Causes of delinquency

Books

“CAUSES OF DELINQUENCY may mark a turning point in the study of delinquency. Mr. Hirschi takes issue with many currently popular theories and with much of the conventional wisdom on the subject. He shows, for example, that the lower-class child is no more likely than the middle-class child to commit delinquent acts; the broken home and the working mother have very little significance for delinquency; that delinquents are not, as has been contended, the products of their own culture. The author begins by describing history and content of theories of delinquency. In remarkably concise language he then sketches his own theory, which has the virtue of being in essential agreement with earlier investigations as well as the extensive body of new data presented here. Hirschi offers a rigorous definition of delinquency suitable to quantitative research, surveys the social distribution of delinquency, and then examines one by one and with reference to rates and kinds of delinquency, the important ties to society: