Delinquency and Drift

David Matza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138522084
• eBook ISBN: 9781351523028
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The first C. Wright Mills Award-winning book, Delinquency and Drift has become a recognized classic in the fields of criminology and social problems. In it, Matza argues persuasively that delinquent thought and delinquent action are distorted reflections of the ideas and practices that pervade contemporary juvenile law and its administration. His ideas are as persuasive today as when they were first published twenty-five years ago.

By example and illustration, Matza argues that the delinquent subculture is based on many of the same standards as the conventional social order, and that the delinquent's negation of the law is the result of his relations with an inconsistent and vulnerable legal code. Once the juvenile breaks his or her ties to the legal order, the drift to delinquency becomes relatively easy to justify.

The author also maintains that being liberated from legal constraint does not necessarily lead to delinquency; that event depends on the will to commit crime. Because delinquency remains one of our most serious social problems, it is important to consider Matza's thesis that the drift toward delinquency is frequently aided by the unwitting support of society and the guardians of social order.

[1]

The Positive Delinquent

EACH of us carries in mind pictures of a variety of social statuses; among these is one of the juvenile delinquent. Our basic conceptions of the juvenile delinquent, and those of other contemporary figures, are imbedded in these pictures. Consequently, research frequently does not progress deeply enough to offend and thus qualify our conceptions. Research typically is guided by basic conceptions rather than being designed to question them.

Our picture of the delinquent consists of the basic assumptions we make about him. Currently and for almost one hundred years our assumptions about the delinquent have been those of the positive school of criminology. My main purpose in this book is to question and modify the positivist portrait. Since assumptions are usually implicit, they tend to remain beyond the reach of such intellectual correctives as argument, criticism, and scrutiny. Thus, to render assumptions explicit is not only to propose a thesis; more fundamentally it is to widen and deepen the area requiring exploration. Assumptions implicit in conceptions are rarely inconsequential. Left unattended, they return to haunt us by shaping or bending theories that purport to explain major social phenomena. Assumptions may prompt us to notice or to ignore discrepancies or patterns that may be observed in the empirical world. Conceptions structure our inquiry.

Moreover, pictures are intimately related to the explanation of social systems. Systems of action may usually be typified in ideal fashion. Indeed, this simplification is almost mandatory if the analyst wishes to proceed to the task of explanation. A system, whether it be capitalism or delinquency, has exemplars, basic figures who perpetrate the system. The accurate characterizing of exemplars is a crucial step in the development of explanatory theory. Given the present state of knowledge, pictures are not true or false, but rather plausible or implausible. They more or less remind us of the many discrete individuals who make up a social category. All conceptions of the delinquent bear some resemblance to some of the discrete individuals who are involved in delinquent enterprise. Currently, therefore, the test of a picture is its ring of truth. Which picture most consistently reminds those who are in intimate and persistent contact with the variety of delinquents of the real thing? My purpose in writing a book of this sort is that the pictures of delinquency that thus far have been drawn do not remind me and many others of the real things they purport to explain. It is not that they distort reality, for all pictures do that; rather, in distorting reality, current pictures seem to lose what is essential in the character of delinquent enterprise.

Systems of action have exemplars and a portrayal of them is a crucial step in the elaboration of causal theory. Thus, for example, a plausible picture of the capitalist was implicit in the various theories explaining the rise of capitalism. This hardly means that a system may be reduced to the character of exemplars; rather, an exemplar is a personification or microcosm of the system. A crucial step from a Marxian to a Weberian theory of the origins of capitalism consisted of a basic shift in the portrait of the exemplary capitalist. Somewhere in the dialectic between competing scholars the pirate capitalist of Marx was transformed to the bookkeeper capitalist of Weber. The more authentic ring of Weber's portrait is largely responsible for the more widespread acceptance of his rather than Marx's theory of the emergence of capitalism. Whatever the other virtues of Marx's theory, it suffers from an initial inplausibility. It seems conceived on a false note. How, we ask, can we believe in a theory that apparently falsifies the character of the exemplars? Whatever the failings of Weber's theory, it seems more plausible because it is more reminiscent of the early capitalists we have studied or read about.

