The post-war expansion of American criminology between 1945 and 1975 transformed a relatively small academic specialty into a substantial research enterprise, driven by federal funding, theoretical innovation, and the urgent social pressures of rising crime rates, civil rights struggle, and urban disorder.
This article examines the institutional expansion of American criminology in the post-war decades, the theoretical ferment that produced labeling theory, control theory, and the self-report research tradition, the federal investment catalyzed by the President’s Crime Commission, the discipline’s encounter with the nothing works debate and the critique of rehabilitation, and the critical challenges from conflict criminology and feminist scholarship within the broader History of Criminology. The argument advanced here is that the post-war expansion produced both the discipline’s greatest methodological advances and its deepest theoretical crisis, as the evidence-based evaluation of rehabilitation programs produced findings that challenged the rehabilitative ideal that had organized correctional practice for a generation.
Introduction
The two decades following World War II were a period of extraordinary institutional expansion for American criminology. University sociology departments established graduate programs in criminology, state and federal agencies created research offices and funding programs, professional associations expanded their membership and activities, and the number of criminological publications increased dramatically. The discipline that had been a small specialty within sociology—with only a handful of dedicated researchers and a modest empirical literature—grew into a recognizable academic field with its own graduate training programs, research centers, and professional infrastructure.
The scale of this expansion was remarkable by any measure. In 1950, criminology was represented in American universities primarily by scattered sociologists who taught delinquency and criminal justice courses within sociology programs; by 1975, dozens of universities had established dedicated criminology and criminal justice programs, the American Society of Criminology had substantially increased its membership, and several peer-reviewed journals specifically devoted to criminological research had been established. The number of criminologists increased by an order of magnitude, and the federal investment in criminological research through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration provided resources that transformed what the discipline could empirically study and how it could study it.
This institutional expansion was driven by a convergence of powerful social forces operating simultaneously. Rising crime rates beginning in the late 1950s and accelerating through the 1960s created political demand for criminological expertise and policy-relevant research. The civil rights movement’s exposure of racial disparities in criminal justice produced scholarly and political pressure to examine the fairness and effectiveness of criminal justice institutions. Urban disorder and political violence in the late 1960s created a sense of social crisis that made crime prevention an urgent national priority. And the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, which identified crime as a consequence of poverty and inequality that federal investment could address, created both the political will and the fiscal resources for large-scale criminological research.
The theoretical landscape of post-war criminology was equally dynamic. The social disorganization tradition of the Chicago School continued to generate productive research, but it faced challenges from new theoretical frameworks that questioned its assumptions, refined its concepts, and extended its implications. Labeling theory challenged the assumption that deviance was a property of acts rather than a product of social reaction. Control theory challenged the consensus that crime required special explanation, arguing that conformity was what needed to be understood. The self-report research tradition challenged the accuracy of official crime statistics and their embedded class and race biases. And the emerging conflict and feminist traditions challenged the political assumptions that organized criminological inquiry itself.
The Theoretical Ferment of the 1950s and 1960s
Subcultural Theory and the Gang Research Tradition
The 1950s produced an exceptionally rich burst of theoretical innovation in the study of juvenile delinquency and gang behavior that extended the Chicago School’s sociological tradition in new directions while also identifying its limitations. Albert Cohen’s Delinquent Boys (1955) proposed that working-class gang delinquency was not merely rational innovation—the use of illegitimate means to achieve legitimate success goals—but a collective cultural response to the status degradation that working-class boys experienced in middle-class institutions. By inverting the criteria for status evaluation—celebrating the behaviors that conventional culture condemned and condemning the behaviors it celebrated—the delinquent subculture provided working-class boys with an alternative status system in which they could succeed. Cohen’s framework explained not only the prevalence of delinquency in working-class communities but its characteristic features—its negativistic, malicious, and non-utilitarian character—that purely economic theories of crime could not account for.
