DAT

• Edwin Sutherland suggests that the opinion of the people we care about has the biggest influence on whether or not we commit crime.
• Differential association theory, created by Cohen, suggests that criminality is participation in a cultural tradition and is learnt from the people around us.
• According to Sutherland, criminality and non-criminality is learnt from the people who surround us, a process known as socialization.
• Each one of us has a different set of people around us who socialize us, this is the differential association.
• Criminals are socialized too but the people around them teach deviant norms and values from the rest of society.
• The more people around them with pro-criminal attitudes and the more extreme those attitudes, the more likely the individual will go on to commit crime.
• Reinforcement in differential association theory works beyond approval, criminals often receive material benefits from committing crimes and might see these rewards as better than potential rewards from not offending in their community.
• Differential association explains both violent and white-collar crime.
• Sutherland's work was a complete rejection of the idea of born criminals, in 1930s America genetic ideas about criminality were used to perform racially motivated for sterilization.
• According to differential association theory, people are most likely to cause criminal offences if they're male and then late adolescence to early adulthood.
• There is no easy way to separate the genetic and social influences, people who are genetically likely to become criminals might seek out other people with criminal attitudes to socialize with, a process known as niche picking.