Delinquency and Drift Revisited, Volume 21

The Criminology of David Matza and Beyond

Thomas G. Blomberg, Francis T. Cullen, Christoffer Carlsson, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Thomas G. Blomberg, Francis T. Cullen, Christoffer Carlsson, Cheryl Lero Jonson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412865425
• eBook ISBN: 9781351655163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Fifty years ago, David Matza wrote Delinquency and Drift, challenging the ways people thought about the development of criminals. Today, Delinquency and Drift Revisited reminds criminologists that they ignore Matza's writings at their own intellectual peril.

Matza's work shows his insights on a range of core criminological issues, such as: the complex nature of culture and its connection to criminality; the extent to which rule-breakers are truly different from the "rest of us"; the importance of focusing on human agency in understanding the subjective side of offending; the interaction of propensity and peer influences in criminal involvement; the role of the state in signifying individuals as deviant and entrapping them in criminal roles; and the processes that lead offenders to desist from crime.

This volume was not written to pay homage to Matza, but to show how his ideas remain relevant to criminology today by continuing to question conventional wisdom, by making us pay attention to realities we have overlooked, and by inspiring us to theorize more innovatively.

Part I
Origins

1
David Matza—Criminologist: With New Reflections From David Matza

Thomas G. Blomberg*

David Matza published Delinquency and Drift in 1964. The book was subsequently hailed as a major theoretical advancement in criminology’s ongoing quest to explain delinquency. Significantly, Delinquency and Drift, and Matza’s next book, Becoming Deviant (published in 1969), were both successful in innovatively integrating their theoretical conceptualizations with the then known empirical patterns and existing theories of delinquency. Moreover, as this volume demonstrates, after more than a half century, Matza’s contributions to our theoretical understanding of crime and delinquency remain vital and informative to contemporary efforts to explain crime.

This opening chapter provides biographical background and context to David Matza’s criminological career. The material presented is drawn from interviews I conducted with David in 2008 and 2009. From the interviews, I was able to gain information regarding David’s early life growing up in Harlem and the East Bronx and his educational experiences in New York’s public schools, at City College of New York (CCNY), and later at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. Importantly, the interviews revealed David’s thoughts and reflections on his becoming and being a criminologist. The chapter includes a brief biography, a description of David’s beginning his criminology career, a discussion of his being a criminologist, and new reflections from him regarding his theoretical ideas underlying Delinquency and Drift, his subsequent criminological career, and thoughts on contemporary criminology and criminal justice policy reforms.

Biography

David was born in New York City in 1930 and grew up in Harlem and the East Bronx with an older brother and sister. His mother and father emigrated to the United States from Greece and Turkey, respectively. Despite long periods of unemployment for his father, particularly during the Great Depression, David considered his childhood to be “normal for the times.” A particularly traumatic event, however, was the death of his brother, Abraham, in 1945 during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. The death of his brother had a devastating and lasting effect.

With regard to his early education, David attended public school and a religious community center in Harlem. He described himself as a “good boy” who liked school and was a high-performing student.

David and his family later moved to the East Bronx, where he attended public junior and senior high schools and regularly participated in a Jewish community center. He reported that, like his neighborhood friends, he spent his free time “playing ball and hanging out in the streets and playgrounds.” One of David’s early “criminological related experiences” related to bullying behavior. On his way to school, older boys would routinely confront David and other younger students demanding money. He indicated that he never resisted, but rather raised his hands for the boys to search him: They never found money because he hid it in his shoes. He was not dismayed by these encounters but rather viewed them as routine and normal.

After high school graduation, David enrolled in CCNY’s Business School but quickly dropped out to work, given his lack of interest in business. Following several years of working, David returned to CCNY as a social science major.

