Cullen 2010

BEYOND ADOLESCENCE-LIMITEDCRIMINOLOGY: CHOOSING OURFUTURE—THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OFCRIMINOLOGY 2010 SUTHERLANDADDRESS!

FRANCIS T. CULLENSchool of Criminal JusticeUniversity of Cincinnati

KEYWORDS: adolescence-limited criminology, criminological paradigms,organization of knowledge, sociology of knowledge

For over a half century, criminology has been dominated by aparadigm—adolescence-limited criminology (ALC)—that has privi-leged the use of self-report surveys of adolescents to test sociologicaltheories of criminal behavior and has embraced the view that “nothingworks” to control crime. Although ALC has created knowledge, op-posed injustice, and advanced scholars’ careers, it has outlived its utility.The time has come for criminologists to choose a different future. Thus, anew paradigm is needed that is rooted in life-course criminology, bringscriminologists closer to offenders and to the crime event, prioritizes theorganization of knowledge, and produces scientific knowledge that iscapable of improving offenders’ lives and reducing crime.

Born in 1951, I grew up at a time of major transition in American society.I spent my childhood in the relative peacefulness of the 1950s, attending apredominantly Irish-Catholic elementary school in Boston. With hand overheart and a small carton of milk in hand, we pledged allegiance to the flagflying just to the side of a photo of President Dwight Eisenhower—drinking

! At least in my case, it has taken a village to make a Sutherland Award winner—andso my sincere gratitude is extended to my family, friends in the field, current andformer students, and colleagues at the University of Cincinnati. Unfortunately,I have space to thank by name only those scholars who have been most instru-mental in shaping my thinking on the ideas in this address. They include MichaelBenson, John Eck, Bonnie Fisher, Colin Goff, Daniel Nagin, Pamela Wilcox, JohnWozniak, and John Paul Wright. Direct correspondence to Francis T. Cullen,School of Criminal Justice, P.O. Box 210389, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati,OH 45221-0389 (e-mail: [email protected]).

C" 2011 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00224.x

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our milk once we finished chanting “with liberty and justice for all.” Butin the eighth grade, in the fall of 1963, life changed. While sitting in class,we heard that our hero, John F. Kennedy, had been shot. Worried and indisbelief, we all marched across a boulevard to St. Gregory’s Church wherewe prayed he would live; he did not. In 1968, news of the assassinations ofMartin Luther King, Jr. and then of Bobby Kennedy dashed what hopesremained that a Great Society might be possible. My college years broughtprotests against the Vietnam War and events such as Kent State and Attica.I heard about President Nixon’s resignation, due to the Watergate scandal,while standing in the Columbia University library checking out books.

My life story is of little concern, but it did have two consequences onhow I came to see the criminological world—effects, I suspect, shared by anumber of those in my scholarly generation. First, the unique intersectionof biography and history sensitized me to the need to have, in C. WrightMills’s (1959) words, a “sociological imagination.” In its broadest sense,I was alerted that we were all prisoners of our narrow, taken-for-grantedsocial worlds. Thus, I came to realize that much of what I had believed—about trust in authority, the goodness of corporations, religion, genderroles, facial hair and hair length, dress and music, and on and on—had beendramatically transformed in the space of a year or two. For some reasonunknown to me, I had the key insight that, at least in my case, these changesin politics, culture, and cherished beliefs were not carefully thought-out po-sitions based on rational reflection but virtually inevitable responses to thesocial experiences that enmeshed the bodies and psyches of my generation.I achieved what Alvin Gouldner (1970) called “reflexivity”—the ability tosee oneself as a social product.

Second and closely related, in this context, I was receptive to the mes-sage that social realities are not immutable and completely objective butrather are socially constructed. Members of my academic cohort learnedfrom Richard Quinney (1970) the relevance of this insight for understand-ing crime; Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) broadened themessage to include social reality generally. Most importantly, it becameapparent that science itself was vulnerable to external influence. We hadbeen schooled to believe that science was a realm in which experimentsproduced findings that allowed for the incremental advance in knowledgetoward objective truth. Now we were being told by Thomas Kuhn (1970)and others that we had been duped. Nothing should be easily taken forgranted. Again, as Gouldner (1970) cautioned, we needed to contemplatewhy we, as scholars, thought as we did—how our theoretical beliefs andacademic practices were shaped by social context.

Kuhn’s (1970) work was critical because he supplied a construct—“paradigm”—that allowed us to organize and understand the operationof our scientific worlds—for me, the worlds of sociology and criminology.

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To be honest, I am not quite sure that anyone, including Kuhn who usedthe term to refer to multiple things, really knows what “paradigm” meansprecisely (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). We can perhaps begin to grasp itsmeaning by noting that it is not a synonym for “theory” or “model”—as inlabeling theory or strain theory. Rather, in a Kuhnian sense, the gist of aparadigm is that it defines for us ways of theorizing, ways of collecting dataand testing theories, and ways of organizing our knowledge. It involves aset of normative standards that tells us what is good research and whatis worthy of publication in our leading journals. As a result, it controls,implicitly at least, a discipline’s reward structure because adherence toparadigmatic norms brings publication, status, and career advancement.

The lessons of my academic youth thus have prompted me to be suffi-ciently reflexive to take a step back and consider whether our field has adominant paradigm—and, if so, what that might be. Some scholars mightclaim that the very theoretical diversity of criminology argues against anyone dominant paradigm. But I will beg to differ. I will try to outline thecomponents of a way of doing business and producing knowledge thatI believe has dominated criminology for a half century or more. Thosenot part of this paradigm thus often speak of being on the periphery ofcriminology and of top journals not welcoming their work. The details aside,they are correct in that they do exist in the margins of the field—howeverinvaluable their scholarship is. Indeed, their complaints are evidence thatan implicit or unrecognized paradigm rules our scholarly universe.

