Travis Hirschi and Social Control Theory examines the intellectual career and lasting influence of one of the twentieth century’s most cited criminologists, whose work reframed the central question of the discipline from why people commit crime to why most people do not. Hirschi’s social bond theory, introduced in Causes of Delinquency (1969), proposed that delinquency results not from deviant motivation but from weakened attachments to conventional society. This article traces the development of control theory from its mid-century origins through Hirschi’s empirical innovations, his later collaboration with Michael Gottfredson on self-control theory, and the ongoing debates these frameworks have generated within American criminology. Situated within the broader History of Criminology, Hirschi’s contributions represent a pivotal reorientation away from strain and subcultural theories toward an individualistic, bond-centered explanation of conformity and deviance.
Introduction
The mid-twentieth century American criminological landscape was dominated by sociological theories that located the origins of crime in structural pressures, cultural transmission, or learned behavior. Strain theory, as articulated by Robert Merton and elaborated by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, held that crime emerged from blocked legitimate opportunities. The Chicago School tradition, carried forward through Edwin Sutherland’s differential association framework, emphasized the social learning of deviant norms. Against this backdrop, Travis Hirschi’s 1969 monograph Causes of Delinquency represented a sharp departure. Rather than asking what drives individuals toward crime, Hirschi inverted the question entirely: given the ubiquity of opportunity and temptation, what prevents most people from offending?
This inversion was not entirely without precedent. Earlier theorists, notably Émile Durkheim, had suggested that weakened social ties produce anomie and deviance. F. Ivan Nye’s 1958 work on family relationships and delinquency had explicitly framed the problem in control-theoretic terms. Jackson Toby’s concept of “stakes in conformity” offered another antecedent. What distinguished Hirschi’s contribution was his systematic formalization of the control perspective into four testable elements — attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief — and his rigorous empirical testing of these propositions against competing theories using self-report survey data from Richmond, California adolescents.
Hirschi’s career did not end with the social bond framework. In 1990, he and Michael Gottfredson published A General Theory of Crime, which shifted the explanatory emphasis from social bonds to low self-control established early in childhood. This second major theoretical statement provoked its own wave of research, debate, and criticism, some of it from scholars who had built careers testing the original bonding theory. The tension between Hirschi’s two theoretical frameworks — one emphasizing ongoing social relationships, the other a stable individual trait — has itself become a significant topic within criminological theory. Understanding both contributions, their intellectual origins, and their empirical legacy is necessary for grasping how American criminology moved from structural explanations of crime toward frameworks centered on individual variation in social integration and self-regulation.
Intellectual Antecedents and the Control Theory Tradition
Durkheim, Anomie, and the Roots of Social Control
Control theory’s philosophical genealogy extends at least to Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan posed the problem of social order in explicitly coercive terms. Hobbes argued that absent external restraint, human beings would exist in a state of perpetual conflict — a war of all against all. Durkheim transformed this insight sociologically. In Suicide (1897), Durkheim demonstrated that rates of self-destruction varied inversely with the degree of social integration: individuals bound tightly to family, religious community, and occupational group were less likely to take their own lives. The mechanism was not punishment or surveillance but rather the constraining power of belonging itself. When social bonds weakened — through rapid economic change, migration, or the dissolution of communal structures — anomie emerged, and with it a range of deviant behaviors.
Durkheim’s influence on American criminology was initially indirect, filtered through the Chicago School’s interest in social disorganization. Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s ecological research demonstrated that high-crime neighborhoods were characterized by residential instability, ethnic heterogeneity, and poverty — conditions that weakened informal social controls. Their work established an empirical connection between weakened community bonds and delinquency rates, though they framed the mechanism primarily in terms of cultural transmission rather than individual-level bonding. Albert Reiss’s 1951 article on the failure of personal and social controls in delinquency made the control framework more explicit, arguing that delinquents were characterized by weak ego controls and inadequate supervision by conventional authority figures. Reiss drew directly on psychiatric and sociological traditions to propose that conformity required active maintenance through internalized norms and external oversight.
F. Ivan Nye’s Family Relationships and Delinquent Behavior (1958) moved control theory further toward a systematic empirical framework. Nye identified four types of control — direct (punishment and supervision), indirect (affectional identification with parents), internalized (conscience), and the availability of alternative means to satisfy needs — and tested their relative explanatory power using self-report data from Washington state high school students. His finding that indirect controls, particularly the quality of parent-child relationships, were more predictive of conformity than direct punitive controls foreshadowed Hirschi’s later emphasis on attachment. Jackson Toby’s concept of “stakes in conformity” offered a complementary mechanism: individuals who had invested heavily in conventional activities — education, careers, reputations — had more to lose from deviance and were therefore more constrained. Walter Reckless’s containment theory similarly proposed inner and outer “containments” that buffered individuals against criminal pulls and pushes. By the early 1960s, the intellectual raw materials for a formal control theory of delinquency were well established, but no single theorist had synthesized them into a coherent, empirically testable framework.
