a trilogy, arguing that young people desist from criminal behavior for three reasons: they fear punishment that would be directly imposed for wrongdoing (either by parents or by other authorities); they refrain from committing criminal acts because they realize that such actions will disappoint friends and family; or they are constrained by internal control mechanisms û something like the traditional definition of conscience û that make such behavior unappealing (Akers, 1997, p. 81).
RecklessÆs theory also incorporated the idea of internal and external controls but û and this must be seen as the distinguishing element of RecklessÆs work that set him apart from other scholars working in the area of control theory û he added another dimension to his matrix of explaining criminality û the idea of ôpushesö and ôpullsö toward delinquency. RecklessÆs model contains a basic predictive (and at least hypothetically testable) element to it: Vectors towards delinquency will produce delinquent behavior in the absence of sufficiently strong containment. This c
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