Walter Miller’s competing account of lower-class culture as a delinquency-generating milieu proposed that the gang behaviors Cohen analyzed as reactive resistance to middle-class values were actually expressions of positively valued working-class cultural traditions—focal concerns including trouble, toughness, smartness, excitement, fate, and autonomy that were adaptive responses to the conditions of lower-class life rather than reactive rejections of middle-class standards. On Miller’s account, delinquency did not require a conflict between classes but was generated within the lower class by its own cultural traditions, which happened to place positive value on behaviors that the criminal law prohibited. The Miller-Cohen debate over the sources and character of delinquent subcultures was one of the most productive theoretical controversies of the period, motivating research on gang organization, subcultural norms, and the relationship between social class and cultural values that substantially advanced empirical understanding of gang delinquency.
Cloward and Ohlin’s Delinquency and Opportunity (1960) integrated the Mertonian strain framework with Sutherland’s differential association theory and the Chicago School’s concept of illegitimate opportunity structures to produce a more differentiated account of delinquent subcultures. Their central theoretical innovation was the concept of differential access to illegitimate means: just as legitimate opportunities were differentially distributed across the social structure, so were criminal opportunity structures—the organized criminal networks, experienced mentors, and criminal career pathways through which individuals under strain could translate their deviant motivations into effective criminal careers. Communities with well-developed criminal organizations offered access to theft subcultures; communities without such structures but with high rates of inter-gang conflict produced violent conflict subcultures; communities where both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures had collapsed produced retreatist drug subcultures. This typology of delinquent subcultures explained not only why gang delinquency was concentrated in specific communities but why different communities produced characteristically different forms of gang organization and activity.
The Self-Report Revolution and Measuring Hidden Crime
The methodological revolution in crime measurement that the self-report survey initiated in the 1950s and 1960s had consequences for criminological theory as profound as any theoretical development of the period. Austin Porterfield’s finding in the 1940s that college students reported engaging in behaviors that technically constituted delinquency at rates comparable to those of adjudicated delinquents, and Short and Nye’s 1957 development of the self-report delinquency survey as a systematic research instrument, demonstrated that criminal behavior was distributed far more broadly across the social spectrum than official records indicated.
The most theoretically significant finding from early self-report research was the dramatic reduction or elimination of the social class gradient in self-reported offending compared to official records. The strong association between lower-class status and officially recorded crime—which had been a fundamental fact of criminological observation since Quetelet’s nineteenth-century analyses and which had provided the empirical foundation for strain theory, subcultural theory, and social disorganization theory—largely disappeared when crime was measured through self-report rather than official processing. This finding did not mean that social class was irrelevant to crime, but it suggested that the dramatic overrepresentation of lower-class individuals in official crime statistics reflected differences in criminal justice processing—in who was arrested, charged, and convicted for comparable behavior—as much as differences in actual criminal conduct. This implication was deeply uncomfortable for theories that explained crime by reference to the conditions of lower-class life and supported the emerging conflict and labeling theory critiques of the criminal justice system’s differential treatment of suspects from different social backgrounds.
The self-report methodology also transformed criminological research by enabling the study of criminal behavior in populations that were not in contact with the criminal justice system—the majority of offenders who were never arrested, charged, or convicted. This access to the hidden population of offenders permitted researchers to examine the correlates and causes of criminal behavior without the systematic biases that were introduced when criminal justice contact served as the measure of criminal behavior. Hirschi’s Causes of Delinquency (1969) exemplified the potential of self-report methodology for theory testing: by measuring both the elements of the social bond and self-reported delinquency independently of official records, Hirschi could test the predictions of social control theory against a measure of criminal behavior that was not confounded by the criminal justice system’s selective processing of lower-class and minority suspects.
