Last Updated on September 12, 2026 by Karl Thompson
‘Social control’ theory sees crime as a result of social institutions losing control over individuals. Weak institutions — certain types of families, the breakdown of local communities, and the breakdown of trust in government and the police — are all linked to higher crime rates.
Control theory doesn’t so much ask “why do they do it?”. The question control theorists ask is “why don’t we do it?”
This post covers Hirschi’s social bond theory, the self-control theory he later developed with Gottfredson, the feminist and life-course developments of control theory, supporting evidence and criticisms.
A note on names before we start. Control theory is the broad tradition. Hirschi’s specific 1969 theory is properly called social bond theory, and the four items below are the elements of the social bond. You will see them called “bonds of attachment” in British textbooks — that phrasing is a little muddled, since attachment is one of the four rather than the name for all of them. Examiners accept either, but social bond theory is what the wider literature uses.
Control Theory: Key Points
- Most people don’t commit crime because they are firmly attached to and controlled by social institutions.
- Crime occurs when an individual’s attachment to social institutions is weakened.
- The fewer family, work and other social commitments an individual has, the more likely they are to commit crime.
- Thus the unemployed, the young, and men should be more likely to commit crime.
- This theory cannot explain domestic violence or corporate and state crime.
- It remains one of the simplest theories of crime today.
Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory (1969)
‘Delinquent acts result when the individual’s bond to society is weak or broken’ (1969: 16)
Hirschi, T. (1969) Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Travis Hirschi argued that criminal activity occurs when an individual’s attachment to society is weakened. That attachment depends on the strength of the social bond holding people to society, which has four elements: attachment, commitment, involvement and belief.
- Attachment — a person’s sensitivity to the opinions of others.
- Commitment — flowing from an investment of time, energy and reputation in conformity.
- Involvement — stemming from engrossment in conventional activity.
- Belief — a person’s conviction that they should obey the legal rules.
Note what the theory assumes. Hirschi’s starting point is that everyone would offend given the opportunity, because crime is often quick, easy and rewarding. What varies between people is not motivation but restraint. That is the reverse of Merton, who assumes the motivation is what needs explaining — and it is why control theory is a different kind of theory rather than simply a later functionalist one.
Hirschi tested the argument on self-report data from around 4,000 school students in Richmond, California — asking young people directly about their own offending rather than relying on police statistics. All four elements predicted delinquency, and the four together predicted it better than any one alone.
Gottfredson and Hirschi: Self-Control Theory (1990)
Hirschi later developed a second and different theory with Michael Gottfredson, and the two are frequently confused.
In A General Theory of Crime (1990) they dropped the social bond entirely. In its place they argued that crime flows from low self-control, formed in early childhood and largely fixed thereafter. Crime provides immediate gratification of desires, which appeals to those who cannot postpone pleasure.
In the main it requires little skill or planning, and it can be intrinsically enjoyable because it involves exercising cunning, agility, deception or power. It requires a lack of sympathy for the victim, and it does not provide the long-term benefits that come from more orthodox careers.
Crime, on this account, is committed by those who are impulsive, insensitive and short-sighted — and the same traits produce a range of analogous behaviours such as heavy drinking, smoking and accidents.
The two theories disagree about something important. Social bond theory says restraint is social and changeable — bonds thicken when you get a job or a partner, which is why most offending stops in the mid-twenties. Self-control theory says the relevant trait is individual and fixed early, which implies it should not change at all. If an exam question asks about “Hirschi’s theory” it almost always means the 1969 social bond theory, but knowing the difference is a straightforward way to show wider reading.
Who commits crime according to control theory?
According to this theory one would predict the ‘typical delinquent’ to be young, single, unemployed and probably male. Conversely, those who are married and in work are less likely to commit crime — those who are involved in and part of social institutions are less likely to go astray.
behaviour
Politicians of all persuasions tend to talk in terms of control theory. Jack Straw, when Home Secretary, argued that ‘lads need dads’, and David Cameron made a series of speeches about the importance of the family and the problems associated with absent fathers. These views are also popular with the right-wing press, which often reminds its readers that ‘seventy per cent of young offenders come from lone-parent families’.