Unlike some scientific fields, paradigms in social sciences such as crimi-nology are not manifest—they have to be drawn out to become apparent.As a result, there often is not a self-awareness that we are part of the samegeneral enterprise. If anything, we emphasize our differences: I am a controltheorist; you are a social learning theorist. I think that birds of a featherflock together; you think that if you lie down with dogs, you get up withfleas. These differences are real and perhaps worth fighting over—as TravisHirschi and Ronald Akers have done cordially over the years. But in myview, they are arguments that occur within the same overarching paradigm.

My purpose, then, is to begin by identifying what I see as our disci-pline’s core paradigm, something I call adolescence-limited criminology.Of course, I am borrowing from Terrie Moffitt’s (1993) typology that in-cludes adolescence-limited antisocial behavior. My general thesis is thatthis paradigm coalesced in a particular social context—the 1960s and itsaftermath—and largely merged the criminologies of Edwin Sutherland andTravis Hirschi. I then argue that this paradigm, although producing enor-mous good, is now bankrupt, even if we do not realize it. Recent SutherlandAward addresses have hinted at this very fact, identifying key omissions inhow we now do criminology. I am less clear on where criminology shouldhead, for in many ways this is the task for the next generation to solve.

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But like a criminological Dear Abby, I will give some advice on what Isee as promising avenues to pursue. Most importantly, I will urge us not tocontinue doing more of the same but to think more boldly and choose adifferent criminological future.

WHAT IS ADOLESCENCE-LIMITED CRIMINOLOGY?

As the name suggests, adolescence-limited criminology focuses mostof its attention on those in adolescence—a period in life that is definedas ranging from puberty to maturity or as being in between childhoodand adulthood. Roughly, adolescence spans the ages of 12 to 20 years.By implication, adolescence-limited criminology pays little attention tochildhood and adulthood. There is no explicit statement that these timesin life are unimportant. If anything, there is an assumption that what isbeing witnessed in adolescence might have started in childhood and mightcontinue into adulthood. It is just that no data are collected on childrenand adults, and events unique to these time periods are not mentioned oraccorded any theoretical salience. Even longitudinal studies tend to occurwithin adolescence, allowing us to control for delinquency at time 1 whenexamining delinquency at time 2.

To constitute a paradigm, however, adolescence-limited criminologymust do more than study adolescents. In fact, it is marked by five corefeatures. For the sake of convenience, I will occasionally use the acronymALC to refer to adolescence-limited criminology.

First, ALC is sociological in orientation. Individual differences inoffenders—“heterogeneity”—are ignored, downplayed, or said not to exist.Efforts to show that offenders have criminogenic traits are viewed withsuspicion. Attributing such traits to biology is prima facie evidence that thescholar is racist, classist, sexist—or some “ist,” which is not a good thing.

Second, ALC rejects identifying risk factors and the epidemiology of crimein favor of applying and inventing new theories. Mapping out facts aboutcrime and criminals is not criticized but neither is it privileged. The weakknowledge we have about the nature of crime and criminals is ignored orincites little worry. By contrast, novel theories, especially if they identifyunsuspected or ironic causes of crime, are valued. Hagan (1973) called thisthe “sociology of the interesting.”

Third, ALC proposes that the hallmark of great criminology is testing newand/or rival theories. There is the assumption that these tests, which focuson the amount of variation explained by theoretical variables, deciphergood from bad theories. There is the assumption that the global effect ofindividual studies writ large—that is, when they are all taken together—isto tell us which theories merit our allegiance and which should be discarded.I suspect, however, that these assumptions are false.


Fourth, ALC embraces the use of self-report surveys as the standard tech-nology for testing theories. These surveys allow individuals—mainly ado-lescents who are old enough to complete surveys and congregate in places(mainly schools) where surveys can be filled out—to answer questions thatmeasure theories and to report how much crime they commit. Independentand dependent variables thus can be measured simultaneously—that is, ona single survey instrument. ALC scholars talk about how much we need todo field work, but then they typically proceed to download another data setthat uses self-report methodology.

Fifth, ALC embraces social justice and is profoundly skeptical that any-thing the state does—especially mass incarceration—controls crime. Beyondtrying to reduce state intervention into offenders’ lives, it offers no con-crete prescription for how to solve crime. There is a general belief that“nothing works” to change offenders or to prevent criminal behavior.Scholars who attempt to reduce crime through pragmatic methods at timesare termed “administrative criminologists” or “reactionaries” (Clarke andFelson, 2011; Sherman, 1993). Such derogatory labels are used becauseworking on behalf of the state to lower crime may make its power morelegitimate and effective. In addition, it may implicitly acquit an unjust socialorder of its role in producing crime. In the end, advancing social justice isthe only true solution to crime.

THREE SOURCES OF ADOLESCENCE-LIMITEDCRIMINOLOGY

For a half century, the argument could be made that adolescence-limitedcriminology was theoretically vibrant, ideologically important, and capableof generating tons of research. Accordingly, it was—and to some degreeremains—a powerful paradigm. It owes its basic orientation to EdwinSutherland, its focus on and technology for theory testing to Travis Hirschi,and its policy orientation to the social context of the sixties. We thus turnnext to how each of these factors contributed to the rise of ALC.

