Social Control theory by Travis Hirschi

Travis Hirschi formulated Social Control theory in 1969. According to this theory, human nature is inherently negative. A person is basically self-centered, headstrong, and egoistic. However, there is a consensus among people regarding the values of society. Human progress is possible only by accepting the goals approved by society and the legal means of achieving them. Deviance or law-breaking arises due to the disparity between goals and the means of achieving them. The correction of deviance is possible only by providing equal opportunities for progress to all individuals.

This theory has four key elements and certain social institutions. These concepts are:

Attachment: This refers to the strength of bonds that connect an individual to relatives and close associates, such as parents, teachers, other close family members, or community leaders. Such connections encourage obedience to the law and develop tendencies to adhere to moral codes.

Commitment: This refers to adherence to conventional patterns and the selection of future goals that can be achieved through lawful means.

Involvement: This means participation in conventional social activities, which guides individuals toward accepting societal goals. The more time a person spends in such activities, the less likely they are to engage in illegal activities.

Beliefs (Belief): This refers to the moral acceptance of social norms. The institutions involved include the home, family environment, parents, school, teachers, and peers.

Several objections have also been raised against this theory: it is based on the insight of classical criminology, and its ideas are expressed in positivist terminology; it is one-sided because it does not explain the factors that arise from the culture and structure of society; it presents such an image of human nature from which it appears that crime is an inevitable result of the absence of social control; and, most persistently, many individuals with weak social bonds still obey the law and do not turn toward crime, apart from the strength or weakness of social bonds, other dimensions – notably qualitative and quantitative aspects of those bonds – seem to matter as well.

Hirschi himself effectively conceded the last point two decades later. Working with Michael Gottfredson, he published A General Theory of Crime in 1990, shifting the explanation away from the four external bonds of 1969 and toward a single internal trait: self-control. On this revised account, the decisive factor is not how attached a person is to parents, school, or community, but how well they learned, in early childhood and mainly through effective parenting, to resist impulsive, short-term temptations in favor of longer-term consequences. Gottfredson and Hirschi argued that this capacity for self-control is largely set by around age ten and stays fairly stable for the rest of a person’s life, and that people with low self-control are simply more prone to crime and to a whole range of other imprudent, short-sighted behavior – reckless driving, heavy drinking, unstable relationships – regardless of how strong or weak their social bonds happen to be. This reframing answered the original theory’s weakest point rather neatly: a person could have thin attachments to conventional institutions and still avoid crime, so long as their underlying self-control was high, which is exactly the pattern the 1969 version struggled to explain. Effective parenting, on this account, came down to three specific tasks – monitoring a child’s behavior closely enough to notice problems, recognizing deviance when it actually appeared, and responding to it with consistent and appropriate discipline – and where parents failed at any of the three, schools could sometimes compensate, though only partially, since a school working against unsupportive parents at home had limited room to make up the difference.

That revision drew its own criticisms in turn. Some pointed out a risk of circular reasoning built into the theory itself: low self-control is inferred from criminal behavior, and criminal behavior is then explained by low self-control, with little independent way to measure the trait apart from the very conduct it is meant to account for. Others noted that Gottfredson and Hirschi’s list of what counted as evidence of low self-control – smoking, premarital relationships, and similar behaviors treated as markers of impulsiveness – reflected a distinctly American set of assumptions about which conduct signals risk in the first place, limiting how cleanly the theory travels into cultures that judge the same behaviors differently. Even with those objections on the table, later meta-analyses of the theory found real and consistent correlations between measured impulsivity in childhood and criminal conduct later on, with self-control assessed early in life continuing to predict delinquency well into adolescence and beyond.

Not every criminologist accepted that self-control alone told the whole story, however. Robert Sampson and John Laub, reanalyzing decades-old longitudinal data originally collected by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, proposed an age-graded theory of informal social control in 1993 that pushed back directly against Gottfredson and Hirschi’s claim that a person’s criminal trajectory is essentially locked in by age ten. Sampson and Laub found that even men who had been seriously delinquent as juveniles frequently desisted from crime in adulthood when they experienced what the two called turning points – a cohesive marriage, stable employment, or military service chief among them – that rebuilt the very kind of social bonds Hirschi had described in his original theory, only now formed in adulthood rather than childhood. Where Gottfredson and Hirschi located the decisive influence in how much parents invested in a child’s self-control early on, Sampson and Laub located it in how much an adult offender came to be emotionally invested in a job or a marriage later in life – restoring Hirschi’s original insight about the power of social bonds, but stretching it across the whole life course rather than treating childhood as the only window that mattered.