Socialization and Crime - Criminal Justice

Socialization — the lifelong process through which individuals acquire the values, norms, roles, and behavioral dispositions that enable participation in social life — is among the most fundamental explanatory concepts in the sociology of crime. Its relationship to criminal behavior is not incidental but constitutive: from the earliest theoretical formulations of Sutherland’s differential association to the contemporary developmental criminology of Sampson and Laub, the central question of criminological theory has been how the social learning processes of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood shape the development of individuals who commit crime and those who do not. Sociology and Criminology treats socialization not merely as background context for criminal behavior but as the primary mechanism through which social structure translates into individual conduct — the process by which the organized arrangements of family, school, peer group, neighborhood, and broader society produce the attitudes, skills, habits, and identities that determine whether individuals become involved in crime, desist from it, or never begin.

The socialization-crime relationship is theoretically rich because socialization is neither deterministic nor uniform. The same family structure, school environment, or neighborhood can produce very different behavioral outcomes for different individuals, and the same individual trajectory can be redirected by new social relationships and institutional experiences across the life course. This variability — the subject of sustained criminological research on risk and protective factors, resilience, turning points, and desistance — establishes that socialization’s effects on crime are real and substantial without being rigid, creating both theoretical space for understanding variation and policy space for intervention.

Introduction

The sociological study of socialization and crime proceeds from two foundational observations. First, criminal behavior is overwhelmingly a social phenomenon: it occurs in social contexts, involves social relationships, and reflects the social learning that has accumulated across the individual’s developmental history. The rare individual who appears to have developed criminal behavior in the absence of any social influence — the isolated psychopath of popular criminological imagination — is an exception that proves the rule, and one whose apparent isolation often reflects inadequate knowledge of the actual social relationships that shaped their development. Second, socialization is a lifelong process rather than a fixed outcome achieved in childhood: the social experiences of adolescence, early adulthood, and even middle age continue to shape behavioral dispositions in ways that affect criminal involvement, desistance, and recidivism throughout the life course.

The major theoretical frameworks for understanding socialization and crime can be organized around the mechanisms they emphasize: social learning approaches (Sutherland’s differential association, Akers’s social learning theory) that emphasize the acquisition of criminal values and techniques through social interaction; control approaches (Hirschi’s social bond theory, Gottfredson and Hirschi’s self-control theory) that emphasize the absence of the bonds and self-regulatory capacities that socialization ordinarily installs; developmental approaches (Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy, Sampson and Laub’s life course theory) that emphasize how socialization produces differential developmental trajectories with different crime-relevant outcomes; and labeling approaches (Lemert, Becker, Paternoster and Iovanni) that emphasize how the criminal justice system’s processing of labeled deviants shapes subsequent socialization through stigma and role assignment. Each framework captures different dimensions of the socialization-crime relationship, and the most complete account of that relationship draws on all four.

Differential Association and Social Learning

Sutherland’s Foundational Framework

Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory — formulated in the late 1930s and published in its final form in 1947 — provided the first systematic sociological account of crime as a learned behavior produced by social interaction rather than individual pathology. The theory’s core proposition — that criminal behavior is learned in association with others through the same processes by which any complex behavior is learned — redirected criminological attention from the individual offender to the social relationships through which criminal attitudes, motivations, and techniques are transmitted. Nine propositions elaborated the mechanism: criminal behavior is learned; it is learned through communication in intimate personal groups; the learning includes techniques of committing crimes and the specific direction of motives and drives; a person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law; and differential associations vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity.

The differential association framework has the advantage of parsimony and universality — it applies equally to all crime types, all populations, and all social contexts — but it has been criticized for its vagueness about the specific mechanisms of social influence, its inability to explain why some people exposed to pro-criminal definitions nonetheless avoid crime, and its tautological tendency to treat both the cause (learning criminal definitions) and the effect (criminal behavior) as manifestations of the same underlying process. These criticisms motivated Ronald Akers’s extension of differential association into social learning theory, which incorporated the behavioral psychological concepts of reinforcement, punishment, imitation, and definitions into a more fully specified account of how criminal behavior is acquired, maintained, and extinguished through social processes.