SUTHERLAND: THE TRIUMPH OF SOCIOLOGY AND THEORY

Contemporary criminologists are well aware of Edwin Sutherland’s en-during contributions to the field—in particular his differential associationtheory and his coining the term “white-collar crime.” As John Laub (2004,2006) pointed out, however, Sutherland’s influence was even more pro-found (see also Laub and Sampson, 1991). He played an instrumentalrole in defining criminology as a discipline that was, first and foremost,sociological and theoretical.

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Becoming a Criminologist

Contrary to what might now be anticipated, Sutherland devoted little ofthe first part of his academic career to the study of crime; he had, afterall, conducted his dissertation research on unemployment and employmentagencies (for accounts on Sutherland, see Gaylord and Galliher, 1988; Geis,2007; Geis and Goff, 1983; Gibbons, 1979; Goff and Geis, 2011; Sheptycki,2010; Snodgrass, 1972). He took one criminology course during his graduateschool days at the University of Chicago and then taught one criminologycourse annually, called “Charities and Corrections,” during his six years atWilliam Jewell College. As a faculty member, he published only a singlearticle, not in criminology, until moving to the University of Illinois in 1919.Little evidence existed that Sutherland was destined to be the most influ-ential criminologist of his generation (Gibbons, 1979). At this point, how-ever, his career—and ultimately the field of criminology—took a dramaticturn.

In 1921, Edward C. Hayes was Sutherland’s chair at the University ofIllinois and the eleventh president of the American Sociological Society(whose acronym later led to the word “Society” being changed to “Associ-ation”) (Sutherland, 1929). Then editing the Lippincott Sociological Series,Hayes invited his younger colleague to author a criminology text for theseries. Sutherland agreed and, not knowing much about crime, proceededto survey the extant criminological research. In 1924, J. B. Lippincott wouldpublish his 643-page Criminology, whose title was changed to Principlesof Criminology in subsequent editions. As Gibbons (1979: 47) noted, thisvolume “was the first attempt by an American sociologist to present asystematic and sociological examination of criminological thought.” It es-tablished Sutherland as a major scholar and, in the estimation of his col-league Karl Schuessler, “had the effect of binding Sutherland to the field ofcriminology, which he cultivated until his death” (quoted in Gaylord andGalliher, 1988: 53). Embarking on this new scholarly journey, Sutherlandwould come to grapple with two central issues—the resolution to whichwould push criminology in a distinctly sociological and theoretical direction:Do defective or pathological traits in individuals cause crime? And, is asociological theory of crime possible?

The Triumph of Sociology

First, as his book project was starting, Sutherland (1956 [1942]: 14) admit-ted that his “principal theoretical interest in criminology . . . was the contro-versy between heredity and environment.” As a sociologist, this concernwas understandable. Lombroso’s ideas might have faded in importance,but “Neo-Lombrosian” theories emerged that linked crime to other sup-posed individual defects (Sutherland, 1949: 103). At that time, Sutherland


(1956 [1942]: 14) observed that “the inherited factor had shifted somewhatfrom morphology, which Lombroso had emphasized, to feeble-mindedness,which Goddard was emphasizing, and inherited psychopathologies werebeginning to claim more attention.”

As his career progressed, Sutherland became increasingly hostile tobiological and individual trait theories. He offered withering criticismof the data sets—which typically compared a large number of inmatesto convenience samples drawn from the community—used to claim thatoffenders and nonoffenders differed in meaningful ways. For example,Sutherland (1956 [1939]: 275) offered a critical analysis of The AmericanCriminal in which Earnest Hooton purported to show the physical inferior-ity of offenders by comparing “approximately 4,000 persons with 313 non-criminals”—a sample that consisted of “146 firemen (in Nashville, Tenn.),of 85 out-patients from Boston hospitals, and 82 others (some of themmembers of the militia and other patrons of a bathhouse in Boston).” Withrapier wit, he concluded that Hooton’s book “is a monumental work insize, but unfortunately it makes little contribution to the explanation ofcriminal behavior” (1956 [1939]: 278; see also Merton and Ashley-Montagu,1940). These sentiments were echoed in his Principles of Criminology whereSutherland (1939: 116) concluded bluntly that the “Neo-Lombrosian theorythat crime is an expression of psychopathy is no more justified than wasthe Lombrosian theory that criminals constitute a distinct physical type.”Finally, his work on white-collar crime offered another opportunity to drivea stake into the heart of trait theorizing. With seemingly restrained delight,he pointed out that theories must be incorrect that link crime to “charac-teristics associated with poverty, including feeblemindedness, psychopathicdeviations, slum neighborhoods, and ‘deteriorated’ families” (Sutherland,1940: 1). These perspectives are flawed because they are incapable of ex-plaining “vast areas of criminal behavior of persons not in the lower class,”including the offending of “business and professional men” (p. 1).

In short, Sutherland prominently attacked scholars seeking to blamecrime on individual defects. In so doing, he created intellectual space forthe growth of a sociology of crime. His critical analyses also undermined thenasty policy implications of the more extreme versions of Neo-Lombrosianthought, which included eugenics. Although Sutherland (1939: 618) con-ceded that the “policy of sterilization may be desirable on general grounds,”he quickly asserted that “there is no clear-cut evidence that it will affectcrime rates. Criminality as such cannot be inherited.” He also doubted thatcapital punishment or prisons had any deterrent effects. Instead, he em-braced individualized treatment, rehabilitation, and prevention. Offenderswere not born criminals so defective as to be beyond redemption but ratherwere social creatures worthy of saving (Sutherland, 1939). Sutherlandthus helped to legitimate liberal reformist policy views that would reflect

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standard criminological thinking for the next two decades and, in someways, beyond that time.

