BEYOND ADOLESCENCE-LIMITED CRIMINOLOGY: CHOOSING OUR FUTURETHE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY 2010 SUTHERLAND ADDRESS

FRANCIS T. CULLEN
School of Criminal Justice University of Cincinnati

KEYWORDS: adolescence-limited criminology, criminological paradigms, organization of knowledge, sociology of knowledge For over a half century, criminology has been dominated by a paradigmadolescence-limited criminology (ALC)that has privileged the use of self-report surveys of adolescents to test sociological theories of criminal behavior and has embraced the view that nothing works to control crime. Although ALC has created knowledge, opposed injustice, and advanced scholars careers, it has outlived its utility. The time has come for criminologists to choose a different future. Thus, a new paradigm is needed that is rooted in life-course criminology, brings criminologists closer to offenders and to the crime event, prioritizes the organization of knowledge, and produces scientic knowledge that is capable of improving offenders lives and reducing crime. Born in 1951, I grew up at a time of major transition in American society. I spent my childhood in the relative peacefulness of the 1950s, attending a predominantly Irish-Catholic elementary school in Boston. With hand over heart and a small carton of milk in hand, we pledged allegiance to the ag ying just to the side of a photo of President Dwight Eisenhowerdrinking

At least in my case, it has taken a village to make a Sutherland Award winnerand so my sincere gratitude is extended to my family, friends in the eld, current and former students, and colleagues at the University of Cincinnati. Unfortunately, I have space to thank by name only those scholars who have been most instrumental in shaping my thinking on the ideas in this address. They include Michael Benson, John Eck, Bonnie Fisher, Colin Goff, Daniel Nagin, Pamela Wilcox, John Wozniak, and John Paul Wright. Direct correspondence to Francis T. Cullen, School of Criminal Justice, P.O. Box 210389, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0389 (e-mail: cullenft@ucmail.uc.edu). doi: 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00224.x

2011 American Society of Criminology

CRIMINOLOGY

Volume 49

Number 2

2011

287

288

CULLEN

our milk once we nished chanting with liberty and justice for all. But in the eighth grade, in the fall of 1963, life changed. While sitting in class, we heard that our hero, John F. Kennedy, had been shot. Worried and in disbelief, we all marched across a boulevard to St. Gregorys Church where we prayed he would live; he did not. In 1968, news of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and then of Bobby Kennedy dashed what hopes remained that a Great Society might be possible. My college years brought protests against the Vietnam War and events such as Kent State and Attica. I heard about President Nixons resignation, due to the Watergate scandal, while standing in the Columbia University library checking out books. My life story is of little concern, but it did have two consequences on how I came to see the criminological worldeffects, I suspect, shared by a number of those in my scholarly generation. First, the unique intersection of biography and history sensitized me to the need to have, in C. Wright Millss (1959) words, a sociological imagination. In its broadest sense, I was alerted that we were all prisoners of our narrow, taken-for-granted social worlds. Thus, I came to realize that much of what I had believed about trust in authority, the goodness of corporations, religion, gender roles, facial hair and hair length, dress and music, and on and onhad been dramatically transformed in the space of a year or two. For some reason unknown to me, I had the key insight that, at least in my case, these changes in politics, culture, and cherished beliefs were not carefully thought-out positions based on rational reection but virtually inevitable responses to the social experiences that enmeshed the bodies and psyches of my generation. I achieved what Alvin Gouldner (1970) called reexivitythe ability to see oneself as a social product. Second and closely related, in this context, I was receptive to the message that social realities are not immutable and completely objective but rather are socially constructed. Members of my academic cohort learned from Richard Quinney (1970) the relevance of this insight for understanding crime; Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) broadened the message to include social reality generally. Most importantly, it became apparent that science itself was vulnerable to external inuence. We had been schooled to believe that science was a realm in which experiments produced ndings that allowed for the incremental advance in knowledge toward objective truth. Now we were being told by Thomas Kuhn (1970) and others that we had been duped. Nothing should be easily taken for granted. Again, as Gouldner (1970) cautioned, we needed to contemplate why we, as scholars, thought as we didhow our theoretical beliefs and academic practices were shaped by social context. Kuhns (1970) work was critical because he supplied a construct paradigmthat allowed us to organize and understand the operation of our scientic worldsfor me, the worlds of sociology and criminology.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

289

To be honest, I am not quite sure that anyone, including Kuhn who used the term to refer to multiple things, really knows what paradigm means precisely (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). We can perhaps begin to grasp its meaning by noting that it is not a synonym for theory or modelas in labeling theory or strain theory. Rather, in a Kuhnian sense, the gist of a paradigm is that it denes for us ways of theorizing, ways of collecting data and testing theories, and ways of organizing our knowledge. It involves a set of normative standards that tells us what is good research and what is worthy of publication in our leading journals. As a result, it controls, implicitly at least, a disciplines reward structure because adherence to paradigmatic norms brings publication, status, and career advancement. The lessons of my academic youth thus have prompted me to be sufciently reexive to take a step back and consider whether our eld has a dominant paradigmand, if so, what that might be. Some scholars might claim that the very theoretical diversity of criminology argues against any one dominant paradigm. But I will beg to differ. I will try to outline the components of a way of doing business and producing knowledge that I believe has dominated criminology for a half century or more. Those not part of this paradigm thus often speak of being on the periphery of criminology and of top journals not welcoming their work. The details aside, they are correct in that they do exist in the margins of the eldhowever invaluable their scholarship is. Indeed, their complaints are evidence that an implicit or unrecognized paradigm rules our scholarly universe. Unlike some scientic elds, paradigms in social sciences such as criminology are not manifestthey have to be drawn out to become apparent. As a result, there often is not a self-awareness that we are part of the same general enterprise. If anything, we emphasize our differences: I am a control theorist; you are a social learning theorist. I think that birds of a feather ock together; you think that if you lie down with dogs, you get up with eas. These differences are real and perhaps worth ghting overas Travis Hirschi and Ronald Akers have done cordially over the years. But in my view, they are arguments that occur within the same overarching paradigm. My purpose, then, is to begin by identifying what I see as our disciplines core paradigm, something I call adolescence-limited criminology. Of course, I am borrowing from Terrie Moftts (1993) typology that includes adolescence-limited antisocial behavior. My general thesis is that this paradigm coalesced in a particular social contextthe 1960s and its aftermathand largely merged the criminologies of Edwin Sutherland and Travis Hirschi. I then argue that this paradigm, although producing enormous good, is now bankrupt, even if we do not realize it. Recent Sutherland Award addresses have hinted at this very fact, identifying key omissions in how we now do criminology. I am less clear on where criminology should head, for in many ways this is the task for the next generation to solve.

290

CULLEN

But like a criminological Dear Abby, I will give some advice on what I see as promising avenues to pursue. Most importantly, I will urge us not to continue doing more of the same but to think more boldly and choose a different criminological future.

WHAT IS ADOLESCENCE-LIMITED CRIMINOLOGY?

As the name suggests, adolescence-limited criminology focuses most of its attention on those in adolescencea period in life that is dened as ranging from puberty to maturity or as being in between childhood and adulthood. Roughly, adolescence spans the ages of 12 to 20 years. By implication, adolescence-limited criminology pays little attention to childhood and adulthood. There is no explicit statement that these times in life are unimportant. If anything, there is an assumption that what is being witnessed in adolescence might have started in childhood and might continue into adulthood. It is just that no data are collected on children and adults, and events unique to these time periods are not mentioned or accorded any theoretical salience. Even longitudinal studies tend to occur within adolescence, allowing us to control for delinquency at time 1 when examining delinquency at time 2. To constitute a paradigm, however, adolescence-limited criminology must do more than study adolescents. In fact, it is marked by ve core features. For the sake of convenience, I will occasionally use the acronym ALC to refer to adolescence-limited criminology. First, ALC is sociological in orientation. Individual differences in offendersheterogeneityare ignored, downplayed, or said not to exist. Efforts to show that offenders have criminogenic traits are viewed with suspicion. Attributing such traits to biology is prima facie evidence that the scholar is racist, classist, sexistor some ist, which is not a good thing. Second, ALC rejects identifying risk factors and the epidemiology of crime in favor of applying and inventing new theories. Mapping out facts about crime and criminals is not criticized but neither is it privileged. The weak knowledge we have about the nature of crime and criminals is ignored or incites little worry. By contrast, novel theories, especially if they identify unsuspected or ironic causes of crime, are valued. Hagan (1973) called this the sociology of the interesting. Third, ALC proposes that the hallmark of great criminology is testing new and/or rival theories. There is the assumption that these tests, which focus on the amount of variation explained by theoretical variables, decipher good from bad theories. There is the assumption that the global effect of individual studies writ largethat is, when they are all taken togetheris to tell us which theories merit our allegiance and which should be discarded. I suspect, however, that these assumptions are false.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

291

Fourth, ALC embraces the use of self-report surveys as the standard technology for testing theories. These surveys allow individualsmainly adolescents who are old enough to complete surveys and congregate in places (mainly schools) where surveys can be lled outto answer questions that measure theories and to report how much crime they commit. Independent and dependent variables thus can be measured simultaneouslythat is, on a single survey instrument. ALC scholars talk about how much we need to do eld work, but then they typically proceed to download another data set that uses self-report methodology. Fifth, ALC embraces social justice and is profoundly skeptical that anything the state doesespecially mass incarcerationcontrols crime. Beyond trying to reduce state intervention into offenders lives, it offers no concrete prescription for how to solve crime. There is a general belief that nothing works to change offenders or to prevent criminal behavior. Scholars who attempt to reduce crime through pragmatic methods at times are termed administrative criminologists or reactionaries (Clarke and Felson, 2011; Sherman, 1993). Such derogatory labels are used because working on behalf of the state to lower crime may make its power more legitimate and effective. In addition, it may implicitly acquit an unjust social order of its role in producing crime. In the end, advancing social justice is the only true solution to crime.

THREE SOURCES OF ADOLESCENCE-LIMITED CRIMINOLOGY

For a half century, the argument could be made that adolescence-limited criminology was theoretically vibrant, ideologically important, and capable of generating tons of research. Accordingly, it wasand to some degree remainsa powerful paradigm. It owes its basic orientation to Edwin Sutherland, its focus on and technology for theory testing to Travis Hirschi, and its policy orientation to the social context of the sixties. We thus turn next to how each of these factors contributed to the rise of ALC. SUTHERLAND: THE TRIUMPH OF SOCIOLOGY AND THEORY Contemporary criminologists are well aware of Edwin Sutherlands enduring contributions to the eldin particular his differential association theory and his coining the term white-collar crime. As John Laub (2004, 2006) pointed out, however, Sutherlands inuence was even more profound (see also Laub and Sampson, 1991). He played an instrumental role in dening criminology as a discipline that was, rst and foremost, sociological and theoretical.

