Drift
Definition
A temporary, reversible state between full control and full freedom in which a person is loosely committed enough to conventional norms to feel guilt, yet free enough of them to occasionally offend.
Related terms
- Condemnation of the Condemners
- A neutralization that shifts attention from the offender's act to the motives and hypocrisy of police, teachers or other authorities who disapprove...
- Denial of Responsibility
- A neutralization in which the offender frames the act as caused by forces outside their control, such as a bad upbringing or...
- Inner Containment
- Reckless's term for the internal buffers, chiefly a favourable self-concept, goal orientation, frustration tolerance and internalised norms, that hold a person to...
- Outer Containment
- Reckless's term for external structures, such as family supervision, school attachment and community reinforcement, that hold a person to lawful conduct from...
- Techniques of Neutralization
- Learned justifications, drawn from conventional morality itself, that let an offender suspend the moral bind of the law before or after an...
- Denial of Injury
- Arguing that no real harm was done, such as treating vandalism as mischief.
- Denial of the Victim
- Reversing the moral direction of the act by claiming the victim deserved it or that no true victim exists.
Explained in these topics
- Drift, Techniques of Neutralization, and Containment Theory
- Drift, Neutralization and Containment Theory (UGC-NET Unit IV)Sykes and Matza's term for an intermittent departure from conventional values, rather than a stable delinquent identity.