The Triumph of Theory

Second, Sutherland (1939: 4) took on the challenge of developing adistinctly sociological explanation of crime, which he termed a “tentativetheory of criminal behavior” and which we have come to call “differentialassociation theory.” Initially, however, his review of the evidence for thefirst edition of his textbook led him to document the known correlates ofcrime and, in turn, to embrace a “multiple-factor theory” (Sutherland, 1956[1942]: 14). But Sutherland ultimately was dissatisfied with what we wouldcall today a “risk-factor” approach. In particular, he worried that establish-ing empirical associations did not illuminate why this was so. For example,“Negroes, young-adult males, and city dwellers all have relatively highcrime rates: What do these three groups have in common that places themin this position?” (1956 [1942]: 15). A more general theory was needed.Three circumstances, among others, helped to shape its development.

First, Sutherland came to embrace the need for a greater level of abstrac-tion in the explanation of crime. In part, he was prodded to this view by theso-called Michael–Adler report, a scathing critique of criminology authoredby legal scholar Jerome Michael and philosopher Mortimer Adler, whoasserted that “criminological research has not yet achieved a single definiteconclusion” (cited in Sutherland, 1956 [1932–1933]: 231). Sutherland (1956[1932–1933]) rebutted their one-sided assessment, but eventually he wasmoved to admit that criminology could not advance without a higher levelof abstraction that involved a general theory capable of accounting for allcrime (Sutherland, 1956 [1942]; see also Goff and Geis, 2008, 2011; Laub,2006).

His specific strategy for theory development was influenced by AlfredLindesmith, his sociology colleague at Indiana University, who advocatedthe methodology of analytic induction (Laub and Sampson, 1991). AsSutherland (1956 [1942]: 17–18) explained:

According to this conception, an hypothesis should fit every case in thedefined universe, and the procedure to use is: State the hypothesis andtry it out on one case; if it does not fit the facts, modify the hypothesisor else redefine the universe to which it applies, and try it on anothercase, and so on for case after case.

In Sutherland’s view, the difficulty with a multiple-factor approach is thateach factor is not associated with crime in every case. Thus, “some Negroescommit crimes, some do not; some people who reside in delinquency areascommit crimes, some do not” (1956 [1942]: 19). That is, “any concrete


condition is sometimes associated with criminal behavior and sometimesnot”—and, in turn, “cannot be a cause of crime” (p. 19). This led Sutherlandto conclude that “the only way to get a causal explanation of criminalbehavior is by abstracting from the varying concrete conditions things thatare universally associated with crime” (p. 19). Sutherland would proposethat differential association is this universal cause and thus constitutes ageneral theory of crime.

Second, as Sutherland (1956 [1942]: 29) readily admitted, “my theoryof differential association has been produced by my own differential as-sociations.” In Merton’s (1995: 5) terms, Sutherland’s theorizing was inti-mately shaped by his “cognitive micro-environment,” which refers to a localintellectual community that produces and distributes a set of theoreticalideas. In this regard, Sutherland was intimately linked to the University ofChicago, first as a doctoral student, second as a faculty member, and finallythrough enduring personal relationships. Not surprisingly, his search for ab-stract explanatory principles led him to conclude that “learning, interaction,and communication were the processes around which a theory of criminalbehavior should be developed” (1956 [1942]: 19). Sutherland added “cul-ture conflict” to this list, an essential factor because differential associationrequired at least two “different” cultures with which to associate! The largerpoint is that Sutherland’s ties to the sociological community at Chicagoprovided him with the scholarly capital to use in developing an abstractgeneral theory of crime.

Sutherland’s views on crime were further reinforced by his associationwith Broadway Jones, who Sutherland gave the alias Chic Conwell whenthey collaborated on their 1937 life-history, The Professional Thief: Bya Professional Thief (see also Snodgrass, 1972). According to Sutherland(1956 [1942]: 17), Jones impressed him that “a person cannot become aprofessional thief merely by wanting to be one; he must be trained inpersonal association with those who are already professional thieves.” ForSutherland, this insight had large implications. “There,” he observed, “Iseemed to see in magnified form the process that occurs in all crime” (p. 17).

Third, serendipity played a key role. In 1935, the year after the publica-tion of the second edition of Sutherland’s text, Sutherland was “surprised”when “Henry McKay referred to my theory of criminal behavior” (1956[1942]: 15). Because Sutherland was not aware that he had a theory, he“asked him what my theory was. He referred me to pages 51–52 of mybook” (p. 15). Sutherland had conveyed three hypotheses stating that in-dividuals could be trained to follow “any pattern of behavior,” that doingso depended on consistent influence, and that culture conflict was thecontext in which such influence—toward one pattern or another—occurred(pp. 15–16). Prodded by McKay and others, Sutherland devoted the firstchapter of the third edition of Principles of Criminology to a “theory of

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criminal behavior” that specified seven principles, including one that statedthat “differential association is the specific causal process in the developmentof systematic criminal behavior” (Sutherland, 1939: 5). The fourth edition ofhis text would list nine principles—the version of the theory passed downto future generations.

My review of the evolution of Sutherland’s criminology was not inspiredby the occasion—the Sutherland Address. Rather, my concern is to arguethat Sutherland played an instrumental role in shaping the discipline’sdevelopment toward adolescence-limited criminology.

First, Sutherland legitimated a hostility toward so-called Neo-Lombrosian theories that sought to locate crime in some defectiveindividual trait. Notably, Sutherland’s importance is not simply that hetrumpeted a sociological approach to the explanation of crime, but that hesimultaneously discredited efforts to link offending to intractable biologicalor psychological factors. In fact, it became a disciplinary truth thatLombroso was a hack and that subsequent efforts to resurrect his brand ofcriminology—one that attempted to study individuals carefully in hopes offinding traits that differentiated offenders from nonoffenders—was fruitlessand signified that the scholar harbored a distaste for the poor and forminorities.

Although he wore the breastplate of a value-free scholar, Sutherland hada varying affinity for different kinds of offenders (see Geis, 2007; Geis andGoff, 1983). In a sense, his differential association theory implicitly nor-malized traditional criminals; they were not pathological but on the wrongside of the culture conflict. In fact, Sutherland and Broadway Jones, his pro-fessional thief, “eventually became friends, corresponded with one another,and made occasional visits, after Sutherland left Chicago” (Snodgrass, 1972:255). He did dislike, however, unscrupulous business managers, membersof the professions, and politicians who used the mask of respectability tohide their victimizing conduct. Many criminologists would come to embraceSutherland’s sentiments, causing Kornhauser (1978: 201) to quip that hedescribed the “slum boys who become delinquent” as “nice friendly lads,available for indoctrination into the delinquent subcultures” but the “richwho violate antitrust laws, fraudulently advertise their products, and en-gage in many other wicked deeds” as an “abomination.” She then chidedSutherland and others in his crowd by saying that such views “are a luxuryaffordable only by professors who, in the safety of their studies, are immuneto grimy-collar crime” (p. 201).

Second, Sutherland made theory construction the sine qua non ofcriminology. Following Sutherland, the challenge for scholars was todevelop a theoretical perspective that could rival differential associationtheory. By comparison, devoting years to measuring offenders’ physicaland psychological defects was merely an exercise in uncovering “concrete


conditions” that either were not criminogenic or were mere correlates ofwayward conduct. Theory was the only way to explain crime and makecriminology a true science. By implication, Sutherland sent the messagethat theorists should occupy the most prominent places in our books and inour status hierarchies.

Sutherland’s Enduring Legacy

As Laub and Sampson (1991) argue, Sutherland not only shaped whatcriminology would become but also effectively knifed off alternative av-enues for disciplinary development. Most important, he took special painsto critique the work of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, whom he depictedas exemplars of the multiple-factor approach that was atheoretical anddevoted to looking for individual-trait correlates of crime. The enmitybetween Sutherland and the Gluecks was mutual. In the end, however,Sutherland easily won the conflict as criminology became an integral part ofsociology and the Gluecks’ work for years was relegated, along with that ofLombroso and the Neo-Lombrosians, to the criminological dustbin (wheretheir work would have stayed had not Sampson and Laub rediscovered theGluecks’ data and used them in their 1993 classic, Crime in the Making).In 1979, Gibbons’ slim but informative history of the “criminological enter-prise” devoted nearly 20 pages to Sutherland’s criminology and concludedthat he “was the most important contributor to American criminologyto have appeared to date. Indeed, there has been no other criminologistwho even begins to approach his stature and importance” (p. 65). TheGluecks received three minor citations, and barely five pages were devotedto “psychological correlates of criminality” due to the “paucity of attentionthat this question has received in criminology” (p. 216).

Regardless of the merits of specific contentions put forward by theGluecks, the neglect of their contributions likely had opportunity costsfor criminology. For one thing, their model of systematic data collectionon various aspects of criminals’ lives was not imitated by scholars. Putdifferently, large-scale studies in which differences between offenders andnonoffenders would be meticulously catalogued would not be necessary topublish in the field’s top journals. Perhaps most salient, this neglect meantthat the Gluecks’ insistence to start the study of crime in childhood and toextend it into adulthood could be comfortably ignored. Instead, as we willsee shortly, the field narrowed its focus to the study of adolescence, leavingunexamined what occurs before and after this stage in life.

HIRSCHI: PUZZLES AND TECHNOLOGY

Sutherland was not an adolescence-limited criminologist, writing littleabout juvenile delinquency because its origin “was simply one aspect

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of his search for a general theory of causation” (Cohen, Lindesmith,and Schuessler, 1956: 129). His major contributions focused on adults—professional thieves and white-collar offenders (Sutherland, 1937, 1940,1949). In fact, his interest in adult criminality was eclectic. As Snodgrass(1972: 227) notes, Sutherland “also kept files and in some instances wroteon such esoteric subjects as lynching, bandits and outlaws, Indian-landfrauds, circus griffting, kidnapping, smuggling, and piracy.” Nonetheless,in the decade after his death in 1950, the field’s concern turned decidedlyin the direction of delinquency, including subcultures and gangs, due tothe publication of Cohen’s (1955) Delinquent Boys, Sykes and Matza’s(1957) essay on “techniques of neutralization,” Miller’s (1958) attribu-tion of gang delinquency to lower class culture, and Cloward and Ohlin’s(1960) Delinquency and Opportunity. Matza’s (1964) Delinquency and Driftwould appear shortly thereafter. These works, bereft of hard data, wereexemplars in sociological theorizing on delinquency. Although about a halfcentury old, most remain staples of virtually all textbooks and readers incriminology.

The mere existence of these works, however, did not mean that mostscholars could simply run out and try to author classic theoretical trea-tises! Something else was needed—a strategy for doing theory in a waythat, for the typical criminologist, was within reach and capable of earn-ing publications. Here is where Travis Hirschi arrived in 1969 with hisCauses of Delinquency, a work that I believe defined the essence ofmodern criminology (see also Laub, 2004). In short, Hirschi providedboth a rich treasure trove of puzzles to be solved and the technologythat could yield publishable products. In so doing, he created fertileground for the inception and growth of adolescence-limited criminol-ogy. I must confess that thanks to Professor Hirschi, I became an avidparticipant in ALC, riding this brand of criminology up the academicladder!

