Criminal behaviour is learned in interaction with others, chiefly through exposure to definitions favourable to breaking the law rather than through deficiency or pathology.
Sutherland's proposition was that the techniques, motives and rationalisations of offending are acquired the way any other behaviour is, in intimate groups, and that a person offends when favourable definitions outweigh unfavourable ones. It displaced accounts based on individual defect and remains the basis of social learning theories of crime.
In practice
- A workplace where expense fiddling is explained to newcomers as normal produces expense fiddling.
- A trading floor transmits both technique and the account of why it is acceptable, in the same conversation.
- Further reading
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- Law & Politics
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- Competing accounts of how power works