Conceptions of the delinquent and a variety of theories explaining his emergence have appeared within the context of criminology. The nature of modern criminology—its connection with, but primarily its considerable insulation from, the rest of social science—has affected our deepest conceptions of the delinquent. Criminology in recent years has become increasingly integrated into sociology, but it was and still is a separate field with its own traditions and preconceptions.¹ Modern criminology is the positive school of criminology. According to most scholars, it begins with the views of Lombroso, which consisted of a rather fundamental repudiation of the earlier classical viewpoint of Beccaria, Bentham, Carrara, and others. This fundamental shift, signaled by Lombroso and largely carried through by Ferri, laid the basic assumptions of criminological thought, and these assumptions persist to this day. Like Ferri, most of us are positivists in that we share the same conceptions of the nature of criminological inquiry and the character of the subject we explore—the criminal actor. The legacy of positive criminology consists of three fundamental assumptions. All are very much alive today, and each contributes to our basic conception of the delinquent. Each was a reaction to the assumptions of classical criminology. Each, I propose to argue, was an overreaction. The picture of the delinquent developed in this book is a revision of that positivist conception. My aim is to incorporate modified versions of the classical viewpoint into the framework of positive criminology.

The most celebrated and thus the most explicit assumption of positive criminology is the primacy of the criminal actor rather than the criminal law as the major point of departure in the construction of etiological theories. The explanation of crime, according to the positive school, may be found in the motivational and behavioral systems of criminals. Among these systems, the law and its administration is deemed secondary or irrelevant. This quest for explanation in the character and background of offenders has characterized all modern criminology, irrespective of the particular causal factors espoused.

The shift from the biological orientation of Lombroso to the social and psychological orientation of the modem criminologist has misled some as to the true influence of the Positive School of modem criminology. If this term “positivist” is applied to Sutherland, for example, someone will object that Sutherland's theory of behavior [leading to crime] is not the same as Lombroso's. The importance of the Positive School is that it focused attention on motivation and on the … criminal. This is true of every theory of criminal behavior which is discussed in textbooks today, even though the explanation is in terms of social and group factors rather than in terms of biological factors. The shift in criminological thinking has been from a biological to a sociological and psychological explanation of behavior, not in terms of a shift in interest from the criminal to crime. The emphasis is still on the … offender, not crime.²

A major consequence of the modern positivist approach has been to reverse the aphorism of Carrara, a classical criminolgist. Whereas Carrara suggested that crime was above all an infraction and not an action, the positivist suggests the very opposite. Delinquency, according to positivism, is best viewed as springing from life situations. It is action. The complex relationship between delinquents and legal institutions has received little attention. Contemporary social and psychological theories of delinquency unwittingly capitalize on the clarity and sharpness with which biological positivism broke with the classical stress on legal institutions. Biological theories of crime made a more reasonable claim than subsequent theories to the irrelevance of legal institutions. The relation between the vagaries of the human organism and the form taken by legal systems hardly seemed a worthwhile subject of inquiry. Legal institutions, however, are an important element of society, and by the very terms of sociological theory—the relation of man to society—their connection with crime warrants consideration. Modern sociological theories of delinquency stress the effects of social class, ethnic affiliation, family, and neighborhood. But we sociologists have continued to ignore the sense in which crime is a peculiar reaction to legal institutions, even though the ambitions of our discipline commit us to the exploration of man's relation to the full round of social institutions.

The delinquent stands in some relation to the legal order, its demands, principles, and doctrines. This relationship is his defining characteristic, and it would be surprising if the description of it in its complexity failed to clarify the motivational system of delinquents. Positive criminology has come very close to ignoring the defining character of delinquents-the fact that they commit infractions—in its various explanations of delinquency. Consequently, it has failed to scrutinize the nature of legal prohibitions and the emergence of delinquent customs which parallel and distort legal views.

The positive school … marks the beginning in the study of crime causation of emphasis on the nature of the criminal act per se…. The positive school represents the first formulations and applications to the field of criminology of the point of view, methodology, and logic of the natural sciences to the study of human behavior.³

Positivism, blessed with the virtues and prestige of science, has little concern for the essence of phenomenon it wishes to study. That is metaphysics. Thus, positive criminology could for close to a century display little concern for the essence of crime—infraction.

The second abiding feature of the positive school may be traced to its quest for scientific status. Positive criminology, at its inception and even now, contrasts its scientific view of man with that of classical philosophy. “Whereas the classical school accepted the doctrine of free will, the positive school based the study of criminal behavior on scientific determinism.”⁴ This it did and more. Positive criminology fashioned an image of man to suit a study of criminal behavior based on scientific determinism. It rejected the view that man exercised freedom, was possessed of reason, and was thus capable of choice. Man, endowed with freedom and reason, is held to be a conception that is “essentially prescientific in any modern sense of the human behavior sciences.”⁵

To understand the positivist view of criminal action, it is necessary to distinguish between two kinds of determinism—hard and soft. All social science is, to one extent or another, deterministic. Modern sociology, however, has in considerable measure shed its early hard determinism. Modern criminology has not. The difference between hard and soft determinism is that one merely directs the analyst, whereas the other makes a fundamental contention regarding the nature of human action. Positive criminology broke with what it regarded an “animistic, self-determining, free will kind of thinking.”⁶ It substituted for the classical model an image of man as fundamentally constrained. Determinism for the positive school of criminology was not merely a heuristic principle; it was a vision that likened man to physical and chemical particles. Every event is caused. Human freedom is illusory. The positive school of criminology concurred with the dictum of Schopenhauer.

