Sutherland's Theory of Differential Association

Sutherland was concerned with white-collar crime. He attempted to explain why and how the upper classes turn to criminality, and to show that the same factors acted upon them as upon most other criminals. It was therefore an explanation which he and others used to explain criminality generally, and some supporters believe it explains all criminal behaviour.

Behind that lies a methodological problem he stated better than anyone. If criminology is to be scientific, the heterogeneous collection of multiple factors known to be associated with crime must be organised and integrated by an explanatory theory with the characteristics of scientific theory in other fields: the conditions said to cause crime should be present when crime is present, and absent when crime is absent.

He proposed two procedures for putting order into criminological knowledge.

1. Logical abstraction. Blacks, males, urban dwellers and young adults all have comparatively high crime rates: what do they have in common that results in those rates? Criminal behaviour is associated in greater or lesser degree with poverty, bad housing, slum residence, lack of recreational facilities, inadequate and demoralised families, mental retardation and emotional instability: what do these conditions have in common? But research also shows that many persons with those traits do not commit crimes, and that persons in the upper socio-economic class frequently violate the law although they are not in poverty and are not emotionally unstable. So it is not the conditions themselves that cause crime. A generalisation must be reached by abstracting the conditions and processes common to the rich and the poor, the males and the females, the urban and the rural, the emotionally stable and the unstable who commit crimes.

The test of any candidate is the respiration test: respiration is necessary for any behaviour, but the respiratory process cannot be used in an explanation of criminal behaviour, because it does not differentiate criminal from non-criminal behaviour.

2. Differentiation of levels of analysis. When renaissance physicists stated the law of falling bodies they were not concerned with why a body began to fall. Galileo did not study the traits of falling objects, as Aristotle might have done; he noted the relationship of the body to its environment while it was falling, and it made no difference whether the body was dropped from an experimenter's hand or rolled off a bridge ledge because of vibration from a passing vehicle. A round object would roll off more readily than a square one, but that fact was not significant for the law: it existed on a different level of explanation. Much of the confusion about crime stems from a failure to define and hold constant the level at which it is explained, and many criminologists would attribute causal power to the equivalent of the roundness of the object.

The two boys. A film showed two boys engaged in a minor theft; they ran when discovered; one boy had longer legs, escaped, and became a priest; the other had shorter legs, was caught, was committed to a reformatory, and became a gangster. Length of legs need not be considered in a criminological theory, because it obviously does not determine criminality and has no necessary relation to it. The difference in leg length was significant only to the degree that it determined the subsequent experiences and associations of the two boys — and it is in those experiences and associations that the mechanisms and processes important to criminality are to be found.

Scientific explanations of criminal behaviour may be stated either in terms of the processes operating at the moment of the crime — mechanistic, situational or dynamic — or in terms of the processes operating in the earlier history of the criminal — historical or developmental. Both are desirable. The mechanistic type has been favoured by physical and biological scientists and could be the more efficient, and as Gibbons observed, in many cases criminality may be a response to nothing more temporal than the provocations and attractions bound up in the immediate circumstances.

But mechanistic explanations of crime have been notably unsuccessful, perhaps because they were formulated in an attempt to isolate personal and social pathologies among criminals. What that work established is that the immediate determinants of criminal behaviour lie in the person-situation complex.

The objective situation matters largely to the extent that it provides an opportunity for a criminal act: a thief may steal from a fruit stand when the owner is out of sight but refrain when he is in sight; a bank burglar may attack a poorly protected bank and refrain from a well-protected one; a corporation manufacturing automobiles seldom violates the pure food and drug law, while a meat-packing corporation might violate it with great frequency.

But the situation is not exclusive of the person, because the situation that matters is the situation as defined by the person involved. Some persons define a situation in which a fruit-stand owner is out of sight as a crime-committing situation; others do not. And the way a person defines a situation is determined by the inclinations and abilities he has acquired — which is a matter of his past experiences. An explanation in terms of those past experiences is a developmental explanation, and that is what differential association is.