Table 1. Major Theoretical Developments of the Post-War Period: Framework, Core Claim, and Empirical Focus
| Theoretical Development | Core Claim | Principal Theorist(s) | Empirical Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subcultural theory | Delinquent gangs reflect distinct cultural values or status systems, not simply blocked opportunity | Cohen (1955); Miller (1958); Cloward & Ohlin (1960) | Gang organization; working-class youth culture |
| Self-report methodology | Official crime records systematically undercount crime and overrepresent lower-class offenders | Short & Nye (1957); Hirschi (1969) | Crime distribution; class-crime relationship |
| Labeling theory | Deviance is a product of social reaction, not a property of acts; official labeling increases deviance | Becker (1963); Lemert (1967) | Secondary deviance; stigma; criminal careers |
| Social control theory | The question is why people conform, not why they deviate; social bonds prevent crime | Hirschi (1969) | Attachment; commitment; belief; involvement |
| The nothing works debate | Correctional rehabilitation programs do not reduce recidivism; the rehabilitative ideal is empirically unsupported | Martinson (1974) | Program evaluation; recidivism; correctional policy |
Labeling Theory and the Social Reaction Approach
Becker, Lemert, and the Construction of Deviance
The labeling perspective that emerged from the work of Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, Erving Goffman, and Kai Erikson in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented a fundamental reorientation of criminological inquiry—from the question of why people committed deviant acts to the question of how certain people and acts came to be defined as deviant and what consequences that definitional process had for subsequent behavior. Becker’s Outsiders (1963) articulated the perspective’s core claim: “deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.'” Deviance, on this account, was a social status conferred through the reactions of others rather than an objective property of behavior.
Lemert’s distinction between primary and secondary deviance provided the labeling perspective with its most criminologically consequential theoretical claim. Primary deviance—initial norm violations that an actor engaged in for various reasons—had limited consequences for identity and behavior as long as they were not officially labeled. Secondary deviance—the deviant behavior that resulted from an actor’s incorporation of the deviant identity that official labeling imposed—was the more significant criminological phenomenon because it was more persistent, more serious, and more socially damaging than primary deviance. The criminal justice system’s processing of offenders through arrest, conviction, and incarceration was not merely a response to crime but a producer of crime, by imposing stigmatizing criminal identities that foreclosed legitimate opportunities and pushed labeled individuals toward the criminal careers that the label had predicted.
Social Control Theory and Travis Hirschi
Travis Hirschi’s Causes of Delinquency (1969) was the most methodologically sophisticated and theoretically consequential work in American criminology in the post-war period—a rigorous empirical test of a theoretical framework that challenged the motivational theories that dominated the discipline with a radically simpler explanation: people committed crimes when the social bonds that tied them to the conventional order were weak or broken, not because they had unusual motivations for crime. The self-report survey of 4,000 California high school students that Hirschi conducted provided systematic empirical tests of social control theory’s predictions about the relationship between the four elements of the social bond—attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief—and self-reported delinquency.
The theoretical innovation of Hirschi’s social control theory was the inversion of the standard criminological question. Rather than asking why people committed crimes—and thereby assuming that crime required special motivation and special explanation—Hirschi asked why people conformed: why most people, most of the time, refrained from behaviors that provided immediate gratification. The answer, which had been implicit in the sociology of deviance since Durkheim, was that conventional social bonds made the costs of deviance salient and the rewards of conformity attractive. Detached individuals—those without strong attachment to conventional others, without commitment to conventional goals, without involvement in conventional activities, and without belief in the moral validity of conventional rules—experienced the full pull of deviant opportunity without the counterweight of conventional stakes that bound most individuals to the law.
The Nothing Works Debate and the Crisis of Rehabilitation
Martinson’s Review and Its Political Consequences
Robert Martinson’s 1974 article “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform” precipitated the most severe crisis in the history of American criminological practice by apparently demonstrating that correctional rehabilitation programs—the programs through which the criminal justice system had for decades claimed to reduce recidivism and justify therapeutic rather than purely punitive approaches to offenders—did not work. Drawing on a systematic review of 231 program evaluations conducted by Martinson, Douglas Lipton, and Judith Wilks and published in full as The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment (1975), the article concluded that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” This conclusion—quickly summarized in the phrase “nothing works,” which Martinson himself did not use but which captured the article’s reception in public discourse—became the most politically consequential empirical finding in the history of criminological research.