Akers’s Social Learning Theory

Ronald Akers’s social learning theory — developed with Robert Burgess in 1966 and elaborated throughout subsequent decades — extended Sutherland’s differential association framework by incorporating operant conditioning and observational learning mechanisms from behavioral psychology, providing the specific micro-level processes of criminal socialization that differential association described in terms too abstract to test empirically. Social learning theory proposes four core concepts: differential association (the interaction with others who model, reinforce, and define criminal behavior); definitions (the attitudes, rationalizations, and cognitive orientations that individuals develop toward criminal behavior); differential reinforcement (the balance of rewards and punishments, both social and non-social, that shapes behavior through operant learning); and imitation (the modeling of behavior observed in others, particularly admired others).

Research testing social learning theory has consistently found strong empirical support across diverse populations, crime types, and methodological approaches. Meta-analyses by Pratt and colleagues found that social learning variables — particularly definitions and differential association — are among the strongest predictors of criminal behavior in the empirical literature, rivaling or exceeding the predictive power of variables from competing theories. The theory’s strongest empirical support comes from research on the role of delinquent peer associations in adolescent criminal behavior — one of the most replicated findings in criminology — which documents that exposure to peers who model, reinforce, and positively define criminal behavior substantially elevates individual delinquency risk.

Table 1. Socialization Frameworks and Their Core Propositions

Theory	Core Mechanism	Primary Agent	Crime-Relevant Outcome	Key Empirical Support
Differential association (Sutherland)	Learning criminal definitions through intimate association	Peer groups; criminal associates	Definitions favorable to law violation	Delinquent peer research; gang socialization studies
Social learning (Akers)	Reinforcement, imitation, and definitions through social interaction	Peer groups; family; media	Behavioral repertoire for crime	Meta-analyses showing SLT variables predict crime
Social bond (Hirschi)	Weakening of bonds to conventional society	Family; school; community	Freed from normative restraint	Attachment, commitment, involvement, belief studies
Self-control (Gottfredson & Hirschi)	Inadequate parental socialization fails to install self-control	Parents/caregivers in early childhood	Low self-control; impulsivity	Low self-control predicts crime across contexts
Life course (Sampson & Laub)	Social bonds change over life course through turning points	Marriage; employment; military	Desistance or persistence	Age-graded informal social control research
Developmental taxonomy (Moffitt)	Early neuropsychological deficits interact with criminogenic environments	Early environment; neurological factors	Life-course-persistent vs. adolescence-limited	Longitudinal cohort studies; neuropsychological research

Social Bond Theory and the Failure of Socialization

Hirschi’s Classic Formulation

Travis Hirschi’s Causes of Delinquency (1969) offered a socialization account of crime diametrically opposed in structure to differential association: rather than asking how individuals are socialized into criminal behavior, social bond theory asks why most people — despite the temptations that all face — refrain from crime. The answer lies in social bonds: attachment to conventional others (parents, teachers, friends) whose opinions matter and whose disapproval deters; commitment to conventional lines of action (educational and occupational investments that crime would jeopardize); involvement in conventional activities that fill time that would otherwise be available for crime; and belief in the moral validity of conventional rules. When these bonds are present and strong, they constrain behavior in conventional directions; when they are absent or weak, the individual is freed from normative constraint and crime becomes a live option.

Hirschi’s theory is a socialization account because the bonds it identifies are products of the socialization process: attachment develops through the quality of parent-child relationships and peer relationships; commitment develops through investment in conventional goals and means that socialization promotes; involvement reflects the organizational structure of daily life that conventional institutions create; and belief reflects the normative consensus that successful socialization transmits. The failure of socialization — inadequate parental supervision, poor school attachment, limited investment in conventional goals — produces the bond deficits that elevate crime risk, making the quality of socialization experiences in the family, school, and community the primary determinants of individual criminal propensity.

Gottfredson and Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

Hirschi’s subsequent collaboration with Michael Gottfredson produced A General Theory of Crime (1990) — perhaps the most influential book in contemporary criminological theory — which proposed that a single individual-level characteristic, self-control, explains the relationship between socialization and criminal behavior across all crime types, all populations, and all social contexts. Low self-control — characterized by impulsivity, insensitivity to others, risk-seeking, shortsightedness, and non-verbal orientation — is produced by inadequate parental socialization in early childhood, is stable across the life course once established by about age 8–10, and predicts not only crime but a wide range of analogous behaviors including accidents, smoking, vocational instability, and interpersonal conflict.