292
Becoming a Criminologist

CULLEN

Contrary to what might now be anticipated, Sutherland devoted little of the rst part of his academic career to the study of crime; he had, after all, conducted his dissertation research on unemployment and employment agencies (for accounts on Sutherland, see Gaylord and Galliher, 1988; Geis, 2007; Geis and Goff, 1983; Gibbons, 1979; Goff and Geis, 2011; Sheptycki, 2010; Snodgrass, 1972). He took one criminology course during his graduate school days at the University of Chicago and then taught one criminology course annually, called Charities and Corrections, during his six years at William Jewell College. As a faculty member, he published only a single article, not in criminology, until moving to the University of Illinois in 1919. Little evidence existed that Sutherland was destined to be the most inuential criminologist of his generation (Gibbons, 1979). At this point, however, his careerand ultimately the eld of criminologytook a dramatic turn. In 1921, Edward C. Hayes was Sutherlands chair at the University of Illinois and the eleventh president of the American Sociological Society (whose acronym later led to the word Society being changed to Association) (Sutherland, 1929). Then editing the Lippincott Sociological Series, Hayes invited his younger colleague to author a criminology text for the series. Sutherland agreed and, not knowing much about crime, proceeded to survey the extant criminological research. In 1924, J. B. Lippincott would publish his 643-page Criminology, whose title was changed to Principles of Criminology in subsequent editions. As Gibbons (1979: 47) noted, this volume was the rst attempt by an American sociologist to present a systematic and sociological examination of criminological thought. It established Sutherland as a major scholar and, in the estimation of his colleague Karl Schuessler, had the effect of binding Sutherland to the eld of criminology, which he cultivated until his death (quoted in Gaylord and Galliher, 1988: 53). Embarking on this new scholarly journey, Sutherland would come to grapple with two central issuesthe resolution to which would push criminology in a distinctly sociological and theoretical direction: Do defective or pathological traits in individuals cause crime? And, is a sociological theory of crime possible? The Triumph of Sociology First, as his book project was starting, Sutherland (1956 [1942]: 14) admitted that his principal theoretical interest in criminology . . . was the controversy between heredity and environment. As a sociologist, this concern was understandable. Lombrosos ideas might have faded in importance, but Neo-Lombrosian theories emerged that linked crime to other supposed individual defects (Sutherland, 1949: 103). At that time, Sutherland

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

293

(1956 [1942]: 14) observed that the inherited factor had shifted somewhat from morphology, which Lombroso had emphasized, to feeble-mindedness, which Goddard was emphasizing, and inherited psychopathologies were beginning to claim more attention. As his career progressed, Sutherland became increasingly hostile to biological and individual trait theories. He offered withering criticism of the data setswhich typically compared a large number of inmates to convenience samples drawn from the communityused to claim that offenders and nonoffenders differed in meaningful ways. For example, Sutherland (1956 [1939]: 275) offered a critical analysis of The American Criminal in which Earnest Hooton purported to show the physical inferiority of offenders by comparing approximately 4,000 persons with 313 noncriminalsa sample that consisted of 146 remen (in Nashville, Tenn.), of 85 out-patients from Boston hospitals, and 82 others (some of them members of the militia and other patrons of a bathhouse in Boston). With rapier wit, he concluded that Hootons book is a monumental work in size, but unfortunately it makes little contribution to the explanation of criminal behavior (1956 [1939]: 278; see also Merton and Ashley-Montagu, 1940). These sentiments were echoed in his Principles of Criminology where Sutherland (1939: 116) concluded bluntly that the Neo-Lombrosian theory that crime is an expression of psychopathy is no more justied than was the Lombrosian theory that criminals constitute a distinct physical type. Finally, his work on white-collar crime offered another opportunity to drive a stake into the heart of trait theorizing. With seemingly restrained delight, he pointed out that theories must be incorrect that link crime to characteristics associated with poverty, including feeblemindedness, psychopathic deviations, slum neighborhoods, and deteriorated families (Sutherland, 1940: 1). These perspectives are awed because they are incapable of explaining vast areas of criminal behavior of persons not in the lower class, including the offending of business and professional men (p. 1). In short, Sutherland prominently attacked scholars seeking to blame crime on individual defects. In so doing, he created intellectual space for the growth of a sociology of crime. His critical analyses also undermined the nasty policy implications of the more extreme versions of Neo-Lombrosian thought, which included eugenics. Although Sutherland (1939: 618) conceded that the policy of sterilization may be desirable on general grounds, he quickly asserted that there is no clear-cut evidence that it will affect crime rates. Criminality as such cannot be inherited. He also doubted that capital punishment or prisons had any deterrent effects. Instead, he embraced individualized treatment, rehabilitation, and prevention. Offenders were not born criminals so defective as to be beyond redemption but rather were social creatures worthy of saving (Sutherland, 1939). Sutherland thus helped to legitimate liberal reformist policy views that would reect

294

CULLEN

standard criminological thinking for the next two decades and, in some ways, beyond that time. The Triumph of Theory Second, Sutherland (1939: 4) took on the challenge of developing a distinctly sociological explanation of crime, which he termed a tentative theory of criminal behavior and which we have come to call differential association theory. Initially, however, his review of the evidence for the rst edition of his textbook led him to document the known correlates of crime and, in turn, to embrace a multiple-factor theory (Sutherland, 1956 [1942]: 14). But Sutherland ultimately was dissatised with what we would call today a risk-factor approach. In particular, he worried that establishing empirical associations did not illuminate why this was so. For example, Negroes, young-adult males, and city dwellers all have relatively high crime rates: What do these three groups have in common that places them in this position? (1956 [1942]: 15). A more general theory was needed. Three circumstances, among others, helped to shape its development. First, Sutherland came to embrace the need for a greater level of abstraction in the explanation of crime. In part, he was prodded to this view by the so-called MichaelAdler report, a scathing critique of criminology authored by legal scholar Jerome Michael and philosopher Mortimer Adler, who asserted that criminological research has not yet achieved a single denite conclusion (cited in Sutherland, 1956 [19321933]: 231). Sutherland (1956 [19321933]) rebutted their one-sided assessment, but eventually he was moved to admit that criminology could not advance without a higher level of abstraction that involved a general theory capable of accounting for all crime (Sutherland, 1956 [1942]; see also Goff and Geis, 2008, 2011; Laub, 2006). His specic strategy for theory development was inuenced by Alfred Lindesmith, his sociology colleague at Indiana University, who advocated the methodology of analytic induction (Laub and Sampson, 1991). As Sutherland (1956 [1942]: 1718) explained: According to this conception, an hypothesis should t every case in the dened universe, and the procedure to use is: State the hypothesis and try it out on one case; if it does not t the facts, modify the hypothesis or else redene the universe to which it applies, and try it on another case, and so on for case after case. In Sutherlands view, the difculty with a multiple-factor approach is that each factor is not associated with crime in every case. Thus, some Negroes commit crimes, some do not; some people who reside in delinquency areas commit crimes, some do not (1956 [1942]: 19). That is, any concrete

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

295

condition is sometimes associated with criminal behavior and sometimes notand, in turn, cannot be a cause of crime (p. 19). This led Sutherland to conclude that the only way to get a causal explanation of criminal behavior is by abstracting from the varying concrete conditions things that are universally associated with crime (p. 19). Sutherland would propose that differential association is this universal cause and thus constitutes a general theory of crime. Second, as Sutherland (1956 [1942]: 29) readily admitted, my theory of differential association has been produced by my own differential associations. In Mertons (1995: 5) terms, Sutherlands theorizing was intimately shaped by his cognitive micro-environment, which refers to a local intellectual community that produces and distributes a set of theoretical ideas. In this regard, Sutherland was intimately linked to the University of Chicago, rst as a doctoral student, second as a faculty member, and nally through enduring personal relationships. Not surprisingly, his search for abstract explanatory principles led him to conclude that learning, interaction, and communication were the processes around which a theory of criminal behavior should be developed (1956 [1942]: 19). Sutherland added culture conict to this list, an essential factor because differential association required at least two different cultures with which to associate! The larger point is that Sutherlands ties to the sociological community at Chicago provided him with the scholarly capital to use in developing an abstract general theory of crime. Sutherlands views on crime were further reinforced by his association with Broadway Jones, who Sutherland gave the alias Chic Conwell when they collaborated on their 1937 life-history, The Professional Thief: By a Professional Thief (see also Snodgrass, 1972). According to Sutherland (1956 [1942]: 17), Jones impressed him that a person cannot become a professional thief merely by wanting to be one; he must be trained in personal association with those who are already professional thieves. For Sutherland, this insight had large implications. There, he observed, I seemed to see in magnied form the process that occurs in all crime (p. 17). Third, serendipity played a key role. In 1935, the year after the publication of the second edition of Sutherlands text, Sutherland was surprised when Henry McKay referred to my theory of criminal behavior (1956 [1942]: 15). Because Sutherland was not aware that he had a theory, he asked him what my theory was. He referred me to pages 5152 of my book (p. 15). Sutherland had conveyed three hypotheses stating that individuals could be trained to follow any pattern of behavior, that doing so depended on consistent inuence, and that culture conict was the context in which such inuencetoward one pattern or anotheroccurred (pp. 1516). Prodded by McKay and others, Sutherland devoted the rst chapter of the third edition of Principles of Criminology to a theory of

296

CULLEN

criminal behavior that specied seven principles, including one that stated that differential association is the specic causal process in the development of systematic criminal behavior (Sutherland, 1939: 5). The fourth edition of his text would list nine principlesthe version of the theory passed down to future generations. My review of the evolution of Sutherlands criminology was not inspired by the occasionthe Sutherland Address. Rather, my concern is to argue that Sutherland played an instrumental role in shaping the disciplines development toward adolescence-limited criminology. First, Sutherland legitimated a hostility toward so-called NeoLombrosian theories that sought to locate crime in some defective individual trait. Notably, Sutherlands importance is not simply that he trumpeted a sociological approach to the explanation of crime, but that he simultaneously discredited efforts to link offending to intractable biological or psychological factors. In fact, it became a disciplinary truth that Lombroso was a hack and that subsequent efforts to resurrect his brand of criminologyone that attempted to study individuals carefully in hopes of nding traits that differentiated offenders from nonoffenderswas fruitless and signied that the scholar harbored a distaste for the poor and for minorities. Although he wore the breastplate of a value-free scholar, Sutherland had a varying afnity for different kinds of offenders (see Geis, 2007; Geis and Goff, 1983). In a sense, his differential association theory implicitly normalized traditional criminals; they were not pathological but on the wrong side of the culture conict. In fact, Sutherland and Broadway Jones, his professional thief, eventually became friends, corresponded with one another, and made occasional visits, after Sutherland left Chicago (Snodgrass, 1972: 255). He did dislike, however, unscrupulous business managers, members of the professions, and politicians who used the mask of respectability to hide their victimizing conduct. Many criminologists would come to embrace Sutherlands sentiments, causing Kornhauser (1978: 201) to quip that he described the slum boys who become delinquent as nice friendly lads, available for indoctrination into the delinquent subcultures but the rich who violate antitrust laws, fraudulently advertise their products, and engage in many other wicked deeds as an abomination. She then chided Sutherland and others in his crowd by saying that such views are a luxury affordable only by professors who, in the safety of their studies, are immune to grimy-collar crime (p. 201). Second, Sutherland made theory construction the sine qua non of criminology. Following Sutherland, the challenge for scholars was to develop a theoretical perspective that could rival differential association theory. By comparison, devoting years to measuring offenders physical and psychological defects was merely an exercise in uncovering concrete

