences, such as interpersonal violence and theft. At the same time, it helps explain society’s ambiguous stance toward some norms and their enforcement, such as drug use and sexual promiscuity.

Implications of Self-Control

Our conception of the trait underlying criminal, deviant, and reckless behavior is, we believe, consistent with

• research showing the importance of the family in delinquency causation (Glueck and Glueck 1950; Hirschi 1969; Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber 1986);
• research showing the importance of opportunities to commit criminal acts (Cohen and Felson 1979);
• research showing a sharp decline in all kinds of criminal, deviant, and reckless behavior with age (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983).

At the same time, this conceptualization of the trait underlying criminal, deviant, and reckless behavior is inconsistent with

• the idea of a career criminal, an individual who makes a living from well-planned and executed crimes over an extended period of time, or who at least persists in a definite line of criminal activity;
• the idea of organized crime, or organized delinquent gangs engaged in long-term and highly profitable illegal activities, such as gambling, prostitution, and drug trafficking;
• the idea that the causes of “adolescent delinquency” are different from the causes of “adult crime” (see Trasler 1991:440);
• the idea that the causes of “white-collar” crime are different from the causes of “ordinary” crime;
• the idea that crime is learned, that it must be acquired from other people.

As might be expected from all this, the idea that low self-control underlies the bulk of criminal and deviant acts has not been greeted with enthusiasm by all segments of the criminological community. On the contrary, the theory has attracted a variety of criticisms. According to the critics, the theory

• is too general. It attempts to encompass too broad a range of deviant behavior. Instrumental and expressive crimes have different causes, as do white-collar and street crimes. Purposive criminal acts have little in common with accidents, bad habits, mental illnesses, or school truancy.
• is tautological. If criminal acts are defined as acts in which the long-term negative consequences for the actor outweigh the short-term gains, it is a matter of definition that those committing such acts tend to ignore or discount long-term consequences.
• is based on an erroneous conception of the relation between age and the various behaviors it attempts to explain, and ignores evidence that the causes of the onset of crime differ from the causes of persistence in and desistence from crime.
• ignores important distinctions between the incidence and prevalence of criminal or deviant behavior.
• fails to distinguish among classes of offenders who differ markedly in the level and variety of their deviant behavior.
• suggests erroneously that the penalties of the criminal justice system are ineffective in crime control. The theory also fails to anticipate important differences among offenders in their sensitivity to institutional experiences or sanctions.
• overstates the importance of self-control, regarding it as the sole cause of crime.
• ignores the fact that self-control is not the stable, general trait the theory claims it to be.

It is not a straightforward matter to respond to critiques of a theory. Such critiques have diverse origins. One ostensibly valid source of criticism is the research literature. But published research may be based on samples or data or interpretations of the theory that are inadequate or inappropriate, and response to research-based criticism therefore requires case-by-case examination of specific studies. Another presumably valid source of criticism is the compatibility between the theory and the rules described by experts in theory construction. But there is in fact considerable disagreement about the logical standards that one can legitimately employ in assessing the adequacy of a theory. Presumably, each theory has its own logic and its own basic assumptions. Adequate response to logic-based criticism would therefore require articulation of the philosophy of science underlying the theory and its competitors, a task that should not be undertaken lightly. Finally, there are the textbooks in a field. These books often provide extensive lists of criticisms of particular theories gathered from a variety of sources. But it is entirely possible that such generic lists of criticisms do more harm than good, suggesting as they do that everything is equally open to doubt, that all research and theory in the field is problematic, that the student is therefore free to believe anything he or she wishes to believe without fear of contradiction.

This is not to say, of course, that theories should be immune from criticism. In fact, in our view, the field suffers from lack of rigorous and persistent criticism of its theories, methods, and assumptions, and too readily accepts the view that all theories contain a grain of truth. (For a recent, excellent review of the field from a critical perspective, see Roshier 1989.) In our view, the primary test of a theory is its ability to organize the data in an area relative to the ability of alternative theories to organize the same data. We recognize that many scholars (e.g., Tittle 1991; Akers 1991) prefer to avoid drawing sharp distinctions between theories, or to presenting them in an oppositional mode. But in our view good criticism must be comparative, asking how one theory fares relative to its competitors. Our perspective places little value on lists of strengths and weaknesses of theories, and sees little benefit in uncritical “integrations” of competing theories. It requires merely a willingness to abide by the dictates of logic and the results of competent research.

One problem with “criticisms” of theories is that, absent a context of competing theories, they are hard to evaluate. Take the most damning criticism one can allege against a theory (after internal inconsistency): that it is false. The record is reasonably clear that even this criticism will have little impact on the viability of a theory in the absence of a competing theory that claims the same territory.

By the same token, the charge that a theory is “too general” is hard to evaluate absent a context of competing theory. When specified in the statement “robbery is not murder” (or, more telling, in the statement “accidents are not crimes!”) this criticism implies that these are such different events that they must have different explanations. But this is tantamount to a critique of the germ theory of disease that asserts that diphtheria is not whooping cough. The theory that diseases are caused by infectious agents is even more general than the germ theory. Is it “too general” because it includes viruses as well as bacteria? Obviously, a general theory is not damaged by the charge of excess generality.

General theories do not assert that the concrete events or states they explain are identical. They assert only that they have something in common. They assert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Generality of Deviance
• 2. Aggression
• 3. Family
• 4. Gender and Crime
• 5. Accidents
• 6. Motor Vehicle Accidents
• 7. Driving Under the Influence
• 8. Drugs and Alcohol
• 9. Rape
• 10. Versatility
• 11. Participation and Frequency
• 12. The Victim-Offender Relationship
• 13. Unemployment, Marital Discord, and Deviant Behavior: The Long-Term Correlates of Childhood Misbehavior
• 14. Substantive Positivism and the Idea of Crime
• Contributors
• Index