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| 101 7 Getting the Drift Social Learning Theories and Mystic River Social learning theorists argue that crime is the result of the same learning processes that are involved in all types of behavior. In their view, criminal values are learned mainly through associations with others, especially those who belong to deviant subcultures, groups that transmit criminal values across generations. This chapter focuses on both social learning and subcultural theories of crime, in particular on the work of Edwin Sutherland, the dominant figure in twentieth-century criminology and a man whose work profoundly shaped both types of explanation. Sutherland, who earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago’s sociology department during its early twentieth-century “golden era,” put forth a social learning type of explanation of crime that he termed differential association theory and claimed could account for every sort of offending. In this chapter we show how he came to develop this theory, what the theory said, and why it was criminologically significant. Then we turn to subcultural theories of crime, illustrating them and demonstrating how films have frequently repeated their key ideas. Our central example is Mystic River (2003), Clint Eastwood’s somber tale of a tightly knit working-class community, part of Boston but geographically and culturally isolated from it, where the abduction and serial rape of a child lead to a kind of fratricidal murder. We also include a section on Sutherland and cinema, showing how movies have echoed his work on professional and white-collar crime. In conclusion, we assess the current status of social learning and subcultural theories. Edwin Sutherland and Differential Association Theory Edwin H. Sutherland (1883–1950) received his doctorate in 1913, just as the Chicago school of urban sociology, with its ecological analysis of social disorganization (discussed here in chapter 5), was taking shape. Sutherland later 102 | Getting the Drift honed the Chicago school’s concept of social disorganization into a more specific, but still thoroughly sociological, explanation of crime. Without Sutherland, the nascent field of criminology might not have become a sociological speciality. After teaching elsewhere for a number of years, Sutherland returned in the early 1930s to teach in the Chicago sociology department, now one of the most powerful and creative groups of sociologists in the country. However, he was denied tenure, possibly because of a falling-out with the department’s chair,1 and left to head the sociology department at Indiana University, where he taught for the rest of his life. Under him the Indiana department became a national leader in criminological theory. In his account of the origins of differential association theory, Sutherland explains that after graduation from Chicago, he sometimes taught a criminology course but was primarily interested in labor issues until a publisher asked him to write a criminology textbook. For the first edition (1924), he drew on sociological principles but in an ad hoc fashion, without trying “to extend these sociological concepts to explain all criminal behavior.” When he published the second edition (1934), now titled Principles of Criminology , his friend Henry McKay “referred to my theory of criminal behavior, and I asked him what my theory was. He referred me to pages 51—52 of my book. . . . I assure you that I was surprised to learn that I had stated a general hypothesis regarding criminal behavior.”2 As Sutherland mulled the possibility of elaborating a general theory of crime, he became increasingly interested in the phenomenon of clashing cultural values. He was impressed by a student’s dissertation on crime in China, which “had the thesis that crime is due to cultural conflict.” About the same time Sutherland and his friend Thorsten Sellin of the University of Pennsylvania were asked to write a report on a key criminological issue of their choice. During a weeklong visit of the Sutherland family to Sellin’s farm in Vermont, Sellin recalled, “We selected culture conflict as the problem and spent considerable time organizing the data and problems of criminal behavior around that concept.” In retrospect, Sutherland saw this work on conflicting social norms as a prelude to his theory of differential association.3 By the time he prepared the 1939 edition of Principles of Criminology, Sutherland was ready to put forth his differential association hypothesis, but “I was reluctant to make the hypothesis explicit and prominent . . . for I knew that every criminological theory which had lifted its head had been cracked down by everyone except its author.” Not until the 1947 edition—published when he...

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