That seventy per cent figure is worth treating carefully. It circulates widely in press coverage but I have not been able to trace it to an underlying study, and a statistic with no findable source is not evidence. It is quoted here as an example of how control theory gets used politically, not as a finding.
Developments of Control Theory
Harriet Wilson (1980): chaperonage
Harriet Wilson researched socially deprived families in Birmingham and concluded that close parental chaperoning was the key variable in preventing offending.
Some parents were convinced their local neighbourhood was so dangerous and contaminating that they kept their children under close supervision. They escorted them to school, kept them indoors as much as possible and prohibited them from playing with other children they thought undesirable. Wilson called this practice ‘chaperonage’, and children subjected to it had lower rates of offending.
In short: parents who controlled their children more prevented them from offending. This is control theory’s involvement and attachment elements operating inside the family.
Hagan and power-control theory
Gender is the most significant variable in predicting rates of offending. Women are much less likely to offend than men, and feminist criminologists have tacitly adopted control theory to explain why.
Hagan, Gillis and Simpson (1985, 1987) developed what they called power-control theory. Their argument is that deviance involving fun and excitement in public space is more available to men than to women, because women are more subject to control at home.
This works in two ways. Women are less visible to formal agents of social control such as the police, so they are less likely to be processed formally as deviants or criminals. And women are more likely to subject themselves to internal control — less likely to engage in deviant acts in public because they are more likely to be shamed for doing so.
Hagan’s further claim is that power relations in the workplace translate into power relations at home. The more patriarchal the household — the clearer the distinction between male and female roles — the wider the gender gap in offending. In more egalitarian households the gap narrows.
Pat Carlen: the ‘gender deal’
Carlen’s ‘gender deal’ theory builds on the same logic. Women are more likely to offend when they leave the formal constraints of a traditional female gender role subject to male control — in other words, when the deal stops delivering.
This section is the bridge between control theory and the gender and crime topic, and it is worth carrying across into an essay on either.
Sampson and Laub: the life course
Control theory has also been applied to life-course studies — Sampson and Laub (1993), Crime in the Making and Laub and Sampson (2003), Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives.
Both works studied men over decades of their lives, examining how deviance emerges and why some men stop. They paid particular attention to family, friends, employment and military service, and argued that marriage, employment and military service can act as turning points in the life course. At these moments men develop new connections and new responsibilities, and reflect on their lives.
The study reinforces the idea that it is the fundamental, formal connections to society which usually prevent deviance.
Conversely, it can be used to criticise prison, which breaks men’s ability to form exactly those new bonds — and introduces them to other offenders, which can reinforce further deviance.
One criticism of this work is that it ignored domestic violence and offending within the military.
Contemporary supporting evidence for control theory
Evidence tends to focus on three problem areas correlated with higher crime rates: absentee parents, truancy and unemployment.
The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development followed 411 South London males, mostly born in 1953, from the age of eight in 1961–62. They were interviewed in person up to age 48, tracked in official records to age 61, and a further wave of interviews was carried out at around age 70. It found that offenders were more likely to come from poorer, single-parent families with poor parenting and parents who were themselves offenders.
Crucially for control theory, the study also found that marriage, employment and moving away from London fostered desistance from offending — which is Sampson and Laub’s turning-point argument, confirmed on a British cohort.
Martin Glyn has pointed out that many young offenders suffer from what he calls ‘parent deficit’, arguing that this is the single most important factor in explaining youth offending. He argues that children need both discipline and love, two things often absent when parents are absent. [Undated — source needed.]
Research commissioned by NASUWT, a teachers’ union, based on a literature review and in-depth studies of two schools in Birmingham and London, found that family breakdown and a lack of father figures could contribute to pupils joining gangs. Children as young as nine were being drawn into organised crime for protection and a ‘sense of belonging’ because of a lack of positive role models at home. Others were effectively ‘born into’ gangs, as membership was common among older brothers and even parents in some areas. [Undated — source needed.]
