ABSTRACT
In 1940, Edwin H. Sutherland had been elected president of the Sociological Research Association. Compared to American sociology, which by the 1920s had created a profound new social psychology and developed an empirical methodology, American criminology was intellectually backward and unscientific. From the start of the century, American criminology struggled for twenty years to free itself from the Lombrosian legacy of biological determinism, with its notions of "born criminals," criminal types, and eugenics. Sutherland was an active member of a group of Chicago-trained sociologists, including W. I. Thomas, Robert Park, Clifford Shaw, and Henry McKay, who drew from (and added to) the concepts and perspectives of the wider sociological community as well as from each other's work to develop a general theory of human behavior. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
