- a theory that has become central to the study of criminology and juvenile delinquency.
Travis Hirschi is author of The Causes of Delinquency (1969), co-author of A General Theory of Crime (1990) and has had a significant career in the fields of sociology and criminology (See). He currently teaches at the University of Arizona, where he is a Regents Professor, and is a Professor of Sociology as well as a Professor of Management and Policy. Previously, he has been a Professor of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York, Albany and has worked at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a former President of the American Society of Criminology, and has been awarded their prestigious Edwin H. Sutherland Award in 1986 (Welch).
At the time of his writing of The Causes of Delinquency during the 1960s, Travis Hirschi was observing a loss of social control over individuals. Social institutions, such as organized religion, the family, educational institutions, and political groups lost favor with America's youth, while the advent of rock and roll, drugs, and the civil rights movement encouraged individuals to sever ties with conventional social norms (Welch). He felt that the most noticeable feature of the 1960s was the breakdown of the typical American family. It was within this context that Hirschi developed his theory of delinquency and as such, his theory blamed the family breakdown, rather than social disorganization - as had been accepted for years - for society's growing numbers of juvenile offenders (Welch).
Rather than focusing on an individual's personality as a source of criminality, as did his contemporaries, he focused on the role of social relationships, which he termed social bonds (Welch). In creating bonds with various agents of social institutions the individual creates higher levels of social capital and therefore internalizes the norms of society (Zappen). The control theory of delinquency as...