Charles Tittle

Charles R. Tittle, who lived from 1938 to 2021, was an American sociologist and criminologist who taught at Washington State University after earlier posts including North Carolina State University. He is best known for developing control balance theory, an integrated theory of deviance holding that the amount of control a person is subject to, relative to the amount of control that person can exercise over others, shapes the probability and form of that person's deviant behavior. His book Control Balance: Toward a General Theory of Deviance became a widely discussed contribution to general theories of crime and the subject of extensive debate and empirical testing within the field.