“THE GENERALITY OF DEVIANCE”
Travis Hirschi and Michael R. Gottfredson (1994)
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The theory [of self-control] simply stated, is this: Criminal acts are a subset of acts in which the actor ignores the long-term negative consequences that flow from the act itself (e.g., the health consequences of drug use), from the social or familial environment (e.g., a spouse’s reaction to infidelity), or from the state (e.g., the criminal justice response to robbery). All acts that share this feature, including criminal acts, are therefore likely to be engaged in by individuals unusually sensitive to immediate pleasure and insensitive to long-term consequences. The immediacy of the benefits of crime implies that they are obvious to the actor, that no special skill or learning is required. The property of individuals that explains variations in the likelihood of engaging in such acts we call ‘self-control.’ The evidence suggests to us that variation in self-control is established early in life, and that differences between individuals remain reasonably constant over the life course. It also suggests, consistent with the idea of self-control, that individuals will tend to engage in (or avoid) a wide variety of criminal and analogous behaviours – that they will not specialize in some to the exclusion of others, nor will they ‘escalate’ into more serious or skillful criminal behaviour over time.
Both the stability of differences between individuals and the versatility of offenders can be derived from the fact that all such acts follow a predictable path over the life course, peaking in the middle to later teens and then declining steadily throughout life. If children who offend by whining and pushing and shoving are the adults who offend by robbing and raping, it must be that whining and pushing and shoving are the theoretical equivalents of robbery and rape. If robbery and rape are theoretical equivalents, they should be engaged in by the same people. They are engaged in by the same people (putting the lie to the idea that each of them is peculiarly motivated). If deviant acts at different phases of the life course are engaged in differentially by the same individuals, the underlying trait must be extremely stable over time. If the same individuals tend to engage in serious and trivial acts, these acts must satisfy equivalent desires of the actor.
Evidence for a ‘latent trait’ that somehow causes deviant behaviour thus comes from two primary sources. The first is the statistical association among diverse criminal, deviant, or reckless acts. Because these acts are behaviourally heterogeneous, because they occur in a variety of situations, and because they entail different sets of necessary conditions, it seems reasonable to suppose that what they have in common somehow resides in the person committing them. Because individuals relatively likely to commit criminal, deviant, or reckless acts at one point in time are also relatively likely to commit such acts at later points in time, it seems reasonable to ascribe these differences to a persistent underlying trait possessed in different degrees by those whose behaviour is being compared.
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NATURAL SANCTIONS
This conception of the trait underlying criminal, deviant, and reckless behaviour solves several problems. A persistent problem in this area is extinction, the tendency of responses created and maintained by sanctions to evaporate in the absence of continued reinforcement. How is self-control maintained when there are no obvious social or legal supports for it? It is hard not to find examples of people who continue to ‘conform’ during very long periods in which their behaviour is not observed by other people or subject to the sanctions of the criminal law. In our view, self-control is resistant to extinction because its ultimate sources are natural sanctions that by definition do not require continued input from others. Socialization, in this sense, may be seen as a process of educating individuals about the consequences of their behaviour. Once they have such knowledge and the habit of acting on it, no further reinforcement is required. In fact in most areas natural sanctions so exceed in strength social or legal sanctions that the latter are not really necessary to explain the conformity of most people. The mystery is, rather, how some people can ignore or misapprehend the automatic consequences of their behaviour, both positive and negative, and thus continue to act as though those consequences did not exist.
For example, opportunities to drink are virtually unlimited for all members of the population. Alcohol in one form or another is relatively cheap and is widely available. For many people, normative control is for all intents and purposes absent. They lead essentially private lives, or those around them do not really care about their consumption. The pleasures of alcohol are known and acknowledged by a large majority of the population. Yet self-control predicts consumption of alcohol in both public and private settings over the life course. It must be that self-control is maintained by the natural consequences of behaviour including but by no means limited to the reactions of others. Consistent with this argument, alcohol consumption also declines with age, suggesting that consumption is governed more by its physiological than by its social consequences.
Self-control is highly efficient precisely because it is effective in a variety of settings, many of which lack social or legal surveillance, but few of which lack natural sanctions. People with self-control do not risk accidents on lonely mountain roads even though no one is there to see them exceed the speed limit. They do not steal goods belonging to others despite countless opportunities to do so because such actions are inconsistent with prospects for success (prospects that do not allow a record of criminal behaviour, but are otherwise independent of social or legal sanctions).
The idea of self-control suggests that the origin of all sanctions or norms is to be found in natural sanctions, the rewards and punishments that follow automatically from particular acts or lines of behaviour. Many natural sanctions are of course physical or physiological, affecting the health or well-being of the body – producing injury, disease, deterioration, or even death. Excessive use of drugs, interpersonal violence, promiscuous sexual behaviour, and theft of all sorts can yield such consequences (the difficulty we have in saying precisely what these systems are up to suggests that they have many sources and functions). The relation between natural and normative sanctions helps account for the universality of norms governing those behaviours with the most serious consequences, such as interpersonal violence and theft. At the same time, it helps to explain society’s ambiguous stance toward some norms and their enforcement, such as drug use and sexual promiscuity.
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