1. Criminal behaviour is learned. Negatively, this means it is not inherited as such, and that a person not already trained in crime does not invent criminal behaviour, just as a person does not make mechanical inventions unless he has had training in mechanics.
2. It is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication — verbal in many respects, but including also the communication of gestures.
3. The principal part of the learning occurs within intimate personal groups. Negatively, the impersonal agencies of communication, such as movies and newspapers, play a relatively unimportant part in the genesis of criminal behaviour.
4. The learning includes the techniques of committing the crime, sometimes very complicated and sometimes very simple, and the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalisations and attitudes.
5. The specific direction of motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favourable or unfavourable. In some societies an individual is surrounded by persons who invariably define the legal codes as rules to be observed; in others by persons whose definitions favour violation. In American society these definitions are almost always mixed, with the consequence that there is culture conflict in relation to the legal codes.
6. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable to violation of law. This is the principle of differential association. It refers to both criminal and anticriminal associations and has to do with counteracting forces: people become criminal because of contacts with criminal patterns and also because of isolation from anticriminal patterns. Any person inevitably assimilates the surrounding culture unless other patterns are in conflict — a southerner does not pronounce his r because other southerners do not. Negatively, associations neutral so far as crime is concerned have little or no effect on the genesis of criminal behaviour; much experience, such as learning to brush one's teeth, is neutral in this sense, and is important chiefly as an occupier of a child's time so that he is not in contact with criminal behaviour while so engaged.
7. Differential association may vary in frequency, duration, priority and intensity. Frequency and duration are obvious. Priority is assumed important in the sense that lawful behaviour developed in early childhood may persist through life, and so may delinquent behaviour; the tendency has not been adequately demonstrated, and priority seems important principally through its selective influence. Intensity is not precisely defined but has to do with the prestige of the source of a criminal or anticriminal pattern and with the emotional reactions related to the associations. In a precise description these modalities would be rated quantitatively and a mathematical ratio reached; no such formula has been developed and developing one would be extremely difficult.
8. The process of learning criminal behaviour involves all of the mechanisms involved in any other learning. Negatively, it is not restricted to imitation: a person who is seduced learns criminal behaviour by association, but the process would not ordinarily be described as imitation.
9. While criminal behaviour is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by them, since non-criminal behaviour is an expression of the same needs and values. Thieves generally steal in order to secure money, but honest labourers work in order to secure money. Attempts to explain crime by general drives and values — the happiness principle, striving for social status, the money motive, frustration — have been and must continue to be futile, since they explain lawful behaviour as completely as criminal behaviour.

Sutherland thought it unnecessary at this level to explain why persons have the associations they have. In a high-delinquency area a boy who is sociable, gregarious, active and athletic is very likely to come into contact with the other boys, learn delinquent patterns and become a criminal, while the psychopathic boy who is isolated, introverted and inert may remain at home and not become delinquent; and in another situation the same sociable boy may join a scout troop instead. A person's associations are determined in a general context of social organisation: a child is reared in a family, the family's place of residence is determined largely by income, and the delinquency rate is in many respects related to the rental value of houses.

For rates, Sutherland preferred differential social organisation to social disorganization. The postulate is that crime is rooted in the social organisation and is an expression of it. A group may be organised for criminal behaviour or against it; most communities are organised for both, and in that sense the crime rate is an expression of the differential group organisation. That account is consistent with the differential association theory of how persons become criminal.