The political consequences were profound and in some respects paradoxical. Conservatives used the nothing works finding to justify abandoning the rehabilitative ideal in favor of a retributive punishment model that emphasized incapacitation, deterrence, and just deserts rather than offender reform—a policy shift that contributed to the extraordinary expansion of American incarceration over the subsequent decades. Liberals used the same finding to argue for decarceration—for reducing imprisonment on the grounds that it served no rehabilitative function and was simply expensive and harmful—an argument that found little political traction in the politically punitive climate of the late 1970s and 1980s. The nothing works finding thus contributed simultaneously to the punitive turn in criminal justice policy and to the research agenda of the evidence-based criminology movement that would develop in subsequent decades.
The methodological critique of the Martinson review—articulated most forcefully by Ted Palmer and subsequently by Francis Cullen and Paul Gendreau—argued that the conclusion that nothing worked was not supported by the evidence that Martinson had reviewed, because many of the evaluations he had examined were methodologically inadequate to detect genuine treatment effects, because the programs he reviewed varied enormously in quality and intensity, and because a substantial minority of the studies he reviewed did find positive effects for specific programs with specific populations. The subsequent development of meta-analysis as a tool for synthesizing evaluation evidence across multiple studies—and its application to correctional treatment research by Paul Gendreau and Robert Ross, and subsequently by Cullen and Gendreau—produced a revised conclusion that some rehabilitation programs were consistently effective at reducing recidivism, that effective programs shared identifiable characteristics (cognitive-behavioral methods, targeting criminogenic needs, matching program intensity to offender risk level), and that the nothing works conclusion was a product of premature synthesis of inadequate evidence rather than a genuine empirical finding.
The Criminal Career and the Philadelphia Cohort Study
Marvin Wolfgang, Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin’s Delinquency in a Birth Cohort (1972) was among the most methodologically ambitious and empirically consequential criminological studies of the post-war period, following an entire birth cohort of 9,945 Philadelphia boys from birth to age 18 and documenting the distribution of official delinquency across the cohort in unprecedented detail. The study’s most influential finding—that approximately 6 percent of the cohort members (the “chronic offenders” who had five or more official delinquency contacts) accounted for approximately 52 percent of all delinquency contacts, and for an even higher proportion of serious violent offenses—established the concentration of criminal behavior as a fundamental empirical fact of criminological research.
This chronic offender finding had major theoretical and policy implications. Theoretically, it supported the development of the criminal careers paradigm—the analysis of individual patterns of offending over time in terms of onset, frequency, duration, and desistance—that Alfred Blumstein and colleagues would elaborate in subsequent decades. Policy-wise, it provided the empirical foundation for selective incapacitation as a crime prevention strategy: if a small proportion of offenders were responsible for most crime, then identifying and incapacitating that proportion could achieve substantial crime reduction at manageable cost in incarceration. The practical limitations of prospectively identifying chronic offenders before they accumulated the criminal records that retrospectively identified them would prove formidable, but the empirical foundation that the Philadelphia cohort study provided for selective incapacitation thinking was enormously influential in shaping criminal justice policy discussions through the 1980s and 1990s.
Wolfgang and colleagues’ cohort methodology established the longitudinal study of criminal careers as one of criminology’s most productive research designs. By following a defined cohort from birth through adolescence and early adulthood, tracking all contact with the juvenile justice system, and connecting official records to individual and family background characteristics, the Philadelphia study demonstrated that criminal behavior had a developmental trajectory—that onset, frequency, seriousness, and desistance of offending followed patterns that could be systematically studied and that varied predictably with individual and social characteristics. This developmental perspective on criminal behavior—the recognition that criminal careers had beginnings, middles, and ends, and that understanding crime required studying these trajectories over time rather than examining the correlates of criminal behavior at a single point—provided the foundation for the criminal careers paradigm that Alfred Blumstein and colleagues would elaborate in subsequent decades.