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

297

conditions that either were not criminogenic or were mere correlates of wayward conduct. Theory was the only way to explain crime and make criminology a true science. By implication, Sutherland sent the message that theorists should occupy the most prominent places in our books and in our status hierarchies. Sutherlands Enduring Legacy As Laub and Sampson (1991) argue, Sutherland not only shaped what criminology would become but also effectively knifed off alternative avenues for disciplinary development. Most important, he took special pains to critique the work of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, whom he depicted as exemplars of the multiple-factor approach that was atheoretical and devoted to looking for individual-trait correlates of crime. The enmity between Sutherland and the Gluecks was mutual. In the end, however, Sutherland easily won the conict as criminology became an integral part of sociology and the Gluecks work for years was relegated, along with that of Lombroso and the Neo-Lombrosians, to the criminological dustbin (where their work would have stayed had not Sampson and Laub rediscovered the Gluecks data and used them in their 1993 classic, Crime in the Making). In 1979, Gibbons slim but informative history of the criminological enterprise devoted nearly 20 pages to Sutherlands criminology and concluded that he was the most important contributor to American criminology to have appeared to date. Indeed, there has been no other criminologist who even begins to approach his stature and importance (p. 65). The Gluecks received three minor citations, and barely ve pages were devoted to psychological correlates of criminality due to the paucity of attention that this question has received in criminology (p. 216). Regardless of the merits of specic contentions put forward by the Gluecks, the neglect of their contributions likely had opportunity costs for criminology. For one thing, their model of systematic data collection on various aspects of criminals lives was not imitated by scholars. Put differently, large-scale studies in which differences between offenders and nonoffenders would be meticulously catalogued would not be necessary to publish in the elds top journals. Perhaps most salient, this neglect meant that the Gluecks insistence to start the study of crime in childhood and to extend it into adulthood could be comfortably ignored. Instead, as we will see shortly, the eld narrowed its focus to the study of adolescence, leaving unexamined what occurs before and after this stage in life. HIRSCHI: PUZZLES AND TECHNOLOGY Sutherland was not an adolescence-limited criminologist, writing little about juvenile delinquency because its origin was simply one aspect

298

CULLEN

of his search for a general theory of causation (Cohen, Lindesmith, and Schuessler, 1956: 129). His major contributions focused on adults professional thieves and white-collar offenders (Sutherland, 1937, 1940, 1949). In fact, his interest in adult criminality was eclectic. As Snodgrass (1972: 227) notes, Sutherland also kept les and in some instances wrote on such esoteric subjects as lynching, bandits and outlaws, Indian-land frauds, circus griffting, kidnapping, smuggling, and piracy. Nonetheless, in the decade after his death in 1950, the elds concern turned decidedly in the direction of delinquency, including subcultures and gangs, due to the publication of Cohens (1955) Delinquent Boys, Sykes and Matzas (1957) essay on techniques of neutralization, Millers (1958) attribution of gang delinquency to lower class culture, and Cloward and Ohlins (1960) Delinquency and Opportunity. Matzas (1964) Delinquency and Drift would appear shortly thereafter. These works, bereft of hard data, were exemplars in sociological theorizing on delinquency. Although about a half century old, most remain staples of virtually all textbooks and readers in criminology. The mere existence of these works, however, did not mean that most scholars could simply run out and try to author classic theoretical treatises! Something else was neededa strategy for doing theory in a way that, for the typical criminologist, was within reach and capable of earning publications. Here is where Travis Hirschi arrived in 1969 with his Causes of Delinquency, a work that I believe dened the essence of modern criminology (see also Laub, 2004). In short, Hirschi provided both a rich treasure trove of puzzles to be solved and the technology that could yield publishable products. In so doing, he created fertile ground for the inception and growth of adolescence-limited criminology. I must confess that thanks to Professor Hirschi, I became an avid participant in ALC, riding this brand of criminology up the academic ladder! Studying Theories of Delinquency As Kuhn (1970) alerted us, a central function of a paradigm is to provide puzzles to be solved. With no puzzlesor research questionsto be explored, no scholarly activity can take place. When this occurs, scholars will search for alternative paradigms that can provide researchable ideas, publications, and ultimately professional reward and advancement. Put another way, paradigms that cannot guide publishable investigations will lose adherents in favor of those that can. Kuhns work thus suggests that criminological inquiry is shaped not only by the pursuit of knowledge but also by crass career interests (see also Cole, 1975).

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

299

Hirschis genius in Causes of Delinquency (1969) was in creating puzzles in four ways. First, he set forth a new perspectivesocial bond theory that could be subjected to empirical investigation. Second, he clearly and parsimoniously dened the components of his theorythe four social bonds of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. Accordingly, the relative explanatory power of each bond could be assessed. Third, he argued that he was proposing a general theory of delinquency, which meant that scholars could explore whether social bonds had the same effects across demographic groups (e.g., boys versus girls and African Americans versus Whites) and across social contexts. Fourth, and perhaps most important, he juxtaposed his social bond theory to so-called strain theory and cultural deviance theory. In so doing, he identied for fellow criminologists a fertile line of inquiry: testing rival theories against one another. But Hirschi did more than simply create puzzles. In Causes of Delinquency (1969), he displayed a technology that could be used to solve puzzles in a way that would result in scholarly publications. Ironically, Hirschi had originally hoped to use the Gluecks data for his dissertation, but his requestcommunicated by Charles Glock, his advisorwas denied (Laub, 2002). As an alternative, Hirschi was able to participate in a 1964 1965 study of youths conducted by Alan B. Wilson, which was called the Richmond Youth Project. As reprinted in Appendix C-1 in Causes of Delinquency, the High School Questionnaire extended over 50 pages, probing virtually every aspect of the subjects lives. Hirschi inserted a sixitem self-report survey, drawing two items from a scale developed by Nye and Short (1957) and four items from a theft scale developed by Dentler and Monroe (1961). He then used items from the survey to measure various dimensions of social bond, strain, and cultural deviance theories and to see how they were associated with self-reported delinquency. Hirschi was not the rst to use a questionnaire to measure theories and/or to measure delinquency (see, e.g., Akers, 1964; Dentler and Monroe, 1961; Landis and Scarpitti, 1965; Nye, 1958; Reiss and Rhodes, 1964; Short, 1957; Short, Rivera, and Tennyson, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1964). But Causes of Delinquency (1969) was a prodigious scholarly achievement; nothing like it had appeared previously. It was as though one was watching the rst Star Wars movie after having had a steady diet of the original television series of Star Trek. This enterprise was a whole new experience! Indeed, Hirschi showed the eld how to dene theories clearly and then how to use survey items to measure these perspectives. He also demonstrated how to systematically identify and then assess the assumptions of competing theories so as to make a case for which approach earned more, or less, empirical support. In short, he provided a wonderful how to display of the technology of theory testing.

300

CULLEN

In a real sense, Hirschi established the normative standards for what would constitute quality research. First, secure a fairly large sample of adolescents that can be surveyed using a paper-and-pencil instrument during the school day. Second, develop multiple measures and/or multiple-item measures of theoretical variables. It is really good if this can be done on a new theory that has, to date, been under-researched. Third, include a defensible (based on previous research) set of items purporting to measure self-reported participation in delinquency. Fourth, conduct an analysis that reveals which theory is or is not supported. Fifth, claim victory for one theory (as Hirschi did) or call for further research (as most of us do). If these norms are obeyed, the chances for publicationperhaps in a rst-tier journalare high. Completing the ALC Paradigm My thesis is that although working independently and not sharing the same theoretical views, Sutherland and Hirschi established the central parameters of what I have termed adolescence-limited criminology. From Sutherland, criminology was to be sociological and theoretical. This meant downplaying the study of multiple (risk) factors. Because the causes of crime were general, there was no particular need to study childhood or to study how what happens early in life might affect what happens later in life. From Hirschi, criminology was to focus on the rigorous operationalization of theoretical variables. We could then rely on adolescentsconveniently stored in schoolsto complete questions measuring how they stacked up on the theories and how much delinquency they had committed. Implicitly, this approach suggested that there would be no need to know much about the nature and concentration of crime, to talk to active criminals, to study offenders in groups, or to wander around inner-city neighborhoods wondering whether these contexts were criminogenic. Adolescents sitting in a classroom, silently completing a questionnaire as they would any other test, could tell us all we needed to know about our theories. The manifest function of ALC was to generate a rash of studies that, when taken together, could decide which general theory of delinquency was most powerful. But again, as Cole (1975: 183) noted, a paradigm must also fulll the latent function to provide puzzles and to stimulate additional scientic work. Indeed, ALC would have fallen into disutility if not for the fact that it provided almost unlimited theoretical puzzles and a technology that virtually any scholar could, with reasonable effort, employ. Until relatively recently, studies could be conducted using cross-sectional designs, essentially meaning that students could be surveyed at one point in time often on a single day. The increasing requirement to use longitudinal data (so as to control for that damn time 1 delinquency!) has complicated matters a bit, but the ability to simply download large adolescence-limited data sets

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

301

has more than compensated for this bothersome standard. In short, ALC remains salient because it supplies a safe way to publish lots of studies and to advance our careers.

THE SIXTIES: THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING WORKS IDEOLOGY The decade of the 1960s began with enormous hopes, with the Kennedy Administration promising a New Frontier. Even after John F. Kennedys assassination, there were still expectations that a Great Society was possible in which equal opportunity would be extended to all. By the decades end, however, these grand expectationsas Patterson (1996) called them had not only been dashed but transformed into a sense of betrayal, mistrust, and anger. For criminologists, the special change in thinking came from viewing the state as an instrument of progressive social welfare to viewing it as an instrument of coercive control. This cognitive transformation was inspired by a seemingly endless roster of events that showed the states willingness to deceive and exert brutal powerfrom civil rights marchers being attacked by police dogs, Vietnam War protesters being beaten by law enforcement ofcers, and students at Kent State and inmates and correctional ofcers at Attica being shot down by state agents. An unpopular war and the Watergate scandal only served to reinforce the belief that the state was a conduit not for doing good but for inicting harm. Mistrustful of state power, scholars schooled in the sixties rst attacked policiesespecially rehabilitationbased on social welfare ideology (see, e.g., Kittrie, 1971; Platt, 1969; Rothman, 1980). They were wary of the wide discretion afforded to state ofcials to save deviant and poor populations, which they believed was used ineptly, unjustly, and coercively. A few of us arguedcorrectly, as it turned outthat a correctional system based on social welfare and treatment was preferable to the alternative: a system that was shorn of any pretense of doing good and that was free to try diligently to inict pain on offenders (Cullen and Gilbert, 1982). Regardless, concerns about too much welfare ideology soon subsided as criminologists confronted the reality ofand did their best to deconstruct the justications fora punitive state, a protracted mean season in corrections, and the policy of mass incarceration (see, e.g., Clear, 1994; Currie, 1985). In this context, criminology increasingly and understandably became a discipline committed to knowledge destruction. The state was acting badly, and many statutory (e.g., three-strikes laws) and programmatic (e.g., boot camps) initiatives were harsh and ineffective. Showing what did not work was important. Unfortunately, criminology as a discipline went too far throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