Criticisms of control theory
- Some crimes are more likely to be committed by people with lots of social connections — corporate crime especially. This is the most serious problem with the theory. Corporate and white-collar offenders are typically the most strongly bonded people in society: employed, qualified, married, professionally networked. On Hirschi’s account they should be the least likely to offend, yet fraud is now close to half of all crime the Crime Survey measures.
- Marxism — it’s unfair to blame marginalised people. They are victims of an unfair society which does not provide sufficient opportunities for work.
- Interactionism — middle-class crimes are less likely to appear in the statistics. In reality the attached are just as criminal.
- By focusing on the crimes of the marginalised, the right-wing elite dupe the public into thinking we need them to protect us from criminals, whereas in reality we need protecting from the elite.
- This may be a case of blaming the victim. We need to look at the structural factors that lead to family breakdown — poverty, long working hours, unemployment.
- Parent deficit does not automatically lead to children becoming criminals. There are also ‘pull factors’ such as peer group pressure.
- The direction of causation is unclear. Does a weak bond cause offending, or does offending weaken the bond? Being arrested damages relationships, employment prospects and belief in the fairness of the system all at once. Longitudinal evidence suggests it runs both ways.
- It ignores labelling. Exclusion from school removes involvement and attachment simultaneously, so bond strength may be an effect of official reaction as much as a cause of offending.
Control theory and the current figures (2026 update)
Control theory predicts that as commitment and involvement weaken, offending rises. The last few years have run the other way, and it is worth being honest about that.
Youth worklessness has risen sharply. According to the House of Commons Library, 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 were NEET in April to June 2026 (13.0%), having passed a million in the first quarter of 2026 for the first time since 2013. The government launched an independent review into youth inactivity in November 2025.
Over the same period, offending has fallen. The year ending March 2026 crime figures show homicide at its lowest since 2003, and knife-enabled and firearms offences both down 8%.
Involvement is the element most directly weakened by being out of work and out of education. A million young people have less of it than they did, and youth violence has fallen.
HOWEVER, there is a defence, and it is a good one. The bond has four elements, not one. Attachment and belief may have strengthened even as involvement weakened — young people today drink less and take fewer drugs than any recent generation. Drug use among 16–24 year olds has fallen from 31.8% in 1997 to 15.1% in the year to March 2025, and the proportion of 16–24 year old men binge drinking fell from 37% in 1998 to 17% in 2022, while the figure for men of all ages barely moved.
Whether time spent online counts as involvement is a genuinely open question, and a good one to raise in an essay.
Revision Notes for Sale
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Crime and Deviance Revision Notes – 31 pages of revision notes covering the following topics:
- Consensus based theories part 1 – Functionalism; Social control’ theory; Strain theory
- Consensus based theories part 2 – Sub cultural theories
- The Traditional Marxist and Neo-Marxist perspective on crime
- Labelling Theory
- Left- Realist and Right-Realist Criminology (including situational, environmental and community crime prevention)
- Post-Modernism, Late-Modernism and Crime (Social change and crime)
- Sociological Perspectives on controlling crime – the role of the community and policing in preventing crime
- Sociological Perspectives on Surveillance
- Sociological Perspectives on Punishment
- Social Class and Crime
- Ethnicity and Crime
- Gender and crime (including Girl gangs and Rape and domestic violence)
- Victimology – Why are some people more likely to be criminals than others
- Global crime, State crime and Environmental crime (Green crime)
- The Media and Crime, including moral panics
Signposting
Control theory is a major component of consensus theories of crime, usually taught as part of the Crime and Deviance module within the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.
The other consensus theories are The Functionalist Perspective on Crime and Deviance and Merton’s Strain Theory.
The Hagan and Carlen material above leads directly into the gender and crime topic.
Find Out More
A more in-depth account of Hirschi’s social bond theory.
Highly fruitful presentation