Introduction
News articles, reports, and other credible materials revealed that criminal behaviors and/or tendencies are becoming highly prevalent, bringing more and bigger problems to society. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) suggest that the problem with most approaches to crime is that they tend to ignore its characteristics. While not denying the prevalence of serious victimization, “the vast majority of criminal acts are trivial and mundane affairs that result in little loss and less gain”.
These are events “whose temporal and spatial distributions are highly predictable”, typically representing unprotected targets close at hand with little or no surveillance or resistance. They are also events that “require little preparation,” virtually no specialized knowledge or skill, and “often do not produce the result intended by the offender”.
Following a review of the evidence, they make the same case for so-called white-collar offenders and organized crime. Quoting Stanton Wheeler and his associates, they report that “we emerged with a strong sense of the banal, mundane quality of the vast majority of white collar offenses“. This observation reinforces the credibility of the theory’s claim to be “general”.
Main Body
In terms of their theory of action, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) argue that all crimes occur because they are chosen. They say that there is significant variation in the extent to which people choose to act offensively or recklessly based on their underlying “criminality”. This criminality or impulsiveness is an individual property characterized by several things: the need for immediate gratification of desires, the utilization of simple means (“money without work, sex without courtship, revenge without court delays”), preferences for exciting, thrilling, or risky activities, little interest in long term interpersonal or economic investments, little interest in skillful or sophisticated criminal planning, and insensitivity to the pain or discomfort of others.
This global outlook will also extend to the non-criminal acts of low self-control individuals: “They will tend to smoke, drink, use drugs, gamble, have children out of wedlock, and engage in illicit sex… people who lack self-control will tend to be impulsive, insensitive, physical (as opposed to mental), risk-taking, short-sighted, and nonverbal, and they will tend therefore to engage in criminal and analogous acts”.
Such traits appear where parental supervision has been lacking, and/or where discipline has been harsh and inconsistent, where the children are stigmatized and rejected, as opposed to shamed and reintegrated (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990). The traits are evident to teachers as early as the first grades and they tend to persist throughout the life cycle. This is the stability theorem, and it has considerable relevance in penology since it makes later-life rehabilitation unrealistic.
This general theory is important because it is quite clear about the probable relevance of a number of other key life experiences to delinquency and misconduct – the school, delinquent friends, drugs, and criminal justice interventions. Contrary to suggestions of school critics, the school is not a primary source of experience which fosters criminal careers.
The school makes demands of control, discipline, and accountability which are difficult for the low self-control student to meet, and, for this reason, early school leaving is a result of low self-control, not a cause of it, and hence not a cause of delinquency (McLaughlin et. al., 2003). Children from fractious families may be at greater risk of early leaving because their families have ill-equipped them to behave appropriately or have already lost any control they themselves have over the children.
Delinquent peers were traditionally thought of as the crucible of criminal careers, especially in the context of the contemporary images of the power of gangs over ghetto adolescents. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) also argue that the drift of adolescents toward gangs follows a loss of parental control. Adolescents seek out people like themselves who are thrill-seekers, renegades, and who reject conformity.
Unlike Sutherland’s differential association theory which suggested that gangs were a sort of counter-cultural fraternity where the positive labeling of crime outweighed the negative, and where the gang became a repository for the acquisition of specialized knowledge, contacts, and attitudes. This general theory argues otherwise. Crime is its own reward, but gangs are only attractive to people who are already impulsive and hedonistic and lack normal restraints.
In fact, the relationships within gangs are notoriously fractious and unstable because gang members have common selfish, impulsive, and insensitive traits (McLaughlin et. al., 2003). This conclusion is important since it advises that the impact of criminal peers is not a primary source of criminality. Changes in individual training can be expected to influence the subject without second-guessing how the peer group dictates the individual’s life-course trajectory.
Finally, many commentators argue that the causes of crime like robbery or breaking and entry are narcotics, solvents, and/or alcohol abuse. If the low self-control theorem is valid, there is no need to make such an inference across two expressions of deviancy since they are both manifestations of the same underlying thing, and all are consistent with the non-specialized nature of delinquency.
Since crime is its own reward, learning theories suggest that to make the criminal opportunity unattractive, authorities have to punish the choice to make it aversive or painful to the actor. While it is open to debate whether our laws are even consistent with the types of aversion which are presupposed by the econometric models, the fact is that the econometric model is based on the idea of a rational actor who ventures into the marketplace are governed by the changing costs of opportunities.
The low self-control actors are oblivious to such costs’ because the long-term consequences are remote from the contexts which give immediate satisfaction to criminal behavior. There are also reports that revealed that robbers typically do not plan their heists before the day they commit them, take little precautions to evade identification even on-premises known to be open to camera surveillance, and do not believe they will be caught in spite of choosing the same targets repeatedly.
What this suggests is that legal intervention comes at a point in the life cycle where those whose misconduct has become problematic are impervious to rational checks on their behaviors provided by the state. “Because low self-control arises in the absence of the powerful inhibiting forces of early childhood, it is highly resistant to the less powerful inhibiting forces of later life, especially the relatively weak forces of the criminal justice system” (McLaughlin et. al., 2003).
Two further interrelated points are raised in the theory in the context of criminal justice intervention. The first has to do with work schemes and/or training initiatives designed to prevent crime among those already prone to it. The second has to do with evaluating the results of such programs. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) stressed that the motives for engaging in crime are the immediate proceeds or rewards of crime. The idea that people steal bread because they are starving may make good theatre but it does not reflect the mundane crime picture.
“Therefore, policies that seek to redress crime by the satisfaction of theoretically derived wants (e.g., equality, adequate housing, good jobs, self-esteem) are likely to be unsuccessful”. They argue further that possession of a job is not incompatible with the commission of crimes in Hirschi’s earlier work (1969) and that, even where employment opportunities exist equally for delinquents and non-delinquents, the former continues to offend.
In other words, this individual-based theory would predict that unemployment and welfare dependency go hand in hand with crime, not because poverty causes crime, but because the same low self-control and high impulsiveness which makes crime attractive simultaneously make work stressful. Attempts to substitute work for crime, from the perspective of this theory, misunderstand the relationship. This is critical in the context of correctional initiatives since the latter appears to presuppose that recidivism will decline as work replaces crime. The theory advises to the contrary. There is also a second more methodological point to consider.
Conclusion
The patterns of offending over the life cycle commonly follow an age curve – a peak in the levels of offenses that rise throughout late adolescence and which declines into early adulthood. This has been reported consistently for over a century and holds true from a cross-cultural perspective. It is simply “the inexorable aging of the organism” (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990). This does not deny the existence of variations in individual tendencies toward self-control according to which some offenders will start earlier, desist later, and achieve higher peaks than their contemporaries.
However, “policies which do not attend to this highly predictable circumstance are likely to mistake natural change for program effectiveness or to waste considerable resources treating or incapacitating people without benefit to them or to society”. Likewise, policies that promote work subsidies, employment preparation, and the like will produce effects that must be measured independently of the age curve effect. In short, no matter how such policies work, the age-crime curve will predict a tendency towards resistance based on maturation alone.
References:
Gottfredson, Michael and Travis Hirschi, 1990, A General Theory of Crime. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hirschi, Travis, 1969, Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McLaughlin, E. Muncie, J. and Hughes, G., 2003, Criminological Perspectives: Essential Readings (Open University). Sage Publications Ltd; 2nd edition.