ABSTRACT
The late Edwin H. Sutherland is widely recognized as the most important criminologist of the twentieth century. Sutherland is best known, however, for his "differential association" theory of criminal behavior. Criminology was Sutherland's first publication of any kind in the specialty and it served as the foundation for all his future work on the sociology of crime and delinquency. This development results in the first published statement of differential association theory, in the third edition of Principles of Criminology. Donald R. Cressey reviews the critiques of differential association in the 1940s and 1950s. Surprisingly, Travis Hirschi described the Cressey's concepts of verbalizations and rationalizations and Gresham Sykes and David Matza's concept of techniques of neutralization as attempts by control theorists to answer the question of why a person can believe that an act is morally wrong and still commit it.