The Sociological Context of the 1960s
Hirschi developed his social bond theory during a period of intense theoretical competition within American sociology and criminology. The dominant paradigms — Merton’s strain theory, Sutherland’s differential association, and various subcultural theories — all shared a common assumption: offenders were qualitatively different from non-offenders in their motivations, values, or social learning experiences. Strain theory posited that crime arose from the disjunction between culturally prescribed goals and structurally available means. Differential association held that criminal behavior was learned through intimate personal groups in which definitions favorable to law violation exceeded definitions unfavorable to it. Subcultural theories, from Albert Cohen’s delinquent boys to Cloward and Ohlin’s differential opportunity structure, proposed that criminal subcultures provided alternative normative systems for those excluded from mainstream success.
Hirschi’s skepticism toward these frameworks was both theoretical and empirical. He noted that strain theory predicted the highest delinquency rates among lower-class youth who aspired to middle-class success but lacked the means to achieve it — yet the empirical evidence for this specific prediction was weak. Self-report studies consistently showed that the relationship between class and delinquency was far more modest than official statistics suggested. Differential association, meanwhile, faced the tautological criticism that it could explain any behavioral outcome after the fact by pointing to prior associations, but generated few falsifiable predictions in advance. Hirschi was also influenced by David Matza’s critique of deterministic theories in Delinquency and Drift (1964), which argued that most delinquents were not deeply committed to deviant values but rather “drifted” between conformity and delinquency, using techniques of neutralization to temporarily suspend moral constraints. Matza’s emphasis on the episodic, uncommitted character of most delinquency resonated with Hirschi’s emerging view that crime required no special motivation — only the absence of effective restraints.
Causes of Delinquency: The Social Bond Theory
The Four Elements of the Social Bond
Hirschi’s Causes of Delinquency, published by the University of California Press in 1969, remains one of the most cited works in the history of criminology. The book’s theoretical core was elegant in its simplicity. Hirschi proposed that the bond between the individual and society consisted of four interrelated elements: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. Each element represented a distinct mechanism through which conventional society constrains individuals from engaging in delinquent behavior.
Attachment referred to the emotional connection between the individual and significant others — parents, teachers, peers. Hirschi argued that sensitivity to the opinions and expectations of others constituted the primary mechanism of informal social control. A youth who cared deeply about maintaining parental approval would be reluctant to engage in acts that might jeopardize that relationship. Unlike psychoanalytic theories that located conscience within the individual psyche as an internalized structure, Hirschi conceptualized attachment as inherently relational: moral constraint depended on the ongoing quality of social relationships, not on a fixed internal disposition. Commitment captured the rational investment dimension of conformity. Individuals who had accumulated conventional investments — educational achievement, occupational status, community reputation — faced higher costs from deviant behavior. A college-bound student risked expulsion; a professional risked career destruction. This element drew directly from Toby’s stakes-in-conformity concept and from Gary Becker’s emerging rational choice framework in economics, though Hirschi framed it sociologically rather than economically.
Involvement referred simply to the time dimension: individuals occupied with conventional activities — schoolwork, employment, organized recreation — had less time available for delinquent behavior. This was the weakest element theoretically, amounting to what scholars have called the “idle hands” hypothesis, and subsequent empirical research provided the least consistent support for it. Belief referred to the degree to which individuals endorsed the moral validity of conventional norms. Hirschi rejected the subcultural argument that delinquents operated under an alternative value system. Instead, he proposed a single moral order to which all members of society were socialized, but to which some were more weakly bound than others. Delinquents did not reject mainstream norms so much as hold them with less conviction — a position consistent with Matza’s neutralization argument.
The Richmond Youth Project and Empirical Testing
The theoretical framework alone would not have secured Causes of Delinquency its canonical status. Equally important was Hirschi’s empirical methodology. The book reported results from the Richmond Youth Project, a self-report survey of approximately 4,000 junior and senior high school students in Contra Costa County, California. Hirschi supplemented self-reported delinquency measures with official police records and school records, enabling cross-validation across data sources. The survey included items measuring each element of the social bond — questions about closeness to parents, educational aspirations, time spent on homework and extracurricular activities, and endorsement of legal norms — as well as measures of key variables from competing theories.
