Differential Association

Differential Association

Pro-Criminal Attitudes

Explanatory Power

• Has the ability to account for crime within all sectors of society.
• Sutherland recognised that some types of crimes may be clustered within certain inner-city, working-class communities.
• Also the case that some crimes are more prevalent amongst more affluent groups in society.
• Particularly interested in white-collar crime and corporate crime and how this may be a feature of middle-class social groups who share deviant norms and values.

Evaluation

• When a person is socialised into a group, they will be exposed to values and attitudes towards the law.
• Some of these values will be pro-crime, some anti-crime.
• Sutherland argues that if the number of pro-criminal attitudes outweighs the number of anti-criminal attitudes, the person will offend.
• The learning process is the same whether a person is learning criminality or conformity to the law.
• Differential association suggests it should be possible to calculate how likely it is that an individual will commit crime based on the frequency, intensity and duration of which they have been exposed to deviant and non-deviant norms and values.

Shift of Focus

Difficulty of Testing

• Sutherland was successful in moving the emphasis away from early biological accounts of crime, such as atavistic theory.
• Also moved away from explanations stating offending was a product of individual weakness or immorality.
• Draws attention to the fact that dysfunctional social circumstances and environments may be more to blame than dysfunctional people.
• Offers a more realistic solution to the problem of crime instead of eugenics or punishment.

• Even though Sutherland claimed his theory was scientific and mathematical, it is difficult to test.
• Hard to see how the number of pro-criminal attitudes a person has been exposed to could be measured.
• Built on the assumption that offending behaviour will occur when pro-criminal values outnumber anti-criminal ones.
• Without being able to measure these, it is hard to know what point the urge to offend is realised and the criminal career triggered.

Individual Differences

Intergenerational Crime

• Not everyone who is exposed to criminal influences goes on to commit crime.
• There is a danger within differential association theory of stereotyping individuals who come from impoverished, crime-ridden backgrounds as 'unavoidably criminal'.
• Tends to suggest that exposure to pro-criminal values is sufficient to produce offending in those who are exposed.
• Ignores the fact that people may choose not to offend despite such influences.

• If the family is seen to support criminal activity, making it seem reasonable, then this becomes a major influence on the child's value system.
• Supported by the fact that offending behaviour often seems to run in families.
• In Farrington's study, intergenerational crime was a key feature of the findings.
• Also the cases in Mednick's study where boys who had criminal adoptive parents and non-criminal biological parents were more likely to go on to offend.

Scientific Basis

Learning Criminal Acts

• Additionally, the future offender may also learn particular techniques for committing crime.
• As well as offering an account of how crime may 'breed' amongst specific social groups, this theory also accounts for why so many convicts released from prison go on to reoffend.
• Whilst inside, inmates will learn specific techniques of offending from more experienced criminals and will want to put this into practice.
• May occur through observational learning and imitation or direct tuition.

Crime as a Learned Behaviour

• Sutherland set himself the task of developing a set of scientific principles that could explain all types of offending.
• 'The conditions which are said to cause crime should be present when crime is present, and they should be absent when crime is absent'.
• His theory is designed to discriminate between individuals who become criminals and those who do not, whatever their race, class or ethnic background.

• Offending behaviour may be acquired in the same way as any other behaviour through the processes of learning.
• This occurs most often through interactions with significant others that the child associates with, such as the family.
• Criminality arises from two factors -
• Learned attitudes towards crime
• Learning of specific criminal acts