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As the twenty-first century begins, crime seems to be on everyones mind, and both the media and politicians are having debates about it. Today people are witnessing the first blow-by-blow nationally televised criminal trial in history. Meanwhile, politicians of every stripe are grappling noisily with how to fix their versions of the crime problem. In the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics annual editions the following official data is provided on the trends of criminal process since the early 1980 s.
In accordance with it, the adult prison population has more than doubled, to over 1 million inmates in 1994, while the number of people in jails and juvenile detention facilities has increased by over 200000 (in the USA). The proportion of prison sentences over five years in length had increased steadily in courts, and the number of prisoners on the death row has more than tripled, now it is approximately 4000 people. It is widely believed that social organization involved an integration of high moral, customs, teamwork and bonding, which leads to harmonious social relationships. This kind of group shows solidarity and homogeneous and traditional behavior. Many theorists believe that social disorganization exists in much of city life, and they made this relationship almost unmistakable. The city was used as a laboratory in which theorists studied deviance and crime.
The research was concentrated on disorganized local areas and inner-city areas of high crime, suicide, prostitution and other un excitable forms of behavior. They came to the conclusion that social patterns of urban environment produced social disorganization, which led to crime and deviance. Subculture theorists believe that the delinquent subcultures emerged in response to the special problems that the members of mainstream society do not face. The inability to understand violence and its wider implications is exacerbated by ignoring the lens of gender. In my opinion, public policy fails to develop a comprehensive picture of the damaging effects of violence and the cause to this is the separation of normal violence (the kind of violence that most likely to involve family, friends) from the public violence (violence that takes place in public places and it unexpected). This public-private division has blinkered social policy and confuses the understanding of the violence, its location in our lives, and its prevailing support within a wider cultural and political context.
In the 1960 s David Matza and his associate Gresham Sykes developed a different perspective on social control which explains why some delinquents drift in and out of delinquency. Drift theory, as it is sometimes called, proposed that juveniles sense a moral obligation to be bound by the law. These kind of bind between the person and the law most of the times remains in place. When it is not in place delinquents will drift. In Delinquency and Drift (1964), David Matza suggested that people live their lives somewhere between total freedom and total restraint. The foundation of his theory can be expressed in the following words: the very process by which a person moves from one extreme of behavior to another one is called drift.
Matza's view of delinquent drift goes some way toward explaining high levels of crime and includes the number of females who offend. In my opinion, David Matza has a point in developing this subject, and it is hard for me to reject his point of view. According to Sykes and Matza, delinquents hold values, attitudes and beliefs very similar to those of law-abiding citizens, actually they feel obligated to be bound by law. How then they can justify their delinquent activities? The answer may be that they learn techniques which enable them to neutralize such values and attitudes and drift back and forth between legitimate and illegitimate behaviors.
Such a theory suggests that delinquents disregard controlling functions of rules and values and use these techniques of neutralization to weaken the hold that society place on them. Crime is a product of uneven development in society, with change and conflict which affects the behavior of those within it.
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Research essay sample on David Matza Social Disorganization Drift