302

CULLEN

Thus, a widespread belief emerged that virtually all state-related crimecontrol interventions were doomed to fail. Some of us have called this ideological stance the nothing works doctrine (Cullen and Gendreau, 2001: 321); Roger Matthews (2009: 357) termed this impossibilism (see also Garland, 2001; Rafter, 2010; Sherman, 1993). In corrections, the notion that nothing works to rehabilitate offenders was metastasized by Martinson (1974) in his famous review of program evaluation studies. Scholars quickly became resistant to contrary evidence that treatment interventions were effective, employing what Gottfredson (1979) labeled treatment destruction techniques (see also Andrews and Bonta, 2010). Concepts such as crime displacement and net widening were commonly invoked to show that interventions that seemed to work really did not due to untoward unanticipated consequences (Binder and Geis, 1984). Scholars also took the implicit position that prisons were beyond redemption and thus that no efforts should be expended by them to make such institutions humane and effective (cf. DiIulio, 1987). The only permissible position was to argue that prisons should be used less often. They were not, of course, and criminologists surrendered the job of prison management to more conservative interests. In fact, informal social controls were exerted on scholars who wanted to engage in pragmatic efforts to reduce crime and victimization. Criminologists were expected to choose sidesnot to join the states team but to be on the knowledge destruction, nothing works team. In particular, cooptation was feared: The state would use scholars to legitimate or expand its power to crack down on poor and minority offendersthemselves victims of unjust social conditions. Fine-tuning the administration of crime control might occasionally prevent a few crimes, it was argued, but only at the expense of acquitting the state of its responsibility for preserving an inequitable, criminogenic society. In a 1993 challenge to such thinking, Lawrence Sherman authored an essay titled, Why Crime Control Is Not Reactionary. To previous generations of criminologists, the need to make such an argument would have been inexplicable (Cullen and Gendreau, 2001; Tonry, 2010). Indeed, Sutherlands (1939: v) very rst words in his Principles of Criminology were that A science of criminology is greatly needed at present both for satisfactory understanding [of crime] and for adequate control. He rejected the idea that criminology should only be used to refer to the causes of crime, instead arguing that it should involve the development of a body of general and veriable principles and other types of knowledge regarding the process of law, crime, and treatment or prevention (p. 1). As Garland (2001: 62) noted, despite being a thriving academic discipline, expanding its hold on the academy and producing more research and publications than ever before, criminologists felt that they had failed at the very

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

303

project identied by Sutherland. Thus, criminologys basic projectthat of discovering the causes of crime and identifying means whereby it might be reducedwas increasingly viewed as having failed to produce anything worthwhile (p. 62). Sherman recognized not only this failure but also the reality that many scholars embraced the ght against repression and being anti-crime control. In the policing areahis area of special expertiseSherman correctly pointed out that research ndings that police practices did not reduce crime were heartily applauded. It was with great joy, then, observed Sherman (1993: 176), that many academics welcomed the results of the Kansas City Preventative Patrol Experiment, and similar satisfaction greeted the ndings that adding foot patrols to a small number of beats in Newark had no measurable impact on ofcial crime statistics or victimization survey results. For many criminologists, there was a strong academic bias . . . against police even trying to control crime (p. 174). Furthermore, there were consequences to complying with or defying nothing works normative beliefs, for this politically correct orthodoxy has been used to reward some scholarly careers and punish others (p. 174). Admittedly, the triumph of the nothing works doctrine was largely separate from the triumph of the crime-explanation side of the adolescencelimited criminology paradigm. Nonetheless, this view of policy and practice had profound theoretical implications that, at least indirectly, allowed this crime-explanation side of ALC to ourish. To wit: If nothing works, then there is no pressing need for theories to produce knowledge that can be used to create interventions that reduce crime. Scholars thus are free to devote large chunks of their careers to publishing self-report studies that have little relevance to changing offenders in the real world. Of course, theorists are called upon to tell us the policy implications of their frameworks, which they do persuasively (see, e.g., Barlow and Decker, 2010). But there is no need ever to truly change anythingeither in our academic world or in the world of crime control. In fact, when theories are developed that have a legitimate chance of reducing crime, they risk being critically evaluated by fellow criminologists. Until relatively recently, this was the fate that befell the use of routine activity theory and bounded rational choice theory to inform situational crime prevention interventionsin particular the work of Clarke and Felson (2011). The chief criticism was that their focus on crime events diverted attention away from the root causes of crime. They also were found guilty of being politically incorrectof actually wanting to reduce crime and of thinking that this is possible. As Clarke and Felson (2011: 255) noted, our approaches are often bundled together under the pejorative label of administrative criminology. Having been reared in the root-causes sociological tradition, I must confess that I nd problematic this perspectives

304

CULLEN

disinterest in the sources of criminal motivation and embrace of rationalitythe view that offenders are, as Garland (2001: 129) put it, the opportunistic consumer, whose attitudes cannot be changed but whose access to social goods could be barred. Even so, if we had the Nobel Prize in criminology, Clarke, Felson, and their crew should receive it (well, at least they should receive the elds Stockholm Prize!). I might quibble with them on some points, but collectively environmental criminologistswith their focus on opportunity reduction and situational crime preventionhave likely done more to save people from criminal victimization, including from homicide, than any other group of scholars. Instead of awards, however, they have at times been viewed with the kind of suspicion and animus that criminologists typically reserve for James Q. Wilson.

IN PRAISE OF A BANKRUPT PARADIGM

In its most truncated form, adolescence-limited criminology is a paradigm that privileges the use of questionnaires, completed by adolescents, to explain self-reported delinquency and privileges efforts to show that state intervention does not work to reduce crime. There is no demand that theoretically based research must produce ndings that direct effective efforts at social control. There is no commitment to construct systematic scientic knowledge that is capable of changing offender behavior or of lowing crime rates. In short order, I will argue that this paradigm is bankrupt and should be discarded. But before doing so, I want to insert the giant caveat that I do not view ALC as a failed enterprise. For one thing, I was raised by strain theoristsa bit by Robert Merton and a lot by my mentor, Richard Clowardand have been an ardent practitioner of ALC over the past 30 years. For another thing, just as a persons life can be well lived, so too can a paradigmseven if the endpoint is a kindly death. Thus, ALC has served four important functions. First, the triumph of sociological over individual-trait theorizing was a good thing. Today, many criminologists are not aware of the intense prejudice against racial and ethnic groups that prevailed in America during Sutherlands day. Indeed, the United States had passed restrictive immigration laws and the rst eugenic legislation in the world (Bruinius, 2006). Many scholars commented favorably on the racial hygiene movement in Hitlers pre-World World II Germany (Cornwell, 2003). Thus, writing in the American Sociological Review, Kopp (1936) described her 1935 visit to Germany to inspect their eugenics policies and practices. She concluded that the German legislation, apart from its eugenics aspects, is a great step ahead as a constructive public health measure, as a measure of preventative

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

305

medicine, and as a contribution to social welfare (p. 770). Not long thereafter, Merton and Ashley-Montagu (1940: 391) felt compelled to provide a detailed analytical and statistical critique of Hootons The American Criminal, troubled as they were by his use of such horrendous catchwords as biological inferiority, organic degeneration, biological deterioration. It is instructive that Hooton (1939: 309), an esteemed Harvard University anthropologist, could end The American Criminal with the following words expressed without second thought: Criminals are organically inferior. Crime is the resultant of the impact of environment upon low grade human organisms. It follows that the elimination of crime can be effected only by the extirpation of the physically, mentally and morally unt, or by their complete segregation in a socially aseptic environment. Sutherlands theorizing and sociological criminology generally provided a powerful antidote to crass attempts to blame offenders natures for their criminality and to justify repressive sanctions. As a discipline, we have come to stand for social justice. Over the years, criminologists have formed a community that has subjected simplistic trait theories to the organized skepticism they deserved. Admittedly, at times, opposition to such theories has become ideological, rejecting out of hand the existence of individual differences between offenders and nonoffenders. But if nothing else, criminologists have raised the bar that those wishing to advance such views must jump over in order to be taken seriously. Second and related, the ALC paradigm has urged scholars to stand on the side of the poor and minorities in the so-called wars on crime and drugs. In our knowledge destruction roles, we have shown how many common-sense, punitive interventions (e.g., boot camps) do not work (Cullen, 2005). We also have been one of the few interest groups in society to stand up against mass incarceration and its untoward consequences (see, e.g., Currie, 1998; Patillo, Weiman, and Western, 2004; Simon, 2007; Tonry, 1995). Third, studies conducted by ALC have produced information that has helped to identify the most salient risk factors for criminal involvement (Andrews and Bonta, 2010). Ironically, this research suggests the need for a multiple-factor approach to understanding offending rather than for a general theory approach. It is also the case that ALC theories and studies have, on some occasions, helped scholars developing interventions to know what risk factors to target for change (see, e.g., Hawkins et al., 2003). Fourth, the ALC paradigm has allowed criminology to grow and prosper as a discipline. ALC has encouraged scholars to value theory and to create a lengthy body of theoretical explanations that ll our books (see, e.g., Cullen and Agnew, 2011; Cullen and Wilcox, 2010; Lilly, Cullen, and Ball, 2011).

306

CULLEN

As noted, ALC also has provided a paradigm in which scholars could nd seemingly unending research puzzles that could be explored for publication and reward. As a result, knowledge production has expanded steadily and journals have multiplied to meet the supply. In many respects, the academic discipline of criminology has never been healthier.

REQUIEM FOR A PARADIGM: FOUR SOURCES OF CRIMINOLOGICAL BANKRUPTCY

As a kid, I loved funerals. No, I was not morose. But as an altar boy, we got to leave school, travel across the street to St. Gregorys Church, and serve at requiems. If I left early and walked slowly back to school after the mass was nished, I could miss almost two hours of classes. Well, this is a funeral that I am also happy to attend. I do not regret the death of adolescence-limited criminology. It has, as just noted, done much good and perhaps fullled its destiny, but it has reached its end. The ALC paradigm is intellectually bankrupt. I do not believe that my assessment is idiosyncratic. I regularly hear colleagues greet a publication of Criminology with the lament that the articles, although technically procient, are not so meaningful. We also decry the failure of criminology to be policy relevantto make a difference in the world (see, e.g., Uggen and Inderbitzin, 2010). We know we are in trouble when we refer to our work as so what? criminology (Currie, 2007; Matthews, 2009) or as antiseptic criminology (Cullen, 2010). Although more may exist, I will offer four major sources of this collective malaise about our disciplineor at least about adolescence-limited criminology. ALC LEAVES OUT TOO MUCH In reading recent Sutherland Award addresses, I was not only impressed but also struck by how each one tended to identify something core about criminology that was not being adequately investigatedwhether that was emotions, context, or some aspect of life-course criminology. When taken together, these addresses suggest that traditional ALC is decient in important ways. It leaves out too much. This reality should not be surprising. When ALC embraced the search for an abstract general theory of crime, it chose to ignore the multiple factors associated with crime identied by the Gluecks and by subsequent researchers. Moreover, developments outside a pure sociological perspectivefrom biology to behavioral economicsdemand serious consideration in our understanding of crime. Other elds are illuminating new ways to see crime and new research puzzles (see Nagin, 2007). Put in the

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

307

terms of Kuhn (1970), the anomalies have become so extensive that the paradigm is collapsing.