David took courses in history, sociology, economics, and philosophy. He was in the honor’s program, which required completion of a “great books” reading course that included the works of Plato, Marx, Machiavelli, and Schumpeter, among others. David recalled that the course had considerable influence in shaping his interest in sociology because it exposed him to a series of major contributions, particularly the writings of Marx, Veblen, and to a lesser degree, C. Wright Mills. David indicated that while he found all of these authors’ works interesting and compelling, Dostoyevsky was his favorite novelist.

Throughout the early course of his studies in social science, David planned to become a social worker. Although he did not personally aspire to be a social worker, he felt that because of his positive experiences with a number of social workers in the Jewish community center and at the East Bronx YMCA, social work seemed like a useful and logical career choice. Further, many of his closest friends had pursued social work careers. Nonetheless, when he graduated from CCNY, he had decided to become a writer. His strong interest in sociology and economics seemed more related to a writing career than the applied field of social work. David added that he knew he was not ideally suited to be a social worker. Importantly, during his final year of study at CCNY, his advisor, Charles Page, urged David to seriously consider graduate study in sociology.

Graduate Education and the Beginning of a Criminology Career

David followed Charles Page’s advice and applied to Princeton University’s Ph.D. program because it was the only university with a joint program in economics and sociology. David explained that he was interested in what he felt was the important and necessary relationship between economics and sociology. However, soon after his admission into Princeton, he discovered that economics and sociology were not well integrated. David recalled that while he completed Jacob Vinter’s course on the history of economic theory, the Princeton faculty who influenced him most were Wilbert Moore, an industrial sociologist, and Melvin Tumin, an anti-functional theorist in sociology.

Much of David’s early coursework centered upon radical social movements. His master’s thesis assessed the United States’ anarchist movement beginning with the Haymarket events to Emma Goldman. He planned to write his doctoral dissertation on shifts in the United States’ labor force in relation to the trade union movement, under the supervision of Wilbert Moore. During this period of his Ph.D. studies, David married and became a father. He had a research assistantship with Wilbert Moore, but just before David began his dissertation research, Moore took a one-year leave from Princeton. This left David without a research assistantship to support his family and without a major professor.

It was at this time that David happened to meet a newly hired assistant professor, Gresham Sykes. Sykes had just received a grant to study delinquency and offered David a one-year research assistantship to work on his delinquency study and to assist with the completion of his forthcoming classic book, The Society of Captives. David readily accepted the offer—marking the beginning of his professional collaboration with Sykes and the start of his becoming a criminologist. Like many careers and scientific discoveries, David becoming a criminologist involved elements of serendipity. If not for Wilbert Moore’s leave and a chance meeting with Gresham Sykes, it is probable that David would have followed his chosen sociological career interests in the American labor force and trade union movement. It is interesting to think about how David’s general historical, economic, and sociological training and interests influenced his later criminological theory contributions. David’s subsequent focus upon the historical development of criminological theory in his theoretical conceptualizations and important insights on the subjective context of delinquent behavior decisions appears consistent with his earlier interests in historical events and their sociological context.

Being a Criminologist

Before the completion of his dissertation, David was offered a teaching position in 1957 from Negley Teeters at Temple University, which he accepted. Following the completion of his dissertation in 1960, David took a leave from Temple and moved to the University of Chicago for post-doctoral studies. David’s research at Chicago involved observational studies of Cook County’s juvenile court operations. It was during this period that David began the preliminary conceptualization and research for Delinquency and Drift and published two articles in the American Sociological Review with Gresham Sykes on techniques of neutralization (1957) and subterranean values. (1961)

As David was completing his post-doctoral research during 1960–1961, he decided not to return to Temple University and instead to pursue more independent research and less collaborative work. He interviewed for faculty positions at several universities, including the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Smith College. At this same time, Reinhart Bendix, Chair of the Sociology Program at the University of California at Berkeley, visited Chicago and interviewed David for a faculty position at Berkeley. Bendix subsequently offered David a faculty position to begin in the fall of 1961. David related that he was gratified and pleased to accept a faculty position at Berkeley, given that its distinguished faculty and strong sociology program was recognized as one of the very best in the county.

