ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to clarify and broaden key elements of differential-association/social-learning theory, using illustrative quotes from life history of "Sam Goodman"—a longtime "thief" and quasi-legitimate businessman who died in the 1990s following a four-month bout with lung cancer. Sam Goodman's life history narratives reveal crime and criminal careers not so much as discrete events or series of events, but as a process that can be marked by amplification spirals, shifts, and oscillations, and waxing and waning commitments to crime and criminal others. The behaviors of peers or associates may be as or more important than attitudes of peers in influencing an individual's own delinquency, just as one's past delinquency is likely to forecast greater risk for future delinquency. The concept of normative conflict frames the theory. Normative conflict is simply the notion that various groups and subgroups in society differ in terms of definitions of right and wrong, and in their definitions of whether individuals are obligated to follow laws.
