All Social Control and Self-Control Theory

Theorists who ask not why people commit crime but why most people do not, holding that conforming behavior depends on the strength of an individual's bond to conventional society, including attachment to others, commitment to conventional goals, involvement in conventional activities and belief in shared moral rules, and its later extension into self-control theory, which locates the primary cause of crime in a low self-control formed in early childhood that persists across the life span. This group gathers the control tradition's own founders and the researchers who extended it into containment theory, control balance theory and power-control theory, linking family authority structures to delinquency, and it excludes developmental and life-course theorists whose central claim is about how offending itself changes over a life span rather than about the strength of social bonds or self-control, who belong under Developmental and Life-Course Criminology.