U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Control and Deterrence Theories (From Criminology, P 295-313, 1991, Joseph F Sheley, ed.)

NCJ Number
150432
Author(s)
M Krohn
Date Published
1991
Length
19 pages
Annotation
In examining social disorganization theory and its emphasis on the ecology of crime, this chapter explores two major types of control theory -- social bonding theories and individually oriented theories -- and discusses the classic deterrence doctrine and its present-day forms.
Abstract
The social control perspectives reviewed in this chapter all shared an emphasis on identifying those social and/or social psychological factors that constrain people from committing delinquent or criminal behavior. They differ in the level (community to individual) of their analysis and, to some extent, in their relative emphasis on social integration and social regulation. The social-control perspectives have served to reorient criminologists to the study of factors that inhibit crime. Hirschi (1987) has suggested that this emphasis can be viewed as a revitalization of the classical image of man as a rational actor who is constrained from deviating only by those social forces that make coexistence possible. This emphasis has highlighted the role of primary social institutions such as the family, schools, the church, and the legal system. By focusing research efforts on these institutions, researchers have learned much about how and why they generate conformity. The research effort also has raised a number of questions about the viability of some of the assumptions contained in these perspectives and about their ability to explain criminal behavior. Two problems appear to be generic to social-control perspectives. The assumption that motivation for criminal behavior need not be included in the theory limits the ability of these perspectives to explain that behavior. The other generic problem for social-control perspectives is to determine the appropriate causal order among the variables in the respective models. Deterrence doctrine traces to the same assumptions as control models generally. Deterrence research investigates the inhibitory power of threatened legal punishments on offense behavior. The author concludes that the findings of such research are weak and ambiguous and that policymakers should resist the temptation to build anticrime policy around the deterrence doctrine.

Downloads

No download available

Availability