ALC WILL NOT PRODUCE ANY MORE KNOWLEDGE OF VALUE: SOCIAL BOND THEORY AS AN EXEMPLAR ALC research has shown that major theories of crime have likely identied factors involved in criminal behaviorwhether that is strain, social learning, defective controls, perceptual deterrence, or other processes (see, e.g., Pratt and Cullen, 2000; Pratt et al., 2006; Pratt et al., 2010; Weisburd and Piquero, 2008). But this enterprise appears to suffer from diminishing returns. Weisburd and Piqueros (2008) examination of how well criminologists explain crime is instructive. Based on articles testing theories published in Criminology between 1968 and 2005, they concluded that the amount of variance explained is often very low and that the models provide relatively weak explanatory power (2008: 453). Furthermore, there is no evidence of improvement over time (p. 453). Some of these problems could be inherent in the nature of trying to measure theories and measure crime. The other likely possibility, however, is that ALC has reached a ceiling in what the knowledge it produces can explain (see Weisburd and Piquero, 2008). This reality is exemplied by the history of Hirschis (1969) social bond theory. This perspective, now more than 40 years of age, remains a vibrant part of contemporary ALC. In fact, it is likely the most famous sociological theory of crime in existence. But why should this be the case? In its four decades of existence, nobodyat least to my knowledgehas ever discovered the fth social bond! I also do not believe that any criminologist can reliably tell me which social bond is most strongly related to delinquency. Toward this end, I am now engaged in a project to decipher this mystery. Remarkably, three of my collaborators (Tara Livelsberger, Jennifer Lux, and Lacey Rohleder) have thus far found 201 studies and 47 dissertations that test social bond theory; they are still searching for more. We might expect that when a eld has produced approximately 250 studies, we should know a great deal about a theory in question. But this does not appear to be the case. In 1993, Kimberly Kempf undertook a systematic analysis of the extant empirical literature on social bond theory. She termed her review of 71 studies disheartening (1993: 173) and concluded that social control theory has not fared well (p. 167). Findings were often weak and inconsistent, but this state of affairs was caused by the use of diverse social bond measures and no coherent strategy for how to build the perspective theoretically and empirically. Criminology, Kempf observed, has not yet determined the capacity of this theory (p. 167).

308

CULLEN

Many years and many studies later, we might have anticipated that Kempfs (1993) wise advice would have been followed and valuable knowledge construction would have taken place. Or, in the least, we might have reluctantly concluded that this theory had now been falsied and needs to be discarded. Of course, neither of these has taken place. Kubrin, Stucky, and Krohn (2009) provided a thoughtful dissection of social bond theory. They admit that the perspective makes intuitive sense in that ties to parents and investments in the conventional order would seem likely to restrain delinquent propensities. Despite these advantages, they observed, equivocal empirical support for the theory is problematic, with longitudinal studies in particular failing to support the notion of a direct causal link between the elements and deviance (2009: 185). What does this short history of social bond theory tell us about ALC? I think it means that we have long believed or pretended to believe that if we went out and produced lots of individual studies, the empirical status of theories would somehow become known. But as the fate of social bond theory shows, this does not seem to be the case. It is the power and the tragedy of the ALC paradigm that theories can continue to ourish and inspire empirical test after empirical test, year after year, regardless of what the data tell us. Quite seriously, I suspect that we would be better off as a discipline if we called for a moratorium on studies of social bond theories, at least among our doctoral students. Make them do something different. It is instructive that after 20 years, Hirschi himself lost his attachment to his own theory and turned to self-control theorya life-course change perhaps instigated by a quality academic marriage to Michael Gottfredson!

ALC WILL NOT ALLOW US TO DO GOOD Given my long-term trumpeting of rehabilitation (Cullen and Gilbert, 1982), I nd it gratifying that the professional ideology of nothing works and impossibilism is losing its grasp on criminology (Cullen and Gendreau, 2001). I see a growing thirst among criminologists to do good in the world of crimewhether this is voiced by left realists and feminists or by those more interested in program evaluation (see, e.g., Daly, 2010; DeKeseredy, 2010; MacKenzie, 2006; Matthews, 2010; McGuire, 1995; Sherman et al., 2002). The difculty, however, is that ALC was never set up to provide policyrelevant knowledge. Theory testing using adolescents and self-report delinquency yields data only loosely coupled to the design of effective interventions. As a result, as scholars embark on public criminologyas they try to make a difference in the worldthey will nd existing criminology to be only marginally helpful in directing policy and, in particular, in saving

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

309

offenders from a life in crime. Roger Matthews (2010: 195) captured my sentiments in arguing that the steady growth of a criminology lacking policy relevance has created an expanding criminological industry that has become obese and is, as they say nowadays in ofcial circles, unt for purpose. Indeed, it is instructive that the best models for effective interventions have been invented by scholars outside criminologyespecially by psychologists (see, e.g., Andrews and Bonta, 2010; Henggeler, 1998; Olds, 2007). This reality is thus another reason why the hold of ALC is likely to weaken and why the paradigm is heading toward bankruptcy. ALCS OPPORTUNITY COSTS ARE TOO HIGH I am hesitant to tell others that they should cease publishing ALC studies. If this activity is enjoyable and advances ones career, then feel free to publish away! I may occasionally do so myself. But writ large, criminologists collective investment in ALC is not a good thing. It steals time and effort that could be devoted to more meaningful brands of research. This observation leads me to reiterate a core point of this address: ALC has had its day and has served its purpose. Doing more of the same should be discouraged.

EIGHT STEPS TO BUILDING A NEW CRIMINOLOGY

Being a criminological curmudgeon is perhaps the easy part. Mapping out a coherent vision for the disciplines future is more daunting. In fact, I have searched in vain for a label that would capture the essence of what this new criminology might be. Unfortunately, Terrie Moftt is of little help here because life-course-persistent criminology has no intuitive appeal. At this point, the best I can do is to offer a working title for a novel paradigm: Cullenology! This is stupid, or course, but also not far-fetched: After all, what follows is merely my best sense of where we should head. I can offer eight steps to enabling criminology to become more meaningful by moving beyond the prevailing ALC paradigm. I will do so only parsimoniously, with the knowledge that each step could easily merit its own essay. Each of the steps I will identify is different, but they share a common theme. ALC brought criminologists too far away from their subject matter: offenders and nonoffenders. Whatever else they might have gotten wrong, individual trait researchersfrom Lombroso and his Italian positivists to the Americans of Hooton and the Glueckshad a commitment to studying offenders up close and personal. In many ways, our eld has moved progressively farther and farther away from our subject matter, embracing abstract theoretical principles and the use of secondary data sets that measure most aspects of life with two-item scales having a reliability of .68. Criminology has become, as I have lamented, too antiseptic (Cullen, 2010). Contrary

310

CULLEN

to what Sutherland suggested, we need to study the concrete conditions of peoples lives in great detail. ACCEPT THAT LIFE-COURSE CRIMINOLOGY IS CRIMINOLOGY In his 2005 Sutherland Address, John Laub (2006: 241) advanced the argument that life-course criminology . . . provides a starting point for answering . . . prominent questions facing the eld. I wish to express Johns point more directly: Life-course criminology (LCC) now is criminology. It is not simply another perspective that competes with, say, strain theory or feminist theory. Rather, LCC should replace ALC as the organizing framework for the study of crime causation; it is obvious that we need to study what happens not only during but also before and after adolescence. I would submit that nearly all serious researchers already recognize that LCC is criminology. Two important observations follow from this assertion. First, I am not arguing that other theories do not matter. Rather, it simply means that they should be age graded, with the effects of their factors specied contemporaneously by age grade and into the future. Of course, Sampson and Laub (1993) realized this with regard to social bond theory, but they are not the only ones to have this insight. For example, feminists have focused on gendered pathways and on how early physical and sexual abuse can have short-term and long-term criminogenic consequences (Chesney-Lind, 1989; Miller and Mullins, 2006). More broadly, most theories would be enriched by being placed systematically within a LCC paradigm. Second, if LCC is the organizing framework for theory and research, our textbooks and the way we teach criminology should begin to reect this reality. Current textbooks implicitly are informed by a static, ALC view of offenders and their careers. They focus on standard theories and on standard crime types. Although a transformation of the textbook industry will not occur soon, we need to think about writing books and developing courses (e.g., Child Criminology) that allow LCC to gradually take over our pedagogy. EMBRACE BIOSOCIAL THEORY Every year of my academic life, since starting at Western Illinois University at age 25, I have taught my students Mertons (1938) typology of adaptations. I suspect that many scholars in this audience have done likewise in their careers, if not in this semester. Why? It directs no research. Its theoretical value is limitedand, alas, not widely understood: That is, Merton showed that strain does not lead ineluctably to crime or deviance but can have diverse adaptations. Accordingly, strain theory has a lengthy

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

311

history of trying to explain not simply the origins of strain but also the factors that condition or structure differential reactions to it (Agnew, 1992; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Cohen, 1955; see also Cullen, 1984). The reality is that we teach this typology because it is in every book and because we always have. By contrast, how many of us teach about something that offenders carry with them every day from birth: the human brain? I must confess that I do not. For most of my career, I have assumed that brains and biology did not matter. It never dawned on me that teaching Mertons (1938) typology of adaptations rather than the brain was indefensible. Of course, I am not alone in this choice. It is a standard practice within ALC. As we move forward, however, we can no longer pretend that biology is not intimately implicated in human behavior and thus in criminal behavior. Knowledge about genes and how brains operate is exploding, and it is inuencing other social scientic eldsincluding even sociology. Although we must be guarded against trait theories being used to blame the victimto excuse savage inequalities, as Jonathan Kozol (1991) calls them, from any role in crime causationthis is not 1940s or 1950s America. The context has changed, and we are far more attuned today to the risks of using biology for racist or repressive purposes. In the end, we truncate reality if we do not study what we all now know: Babies emerge from the womb with individual differences, which then inuence the lives that they will help to create. As Rafter (2008: 251) eloquently expressed this point: Today, new understandings of the complexity, exibility, and indeterminacy of genetic and neuroscientic development open the way to formulating new positions outside the old nature-nurture debate. We no longer have to pit nature against nurture; now we can picture the two as working together so as to achieve gene expression and produce the individual. We can now see that biocriminology itself indicates that ameliorating social environments is the most effective of all anticrime measures. EXPLORE HOW INDIVIDUALS TRAVEL THROUGH CONTEXTS As a sociologist, I am persuaded that social context matters. But as we have become more sophisticated in our statistics (e.g., the HLM revolution!), it seems that the amount of explained variation and the amount of our understanding of contextual effects have shrunk commensurately. It is possible that weak contextual effects exist because, in reality, individual differences are what truly account for criminal choices. But I think more than this is at work. Part of the problem is that context is undertheorized, so we settle for plopping all sorts of aggregated measures into our

