Drift, Techniques of Neutralization, and Containment Theory

By the mid-1950s American criminology had two dominant explanations for delinquency and both treated the delinquent as, in some sense, a committed outsider. Classical school and deterrence theory pictured a calculating actor weighing costs and benefits, while the Chicago-school subcultural tradition pictured a boy raised inside a lower-class culture with its own values, in which toughness and defiance of authority were rewarded rather than deviant. Both views implied that once a young person had joined a delinquent subculture, delinquency became close to routine.

Gresham Sykes and David Matza found this picture hard to square with what delinquents actually said and did. Boys who had just been arrested for theft or vandalism still expressed shame, still admired law-abiding relatives, still avoided victimising people they respected, and still returned, days later, to ordinary school and family life.

If a genuine subculture with its own moral code governed their behaviour, this pattern made little sense; a committed outsider does not need to excuse a violation of rules he has already rejected.

Sykes and Matza set out their alternative account in a short 1957 paper, and Matza expanded it into a full theoretical statement in 1964. Their central claim was that most delinquents remain committed to conventional values most of the time and drift into occasional violations of them, then drift back. Delinquency, on this view, is not a stable identity but an intermittent departure that requires the offender to first talk himself around his own conscience.

This reframing had a second consequence. If most offending is intermittent and most offenders remain morally attached to society, the search for a general cause of delinquent conduct becomes less useful than a search for what makes drift possible at a given moment. That question is exactly what the five techniques of neutralization were built to answer.

The drift concept also reframed how criminology talked about age. Because most recorded delinquency is committed by teenagers who go on to live conventional adult lives, a theory that treats delinquency as episodic drift rather than as evidence of a fixed criminal character fits the aggregate data better than a theory that requires a stable delinquent identity to explain the same statistics.

Sykes and Matza proposed that a small set of learned justifications lets a person drift out of conventional control without discarding conventional morality. Each technique borrows a piece of legitimate legal or moral reasoning and stretches it to cover a case it was never meant to cover, which is why the excuses sound almost reasonable rather than openly criminal.

Denial of responsibility casts the act as an accident or the product of forces beyond the offender's control, such as a broken home, bad company or a moment of impulse, so the actor becomes, in his own account, more acted upon than acting.

Denial of injury argues that no real harm was done, treating vandalism as mischief or joyriding as borrowing rather than theft. Denial of the victim reverses the moral direction of the act by claiming the victim deserved it or that there was no true victim at all, a device commonly used to justify theft from a store or an attack on someone framed as having provoked it.

Condemnation of the condemners turns attention away from the act and onto the people disapproving of it, arguing that the police are corrupt, teachers are hypocrites, or parents took their anger out on the child first, which lets the offender treat the disapproval itself as illegitimate.

Appeal to higher loyalties sets a small, immediate loyalty, to a friend, a gang or a family member, above the larger demands of the law, so the offender frames the act as a duty rather than a crime.

None of the five techniques denies that the underlying rule exists or that it usually applies. They work by carving out an exception for this act, this time, which is precisely why they let the person return to full acceptance of the rule once the moment has passed.

The techniques also differ in how directly they touch the harm caused. Denial of responsibility and denial of injury work on the act itself, minimising either the offender's role or the damage done, while condemnation of the condemners and appeal to higher loyalties work on the audience, discrediting whoever might object or invoking a competing duty that outranks the law in the moment.

Sykes and Matza treated the five as a starting list rather than an exhaustive one, and later writers have proposed additions such as the metaphor of the ledger, in which an offender balances one violation against a long record of past good conduct, but the original five remain the version taught and tested most often.

A recurring question about the theory is when neutralization actually operates. Sykes and Matza argued it typically works before the act, freeing the person to offend without full moral cost, but they also recognised that offenders reach for the same justifications afterward to manage guilt and repair their self-image. Later researchers have generally found both patterns: neutralizations that function as genuine, in-the-moment permission and neutralizations that function mainly as after-the-fact excuse-making once an act has already occurred for other reasons.

Matza, together with Sykes, connected the techniques to a second idea they called subterranean values, the argument that even law-abiding, respectable society values excitement, toughness and a controlled disregard for property in specific settings, such as fraternity hazing, contact sport or a wild weekend before marriage. Delinquency, on this reading, does not need an entirely separate value system; it can borrow values that mainstream culture already holds in reserve for approved occasions and apply them to an unapproved one.

This matters because it explains why neutralizations feel persuasive to the people using them. An excuse works only if it appeals to a value the listener, including the offender's own conscience, already accepts. Denial of the victim persuades because the culture already accepts that some victims deserve less protection; appeal to higher loyalties persuades because loyalty to friends is itself a celebrated value, not an alien one.

Later scholarship extended the five techniques well beyond youth street crime. Studies of white-collar and corporate offending have repeatedly found executives and employees using the same moves, denying that anyone was really hurt by a pricing scheme, condemning regulators as out of touch, or citing loyalty to colleagues and the firm, which suggests neutralization describes a general mechanism for reconciling wrongdoing with a law-abiding self-image rather than a delinquency-specific one.

The subterranean values argument also helps explain why neutralization theory travels reasonably well across settings that look very different on the surface. A justification that leans on loyalty to family or community rather than loyalty to a street gang can excuse tax evasion, licence fraud or the concealment of a relative's offence in societies organised around extended kinship obligation, because the same underlying move, ranking a close loyalty above a general legal duty, is available wherever both kinds of obligation exist side by side. The content of the excuse changes with the culture; the mechanism does not.

Walter Reckless approached the same underlying puzzle, why most people in high-crime conditions still do not offend, from a control-theory angle rather than a neutralization angle.