Studying Theories of Delinquency

As Kuhn (1970) alerted us, a central function of a paradigm is to pro-vide puzzles to be solved. With no puzzles—or research questions—to beexplored, no scholarly activity can take place. When this occurs, scholarswill search for alternative paradigms that can provide researchable ideas,publications, and ultimately professional reward and advancement. Putanother way, paradigms that cannot guide publishable investigations willlose adherents in favor of those that can. Kuhn’s work thus suggests thatcriminological inquiry is shaped not only by the pursuit of knowledge butalso by crass career interests (see also Cole, 1975).


Hirschi’s genius in Causes of Delinquency (1969) was in creating puzzlesin four ways. First, he set forth a new perspective—social bond theory—that could be subjected to empirical investigation. Second, he clearly andparsimoniously defined the components of his theory—the four socialbonds of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. Accordingly,the relative explanatory power of each bond could be assessed. Third, heargued that he was proposing a general theory of delinquency, which meantthat scholars could explore whether social bonds had the same effects acrossdemographic groups (e.g., boys versus girls and African Americans versusWhites) and across social contexts. Fourth, and perhaps most important,he juxtaposed his social bond theory to so-called strain theory and culturaldeviance theory. In so doing, he identified for fellow criminologists a fertileline of inquiry: testing rival theories against one another.

But Hirschi did more than simply create puzzles. In Causes of Delin-quency (1969), he displayed a technology that could be used to solve puzzlesin a way that would result in scholarly publications. Ironically, Hirschihad originally hoped to use the Gluecks’ data for his dissertation, buthis request—communicated by Charles Glock, his advisor—was denied(Laub, 2002). As an alternative, Hirschi was able to participate in a 1964–1965 study of youths conducted by Alan B. Wilson, which was called theRichmond Youth Project. As reprinted in Appendix C-1 in Causes ofDelinquency, the “High School Questionnaire” extended over 50 pages,probing virtually every aspect of the subjects’ lives. Hirschi inserted a six-item self-report survey, drawing two items from a scale developed by Nyeand Short (1957) and four items from a theft scale developed by Dentlerand Monroe (1961). He then used items from the survey to measure variousdimensions of social bond, strain, and cultural deviance theories and to seehow they were associated with self-reported delinquency.

Hirschi was not the first to use a questionnaire to measure theories and/orto measure delinquency (see, e.g., Akers, 1964; Dentler and Monroe, 1961;Landis and Scarpitti, 1965; Nye, 1958; Reiss and Rhodes, 1964; Short, 1957;Short, Rivera, and Tennyson, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1964). But Causes ofDelinquency (1969) was a prodigious scholarly achievement; nothing likeit had appeared previously. It was as though one was watching the firstStar Wars movie after having had a steady diet of the original televisionseries of Star Trek. This enterprise was a whole new experience! Indeed,Hirschi showed the field how to define theories clearly and then how touse survey items to measure these perspectives. He also demonstrated howto systematically identify and then assess the assumptions of competingtheories so as to make a case for which approach earned more, or less,empirical support. In short, he provided a wonderful “how to” display ofthe technology of theory testing.

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In a real sense, Hirschi established the normative standards for whatwould constitute quality research. First, secure a fairly large sample of ado-lescents that can be surveyed using a paper-and-pencil instrument duringthe school day. Second, develop multiple measures and/or multiple-itemmeasures of theoretical variables. It is really good if this can be done ona new theory that has, to date, been under-researched. Third, include adefensible (based on previous research) set of items purporting to measureself-reported participation in delinquency. Fourth, conduct an analysis thatreveals which theory is or is not supported. Fifth, claim victory for onetheory (as Hirschi did) or call for further research (as most of us do). Ifthese norms are obeyed, the chances for publication—perhaps in a first-tierjournal—are high.

Completing the ALC Paradigm

My thesis is that although working independently and not sharing thesame theoretical views, Sutherland and Hirschi established the centralparameters of what I have termed adolescence-limited criminology. FromSutherland, criminology was to be sociological and theoretical. This meantdownplaying the study of multiple (risk) factors. Because the causes ofcrime were general, there was no particular need to study childhood or tostudy how what happens early in life might affect what happens later in life.From Hirschi, criminology was to focus on the rigorous operationalizationof theoretical variables. We could then rely on adolescents—convenientlystored in schools—to complete questions measuring how they stacked upon the theories and how much delinquency they had committed. Implicitly,this approach suggested that there would be no need to know much aboutthe nature and concentration of crime, to talk to active criminals, to studyoffenders in groups, or to wander around inner-city neighborhoods won-dering whether these contexts were criminogenic. Adolescents sitting in aclassroom, silently completing a questionnaire as they would any other test,could tell us all we needed to know about our theories.

The manifest function of ALC was to generate a rash of studies that,when taken together, could decide which general theory of delinquency wasmost powerful. But again, as Cole (1975: 183) noted, a paradigm must alsofulfill the latent function “to provide puzzles” and “to stimulate additionalscientific work.” Indeed, ALC would have fallen into disutility if not for thefact that it provided almost unlimited theoretical puzzles and a technologythat virtually any scholar could, with reasonable effort, employ. Until rel-atively recently, studies could be conducted using cross-sectional designs,essentially meaning that students could be surveyed at one point in time—often on a single day. The increasing requirement to use longitudinal data(so as to control for that damn time 1 delinquency!) has complicated mattersa bit, but the ability to simply download large adolescence-limited data sets


has more than compensated for this bothersome standard. In short, ALCremains salient because it supplies a safe way to publish lots of studies andto advance our careers.