312

CULLEN

multivariate, multimodel equations. If only implicitly, context thus is treated as a static domain into which individuals are inserted and somehow affected. At most, we manufacture interaction terms to see whether some individual-level variable and some contextual-level variable interact. The results are typically disappointing. I would propose an alternative, or at least complementary, strategy: exploring how individuals travel through context. The starting point would be human beings and not contexts; we would study context not from the top down but from the bottom up. The assumption would be that contexts affect individuals mainly because they are composed of people who possess shared beliefs (culture) and engage in shared actions (social constraints). Context is thus not so much a thing as a living entity that exerts inuences through patterned interactions. From an individuals perspective, he or she travels through different contexts over the life course and during any one stage in life (see, e.g., Sampson, 1997). Understanding how context matters thus involves following individuals as they are placed into, choose, negotiate, and are constrained by different social domains. I am convinced that criminology took a wrong turn in the study of context when it followed Kornhauser (1978) by reducing Shaw and McKays theory from a so-called mixed model (culture and control) into a community-level control theory. The unfolding of the systemic model placed attention on informal social control and on attempts to measure this by aggregating census data or other characteristics of area residents. But where did the individual offenders go to? Clifford Shaw (1966 [1930]) well understood the need to preserve the delinquent boys own story, which is why he collected life histories. These stories document how the youngsters commitment to crime increased as they traveled through the contexts of impoverished dysfunctional families, play groups, life on the street at early ages, delinquent gangs, older criminal clubs and groups, and correctional institutions. In these accounts, context becomes more concrete and its effect undeniable. More contemporary ethnographies tell similar stories (see, e.g., Kotlowitz, 1991). Elijah Anderson (1999) perhaps most clearly illuminated what I am suggesting. Youngsters from the so-called decent families live in a distinct cultural and interactional context. But when they travel into the street and even to school, they are in a context where those raised in street families and the code of the street prevails. As a result, decent kids choices and behavior are constrained. To be sure, all of the youths decent and streetare situated in a hyper-segregated neighborhood context shaped by larger economic, political, and structural conditions. But for kids who turn to violence, the contextual effects on their behavior are not distant but proximatefunneled powerfully through their cognitions,

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

313

how other youngsters think, and the situations they encounter in public places. UNDERSTAND CRIMINAL DECISION MAKING In his 2006 Sutherland Address, Daniel Nagin (2007) made a persuasive case for moving choice to center stage in criminology. Accordingly, I do not need to say too much here except to reiterate that ALC ignored this issue of decision making. In a very real way, ALC methodology necessitated this omission. Self-report studies are ideally suited for measuring the background rather than the foreground of crime causation (e.g., questions assessing bonds with parents or number of delinquent peers) and for measuring criminality or propensity (by including a multiple-item self-report delinquency scale with a high Cronbachs alpha). But this technology also meant that many other key features of the criminal act, not easily measured, were left unstudied. My sense is that the investigation of criminal decision making will proceed along two tracks: developmental and situational. First, there is now expanded interest in developmental neuroscience and how it affects risktaking behavior, including the choice of antisocial conduct, across the life course (see, e.g., Steinberg, 2008). Put simply, the salience of biosocial research and theory promises to enrich our understanding of why choices are made (Wright, Tibbetts, and Daigle, 2008). Within this framework, we can probe more deeply issues such as human agencyhow it emerges, is differentially manifested at various ages, and grows in its capacity to prompt change in offenders away from crime. Second, the growing inuence of behavioral economics also is likely to shape inquiry into how potential offenders perceive and are inuenced by situations (Nagin and Paternoster, 2010; see also Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). Although valuable, we must resist relying in this area exclusively on factorial-design vignette studies with intentions to offend as the dependent variable. Our best insights into how the decision to offend is bounded by situational factors have been drawn from research on recent or active offenders (Shover, 1996; Steffensmeier and Ulmer, 2005; Wright and Decker, 1994, 1997). I will return to this issue shortly. I would be remiss if I did not highlight one other factor that must be incorporated into our developmental and situational understanding of crime decision making: emotions (Nagin, 2007). Most criminological theories have been strangely silent on the issue of emotions (for an exception, see Agnew 2006). But it is now indisputable that emotions have strong neuroscientic origins and affect decision making, both generally and with regard to crime (Massey, 2002). We also have a long history within criminology of exploring how situational factors can induce emotions that lead to crime (see, e.g.,

314

CULLEN

Anderson, 1999; Katz, 1988). Finally, we need to recognize the importance of examining not only negative but positive emotions, such as empathy (Joliffe and Farrington, 2004).

KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT THE CRIME EVENT When I ask students about the components of routine activity theory, they immediately chant motivated offender, attractive target, no guardianship. When I ask them to name the three strains at the core of general strain theory, they look at me like deer staring into oncoming headlights. I would suggest that I would obtain a similar differential reaction from any group of criminologists, including this one! Despite this fact, most criminologists know a lot about criminality or propensity and almost nothing about crime or crime events. I was initially confronted with my ignorance when I read Gottfredson and Hirschis (1990) A General Theory of Crime and saw the power of their observation that the nature of crime (i.e., provides immediate, unplanned gratication that requires little effort or skill) told us something about the nature of criminals (e.g., impulsive and risk-seeking, versatile in their offending, and experience the generality of deviance). I wondered why I had not thought much about such issues previously. The scholarship of those who study crime events, including advocates of routine activity theory, are so neglected that Ronald Clarke (2010) suggested that they may wish to break off from criminology into a new eld called crime science. He is willing to leave the study of propensity to us and take with him the study of crime and crime reduction. In his view, environmental criminologistsas they are often calledhave led an uncomfortable existence on the edges of criminology for many years and are just now coming in from the cold (2010: 276). It is instructive that at ASC meetings, they are birds of a feather ocking together. Most often, they just attend their own conference that goes by the acronym of ECCA (Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis). If you have not heard of this society, it means that you likely know nothing about crimebut you should. Indeed, crime science relies on diverse perspectives to enrich our understanding of the details of the criminal event, seeking to uncover factors that can be manipulated to reduce opportunities for victimization. Scholars at times worry that such criminologies of everyday life (Garland, 2001: 127) might divert attention away from underlying issues of social injustice and be implicitly conservative because of a willingness to see offenders as the enemy. But crime science is ideologically neutral. Its premises can be used, for example, to understand and prevent the sexual victimization of

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

315

womenhardly a concern of conservative commentators (see, e.g., Fisher, Daigle, and Cullen, 2009). The mistake of crime science is to assume that motivated offenders can be taken for granted and, in turn, to give only marginal attention to the way in which criminal decision making is bounded by factors that offenders import into the crime situation. It is at this point that propensity (or criminality) and opportunity co-mingle. My advisor, Richard Cloward (1959: 168), avoided this problem through his concept of illegitimate means. He understood that engaging in a crime was a matter not only of the act being possible (what he called an opportunity structure) but also of acquiring the cognitions and skills needed to perform the act (what he called a learning structure). Access to the illegitimate means to offend thus had a situational component (the act was possible) and a life-course component (the actor had developed the capacity to complete the specic crime in question). My only point is that it would be a mistake to place criminal propensity into one eld (criminology) and crime events into another eld (crime science). The challenge is for traditional criminologists to put out the welcome mat to crime scientists and to understand that the future of criminology will be advanced by exploring systematically the nexus between propensity and opportunitybetween offender and situation. TALK TO OFFENDERS, NOT TO HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENTS As noted, ALC was built predominantly on self-report studies of highschool students. It is instructive that Sutherland (1956 [1931]) did not write an essay on the high school as a criminological laboratory, but he did on the prison as a criminological laboratory. It would not have dawned on him not to talk to offenders about why and how they committed criminal acts. Is there any special value, however, in talking with offenders? I could provide many examples of the salient insights drawn from such data collection, but let me discuss just one. It struck me that although I can supply no denitive total, self-report studies have been so plentiful that they likely have an overall N in excess of, say, 200,000 participants. What has this research told us about desistance? Not much. Now let me give you another number: 117. This number has resulted in a transformation in our understanding of desistance, leading to new theories and to new proposals for how to intervene with offenders called creative corrections (see Brayford, Cowe, and Deering, 2010; Veysey, Christian, and Martinez, 2009). Where does this number come from? Well, this number represents the total number of offendersmostly adult to aged white-male offendersinterviewed by Shadd Maruna (n = 65) and by John Laub and

316

CULLEN

Robert Sampson (n = 52). Based on these interviews, we now have at the core of desistance theory the concepts of redemption scripts and human agency (Maruna, 2001; Sampson and Laub, 2003). My advice: Go speak with offenders; you, too, might get famous!

REVOLUTIONIZE THE ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE I sense a yearning among criminologists to look out in the expansive sea of research studies and to have some guidance as to what it all tells us about crime and its control. But as a eld, we generally are not very good at taking all this knowledge and reducing it into a form where we can all agree on what we know and what we do not know. As a eld, we are sometimes closer to intelligent design, where belief trumps data, than evolutionary science, where systematic attempts have been made to organize what is known (Dawkins, 2009). In response, efforts to organize knowledge have been undertaken, bearing important fruits. I can point briey to the following prominent examples: Michael Tonrys long-running Crime and Justice: A Review of Research series; initiatives to show what works in crime prevention, most notably The Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group (Farrington, Weisburd, and Gill, 2011; see also Lipsey and Cullen, 2007; MacKenzie, 2006; Sherman et al., 2002); scholars taking stock of the empirical status of their theories (Cullen, Wright, and Blevins, 2006); attempts to compile the central conclusions of major longitudinal studies (Piquero, Farrington, and Blumstein, 2007; Thornberry and Krohn, 2003); meta-analyses and systematic reviews of criminogenic risk factors (Ellis, Beaver, and Wright, 2009; Loeber and Farrington, 1998); the construction of an evidence-based policing matrix that organizes evaluation studies and shows visually the most promising enforcement strategies (Lum, Koper, and Telep, 2011); guides by crime scientists, such as the series developed by the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, that outline evidence-based recommendations for how best to prevent specic types of crime and disorder (see, e.g., Clarke and Eck, 2005); and multiple-volume works devoted to synthesizing extant research on specic topics such as the National Institute of Justices Criminal Justice 2000 and the National Research Councils Understanding and Preventing Violence. Again, these diverse endeavors are welcomed and valuablebut they are not enough. They remain on the fringes of the discipline, read by a select group of scholars. Somehow, we need to revolutionize how we organize our knowledge to make it more accessible to all criminologists. I do not have guidelines for how this might be accomplished. But I can offer two ideas to get the ball rolling, so to speak.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

317

First, the editors of our major journals should begin to privilege articles that seek to organize knowledge. We now reward scholars for undertaking single research studies that present new information, which is why they devote their time to producing ALC studies rather than to organizing the extant literature. But as I have tried to show through my discussion of the empirical status of social bond theory, these efforts often lead nowhere. Of course, I am not trumpeting the publication of mere literature reviews. Rather, what I have in mind are sophisticated quantitative and qualitative reviews that derive clear propositions and establish on a given topic what we know and what we need to know. If journals are receptive to such articles, then they will be submitted! Second, I am most excited about this recommendation: We should establish What-We-Know Websites. Over the past three years, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Daniel Nagin, and I have been exploring the effects of imprisonment on recidivisma salient but inexplicably neglected topic (Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson, 2009). Cheryl has meta-analyzed this research, conrming the nding that prisons have a null or criminogenic effect on recidivism (Jonson, 2010). I believe that I have now persuaded her to start, within the next year, Cheryls Prison Website. My vision is that, among other related information, she would have on the website the updated effect sizes of the impact of custodial versus noncustodial sanctions. As new evaluations are conducted, authors would send them to Cheryl who would, once or twice a year, meta-analyze them and update what we know about prison effects. Writ large, this approach could result in numerous What-We-Know Websites on a variety of topicsfrom the empirical status of theories, to the impact of various risk factors on crime, to the effectiveness of specic interventions. Unlike published literature reviewswhich give us an account of what we know at one point in timethese websites would be dynamic, importing in and synthesizing new knowledge as it appears. It also has the potential to allow many scholars to participate in the organization of knowledge. Unlike journals, space on the Internet is unlimited. There are pitfalls, not the least of which is that the knowledge placed online would not be peer reviewed. But if ASC worked to set standards and train scholars in how to administer quality websites, these problems might be minimized. In any case, the pressure is on Cheryl to get this website up and running! Lets see where it might lead.