Working through the 1950s with collaborators including Simon Dinitz and Ellen Murray, and stating the full model in his 1961 article, Reckless proposed that every person sits inside a field of pushes and pulls toward crime, poverty, discrimination, frustration, and delinquent peer influence among them, and pushes and pulls away from it, family attachment, legitimate opportunity and social reward among them.

Whether a given person offends, in this model, depends less on the strength of the pushes and pulls themselves than on the strength of the containment holding the person to a conventional path despite them. Reckless split containment into two components. Outer containment is the set of external structures, effective family supervision, meaningful roles at school or work, and a community that reinforces lawful behaviour, that constrain a person from outside regardless of what they privately believe.

Inner containment is the internal counterpart: a favourable self-concept, a sense of realistic goals, tolerance for frustration and an internalised commitment to social norms. Reckless and Dinitz's earlier research had already found that boys in high-delinquency neighbourhoods who nonetheless saw themselves as good, capable and future-oriented were far less likely to be officially delinquent than boys with similar backgrounds and a poor self-concept, which is the empirical seed the full containment model grew from.

Containment theory's distinctive claim is that inner and outer containment can substitute for each other to some degree. A young person with weak family supervision but a strong, insulated self-concept may still resist pressure toward crime, and a young person with a fragile self-concept may still be held in check by close supervision and strong community ties. Delinquency becomes more likely only when both layers of containment weaken at roughly the same time.

Reckless framed containment as a general theory of conformity rather than a theory of any one offence, which is why he applied it beyond juvenile street delinquency to questions such as relapse after treatment and resistance to peer pressure in adulthood.

The push-pull vocabulary was deliberately broad: pushes could include psychological discomfort as easily as material deprivation, and pulls could include the lure of a delinquent peer group as easily as the promise of quick money, which let the model absorb findings from strain theory and subcultural theory as inputs into the field rather than treating them as rival explanations.

Both theories have drawn sustained empirical attention, and both have drawn the same central criticism: it is hard to establish, from a survey or an interview taken after an offence, whether a neutralization or a weak self-concept caused the act or was simply produced afterward to explain it.

Researchers testing neutralization theory have found that offenders and non-offenders often endorse similar neutralizing statements in the abstract, which complicates any claim that holding these beliefs is what distinguishes delinquents from everyone else.

A related line of research asked whether neutralization operates before an act, as Sykes and Matza's original argument required, or mainly afterward, as a form of guilt management once the act is already done. Studies using longitudinal and vignette methods have found support for both timings depending on the offence and the sample, which has pushed later theorists toward hybrid models in which neutralization interacts with opportunity and situational pressure rather than acting alone.

Containment theory has faced a parallel critique about measurement. Self-concept is difficult to operationalise consistently across studies, and Reckless's own early work relied heavily on teacher ratings of who counted as good versus vulnerable boys, which risks building the conclusion into the measurement.

Comparative and cross-cultural tests have also questioned how well a model built on 1950s American self-concept research travels to settings where family and community containment operate through different institutions, extended kinship networks in parts of South Asia and East Africa, for instance, rather than the nuclear-family supervision Reckless had mainly in view.

A further limitation common to both theories is scope. Neither explains why some people encounter strong pushes toward crime in the first place, which is the question strain theory and subcultural theory were built to answer, and neither predicts serious, persistent offending as well as it accounts for the episodic, largely juvenile delinquency both were designed around.

Critics in the 1970s and after generally treat drift, neutralization and containment as strong accounts of how ordinary people manage occasional rule-breaking, and weaker accounts of why career offending develops.

Methodologically, most tests of both theories have relied on self-report surveys administered to adolescents, which raises a further concern: a respondent who has already offended has an incentive to endorse neutralizing statements regardless of whether those statements played any causal role, simply to present the act in a better light to the researcher.

Panel studies that measure neutralization or self-concept before an offence occurs are rarer and harder to run, which is part of why the timing debate in both theories remains unresolved rather than settled by a single decisive study.

Neutralization theory's clearest legacy is in the study of white-collar and organisational offending, where researchers have used the same five techniques to explain how otherwise law-abiding professionals justify fraud, safety violations and environmental offences without adopting a criminal identity. Because these offenders typically have the most to lose from a criminal self-image, the theory's emphasis on excuse rather than rejection of morality fits their behaviour especially well.

Containment theory's most direct heir is Travis Hirschi's social bond theory, published in 1969, which replaced Reckless's inner and outer containment with four measurable bonds, attachment, commitment, involvement and belief, and gave the same basic push-pull logic a research programme that could be tested with survey data rather than clinical self-concept ratings. Readers moving from containment theory to social bond and self-control theories are following the same theoretical lineage forward by roughly a decade.

Drift and neutralization also left a mark on labelling theory. If most delinquents are conventionally attached and merely drifting, then how the justice system responds to a first offence, whether it reinforces a delinquent identity or allows a return to conventional roles, becomes far more consequential than a subcultural account would predict, since there is no settled delinquent identity yet to reinforce or reject.

Taken together, the two theories shifted the central question of mid-century criminology from what kind of person commits crime toward what conditions let an otherwise conventional person commit it, and what holds most people back most of the time. That shift toward control and situational explanation, rather than a fixed criminal type or a rival subculture, runs through most control theory that followed.

The two theories also shaped how criminal justice systems think about diversion. If most young offenders are drifting rather than committed, and if containment can be rebuilt rather than only measured, then interventions that strengthen a family's supervisory role or a young person's stake in school make more sense than interventions built purely around punishment or purely around removing a person from a subculture, since there may be no settled subculture to remove them from.

Diversion programmes, restorative conferencing and family-based supervision orders used in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere all rest, at least implicitly, on this same assumption that ordinary social bonds, once restored, can hold most young people to a conventional path without further formal punishment.