During his early years at Berkeley, there was considerable pressure to publish. As a result, Delinquency and Drift became the book that David “had to write,” if he was to be promoted and tenured at Berkeley. The Berkeley sociology faculty was comprised of a number of different academic orientations that included the extremes of humanism and positivism with a number of faculty falling somewhere in between. David did not fit easily within any of these faculty groupings given his criminological interests. Nonetheless, in 1964, with the publication of Delinquency and Drift, David was promoted to associate professor and awarded tenure. Delinquency and Drift received significant praise, including a tremendously positive review by Edgar Friendenberg of the New York Times Review of Books, making its publication a very positive and satisfying experience for David.

In explaining the difference between Delinquency and Drift and his dissertation and the two American Sociological Review articles written with Sykes, David indicated that he intended to “institutionally contextualize the attitudes or techniques of neutralization.” He explains that in the first ASR article, “Techniques of Neutralization,” he and Sykes referred to the legal anchoring of the various rationalizations with little explanation. Moreover, his dissertation was primarily a study of incarcerated delinquent youth’s attitudes. David elaborates that in Delinquency and Drift, he wanted to be able to place the “techniques” into the broader institutional or organizational context of the juvenile code and Juvenile Court. He further explains that in writing Delinquency and Drift, he was trying to develop a textbook on juvenile delinquency. Therefore, in the book, he attempted to integrate his readings and interpretations with various other delinquency textbooks and articles.

David feels that Delinquency and Drift differed from mainstream delinquency texts, articles, and theories, which he believed were largely positivist while his book was more classical or neoclassical. He points out that he did not think that his theory was unique but rather conventional in that he elaborated upon and refined the previous work of others. He acknowledges that his theory is neoclassical in its claim that delinquents do believe in mainstream values but often drift from mainstream behaviors. He elaborates that the average or modal juvenile delinquent (especially the “subcultural” or slum delinquent) was more integrated into the usual or semi-usual culture of American society than most writers of the time seemed to infer. David portrayed delinquency as part of the functional mix of American society’s “subterranean” youth culture. As he stated in the Preface to Delinquency and Drift:

In developing a conception of the classical delinquent—a delinquent seen in legal context—I have been led quite naturally, or so I would like to believe, to a portrayal that incorporates the associated assumptions of classical criminology. Thus, I have tried to convey the sense in which the precepts featured in a subculture of delinquency are only marginally different from those apparent in common sentiments of American life; and I have attempted to utilize the classic conception of a will to crime in order to maintain the eradicable element of choice and freedom inherent in the condition of delinquent drift. (Matza, 1964, para. 2)

Following the 1964 publication of Delinquency and Drift, David began writing Becoming Deviant, which he hoped would provide a sociological notion of how individuals become deviant without implying determinism. The idea of “becoming” was then popular in psychology and existentialism as a sufficiently general concept to allow the subject to be a part of the becoming deviant process. With the publication of Becoming Deviant in 1969, David Matza provided a much anticipated sequel to his 1964 classic Delinquency and Drift.

Following the publication of Becoming Deviant, Matza turned his scholarly attention to other sociological areas, particularly labor organizations. I am pleased to include in this chapter new reflections from David related to Delinquency and Drift, his criminological career and subsequent scholarly shift, and his thoughts on contemporary criminology and criminal justice policy and practice.

New Reflections: David Matza

What were the origins of “techniques of neutralization” and “subterranean values”?

“Techniques of neutralization” was Gresham Sykes’s idea. I think it came out of his time in the military during World War II. Neutralization had a military meaning of neutralizing the enemy to overcome their power by using defensive an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Origins
• Part II. Techniques of Neutralization
• Part III. Subterranean Values
• Part IV. Delinquency and Drift
• Part V. Becoming Deviant
• Contributors
• Index