THE SIXTIES: THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING WORKS IDEOLOGY

The decade of the 1960s began with enormous hopes, with the KennedyAdministration promising a New Frontier. Even after John F. Kennedy’sassassination, there were still expectations that a Great Society was possiblein which equal opportunity would be extended to all. By the decade’s end,however, these “grand expectations”—as Patterson (1996) called them—had not only been dashed but transformed into a sense of betrayal, mistrust,and anger. For criminologists, the special change in thinking came fromviewing the state as an instrument of progressive social welfare to viewingit as an instrument of coercive control. This cognitive transformation wasinspired by a seemingly endless roster of events that showed the state’swillingness to deceive and exert brutal power—from civil rights marchersbeing attacked by police dogs, Vietnam War protesters being beaten by lawenforcement officers, and students at Kent State and inmates and correc-tional officers at Attica being shot down by state agents. An unpopular warand the Watergate scandal only served to reinforce the belief that the statewas a conduit not for doing good but for inflicting harm.

Mistrustful of state power, scholars schooled in the sixties first attackedpolicies—especially rehabilitation—based on social welfare ideology (see,e.g., Kittrie, 1971; Platt, 1969; Rothman, 1980). They were wary of the widediscretion afforded to state officials to “save” deviant and poor popula-tions, which they believed was used ineptly, unjustly, and coercively. Afew of us argued—correctly, as it turned out—that a correctional systembased on social welfare and treatment was preferable to the alternative:a system that was shorn of any pretense of doing good and that was freeto try diligently to inflict pain on offenders (Cullen and Gilbert, 1982).Regardless, concerns about too much welfare ideology soon subsided ascriminologists confronted the reality of—and did their best to deconstructthe justifications for—a punitive state, a protracted mean season in correc-tions, and the policy of mass incarceration (see, e.g., Clear, 1994; Currie,1985).

In this context, criminology increasingly and understandably became adiscipline committed to knowledge destruction. The state was acting badly,and many statutory (e.g., three-strikes laws) and programmatic (e.g., bootcamps) initiatives were harsh and ineffective. Showing what did not workwas important. Unfortunately, criminology as a discipline went too far—throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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Thus, a widespread belief emerged that virtually all state-related crime-control interventions were doomed to fail. Some of us have called thisideological stance the “nothing works doctrine” (Cullen and Gendreau,2001: 321); Roger Matthews (2009: 357) termed this “impossibilism” (seealso Garland, 2001; Rafter, 2010; Sherman, 1993). In corrections, the notionthat “nothing works” to rehabilitate offenders was metastasized by Mar-tinson (1974) in his famous review of program evaluation studies. Scholarsquickly became resistant to contrary evidence that treatment interventionswere effective, employing what Gottfredson (1979) labeled “treatment de-struction techniques” (see also Andrews and Bonta, 2010). Concepts suchas “crime displacement” and “net widening” were commonly invoked toshow that interventions that seemed to work really did not due to untowardunanticipated consequences (Binder and Geis, 1984). Scholars also tookthe implicit position that prisons were beyond redemption and thus thatno efforts should be expended by them to make such institutions humaneand effective (cf. DiIulio, 1987). The only permissible position was to arguethat prisons should be used less often. They were not, of course, and crim-inologists surrendered the job of prison management to more conservativeinterests.

In fact, informal social controls were exerted on scholars who wantedto engage in pragmatic efforts to reduce crime and victimization. Crimi-nologists were expected to choose sides—not to join the state’s team butto be on the “knowledge destruction, nothing works” team. In particular,cooptation was feared: The state would use scholars to legitimate or ex-pand its power to crack down on poor and minority offenders—themselvesvictims of unjust social conditions. Fine-tuning the administration of crimecontrol might occasionally prevent a few crimes, it was argued, but only atthe expense of acquitting the state of its responsibility for preserving aninequitable, criminogenic society.

In a 1993 challenge to such thinking, Lawrence Sherman authored anessay titled, “Why Crime Control Is Not Reactionary.” To previous gen-erations of criminologists, the need to make such an argument wouldhave been inexplicable (Cullen and Gendreau, 2001; Tonry, 2010). Indeed,Sutherland’s (1939: v) very first words in his Principles of Criminology werethat “A science of criminology is greatly needed at present both for sat-isfactory understanding [of crime] and for adequate control.” He rejectedthe idea that “criminology” should only be used to refer to the “causes ofcrime,” instead arguing that it should involve the “development of a bodyof general and verifiable principles and other types of knowledge regardingthe process of law, crime, and treatment or prevention” (p. 1). As Garland(2001: 62) noted, despite being a “thriving academic discipline, expandingits hold on the academy and producing more research and publicationsthan ever before,” criminologists felt that they had “failed” at the very


project identified by Sutherland. Thus, “criminology’s basic project—thatof discovering the causes of crime and identifying means whereby it mightbe reduced—was increasingly viewed as having failed to produce anythingworthwhile” (p. 62).

