Long before criminology had a name for it, this idea was already sitting in a piece of Persian poetry: sohbat-e-saleh tura saleh kunad, sohbat-e-talih tura talih kunad – the company of the righteous makes you righteous, the company of the corrupt makes you corrupt. There’s a smaller, gentler version of the same thought in an old story about a rose’s petals: asked where they got their fragrance from, the petals answer that it came from the beauty of the companion buried in the same soil – otherwise, they were only plain, raw earth. Neither the American criminologist Edwin Sutherland nor his theory invented this insight. What he did was give it a name, a mechanism, and a scientific argument: differential association.
Sutherland, whose work on corporate crime helped coin the term white-collar crime, first published the theory in 1939 and substantially revised it a few years later. Its core claim is straightforward: criminal behavior is learned, not inherited, and it is learned the same way any other behavior is learned – through interaction with other people.
An Old Idea, Given a Mechanism
The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde had proposed something similar back in 1912: that crime, like any trade, is a profession, and like any profession, it has to be learned. Association with other offenders had already surfaced repeatedly in nineteenth-century debates about the causes of crime, usually framed crudely, in terms of “clean” versus “corrupting” company.
Sutherland gave the idea real depth. Learning to break the law, in his account, isn’t just picking up technique from people who happen to break it themselves. It includes absorbing their attitudes, their motives, their justifications – the whole framework that makes hostility to the law feel reasonable rather than shameful. Crucially, Sutherland argued that no one is born with criminal character traits as some kind of inherited package. A person raised in a particular cultural environment learns whatever behavior that environment models, for good or ill. Someone surrounded by lawful influences learns to be law-abiding. Someone surrounded by criminal influences learns criminal habits and, in some cases, effectively learns crime as a trade – through the same mechanism, not a different one.
That learning is usually the product of sustained exposure over time, not a single encounter – though Sutherland allowed that, occasionally, even one especially dramatic experience can reshape the direction of a life.
Where the Theory Runs Into Trouble
Despite some circularity in its own language and definitions, differential association became one of the most widely cited theories in American criminology – and one of the most argued over.
George Vold and Richard Herrnstein pointed out an obvious gap: the theory doesn’t explain why some people who grow up surrounded by criminal family and friends nonetheless take good advice and never adopt criminal company themselves, while others in identical circumstances do. Travis Hirschi – whose own social control theory would later argue almost the opposite case – objected that the theory imagines crime as something that requires a social circle to begin with, when plenty of repeat offenders have had no meaningful contact with other criminals at all; the theory has no account of where their criminal behavior came from. Donald Cressey argued that large parts of the theory simply aren’t testable under any real experimental design, even if the theory reads as broadly plausible on its face.
None of these objections killed the theory, and none were really meant to. What they did was mark its limits: differential association explains a great deal about how criminal habits spread through families, neighborhoods, and peer groups, but it was never going to be a complete account of why any one individual, exposed to the exact same influences as everyone around him, ends up on one side of the law rather than the other.
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