The self-control theory’s socialization account is unusually specific: parental monitoring and recognition and discipline of deviant behavior are the mechanisms through which self-control is instilled, and their absence — whether through parental neglect, single parenthood, inadequate supervision, or indifference to deviant behavior — produces the low self-control that elevates crime risk. Research testing this account has found consistent support for the relationship between parental supervision and self-control, and between self-control and crime, across diverse samples and methodological approaches. Meta-analyses by Pratt and Cullen found self-control to be among the strongest and most consistent individual-level predictors of criminal behavior in the empirical literature.

The Life Course Perspective

Sampson and Laub’s Age-Graded Theory

Robert Sampson and John Laub’s life course theory of crime — developed through their reanalysis of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s longitudinal data and published in Crime in the Making (1993) and Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives (2003) — integrates the social bond and developmental perspectives while insisting on the dynamic nature of socialization across the full life span. Their central contribution is the concept of age-graded informal social control: the proposition that the social bonds that constrain criminal behavior vary in their specific form and institutional location across the life course, with family attachment dominant in childhood, school commitment dominant in adolescence, and the bonds of marriage and stable employment becoming increasingly important in adulthood.

The theory’s most important empirical contribution is the demonstration that criminal careers are not simply expressions of early-established propensities playing out across time but are shaped by the social experiences of adulthood in ways that neither the stability emphasized by Gottfredson and Hirschi nor the developmental taxonomies of Moffitt fully capture. Research following men identified as delinquent in adolescence into old age documented that the quality of marital bonds, the stability of employment, and the social controls of military service all predicted desistance from crime independently of the individual’s prior criminal history and early childhood characteristics — establishing that socialization continues to shape criminal behavior well into adulthood through the informal social controls that life course transitions create.

Turning Points and Desistance

The concept of turning points — social experiences that redirect the trajectory of a criminal career toward desistance — is among Sampson and Laub’s most influential contributions to both theory and policy. Marriage to a prosocial partner, stable employment, military service, religious conversion, and geographic relocation all appear in the research literature as turning points that redirect criminal trajectories, and the mechanism is consistent with social bond theory’s framework: these experiences build the social investments, relational obligations, and identity commitments that make continued criminal involvement costly and desistance appealing.

Contemporary desistance research has extended this analysis in important directions. Maruna’s narrative approach documented that successful desisters construct redemption scripts — personal narratives that reframe their criminal pasts as chapters in a story of redemption and prosocial purpose — suggesting that identity transformation, not merely social bond formation, is a mechanism of desistance that socialization theory must incorporate. Giordano and colleagues’ cognitive transformation model proposed that the motivation to change, the exposure to “hooks for change” in the social environment, and the construction of a prosocial identity all interact in the desistance process, requiring both changed social circumstances and cognitive engagement with those changes for durable behavioral transformation to occur.

Media, Culture, and Secondary Socialization

Socialization Beyond Primary Groups

While family and peer groups constitute the primary agents of socialization most directly linked to criminal behavior, secondary socialization through cultural institutions — media, religion, civic organizations, and the broader cultural environment — shapes the values, norms, and cognitive frameworks that primary socialization interacts with. Research on media and crime has examined both the direct effects of violent media consumption on aggressive behavior and the broader normative effects of cultural messages about violence, masculinity, and criminal behavior on the cognitive schemas that individuals bring to conflict situations.

The research on media violence and aggression has found consistent positive associations in experimental and longitudinal studies, with meta-analyses documenting small to moderate effect sizes across diverse media types — television, video games, social media — and age groups. The mechanisms appear to operate through both short-term priming effects (violent media activates aggressive scripts and reduces inhibitions in the immediate aftermath) and long-term normalization effects (sustained exposure to violent media normalizes aggressive responses to conflict). Research by Przybylski and Weinstein examining violent video game effects using more rigorous methods than prior studies found much smaller effects than earlier meta-analyses suggested, however, renewing debate about the magnitude of media effects on aggression and crime.

Social media presents a distinctive secondary socialization challenge that earlier frameworks did not anticipate. Research documenting that social media exposure facilitates the formation of online peer groups with potentially stronger pro-criminal influences than in-person peer groups — because online environments remove the geographic constraints on peer association and concentrate individuals with shared deviant interests in networks of greater density and specificity — suggests that the peer socialization mechanisms Sutherland and Akers documented operate in amplified form in online environments. Research on gang members’ social media use has documented that online platforms facilitate both the recruitment of new members and the retaliation sequences that amplify violence, establishing social media as a genuine secondary socialization context for criminal behavior.

