Atlas Trail
Explaining Why: A Century of Criminology Theory
Why does anyone commit a crime? Six stops trace one line of answers across more than a century: from Durkheim's account of a society without shared norms, through Merton's and then Agnew's accounts of blocked goals and strain, sideways into Cohen's account of a delinquent subculture, challenged in turn by Sykes and Matza's account of an offender who merely neutralizes conventional guilt, and answered again by Akers' rival claim that crime, like anything else, is learned.
Stop 1 of 6.
Criminology Theories and Schools
Emile Durkheim names the starting condition: anomie, a society whose moral norms have broken down under change too rapid for them to keep pace. Every theory that follows is an answer to what anomie leaves in its wake.
Stop 2 of 6.
Criminology Theories and Schools
Robert K. Merton adapts Durkheim's anomie into a theory of crime: strain arises when a society preaches shared goals, wealth above all, while denying most people the legitimate means to reach them.
Stop 3 of 6.
Criminology Theories and Schools
Robert Agnew generalizes strain far beyond blocked economic goals in 1992: any negative treatment, any blocked goal, any real loss produces the anger that presses toward crime, whatever a person's station in life.
Stop 4 of 6.
Criminology Theories and Schools
Albert Cohen takes strain sideways in 1955: working class boys measured against middle class standards they cannot reach do not just feel strain alone, they respond together, building a delinquent subculture that inverts the very standards that shut them out.
Stop 5 of 6.
Criminology Theories and Schools
Gresham Sykes and David Matza push back in 1957: most delinquents never really build a separate value system at all. They still believe in the rules, and merely neutralize their own guilt, case by case, just long enough to offend.
Stop 6 of 6.
Criminology Theories and Schools
Ronald Akers answers with a different mechanism entirely: crime need not come from strain, subculture or neutralized guilt at all. It is learned, the same way any behavior is learned, through association, imitation and reinforcement.
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