Social Control Theory - Criticisms

Criticisms

Much of the early research on social control theory is based on self-reporting studies. Critics of self-report data note that there may be various motives for disclosing information, and that questions may be interpreted differently by individual participants. Nevertheless, many of the conclusions are intuitively convincing, e.g. that individuals will not engage in crime if they think that this will sacrifice the affection or respect of significant others, or cause them to lose employment or their autonomy if they face imprisonment. Davies (1994 and 2004), reports that in late-nineteenth century Britain, crime rates fell dramatically, as did drug and alcohol abuse, and illegitimacy became less common. All of these indexes of deviance were fairly steady between World War I and 1955. After 1955, they all rose to create a U-curve of deviance, over the period from 1847 to 1997. He attributes the initial shift to adoption of a culture in which the assumptions of Protestant Christianity were taken for granted. Everyone at the time believed - at least somewhat - in a moral code of helping others. This belief was rooted in religion. The same social norms for the defense of the person and property that informed the law before 1955 remain the policy norms. Furthermore, the concept that people are uncontrollable and may offend against those norms in social interactions, cannot be explained by simply counting how many people practice the golden rule (see the general discussion in Braithwaite: 1989).