Hirschi’s analytical strategy was explicitly comparative. He tested social bond predictions against strain theory predictions and differential association predictions using the same dataset, a move that was methodologically unusual for its time. The results generally supported the bonding framework. Attachment to parents emerged as one of the strongest predictors of conformity, and this relationship held regardless of the parent’s own criminal involvement — a finding that challenged differential association’s prediction that criminal parents would transmit criminal values. Commitment to educational achievement was significantly associated with lower delinquency. The involvement hypothesis received the weakest support, with some analyses suggesting that certain forms of conventional activity (particularly unsupervised socializing) actually increased delinquent opportunity. Belief in the moral validity of law showed the expected negative relationship with delinquency, though its independent effect was debated.
The Richmond data also produced findings that complicated the theory. The relationship between peer associations and delinquency was strong, but Hirschi interpreted it differently than differential association theorists would. He argued that delinquents associated with other delinquents not because they learned criminal techniques and values from them, but because weakly bonded individuals gravitated toward similarly weakly bonded peers — a selection effect rather than a socialization effect. This interpretive difference between the “birds of a feather” and “bad company” explanations of peer influence has generated decades of subsequent research and remains unresolved in the literature, with longitudinal studies suggesting that both processes operate simultaneously.
Critiques of the Social Bond Framework
Despite its influence, the social bond theory attracted significant criticism from its earliest reception. Feminist scholars noted that Hirschi’s Richmond sample was exclusively male, and questioned whether a theory built on boys’ experiences could account for the dramatically lower rates of female offending — or whether, paradoxically, the higher social bonding typically experienced by girls might actually explain the gender gap in crime better than Hirschi himself had explored. Robert Agnew and others argued that the theory was essentially static, offering a snapshot of bonding at a single point in time without accounting for how bonds develop, weaken, and reconstitute across the life course. This criticism would later be addressed, from a different theoretical direction, by Robert Sampson and John Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control, which explicitly modeled how transitions in bonding (marriage, employment, military service) could redirect criminal trajectories.
Methodological critiques centered on the cross-sectional design of the Richmond study. Because bonding and delinquency were measured simultaneously, the causal direction remained ambiguous: did weak bonds cause delinquency, or did delinquent behavior erode social bonds? The possibility of reciprocal causation — that delinquency and weak bonding reinforced each other in a feedback loop — could not be tested with Hirschi’s data. Scholars also questioned whether self-reported attachment to parents accurately captured the quality of social relationships or merely reflected adolescent mood and self-presentation. Despite these limitations, the theory’s parsimony and testability ensured its dominance in criminological research through the 1970s and 1980s, generating hundreds of empirical studies across multiple national contexts.
A General Theory of Crime and the Self-Control Revolution
The Gottfredson-Hirschi Thesis
In 1990, Hirschi, now collaborating with Michael Gottfredson, published A General Theory of Crime — a book whose ambitions were signaled by its title. Where the social bond theory had been a theory of juvenile delinquency rooted in ongoing social relationships, the general theory proposed a single, stable individual-level trait as the primary cause of crime across all types of offending, all demographic categories, and all historical periods. That trait was low self-control, defined as the tendency to pursue immediate gratification without regard for long-term consequences. Gottfredson and Hirschi argued that individuals with low self-control were impulsive, insensitive to others, risk-seeking, shortsighted, and attracted to simple rather than complex tasks. These characteristics made them more likely to engage not only in criminal behavior but in a range of “analogous behaviors” — smoking, drinking, reckless driving, unstable employment, and risky sexual activity.
The theoretical shift from social bonds to self-control was jarring to many criminologists. Social bond theory had been a sociological theory par excellence, locating the causes of conformity in the quality of ongoing relationships between individuals and social institutions. Self-control theory was fundamentally different: it posited a stable trait established by approximately age eight through the quality of early childhood parenting. Parents who monitored their children’s behavior, recognized deviance when it occurred, and consistently punished it produced children with adequate self-control. Parents who failed on any of these three dimensions produced children with low self-control who would be disproportionately criminal throughout their lives. Once established, self-control was portrayed as essentially fixed — an assumption that placed the theory in tension with life-course perspectives emphasizing the capacity for change through adult transitions.
Empirical Support and the Meta-Analytic Record
The self-control hypothesis generated an enormous volume of empirical research. Travis Pratt and Francis Cullen’s 2000 meta-analysis, one of the most cited works in the field, synthesized results from 21 studies examining the relationship between low self-control and criminal or deviant behavior. The analysis reported a mean effect size (weighted r) of approximately .20, indicating a moderate and consistent relationship between low self-control and offending. Subsequent meta-analyses have confirmed this basic finding while refining it. Attitudinal measures of self-control (derived from the Grasmick et al. 1993 scale) tended to produce stronger effects than behavioral measures, raising questions about whether the construct was being measured independently of the outcomes it was intended to predict. Studies using behavioral or observational measures of self-control, while fewer in number, generally found smaller but still significant effects.
