The kids are all right.
Sociologist Travis Hirschi, a former UA faculty member whose studies on why most adolescents manage to stay out of legal trouble revolutionized the thinking of criminologists, says juvenile delinquency rates continue to drop.
Hirschi’s lifelong work recently won him the international 2016 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, along with two other researchers.
Hirschi upended prevailing theories of the causes of juvenile crime while still a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, arguing that connections to family and community prevent delinquency, regardless of income level or social class.
If you love your kid and your kid loves you back, he will usually stay out of trouble to avoid disappointing you.
Hirschi’s work ran counter to the prevailing theories of the time, some of which linked crime to social class and income.
Hirschi said one such theory posited that an American emphasis on success bred discontent among the poor because they couldn’t achieve it and were somehow “forced into crime by the values of American society.”
Another theory argued that crime was learned in certain subcultures and segments of the social order.
Hirschi didn’t buy it. He had already done a survey of statistics and methodology in criminology while still in graduate school and dismissed much of it.
“That put a little pressure on me,” he said. He needed to develop a new theory.
Hirschi decided to come at the problem from a different angle. Instead of exploring the reasons for crime, he decided to discover why the majority of children do not run afoul of the law. “If we are naturally capable of committing crime, why don’t we?”
While still a grad student at Berkeley, he volunteered his time with a large survey of more than 5,000 juveniles in the city of Richmond, California. He was ultimately hired on to the survey team where he helped design the questionnaire and administer the surveys in school classrooms.
He and another researcher also combed local police records to verify the students’ self-reporting of criminal activity. He was pleasantly surprised to find that most kids were not living a life of crime.
“I had to continually show these samples weren’t biased toward good kids because the delinquents weren’t there,” he said.
“The theory that I espoused was to look at the bonds between the individual and society — family, school, peers.” The research confirmed that they were predictive of delinquent behavior, he said.
He identified four components of those bonds — attachment, commitment, involvement and belief. Children with those bonds did not turn to self-destructive behavior. They made rational choices to stay out of trouble.
“My conclusion was that no parent wants his or her child to be a delinquent. Therefore anything that weakens the connection between the child and the family is conducive to criminal behavior.”
That work earned him his doctorate in 1968. He published his Social Control Theory as a book, “Causes of Delinquency,” in 1969.
It became an instant, if controversial, classic in the field of criminology.
Hirschi continued his research and teaching at the University of Washington, the University of California, Davis and the State University of New York at Albany before joining the UA School of Sociology in 1981.
There he would team up with Michael Gottfredson, whom he had known as a student at UC-Davis and SUNY Albany, to develop a unified theory of criminology based on the single trait of self-control.
Their book, “A General Theory of Crime,” published in 1990, became another instant and controversial classic.
It identified a lack of self-control as the root of not only criminal behavior, but other risky behaviors that provide immediate gratification but have long-term negative consequences — drinking, smoking, overeating, cheating, etc.
The “Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory” (2010) called it “one of the most controversial criminological theories in recent history. Even now, their theory remains at the center of criminological discourse and has resulted in continued theoretical and empirical scrutiny.”
Matt DeLisi, a sociologist at Iowa State University, said criminologists did not want to accept a theory that seemed based on common sense and they set out to knock it down.
Asked to provide a brief tour of his bookshelves at his ranch home on Tucson’s northwest side, Hirschi seemed most proud of a compilation of essays critical of the self-control theory.
“They didn’t lay a glove on it,” he said.
DeLisi, who received his doctorate in 2000 and has never met Hirschi, said he has admired him for years, in particular his “pugilistic style of writing.”
He was never afraid to dismiss theories and research he found lacking, or to take on his critics head-on, DeLisi said.
Self-control remains a valid and much researched theory in the field, DeLisi said. It has its flaws but it passes the common-sense test and the lack of it predicts a variety of adverse results — “not just crime but bad driving records, poor health, bad credit, relationships, cheating on their spouse, getting divorced.”
Hirschi’s two books and many articles make him a giant in the field, DeLisi said. “If he had done either book he would be a hugely influential figure.”
Hirschi, a Regents’ and Distinguished Professor at the UA, retired in 1997.
He’s looking forward to a trip to Stockholm to collect his prize and to hear what others are saying about his research these days.
He will split the $170,000 cash award with Cathy Spatz Widom, a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Swedish criminologist Per-Olof Wikström.