• It cannot explain origins. If the behaviour does not already exist it cannot be learned by a second person.
• It cannot explain new crimes. New and very inventive crimes occasionally appear whose mechanics could not have been learnt by association, although the desires and motives behind them may have been.
• It cannot explain the isolated offender — the criminality of those never exposed to criminals or to people holding criminal ideas. One answer is that criminality may arise from observing parents who, while strongly teaching that theft is wrong, nonetheless fail to correct wrong change, or who renounce violence while practising domestic violence or overtly violent punishment.
• Wilson and Herrnstein's objection: the theory cannot explain why some individuals learn criminal behaviour from a peer group while failing to learn non-criminal behaviour from a family, or the reverse.
• It cannot explain the impulsive offender — the irrational, impulsive, opportunist or passionate criminal, who acts from one of those factors rather than from anything learnt.
• It cannot be measured. There is no objective way to measure whether there has been an excess of definitions favourable to law breaking, or to reconstruct the effect of every input across a whole life; the difficulty is compounded by the different weightings for intensity and priority. One can never be sure what counts as a definition favourable to law-breaking, nor what counts as an excess, nor why, if a person has such an excess, most of his activities are still lawful.
• The chicken and the egg. It is difficult to tell whether gang membership came about because of like thinking already present, or whether the behaviour was learnt from the membership.
• The individual disappears. It seems to assume that people are vessels into which definitions are poured and whose behaviour is decided by the balance, allowing little room for free will, personality or differences in types of response. Sutherland's answer — that each individual's response depends on the learning already encountered, traced back to birth and to zero learning — is not obviously an answer.
• It does not explain why associations differ. Sutherland called this a red herring, insisting that the important point was what was learnt from the associations and not why they occurred; differential social organisation is his partial answer.

Studies go some way towards supporting a causal link between differential association and criminality, but generally show it to be only one of several causes, alongside a broken home, lax supervision within the family, or general emotional insecurity. Sutherland's answer is that what differential association helps to explain is why some people who suffer those other factors are not criminal while others are.

The theory is at its strongest exactly where it began — white-collar and corporate crime. As Steven Box suggested, many businessmen may learn to, and be willing to, commit crimes to enhance the company where they would never consider other forms of criminality. It would be absurd that a hitherto law-abiding individual arrives in a corporation and suddenly, for no reason, begins committing crimes; far more likely is that he slowly learns the realities of business, one of which may be that certain laws can be broken for the wellbeing of the firm. Promotion procedures may reinforce that learning by rewarding those who internalise those realities, and there is little deterrent where neither the peer group nor wider society is likely to condemn the conduct or even hear of it.

The theory also produced a live sentencing proposal. Reintegrative shaming, proposed by Braithwaite and by Fisse and Braithwaite, is a system of crime control and punishment at least partly built on differential association: the key to altering future behaviour is to shame offenders, but to ensure they are also provided with the means and the commitment to be accepted back into society as law-abiding persons. The offender should be made aware of the effects of his actions, be held accountable, and be able through restitution to undo or make good the problem. This is usually mooted to occur in victim-offender mediation and conferencing schemes, which have received considerable backing and have proved supportive of victims in some cases, restitution payments tending to be fairly reliably paid; they have arguably been less useful for offenders, since they seem not to have had an impact on rates of recidivism.

- Always give the nine propositions. A question on differential association that does not state proposition 6 in terms — an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable — has not answered the question. - Use the two boys to explain levels of analysis; it is the cleanest illustration in the subject and it distinguishes the theory from the multiple-factor approach in one paragraph. - Pair it with white-collar crime. The theory was born there, is strongest there, and closes the circle Sutherland opened: part of criminological study should be about why certain normal learned behaviours are criminalised and others are not. - State the conclusion in one line. Sutherland's theory is that criminality is the normal result of normal learned behaviour: just as some people learn non-criminal behaviour, so others learn criminal behaviour, and crime is a natural rather than a pathological form of learned behaviour. - Note the low-intelligence trap. Because learning is made so central, some writers concluded that those of low intelligence, being unable to grasp the moral elements essential to law-abiding behaviour, are more likely to be criminal. The answer is that social learning is not simply dependent on innate intellectual ability: behavioural learning is affected far more by the social setting, social interactions, personal associations and the environment than by innate intelligence. </content>