Pratt and Cullen’s meta-analysis also produced a finding that Gottfredson and Hirschi would not have predicted: social learning variables and opportunity measures retained significant predictive power even after controlling for self-control. The general theory had claimed that once self-control was properly measured, other criminological variables would lose their explanatory relevance — essentially declaring competing theories redundant. The empirical record did not support this strong claim. Peer associations, moral beliefs, routine activities, and situational factors continued to predict offending net of self-control, suggesting that the theory was better understood as identifying one important predictor among several rather than as the general theory its authors claimed.
Criticism, Tautology, and Theoretical Revision
The most persistent criticism of the general theory was the tautology charge. If low self-control was defined by the tendency to commit impulsive, short-sighted acts, and crime was defined as an impulsive, short-sighted act, then the theory risked circularity: people commit crime because they have low self-control, and we know they have low self-control because they commit crime. Gottfredson and Hirschi responded that self-control was conceptually distinct from crime because it also predicted analogous behaviors, and because it could be measured through attitudinal scales independently of criminal behavior. Critics remained unconvinced, arguing that the Grasmick scale items (measuring impulsivity, risk-seeking, self-centeredness, and volatile temper) were themselves indicators of a propensity to offend rather than an independent cause of it.
Hirschi himself later revised his position in a 2004 essay that moved away from the dispositional framing of self-control and toward a reconceptualization rooted in the social bond. He proposed redefining self-control as the tendency to consider the full range of potential costs of a particular act — including the social costs captured by the original bonding elements of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. In this reformulation, a person exercises self-control when they refrain from crime because they consider the damage it would do to their relationships (attachment), their investments (commitment), their time (involvement), and their moral self-image (belief). This move effectively collapsed the distinction between Hirschi’s two theories, treating self-control not as a stable trait but as a situationally variable calculation shaped by the strength of one’s social bonds. The revision was welcomed by some integrative theorists but puzzled others who saw it as an implicit concession that the 1990 framework had been theoretically flawed.
Hirschi’s Influence on Criminological Research and Policy
The Empirical Legacy in Developmental and Life-Course Criminology
Hirschi’s work fundamentally shaped the trajectory of developmental and life-course criminology, even among scholars who rejected his specific theoretical claims. Sampson and Laub’s Crime in the Making (1993) was explicitly constructed as a response to both social bond theory and the general theory. By reanalyzing the Gluecks’ longitudinal dataset of 500 delinquent and 500 non-delinquent Boston males, Sampson and Laub demonstrated that changes in social bonding across the life course — particularly marriage to a prosocial spouse and stable employment — predicted desistance from crime, even among individuals who had exhibited low self-control in childhood. Their age-graded informal social control theory preserved the core mechanism of Hirschi’s 1969 framework (the constraining power of social bonds) while rejecting the 1990 framework’s claim that self-control was fixed and immutable.
Terrie Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy, distinguishing adolescence-limited from life-course-persistent offenders, engaged with Hirschi’s work from a different angle. Moffitt’s argument that a small group of offenders exhibited stable antisocial behavior from early childhood through adulthood was broadly consistent with the self-control perspective’s emphasis on early-established individual differences. Her identification of a much larger group whose offending was confined to adolescence, however, challenged the generality of the self-control thesis and pointed toward peer influence and developmental maturation processes that neither of Hirschi’s theories fully accommodated. The broader developmental criminology enterprise — represented by the work of David Farrington, Rolf Loeber, and others — adopted longitudinal methods partly in response to the limitations of the cross-sectional approach that characterized Hirschi’s own empirical work.
Policy Implications and the Prevention Debate
The policy implications of Hirschi’s theories have been debated since their inception, and the two frameworks point in rather different directions. Social bond theory implies that delinquency prevention should focus on strengthening institutional connections — improving school engagement, supporting family relationships, and integrating marginalized youth into conventional community structures. Programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters, school-based mentoring initiatives, and family strengthening interventions draw implicitly on the logic of the bonding framework, even when their designers do not cite Hirschi directly. The U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has funded numerous programs predicated on the assumption that strengthening prosocial bonds reduces delinquent risk, and evaluations of bonding-oriented programs have generally shown modest positive effects.
