Social Control and Neutralizations: Conflicting Hypotheses?

• In Event: Competing Perspectives on Crime and Delinquency

Abstract

Travis Hirschi’s (1969) Causes of Delinquency and David Matza’s (1964) Delinquency and Drift represent two of the most important theories of social control in criminology. Hirschi (1969) argued that neutralizations are irrelevant to his theory because weak social control causes neutralizations. Contradicting these hypotheses, neutralization researchers have argued that neutralizations are more important when an individual is strongly attached to society (Copes, 2003; Morris & Copes, 2012). The present study attempts to integrate Hirschi’s (1969) conception of social control with Matza’s (1964) conceptions of neutralizations and drift to settle these differences regarding the role of neutralizations in social control theory.

Author

• Kyle McLean, University of South Carolina