Every man, being what he is and placed in the circumstances which for the moment obtain, but which on their part also arise by strict necessity, can absolutely never do anything else than just what at that moment he does do. Accordingly, the whole course of a man's life, in all its incidents great and small, is as necessarily predetermined as the course of a clock.⁷

Positive criminology was from the outset greatly affected by the hard determinism of its early biological foundations. The early spokesmen of positive criminology, Lombroso and Ferri, hoped to combine social, geographical, and psychological factors with a biological base to explain and predict criminality. The assumptions of biological constraint—pathology hardly allows of will—were deemed equally applicable to social and psychological events. Furthermore, when the revolt against the hegemony of biology began, its hard determinism became part of the stance of the new disciplines. Like Hassan the fig vender, they were not to be outdone. Spencerian sociology, Watsonian behaviorism, Freudian psychic determinism, Pavlovian conditioning—all served to create an illusion of a social science indistinguishable from natural science. In the nineteenth century, as well as the early twentieth, most intellectuals aspired to scientific status. Scientific boosterism as personified by Huxley dominated intellectual inquiry. The advance of science required a recasting of man's nature. Notions of human reason and freedom were repugnant because they were the major basis for denying an easy equation of social with natural science. If man possessed freedom and reason, then social science had no place to stand. Or at least so it was, and sometimes still is, mistakenly thought. Enrico Ferri, in a remarkable show of candor rarely evident among his unwitting contemporary followers, appends the following argument to his pathetically inept demonstration that statistics prove the nonexistence of free choice. One can hardly resist the observation that this and not the dubious statistical argument was the real foundation for the premature liquidation of human reason and freedom.

Furthermore, this moral liberty, if once admitted, would make all psychological and social science impossible and absurd in exactly the same way that the supposition of free choice in the atoms of matter would destroy all physical and chemical science. Hence, the negation of free choice instead of being, as the spiritual schools assert, the source of all evils, is fertile in its beneficent effects in moral and social life, since it teaches tolerance of ideas, inspires mutual indulgence and counsels…. Negation [of free will] is the necessary condition of all sociological theory and practice.⁸

Thus it was believed that social science required the negation of choice. What better group to start with than criminals? Surely they did not possess reason. And to deny them freedom was not without its compensations. Indeed, the needs of the new scientific disciplines coincided with the preachings of compassionate humanitarians. The negation of freedom not only suited the pretensions and ambitions of social science; it also was a fundamental requirement of a view that commended the treatment of criminals. Persons without choice are not responsible for their actions. Instead of punishment, they require treatment or other forms of correction. Thus, the joining of determinism as a heuristic principle motivating the analyst to profound inquiry with determinism as a model of human nature was expedited by the needs of emergent professions and humane liberalism. But what of man's nature, generally, and criminal nature, specifically? Did they too warrant the negation of the principle of human choice?

The view of modern social science is fairly complex and by no means unified or definitive. Whatever the ambiguities, however, a shift to a softer determinism is clearly discernible. The crucial step—a breaking of the link between directives for the analyst and the nature of the object of inquiry—has been taken. Indeed, soft determinism may be defined as the maintaining of the principle of universal causality as a guide to profound inquiry and an abandoning of universal assumptions regarding the nature of man, criminal or otherwise. Man's nature with respect to reason and freedom, it is nowadays conceded, is after all an empirical question that can be expected to yield characteristically variable answers. Men vacillate between choice and constraint.

Man is neither as free as he feels nor as bound as he fears. There are some aspects of himself, as of his environment, which he may easily transform, some aspects which he may transform only with difficulty and others which he can never transform…. Much of the debate concerning the freedom of the will arose from a confusion between the concepts of causality and freedom ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Aknowledgements
• Introduction to the Transaction Edtion
• Chapter 1. The Positive Delinquent
• Chapter 2. The Subculture of Delinquency
• Chapter 3. The Negation of Offense
• Chapter 4. The Sense of Injustice
• Chapter 5. Custom, Tort, and Injustsice
• Chapter 6. Drifting into Delinquency
• Index