Peer Socialization and Adolescent Crime

The Delinquent Peer Effect

The relationship between delinquent peer associations and adolescent criminal behavior is among the most robustly documented findings in criminological research, replicated across dozens of studies, samples, and methodological approaches. Research consistently finds that the proportion of an adolescent’s friends who engage in delinquent behavior is among the strongest predictors of that adolescent’s own delinquent behavior, net of individual characteristics, family background, and neighborhood conditions. This peer effect has been explained through both selection mechanisms (delinquent individuals seek each other out) and influence mechanisms (peer group membership shapes individual behavior through the social learning processes that Akers’s theory specifies), with the empirical evidence supporting both.

Natural experiments in peer group formation — exploiting random variation in dormitory assignment, school cohort composition, and neighborhood peer availability — have provided the strongest causal evidence that peer influence effects on delinquency are genuine rather than entirely products of selection. Research by Carrell and colleagues using random assignment of military college students to peer groups found that exposure to peers with lower academic performance reduced own academic performance and elevated misconduct, establishing the peer influence mechanism with experimental rigor that observational studies cannot achieve. Similar natural experiment evidence from public housing lotteries, school assignment policies, and class scheduling variation has consistently found peer influence effects on delinquency that cannot be attributed to selection alone.

Family Socialization and Parenting

Parenting Practices and Criminal Development

The family’s role as the primary agent of socialization in early childhood makes parenting practices among the most important determinants of criminal risk in the developmental criminology literature. Research on the specific parenting dimensions most strongly associated with delinquency has consistently identified parental supervision, discipline consistency, warmth and attachment, and the management of peer relationships as the primary mechanisms through which family socialization shapes criminal outcomes.

Gerald Patterson’s coercion theory — developed through decades of observational research on family interaction patterns in families of antisocial children — proposed that the training for antisocial behavior in many high-risk families occurs through the coercive interaction cycles that negative reinforcement produces: children escalate aversive behavior (tantrums, aggression, defiance) until parents relent and comply, reinforcing the child’s coercive behavior while training the parent to expect and accommodate it. This training ground for antisocial behavior — documented through direct observation of family interactions rather than retrospective self-report — produces children who have learned that coercive behavior is an effective tool for obtaining desired outcomes, a learning that generalizes from the family context to the peer, school, and community contexts where crime and delinquency occur.

Contemporary research using gene-environment interaction designs has refined the understanding of family socialization effects by establishing that parenting practices interact with genetic susceptibilities in producing criminal outcomes, rather than operating independently. Children with certain genetic profiles are more sensitive to both the negative consequences of harsh or neglectful parenting and the positive consequences of warm, consistent parenting — a differential susceptibility hypothesis that establishes the importance of parenting quality while acknowledging the genetic variation in children’s responsiveness to socialization experiences that purely environmental accounts underemphasize.

Institutional Socialization: School, Work, and Military

School as a Socializing Institution

Schools constitute the primary institutional context outside the family in which children and adolescents are socialized, and the quality of the school experience — the academic engagement it produces, the social bonds it builds, and the conventional identity it supports — shapes criminal risk in ways that developmental criminology has documented extensively. School attachment — the sense of belonging and engagement that successful school experiences produce — is among the strongest protective factors against adolescent delinquency, and school failure — academic underperformance, grade retention, and ultimately dropout — is among the strongest predictors of criminal career onset. Research on the school-to-prison pipeline has documented that specific disciplinary practices — particularly suspension and expulsion — produce school detachment and criminal involvement independently of the behavior that triggered them, establishing that school socialization experiences have genuine causal effects on criminal trajectories beyond the individual characteristics that predict both poor school performance and crime.

The quality of the teacher-student relationship contributes importantly to the school’s socializing effectiveness. Research documenting that students who perceive their teachers as fair, caring, and invested in their success show stronger school attachment and lower delinquency — even in disadvantaged school environments — establishes the relational dimension of school socialization as independently consequential alongside the structural features of school quality that resource-focused analyses typically emphasize. This relational dimension is consistent with Hirschi’s emphasis on attachment to conventional others as the primary mechanism of social bond formation, applying the framework to the school context with empirical specificity.