TAKE DOING GOOD SERIOUSLY There is simply no escape from the stubborn reality that criminal behavior will evoke criminal justice control. The question is whether these

318

CULLEN

sanctions will be exclusively punitiveas they have been disproportionately in recent decadesor seek to improve the quality of the lives of offenders and their victims. As I have argued, our disciplines embrace of the nothing works doctrine and impossibilism has compromised criminologys inuence on criminal justice policy and practice. We have contributed valuable work to knowledge destructionshowing what does not workbut have not done much to show what does work through knowledge construction. Lacking persuasive prescriptions for reducing crime, we have often surrendered the crime control arena to those with a ready-made solution to the crime problem: Lock up offenders for lengthy sentences. If there is one thing I have stood for in my career, it is that we should never, never withdraw from the policymaking arena. We must give answers; we must be about doing good where doing harm so often now prevails. The problem is that we cannot give half-baked answers when asked what do to about crime. I do not believe that most criminologists understand how difcult it is to design a quality, evidence-based intervention. I have come to admire my Canadian friendsthe late Don Andrews, James Bonta, and Paul Gendreaubecause they truly have taken seriously the challenges of interveningof doing goodin offenders lives (see Andrews and Bonta, 2010). Indeed, for over three decades, they worked to construct a coherent treatment paradigm (Cullen, 2011). I use the word paradigm because their approach involved the following: 1) a general theory of human behaviorcognitive-social learningwhich led to a set of coherent principles on how best to intervene with offenders; 2) an evidence-based understanding of the risk factors for recidivism that were amenable to change (e.g., antisocial attitudes); 3) an evidence-based choice of intervention techniques (e.g., cognitive-behavioral programs) that were responsive to and thus capable of changing these risk factors; 4) an evidence-based focus on high-risk offenders, showing that attempts to change low-risk offenders were often criminogenic; and 5) the development of technology capable of implementing their treatment model (e.g., the Level of Service Inventory offender-assessment instrument). Regardless of whether you wish to adhere to the specics of the Canadians paradigm, they remain exemplars in showing that successful interventions must be theoretically sophisticated, rooted in the science of offending, and use interventions capable of transforming offender behavior. As is warranted, their ideas are informing corrections across North America, if not beyond. By contrast, criminologists can no longer play at policy and practice, suggesting implausible interventions that will never lead anywhere or trying to implement progressive versions of boot camps and scared straight programs. If we cannot develop effective evidencebased interventions that are capable of controlling crime by doing good,

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

319

our collective irrelevance in policy and practice will continue. Criminology will remain a so what? eld.

CONCLUSION: CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

Edwin Sutherland was concerned not only with his specic research contributions and narrow career interests but also with the future of criminology as a scientic discipline. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that an address honoring Sutherland should be an occasion on which we, as members of a discipline we all cherish, reect on the status of criminologyon its past strengths and accomplishments and on its limits and challenges. John Laub (2004) wonderfully described how criminology has a disciplinary life course that experiences various turning points. But as John has also shown in his work with Robert Sampson, change is not inevitable. Even though I have argued that the ALC paradigm is cracking under the weight of its inadequacies, it is not hard to imagine that our general way of doing criminology could persist for another decade or two. For criminology to change, we must choose a different future. So, here and now, I am urging that we amass a large collective dose of human agency and turn in a different direction. Mostly, I am speaking to the younger generation of scholars in our eld. My generations criminology has done much good, but it need not be your criminology. Our contributions should be appropriately honored, but there is no obligation to show allegiance to our paradigm. There is much work to be done exploring new criminological vistasand fun to be had doing it. I trust that you will choose yourand criminologysfuture wisely.

REFERENCES
Agnew, Robert. 1992. Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology 30:4787. Agnew, Robert. 2006. Pressured Into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. Akers, Ronald L. 1964. Socio-economic status and delinquent behavior: A retest. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 1:3846. Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: Norton. Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta. 2010. The Psychology of Criminal Conduct, 5th ed. New Providence, NJ: Anderson/LexisNexis.

320

CULLEN

Barlow, Hugh D., and Scott H. Decker, eds. 2010. Criminology and Public Policy: Putting Theory to Work. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Reality of Crime: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books. Binder, Arnold, and Gilbert Geis. 1984. Ad populum argumentation in criminology: Juvenile diversion and rhetoric. Crime & Delinquency 30:62447. Brayford, Jo, Francis Cowe, and John Deering, eds. 2010. What Else Works? Creative Work with Offenders. Devon, U.K.: Willan. Bruinius, Harry. 2006. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and Americas Quest for Racial Purity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Chesney-Lind, Meda. 1989. Girls crime and womans place: Toward a feminist model of female delinquency. Crime & Delinquency 35:5 29. Clarke, Ronald V. 2010. Crime science. In The Sage Handbook of Criminological Theory, eds. Eugene McLaughlin and Tim Newburn. London, U.K.: Sage. Clarke, Ronald V., and John E. Eck. 2005. Crime Analysis for Problem Solving: In 60 Small Steps. Washington, DC: Ofce of CommunityOriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. Clarke, Ronald V., and Marcus Felson. 2011. The origins of the routine activity approach and situational crime prevention. In The Origins of American Criminology: Advances in Criminological Theory, vol. 16, eds. Francis T. Cullen, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Andrew J. Myer, and Freda Adler. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Clear, Todd R. 1994. Harm in American Penology: Offenders, Victims, and Their Communities. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cloward, Richard A. 1959. Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behavior. American Sociological Review 24:16476. Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin. 1960. Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. New York: The Free Press. Cohen, Albert K. 1955. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: The Free Press.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

321

Cohen, Albert, Alfred Lindesmith, and Karl Schuessler, eds. 1956. The Sutherland Papers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cole, Stephen. 1975. The growth of scientic knowledge: Theories of deviance as a case study. In The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton, ed. Lewis A. Coser. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Cornwell, John. 2003. Hitlers Scientists: Science, War, and the Devils Pact. New York: Penguin. Cullen, Francis T. 1984. Rethinking Crime and Deviance Theory: The Emergence of a Structuring Approach. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld. Cullen, Francis T. 2005. The twelve people who saved rehabilitation: How the science of criminology made a differenceThe American Society of Criminology 2004 Presidential Address. Criminology 43:142. Cullen, Francis T. 2010. Elliott Currie: In tribute to a life devoted to confronting crime. Criminology & Public Policy 9:1927. Cullen, Francis T. 2011. Taking rehabilitation seriously: Creativity, science, and the challenge of offender change. Punishment & Society. In press. Cullen, Francis T., and Robert Agnew, eds. 2011. Criminological Theory: Past to PresentEssential Readings, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Cullen, Francis T., and Paul Gendreau. 2001. From nothing works to what works: Changing professional ideology in the 21st century. Prison Journal 81:31338. Cullen, Francis T., and Karen E. Gilbert. 1982. Reafrming Rehabilitation. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Cullen, Francis T., and Pamela Wilcox, eds. 2010. Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cullen, Francis T., John Paul Wright, and Kristie R. Blevins, eds. 2006. Taking Stock: The Status of Criminological TheoryAdvances in Criminological Theory, vol. 15. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Currie, Elliott. 1985. Confronting Crime: An American Challenge. New York: Pantheon. Currie, Elliott. 1998. Crime and Punishment in America. New York: Metropolitan Books.

322

CULLEN

Currie, Elliott. 2007. Against marginality: Arguments for a public criminology. Theoretical Criminology 11:17590. Daly, Kathleen. 2010. Feminist perspectives in criminology: A review with Gen Y in mind. In The Sage Handbook of Criminological Theory, eds. Eugene McLaughlin and Tim Newburn. London, U.K.: Sage. Dawkins, Richard. 2009. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: The Free Press. DeKeseredy, Walter S. 2010. Feminist contributions to understanding women abuse: Myths, controversies, and realities. Paper presented at the Controversial Issues in Partner Violence Study Group, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Dentler, Robert A., and Lawrence J. Monroe. 1961. Social correlates of early adolescent theft. American Sociological Review 26:73343. DiIulio, John J., Jr. 1987. Governing Prisons: A Comparative Study of Correctional Management. New York: The Free Press. Ellis, Lee, Kevin M. Beaver, and John Paul Wright. 2009. Handbook of Crime Correlates. London, U.K.: Academic. Farrington, David P., David L. Weisburd, and Charlotte E. Gill. 2011. The Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group: A decade of progress. In The Routledge Handbook of International Criminology, eds. Cindy J. Smith, Sheldon X. Zhang, and Rosemary Barberet. New York: Routledge. Fisher, Bonnie S., Leah E. Daigle, and Francis T. Cullen. 2010. Unsafe in the Ivory Tower: The Sexual Victimization of College Women. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gaylord, Mark S., and John F. Galliher. 1988. The Criminology of Edwin Sutherland. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Geis, Gilbert. 2007. White-Collar and Corporate Crime. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Geis, Gilbert, and Colin Goff. 1983. Introduction. In White Collar Crime: The Uncut Version, Edwin H. Sutherland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

323

Gibbons, Don C. 1979. The Criminological Enterprise: Theories and Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goff, Colin, and Gilbert Geis. 2008. The Michael-Adler report (1933): Criminology under the microscope. Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 44:35063. Goff, Colin, and Gilbert Geis. 2011. Edwin H. Sutherland: The development of differential association theory. In The Origins of American Criminology: Advances in Criminological Theory, vol. 16, eds. Francis T. Cullen, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Andrew J. Myer, and Freda Adler. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Gottfredson, Michael R. 1979. Treatment destruction techniques. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 16:3954. Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi. 1990. A General Theory of Crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Avon Books. Hagan, John. 1973. Labeling and deviance: A case study in the sociology of the interesting. Social Problems 20:44758. Hawkins, J. David, Brian H. Smith, Karl G. Hill, Rick Kosterman, Richard F. Catalano, and Robert D. Abbott. 2003. Understanding and preventing crime and violence: Findings from the Seattle Social Development Project. In Taking Stock: An Overview of Findings from Contemporary Longitudinal Studies, eds. Terence P. Thornberry and Marvin D. Krohn. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Henggeler, Scott W. 1998. Blueprints for Violence Prevention: Multisystemic Therapy. Boulder: Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado. Hirschi, Travis. 1969. Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hooton, Earnest Albert. 1939. The American Criminal: An Anthropological Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joliffe, Darrick, and David P. Farrington. 2004. Empathy and offending: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Aggression and Violent Behavior 9:44176.