Self-control theory points toward a different, and in some respects more pessimistic, policy agenda. If the primary cause of crime is a trait established by age eight through parenting quality, then effective prevention must target early childhood parenting practices rather than adolescent social environments. Gottfredson and Hirschi explicitly argued that schools, police, and the juvenile justice system were largely ineffective at reducing crime because they intervened too late in the developmental process. Early childhood home visiting programs such as the Nurse-Family Partnership, which targets first-time mothers in disadvantaged circumstances and has been evaluated through multiple randomized controlled trials showing reduced child maltreatment and later delinquency, is perhaps the policy intervention most consistent with the self-control framework. The tension between these two policy orientations — one emphasizing ongoing social integration, the other early developmental intervention — reflects the unresolved theoretical tension between Hirschi’s two major works.
Continuing Debates and Contemporary Relevance
Integration, Elaboration, and the State of Control Theory
The decades since A General Theory of Crime have seen numerous efforts to integrate, extend, and test Hirschi’s ideas against accumulating evidence. Charles Tittle’s control balance theory proposed that the ratio of control exercised to control experienced determines the probability and type of deviance — an elaboration that moved beyond Hirschi’s framework while retaining its core emphasis on control as the key variable. Per-Olof Wikström’s situational action theory integrated self-control with moral cognition and environmental opportunity in a framework that treats crime as the outcome of a perception-choice process, retaining elements of both the bonding and self-control traditions while embedding them in a broader causal model. Harold Grasmick and colleagues’ operationalization of self-control through an attitudinal scale became the dominant measurement instrument in the field, though debates about its factorial structure, its discriminant validity from personality constructs like conscientiousness, and its independence from delinquency measures continue.
Longitudinal studies have increasingly challenged the stability assumption central to the 1990 theory. Research using repeated measures of self-control from childhood through adulthood finds that while self-control is moderately stable, it also shows meaningful within-individual change — particularly during adolescence and early adulthood. Hay and Forrest’s (2006) study using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth reported that changes in self-control predicted changes in offending net of initial levels, a finding inconsistent with the strong stability thesis. Neurobiological research on prefrontal cortex maturation, which suggests that the brain regions most associated with impulse control continue developing into the mid-twenties, provides a biological mechanism for the self-control changes that longitudinal data document. These findings align more comfortably with Hirschi’s 2004 revision, which treated self-control as a variable cognitive process rather than a fixed trait, than with the original 1990 formulation.
Hirschi’s Place in the Discipline
Travis Hirschi, who died in 2017, left a discipline fundamentally shaped by his work. The questions he posed — why do people conform? what role do social bonds play in restraining behavior? is self-control the master variable in criminology? — continue to organize empirical research and theoretical debate. His methodological insistence on testing theories against data using self-report measures helped establish the self-report survey as a standard criminological tool, and his willingness to test his own theory against competitors modeled a scientific approach to theory evaluation that the field has not always sustained. Citation analyses consistently rank Causes of Delinquency and A General Theory of Crime among the most influential works in the discipline’s history.
At the same time, the unresolved tensions in Hirschi’s intellectual legacy remain productive sources of debate. The relationship between social bonds and self-control, between sociological and psychological levels of explanation, between static and dynamic models of criminal propensity, and between early prevention and ongoing social integration — all of these tensions are embedded in the gap between Hirschi’s 1969 and 1990 works. Contemporary criminology’s increasingly integrative orientation, combining elements from multiple theoretical traditions and testing them with longitudinal data and sophisticated statistical methods, represents both an extension of and a departure from Hirschi’s approach. He preferred theoretical parsimony and competition between theories; the field has moved increasingly toward integration and synthesis. Whether this represents progress or theoretical muddiness remains, appropriately, a matter of ongoing scholarly disagreement.
Conclusion
Travis Hirschi’s contributions to criminology constitute one of the most consequential intellectual trajectories in the discipline’s history. His 1969 social bond theory reframed the fundamental question from why people offend to why they conform, grounding the answer in the quality of emotional attachments, rational investments, conventional activity patterns, and moral beliefs that tie individuals to the social order. His 1990 general theory of crime, developed with Michael Gottfredson, shifted the explanatory center to early-established self-control, generating an enormous empirical literature and provoking sharp debates about tautology, stability, and the relative contributions of individual and social factors. The tension between these two frameworks — one dynamic and relational, the other static and dispositional — has been among the most productive intellectual tensions in modern criminology, spawning integrative theories, longitudinal research programs, and policy debates that continue to shape how American society understands and responds to crime. Hirschi demonstrated that a single scholar, armed with clear theoretical propositions and a commitment to empirical testing, could redirect an entire field. The discipline’s ongoing engagement with his ideas, decades after their initial articulation, testifies to their enduring analytical power.
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