New criminological perspectives on explaining crime and context

The key assumptions underlying strain, control, and learning theories of criminal behavior are similar, which is why they are sometimes integrated or at least interrelated in criminological discourse. Strain theories evolved from Durkheim’s theory of anomie: the individual’s disregard for social norms arising from the breakdown of social cohesion (Crossman, 2019). A breakdown of social cohesion can result from the ineffectiveness or the perceived illegitimacy of social institutions. Thomas Merton proposed that anomie can be exacerbated when individuals experience strain—or psychological distress—resulting from unmet needs, especially when those needs are unmet due to sociological problems such as inequality, injustice, or disparity.
Control theories posit a set of internal and external controls on individual or even collective behavior. Social institutions are assumed to serve as mechanisms of social control, also influencing individual behaviors via a series of real or perceived constraints. Like strain theories, control theories assume that social cohesion is important for normative behavior, whereas the breakdown of social cohesion leads to the disregard for the institutions and the norms they uphold. Without institutions or their overarching rules, individuals lack the impetus to control urges and are therefore more likely to engage in impulsive or deviant acts.
Learning theories assume that deviance is learned, either through basic conditioning or through modeling. Differential association theory explains social learning in terms of an individual’s subcultural alignment, as deviant behaviors are labeled as normative within some subcultures. According to learning theories, individuals model their behavior or they are rewarded for engaging in deviant behaviors by those they admire or respect in the community—including family members. While they seem unrelated, strain, control, and learning theories are actually based on a set of similar assumptions. All three reveal the importance of social institutions in establishing norms, values, and formal controls on individual behaviors. Similarly, all show that individual behavior is inextricably linked to social realities.
Researchers have in fact shown that there is sufficient compatibility between strain, control, and learning theories to combine them to account for and explain criminological behaviors or patterns. For example, Rukus, Stogner & Miller (2016) use strain, control, and learning theories together to analyze patterns of novel drug use among the LGBT community. Strain theory would show how members of a stigmatized group like LGBT engage in deviant behaviors like drug use, and that those behaviors are labeled as normative within the subculture. Moreover, control theories show how the subculture removes the institutional level controls even while those controls remain tacitly extant in the dominant culture.
An integrated theory combining strain, control, and learning theories can help explain some criminal behaviors but may not necessarily establish the three criteria of causality. Causality is too delicate an issue, confounded by individual differences and psychology as well as sociological variables. At the same time, integrating these three theoretical orientations does a much greater job at clarifying the causal variables than any one of these approaches on its own. The two theories that might be best to integrate for criminology might be strain and social learning, given the fact that control theories are not as relevant in an individualistic society such as that in the United States.
References
Crossman, A. (2019). Deviance and strain theory in sociology. Thoughtco. Retrieved from: https://www.thoughtco.com/structural-strain-theory-3026632
“Differential Association, Strain and Control Theories,” (n.d.). Retrieved from: julianhermida.com/contbondstrain.htm
Rukus, J., Stogner, J. & Miller, B. (2016). LBGT novel drug use as contextualized through control, strain, and learning theories. Social Science Quarterly. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bryan_Miller4/publication/308669239_LGBT_Novel_Drug_Use_as_Contextualized_Through_Control_Strain_and_Learning_Theories_LGBT_Novel_Drug_Use/links/5a579e46aca2726376b66832/LGBT-Novel-Drug-Use-as-Contextualized-Through-Control-Strain-and-Learning-Theories-LGBT-Novel-Drug-Use.pdf