324

CULLEN

Jonson, Cheryl Lero. 2010. The Impact of Imprisonment on Reoffending: A Meta-Analysis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH. Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books. Kempf, Kimberly L. 1993. The empirical status of Hirschis control theory. In New Directions in Criminological Theory: Advances in Criminological Theory, vol. 4, eds. Freda Adler and William S. Laufer. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Kittrie, Nicholas N. 1971. The Right to Be Different: Deviance and Enforced Therapy. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Kopp, Marie E. 1936. Legal and medical aspects of eugenic sterilization in Germany. American Sociological Review 1:76170. Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner. 1978. Social Sources of Delinquency: An Appraisal of Analytic Models. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kotlowitz, Alex. 1991. There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America. New York: Doubleday. Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in Americas Schools. New York: Crown. Kubrin, Charis E., Thomas D. Stucky, and Marvin D. Krohn. 2009. Researching Theories of Crime and Deviance. New York: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientic Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. 1970. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. London, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Landis, Judson R., and Frank R. Scarpitti. 1965. Perceptions regarding value orientation and legitimate opportunity: Delinquents and nondelinquents. Social Forces 44:8391. Laub, John H. 2002. Introduction: The life and work of Travis Hirschi. In The Craft of Criminology: Selected Papers, Travis Hirschi. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

325

Laub, John H. 2004. The life course of criminology in the United States: The American Society of Criminology 2003 Presidential Address. Criminology 42:126. Laub, John H. 2006. Edwin H. Sutherland and the Michael-Adler report: Searching for the soul of criminologyThe American Society of Criminology 2005 Sutherland Address. Criminology 44: 23557. Laub, John H., and Robert J. Sampson. 1991. The Sutherland-Glueck debate: On the sociology of criminological knowledge. American Journal of Sociology 96:140240. Laub, John H., and Robert J. Sampson. 2003. Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loeber, Rolf, and David P. Farrington, eds. 1998. Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lilly, J. Robert, Francis T. Cullen, and Richard A. Ball. 2011. Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences, 5th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lipsey, Mark W., and Francis T. Cullen. 2007. The effectiveness of correctional rehabilitation: A review of systematic reviews. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3:297320. Lum, Cynthia, Christopher S. Koper, and Cody W. Telep. 2011. The evidence-based policing matrix. Journal of Experimental Criminology 7:326. MacKenzie, Doris Layton. 2006. What Works in Corrections: Reducing the Criminal Activities of Offenders and Delinquents. New York: Cambridge University Press. Maruna, Shadd. 2001. Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Martinson, Robert. 1974. What works? Questions and answers about prison reform. The Public Interest 35:2254. Massey, Douglas S. 2002. A brief history of human society: The origin and role of emotion in social life: 2001 presidential address. American Sociological Review 67:119.

326

CULLEN

Matthews, Roger. 2009. Beyond so what criminology: Rediscovering realism. Theoretical Criminology 13:34162. Matthews, Roger. 2010. Realist criminology revisited. In The Sage Handbook of Criminological Theory, eds. Eugene McLaughlin and Tim Newburn. London, U.K.: Sage. Matza, David. 1964. Delinquency and Drift. New York: Wiley. McGuire, James, ed. 1995. What Works: Reducing Offending. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley. Merton, Robert K. 1938. Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review 3:67282. Merton, Robert K. 1995. Opportunity structure: The emergence, diffusion, and differentiation of a sociological concept, 1930s-1950s. In The Legacy of Anomie Theory: Advances in Criminological Theory, vol. 6, eds. Freda Adler and William S. Laufer. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Merton, Robert K., and M. F. Ashley-Montagu. 1940. Crime and the anthropologist. American Anthropologist 42:384408. Miller, Jody, and Christopher W. Mullins. 2006. The status of feminist theory. In Taking Stock: The Status of Criminological TheoryAdvances in Criminological Theory, vol. 15, eds. Francis T. Cullen, John Paul Wright, and Kristie R. Blevins. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Miller, Walter B. 1958. Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues 14:519. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Moftt, Terrie E. 1993. Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review 100:674701. Nagin, Daniel S. 2007. Moving choice to center stage in criminological research and theoryThe American Society of Criminology 2006 Sutherland Address. Criminology 45:25972. Nagin, Daniel S., Francis T. Cullen, and Cheryl Lero Jonson. 2009. Imprisonment and reoffending. In Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 38, ed. Michael Tonry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

327

Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster. 2010. Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral economics and crime. In Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory, eds. Francis T. Cullen and Pamela Wilcox. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nye, F. Ivan. 1958. Family Relationships and Delinquency Behavior. New York: Wiley. Nye, F. Ivan, and James F. Short, Jr. 1957. Scaling delinquent behavior. American Sociological Review 22:32631. Olds, David L. 2007. Preventing crime with prenatal and infancy support of parents: The Nurse-Family Partnership. Victims & Offenders 2:20525. Patillo, Mary, David Weiman, and Bruce Western, eds. 2004. Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Patterson, James T. 1996. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945 1974. New York: Oxford University Press. Piquero, Alex R., David P. Farrington, and Alfred Blumstein. 2007. Key Issues in Criminal Career Research: New Analyses of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Platt, Anthony R. 1969. The Child Savers: The Invention of Juvenile Delinquency. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pratt, Travis C., and Francis T. Cullen. 2000. The empirical status of Gottfredson and Hirschis general theory of crime: A meta-analysis. Criminology 38:93164. Pratt, Travis C., Francis T. Cullen, Kristie R. Blevins, Leah E. Daigle, and Tamara D. Madensen. 2006. The empirical status of deterrence theory: A meta-analysis. In Taking Stock: The Status of Criminological TheoryAdvances in Criminological Theory, vol. 15, eds. Francis T. Cullen, John Paul Wright, and Kristie R. Blevins. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Pratt, Travis C., Francis T. Cullen, Christine S. Sellers, L. Thomas Winfree, Jr., Tamara D. Madensen, Leah E. Daigle, Noelle E. Fearn, and Jacinta M. Gau. 2010. The empirical status of social learning theory: A metaanalysis. Justice Quarterly 27:765802. Quinney, Richard. 1970. The Social Reality of Crime. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Rafter, Nicole. 2008. The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime. New York: New York University Press.

328

CULLEN

Rafter, Nicole. 2010. Silence and memory in criminologyThe American Society of Criminology 2009 Sutherland Address. Criminology 48:339 55. Reiss, Albert J., Jr., and A. Lewis Rhodes. 1964. An empirical test of differential association theory. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 1:518. Rothman, David J. 1980. Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Sampson, Robert J. 1997. The embeddedness of child and adolescent development: A community-level perspective on urban violence. In Violence and Childhood in the Inner City, ed. Joan McCord. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub. 1993. Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shaw, Clifford R. 1966 [1930]. The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boys Own Story. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sheptycki, James. 2010. Edwin Sutherland (19831950). In Fifty Key Thinkers in Criminology, eds. Keith Hayward, Shadd Maruna, and Jayne Mooney. London, U.K.: Routledge. Sherman, Lawrence W. 1993. Why crime control is not reactionary. In Police Innovation and Control of the Police, eds. David Weisburd and Craig Uchida. New York: Springer-Verlag. Sherman, Lawrence W., David P. Farrington, Brandon C. Welsh, and Doris Layton MacKenzie, eds. 2002. Evidence-Based Crime Prevention. New York: Routledge. Short, James F., Jr. 1957. Differential association and delinquency. Social Problems 4:23339. Short, James F., Jr., Ramon Rivera, and Ray A. Tennyson. 1965. Perceived opportunity, gang membership, and delinquency. American Sociological Review 30:5667. Shover, Neal. 1996. Great Pretenders: Pursuits and Careers of Persistent Thieves. Boulder, CO: Westview. Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

329

Snodgrass, Jon Dundee. 1972. The American Criminological Tradition: Portraits of the Men and Ideology in a Discipline. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer. 2005. Confessions of a Dying Thief: Understanding Criminal Careers and Illegal Enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Steinberg, Laurence. 2008. A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review 28:78106. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1964. Rebellion in a High School. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1929. Edward Cary Hayes, 18681928. American Journal of Sociology 35:9399. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1937. The Professional Thief: By a Professional Thief. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1939. Principles of Criminology, 3rd ed. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1940. White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review 5:112. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1949. White Collar Crime. New York: Dryden Press. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1956 [1931]. The prison as a criminological laboratory. In The Sutherland Papers, eds. Albert Cohen, Alfred Lindesmith, and Karl Schuessler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1956 [19321933]. The Michael-Adler report. In The Sutherland Papers, eds. Albert Cohen, Alfred Lindesmith, and Karl Schuessler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1956 [1939]. The American Criminal and Crime and the Man. In The Sutherland Papers, eds. Albert Cohen, Alfred Lindesmith, and Karl Schuessler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1956 [1942]. Development of the theory. In The Sutherland Papers, eds. Albert Cohen, Alfred Lindesmith, and Karl Schuessler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza. 1957. Techniques of neutralization. American Sociological Review 39:1826.

330

CULLEN

Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thornberry, Terence P., and Marvin D. Krohn, eds. 2003. Taking Stock of Delinquency: An Overview of Findings from Contemporary Longitudinal Studies. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Tonry, Michael. 1995. Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Tonry, Michael. 2010. Public criminology and evidence-based policy. Criminology & Public Policy 9:78397. Uggen, Christopher, and Michelle Inderbitzin. 2010. Public criminologies. Criminology & Public Policy 9:72549. Veysey, Bonita M., Johnna Christian, and Damian J. Martinez, eds. 2009. How Offenders Transform Their Lives. Devon, U.K.: Willan. Weisburd, David, and Alex R. Piquero. 2008. How well do criminologists explain crime? Statistical modeling in published studies. In Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 37, ed. Michael Tonry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wright, John Paul, Stephen G. Tibbetts, and Leah E. Daigle. 2008. Criminals in the Making: Criminality Across the Life Course. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wright, Richard T., and Scott H. Decker. 1994. Burglars on the Job: Streetlife and Residential Break-Ins. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Wright, Richard T., and Scott H. Decker. 1997. Armed Robbers in Action: Stickups and Street Culture. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Francis T. Cullen is Distinguished Research Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. His recent works include Unsafe in the Ivory Tower: The Sexual Victimization of College Women, the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory, The Origins of American Criminology, and Correctional Theory: Context and Consequences. His current research focuses on the organization of criminological knowledge and on rehabilitation as a correctional policy. He is a past president of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.