Work, Marriage, and Adult Socialization

The life course perspective’s insistence that socialization continues throughout adulthood is most concretely illustrated by research on the crime-reducing effects of stable employment and marriage — the two turning points that Sampson and Laub identified as most consequential for adult desistance. Research on the mechanism through which stable employment reduces crime has found that it is not simply the legitimate income that employment provides but the social bonds, routine structure, and identity investments that stable work creates — the specific relational and normative dimensions of employment that the social bond framework identifies as consequential. Studies that isolate financially equivalent employment at different levels of stability, social connection, and occupational identity consistently find that the relational and normative dimensions of work quality predict crime reduction beyond what income alone would predict.

Research on the marriage effect on crime has been complicated by debates about selection versus causal effects — whether low-risk individuals are more likely to marry (selection) or whether marriage reduces crime causally through its social bond effects. Natural experiments exploiting variation in the timing and legality of marriage — including studies of same-sex partner recognition, immigration marriage restrictions, and military deployment disrupting marriage formation — have provided causal evidence that marriage does reduce crime beyond what individual propensity selection would predict, establishing the adult socialization effects of marriage as genuine causal influences rather than selection artifacts. Research distinguishing high-quality marriages (characterized by mutual respect, support, and shared conventional goals) from low-quality or conflict-ridden marriages has found that only high-quality marriages predict desistance, consistent with the social bond mechanism that requires genuine attachment and commitment rather than mere marital status.

Intersectional Dimensions of Socialization

Contemporary socialization research has increasingly engaged with the intersectional dimensions of socialization — the ways in which gender, race, class, and other social categories shape the content and consequences of socialization processes in ways that universal accounts of socialization and crime obscure. Research on gendered socialization and crime has documented that girls and boys receive substantially different socialization experiences within the same families and schools — more surveillance and constraint for girls, more risk tolerance and independence for boys — producing the gender gap in crime through differential socialization rather than purely biological mechanisms. Research by Hagan, Gillis, and Simpson’s power-control theory formalized this argument, proposing that the size of the gender gap in delinquency across families reflects the degree to which family structure reproduces patriarchal arrangements that differentially constrain daughters.

Research on racial socialization — the specific parenting practices through which Black parents prepare children for racial discrimination — documents that preparation for racial bias can serve as a protective factor against the alienation and legal cynicism that discrimination produces, by providing cognitive frameworks for interpreting discriminatory encounters that reduce their criminogenic potential. Research by Desmond and Emirbayer and by Brunson and Miller has documented that police encounters experienced as racially discriminatory reduce cooperation with law enforcement and increase legal cynicism in affected communities, establishing that the quality of socialization into legal institutions shapes crime through the legitimacy mechanism alongside the conventional socialization mechanisms that mainstream theory addresses.

Conclusion

The socialization-crime relationship has been the central preoccupation of criminological theory for nearly a century, and the accumulated evidence on its mechanisms — learned through differential association, constrained through social bonds, instilled through parenting and school experiences, redirected through life course turning points, and shaped by the intersectional social categories within which all socialization occurs — provides a comprehensive account of how the social world produces both criminal behavior and the conventional behavior that crime’s relative rarity in any population demonstrates is the modal outcome of socialization processes.

Socialization and crime are connected through mechanisms whose theoretical specification and empirical documentation represent some of criminology’s most sustained and most productive research programs. Differential association and social learning theory establish that criminal behavior is learned through the same social processes through which all complex behavior is acquired, making the quality and direction of social learning experiences in family, peer group, school, and community the primary determinants of criminal development. Social bond and self-control theories establish that the failure of socialization — the absence of the bonds, investments, and self-regulatory capacities that effective socialization installs — is a primary pathway to crime. Life course theory establishes that socialization’s effects are dynamic and continuous across the life span, shaped by turning points and changing social circumstances that redirect even established criminal trajectories toward desistance.

