ABSTRACT
At the end of the 19th century the French scholar Gabriel Tarde (1912) proposed that patterns of delinquency and crime are learned in much the same manner as any occupation, primarily through imitation of, and association with, others. Bad company was a central theme of 19th century accounts. Edwin H Sutherland (1939) whose work can be loosely placed in the tradition of the Chicago-school along with W I Thomas, Robert Park, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, was to offer a more sophisticated version, arguing that criminal behaviour is learned through associations established with those who violate society’s norms. The cultural learning process involves not only the actual techniques of crime, but also the motives, drive, attitudes, and rationalisations favourable to the commission of anti-social acts (Sutherland and Cressey (1978)). Sutherland argues that there is no possibility of a person deterministically participating in criminal behaviour by inheritance, since all patterns of behaviour for humans only make sense in a cultural environment. All behaviour is assimilated from the surrounding culture. Criminal behaviour is learned behaviour, as is so-called normal law-abiding behaviour. It is learned through interaction with other persons, usually within intimate personal groups. A process approach is evident. A criminal identity and career results from a long series of experiences, but a single experience may cause a dramatic change in life. We are given the picture of life courses and vital turning points:
The theory of differential association was postulated in positivist terms: a person becomes delinquent because of the presence of an excess of definitions favourable to violations of the law, over definitions unfavourable to violations of the law. However, differential association emphasised the variable character of each person’s exposure to definitions favourable and unfavourable to conduct in violation of the law. At the time, Sutherland had a fierce antipathy for psychiatry and was determined to espouse the ability of sociology to explain human action (Gaylord and Galliher (1988)). The theory is expressly sociological and the learning process is seen in determinist terms coming from social conditions and contacts outside the individual.
