ABSTRACT
There was definitely a core set of works that were central to criminological upbringing. Perhaps the most fruitful contemporary embrace of the importance of the state in explaining criminal behavior is the recent work on police legitimacy, legal cynicism, and procedural justice. This chapter describes Delinquency and Drift as a scholar who is part of a generation of criminologists who, early on, missed out on David Matza's work. Matza's view of the delinquent had both an immediate effect and a lasting legacy. The strongest contemporary link to Matza is arguably Terrie Moffitt's perspective on adolescence-limited offending, which holds that a certain amount of misbehavior among young people is normative. While Matza's critique was focused primarily on subcultural theory, the problem of the overprediction of criminal and delinquent behavior still plagues virtually all contemporary theories within the positive criminological tradition.