The policy implications of this theoretical synthesis are significant and consistent: investments in the quality of socialization experiences — through parenting support programs, quality early childhood education, school engagement and attachment, employment support, and the development of prosocial intimate relationships — reduce crime through the mechanisms that the theory identifies and the evidence confirms. The challenge is translating these implications into sustained policy investment in the quality of social institutions — family, school, community — rather than the enforcement responses that political incentives reward even when the evidence consistently supports the former over the latter. A criminology that takes socialization seriously as the primary mechanism through which social structure shapes individual criminal behavior is also a criminology that takes social investment seriously as the primary mechanism through which crime can be reduced — a conclusion that connects the theoretical and empirical core of the discipline to the policy investments that the evidence most consistently supports.

References

Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Roxbury.
Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Northeastern University Press.
Akers, R. L., & Jennings, W. G. (2019). Social learning theory. In M. D. Krohn, N. Hendrix, G. P. Hall, & A. J. Lizotte (Eds.), Handbook on crime and deviance (2nd ed., pp. 113–130). Springer.
Arnett, J. J. (2005). The developmental context of substance use in emerging adulthood. Journal of Drug Issues, 35(2), 235–254. https://doi.org/10.1177/002204260503500202
Bushway, S. D., & Sweeten, G. (2007). Abolish the juvenile court? Criminology & Public Policy, 6(4), 727–750. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2007.00459.x
Giordano, P. C. (2010). Legacies of crime: A follow-up of the children of highly delinquent girls and boys. Cambridge University Press.
Giordano, P. C., Cernkovich, S. A., & Rudolph, J. L. (2002). Gender, crime, and desistance: Toward a theory of cognitive transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 107(4), 990–1064. https://doi.org/10.1086/343191
Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford University Press.
Haynie, D. L., & Osgood, D. W. (2005). Reconsidering peers and delinquency: How do peers matter? Social Forces, 84(2), 1109–1130. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2006.0018
Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. University of California Press.
Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys to age 70. Harvard University Press.
Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. American Psychological Association.
Matsueda, R. L. (1992). Reflected appraisals, parental labeling, and delinquency: Specifying a symbolic interactionist theory. American Journal of Sociology, 97(6), 1577–1611. https://doi.org/10.1086/229940
Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100(4), 674–701. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.4.674
Moffitt, T. E. (2018). Male antisocial behaviour in adolescence and beyond. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(3), 177–186. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0309-4
Patterson, G. R., DeBaryshe, B. D., & Ramsey, E. (1989). A developmental perspective on antisocial behavior. American Psychologist, 44(2), 329–335. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.2.329
Piquero, A. R., Jennings, W. G., Diamond, B., Farrington, D. P., Tremblay, R. E., Welsh, B. C., & Reingle Gonzalez, J. M. (2016). A meta-analysis update on the effects of early family/parent training programs on antisocial behavior and delinquency. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 12(2), 229–248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9256-0
Pratt, T. C., & Cullen, F. T. (2000). The empirical status of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory of crime: A meta-analysis. Criminology, 38(3), 931–964. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2000.tb00905.x
Pratt, T. C., Cullen, F. T., Sellers, C. S., Winfree, L. T., Jr., Madensen, T. D., Daigle, L. E., Fearn, N. E., & Gau, J. M. (2010). The empirical status of social learning theory: A meta-analysis. Justice Quarterly, 27(6), 765–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418820903379610
Rebellon, C. J., & Piquero, N. L. (2021). Friends and delinquency. In M. D. Krohn, N. Hendrix, G. P. Hall, & A. J. Lizotte (Eds.), Handbook on crime and deviance (2nd ed., pp. 227–248). Springer.
Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Harvard University Press.
Schroeder, R. D., Bulanda, R. E., Giordano, P. C., & Cernkovich, S. A. (2022). Parenting and the development of criminal propensity. Journal of Criminal Justice, 78, 101894. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2022.101894
Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). Lippincott.
Sweeten, G., Piquero, A. R., & Steinberg, L. (2013). Age and the explanation of crime, revisited. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 42(6), 921–938. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-013-9926-4
Wikström, P.-O. H., Mann, R. P., & Hardie, B. (2018). Young people’s differential vulnerability to criminogenic exposure: Bridging the gap between people- and place-oriented approaches in the study of crime causation. European Journal of Criminology, 15(1), 10–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370817710239
Wikström, P.-O. H., Treiber, K., & Roman, G. (2022). PADS+ and beyond: Advances in longitudinal research on development and crime. In A. Blokland & V. van der Geest (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of life-course criminology (pp. 247–266). Routledge.