Federal Investment and the Institutionalization of Criminological Research
The President’s Crime Commission and the LEAA
The transformation of American criminology from a relatively modest academic specialty into a substantial research enterprise was accomplished primarily through federal investment catalyzed by the Johnson administration’s response to the crime crisis of the 1960s. The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, reporting in 1967 with The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, commissioned seventeen task force studies that drew extensively on criminological expertise and produced a blueprint for federal investment in criminal justice research and reform that shaped the discipline’s development for two decades. The Commission’s report identified crime as a symptom of deeper social problems—poverty, racism, urban decay, inadequate education—that required structural intervention alongside criminal justice reform, providing a political framework for criminological research that connected it to the broader ambitions of the Great Society.
The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and provided hundreds of millions of dollars annually for criminal justice research and improvement, was the most significant federal investment in criminological research in the discipline’s history. The LEAA’s research funding arm—the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, later renamed the National Institute of Justice—supported studies of police effectiveness, correctional programs, crime prevention, and criminal justice system operations that dramatically expanded the discipline’s empirical research base. The infusion of federal funding created both opportunities and distortions: it provided resources for research that the discipline had previously been unable to conduct, while also creating pressures to produce policy-relevant findings on short timelines and to address the research priorities of funding agencies rather than the theoretical priorities of the discipline.
The Institutionalization of Evaluation Research
The growth of federal investment in criminal justice programs during the 1960s and 1970s created demand for systematic evaluation of those programs—for evidence about whether specific interventions actually produced the crime reductions and offender reforms they were designed to achieve. This demand for program evaluation established the randomized controlled trial and the quasi-experimental design as methodological standards for criminological research in ways that had not previously been common in the discipline, creating a research infrastructure and a culture of empirical evaluation that would eventually produce the evidence-based criminology movement.
The Office of Economic Opportunity’s funding of randomized experiments on social programs—including the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Negative Income Tax experiment, which tested the effects of guaranteed income on labor supply—established the principle that social programs could and should be evaluated with the same methodological rigor as pharmaceutical trials. Applied to criminal justice programs, this experimental orientation motivated the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (1981), the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (1972), and the RAND Corporation’s research on the deterrent effects of incarceration—a body of experimental and quasi-experimental research that challenged many of criminal justice’s common assumptions about effective practice and established rigorous empirical evaluation as a permanent feature of the criminological research enterprise. The methodological standards for program evaluation that this period established—the preference for randomized experiments, the use of control groups, the requirement for statistical significance testing—would shape the evidence-based criminology movement’s criteria for distinguishing effective from ineffective interventions for decades to come.
The Critical Challenges: Conflict Theory and Feminist Criminology
Conflict Theory’s Challenge to Mainstream Criminology
The conflict criminological tradition that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s from the work of George Vold, Richard Quinney, William Chambliss, and Austin Turk challenged the foundational assumptions of mainstream criminology with a critique that was simultaneously theoretical and political. If criminal law reflected the interests of dominant social groups rather than a social consensus about harmful behavior, and if criminal justice processing differentially targeted subordinate groups rather than applying the law neutrally, then criminology’s traditional focus on the causes of criminal behavior was misguided—or rather, the question it asked was too narrow. The more fundamental question was why certain behaviors were criminalized in the first place, and why the criminal justice system processed different populations so differently for comparable behaviors.
Chambliss and Seidman’s Law, Order, and Power (1971) and Quinney’s The Social Reality of Crime (1970) represented the most systematic statements of conflict criminology’s theoretical program. For Chambliss and Seidman, the criminal law was not a neutral codification of social consensus about harmful behavior but a resource through which powerful groups protected their interests and controlled subordinate populations. For Quinney, crime was a social reality constructed through the definitional processes by which some behaviors were labeled criminal and others were not—processes that reflected the interests and perceptions of those with the power to define. These conflict frameworks pushed criminology toward a sociology of law and criminal justice—a study of why certain behaviors were criminalized, how the criminal justice system operated in practice, and whose interests the system served—that complemented and challenged the traditional focus on the etiology of criminal behavior.
Feminist Criminology’s Foundational Challenges
The emergence of feminist criminology in the early 1970s from the work of Carol Smart, Freda Adler, and Rita Simon represented perhaps the most fundamental challenge to mainstream criminology’s theoretical and empirical assumptions. Smart’s Women, Crime and Criminology (1976) provided the first systematic feminist analysis of the discipline, documenting how existing criminological theories—from Lombroso’s biological positivism through Chicago School social disorganization theory through Mertonian strain theory—had been developed by men studying male criminal behavior, then presented as general theories of criminal behavior that ignored or distorted women’s experiences of crime and criminal justice.
The feminist challenge was not merely to add women to existing frameworks but to recognize that the frameworks themselves required fundamental reconstruction. Women’s patterns of offending, victimization, and criminal justice processing were so different from men’s that frameworks developed to explain male crime could not simply be extended to women without revision. Women offended less frequently than men but were victimized differently, suffered distinctive forms of harm (domestic violence, sexual assault, the criminalization of poverty) that conventional criminology had largely ignored, and experienced the criminal justice system through different pathways and with different consequences than men. The reconstruction of criminology that feminist scholars demanded—the development of truly gender-inclusive theories, methods, and research agendas—transformed the discipline in ways that extended well beyond the study of women’s crime to reshape how criminology understood gender as a fundamental organizing principle of crime and criminal justice.
Feminist criminology’s most practically consequential achievement in the post-war period was its contribution to the recognition of domestic violence and sexual assault as serious crimes warranting systematic criminal justice response. Before the feminist movement of the 1970s, domestic violence was widely regarded as a private family matter outside the proper scope of criminal law, sexual assault victims were systematically disbelieved and blamed for their victimization, and the criminal justice system’s response to both forms of violence was minimal. Feminist researchers documented the prevalence and severity of these forms of harm through victimization surveys that revealed dramatically higher rates of sexual and domestic violence than official records indicated, while feminist advocates established rape crisis centers, battered women’s shelters, and legal reform campaigns that gradually shifted criminal justice policy toward more serious treatment of gender-based violence. This combination of research, advocacy, and legal reform—connecting empirical criminological evidence to institutional change in criminal justice practice—exemplified the kind of engaged scholarship that feminist criminology championed and that produced some of the most consequential practical changes in criminal justice of the post-war period.
Conclusion
The post-war expansion of American criminology produced a discipline that was both more scientifically rigorous and more theoretically contested than its pre-war predecessor. The methodological advances of the period—the self-report survey, the longitudinal cohort study, the systematic evaluation of correctional programs—substantially improved criminology’s capacity to measure criminal behavior, track criminal careers over time, and evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions. The theoretical developments—labeling theory, social control theory, conflict criminology, feminist criminology—substantially expanded the discipline’s conceptual vocabulary and analytical scope, establishing frameworks for understanding crime that were more sociologically sophisticated and more politically engaged than the positivist tradition from which they emerged.
The nothing works controversy that marked the end of this period produced both a crisis and a productive challenge. The crisis was the apparent discrediting of the rehabilitative ideal that had organized correctional practice and justified the therapeutic approach to offenders that post-war criminology had championed. The productive challenge was the demand for more rigorous evidence about what programs and policies actually reduced crime—a demand that, by the end of the following decade, would produce the evidence-based criminology movement and its systematic methods for distinguishing effective from ineffective interventions.
The post-war period’s legacy to contemporary criminology is thus a combination of methodological rigor, theoretical pluralism, and the empirical skepticism about the criminal justice system’s capacity to achieve its stated goals that the evidence demanded. The period also bequeathed the political consequences of the punitive turn that the nothing works conclusion facilitated—the extraordinary expansion of American incarceration that began in the late 1970s and that would make the United States the most incarcerated nation in the world by the early twenty-first century. Understanding this period’s achievements and failures is necessary for understanding both the discipline’s contemporary character and the criminal justice system’s contemporary condition—which is, in significant measure, the institutional product of the policy choices that post-war criminology’s evidence informed, facilitated, and in some cases helped produce. The challenge for contemporary criminology is to learn from both the period’s theoretical achievements—its expansion of the discipline’s empirical scope, its methodological innovations, its political engagement with questions of inequality and justice—and from its failures, particularly the failure to develop the rigorous evidence base that might have prevented the punitive turn from taking the specific destructive form it did.
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