Sherman recognized not only this failure but also the reality that manyscholars embraced the fight against “repression” and being “anti-crime con-trol.” In the policing area—his area of special expertise—Sherman correctlypointed out that research findings that police practices did not reduce crimewere heartily applauded. “It was with great joy, then,” observed Sherman(1993: 176), “that many academics welcomed the results of the KansasCity Preventative Patrol Experiment,” and “similar satisfaction greeted thefindings that adding foot patrols to a small number of beats in Newark hadno measurable impact on official crime statistics or victimization surveyresults.” For many criminologists, there was a “strong academic bias . . .

against police even trying to control crime” (p. 174). Furthermore, therewere consequences to complying with or defying nothing works normativebeliefs, for this “‘politically correct’ orthodoxy has been used to rewardsome scholarly careers and punish others” (p. 174).

Admittedly, the triumph of the nothing works doctrine was largely sep-arate from the triumph of the crime-explanation side of the adolescence-limited criminology paradigm. Nonetheless, this view of policy and practicehad profound theoretical implications that, at least indirectly, allowed thiscrime-explanation side of ALC to flourish. To wit: If nothing works, thenthere is no pressing need for theories to produce knowledge that can beused to create interventions that reduce crime. Scholars thus are free to de-vote large chunks of their careers to publishing self-report studies that havelittle relevance to changing offenders in the real world. Of course, theoristsare called upon to tell us the policy implications of their frameworks, whichthey do persuasively (see, e.g., Barlow and Decker, 2010). But there is noneed ever to truly change anything—either in our academic world or in theworld of crime control.

In fact, when theories are developed that have a legitimate chance ofreducing crime, they risk being critically evaluated by fellow criminologists.Until relatively recently, this was the fate that befell the use of routineactivity theory and bounded rational choice theory to inform situationalcrime prevention interventions—in particular the work of Clarke andFelson (2011). The chief criticism was that their focus on crime eventsdiverted attention away from the root causes of crime. They also were foundguilty of being politically incorrect—of actually wanting to reduce crimeand of thinking that this is possible. As Clarke and Felson (2011: 255) noted,“our approaches are often bundled together under the pejorative label of‘administrative criminology.’” Having been reared in the root-causes socio-logical tradition, I must confess that I find problematic this perspective’s

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disinterest in the sources of criminal motivation and embrace ofrationality—the view that offenders are, as Garland (2001: 129) put it, “theopportunistic consumer, whose attitudes cannot be changed but whose ac-cess to social goods could be barred.” Even so, if we had the Nobel Prize incriminology, Clarke, Felson, and their crew should receive it (well, at leastthey should receive the field’s Stockholm Prize!). I might quibble with themon some points, but collectively environmental criminologists—with theirfocus on opportunity reduction and situational crime prevention—havelikely done more to save people from criminal victimization, including fromhomicide, than any other group of scholars. Instead of awards, however,they have at times been viewed with the kind of suspicion and animus thatcriminologists typically reserve for James Q. Wilson.

IN PRAISE OF A BANKRUPT PARADIGM

In its most truncated form, adolescence-limited criminology is a paradigmthat privileges the use of questionnaires, completed by adolescents, toexplain self-reported delinquency and privileges efforts to show that stateintervention does not work to reduce crime. There is no demand that the-oretically based research must produce findings that direct effective effortsat social control. There is no commitment to construct systematic scientificknowledge that is capable of changing offender behavior or of lowing crimerates.

In short order, I will argue that this paradigm is bankrupt and shouldbe discarded. But before doing so, I want to insert the giant caveat thatI do not view ALC as a failed enterprise. For one thing, I was raised bystrain theorists—a bit by Robert Merton and a lot by my mentor, RichardCloward—and have been an ardent practitioner of ALC over the past30 years. For another thing, just as a person’s life can be well lived, so toocan a paradigm’s—even if the endpoint is a kindly death. Thus, ALC hasserved four important functions.

First, the triumph of sociological over individual-trait theorizing wasa good thing. Today, many criminologists are not aware of the intenseprejudice against racial and ethnic groups that prevailed in America duringSutherland’s day. Indeed, the United States had passed restrictive immi-gration laws and the first eugenic legislation in the world (Bruinius, 2006).Many scholars commented favorably on the “racial hygiene” movement inHitler’s pre-World World II Germany (Cornwell, 2003). Thus, writing inthe American Sociological Review, Kopp (1936) described her 1935 visit toGermany to inspect their eugenics policies and practices. She concludedthat the “German legislation, apart from its eugenics aspects, is a great stepahead as a constructive public health measure, as a measure of preventative


medicine, and as a contribution to social welfare” (p. 770). Not long there-after, Merton and Ashley-Montagu (1940: 391) felt compelled to provide adetailed analytical and statistical critique of Hooton’s The American Crim-inal, troubled as they were by his use of “such horrendous catchwords as‘biological inferiority,’ ‘organic degeneration,’ ‘biological deterioration.’” Itis instructive that Hooton (1939: 309), an esteemed Harvard University an-thropologist, could end The American Criminal with the following words—expressed without second thought:

Criminals are organically inferior. Crime is the resultant of the impactof environment upon low grade human organisms. It follows that theelimination of crime can be effected only by the extirpation of thephysically, mentally and morally unfit, or by their complete segregationin a socially aseptic environment.

Sutherland’s theorizing and sociological criminology generally provideda powerful antidote to crass attempts to blame offenders’ natures for theircriminality and to justify repressive sanctions. As a discipline, we havecome to stand for social justice. Over the years, criminologists have formeda community that has subjected simplistic trait theories to the organizedskepticism they deserved. Admittedly, at times, opposition to such theorieshas become ideological, rejecting out of hand the existence of individualdifferences between offenders and nonoffenders. But if nothing else, crimi-nologists have raised the bar that those wishing to advance such views mustjump over in order to be taken seriously.

Second and related, the ALC paradigm has urged scholars to stand on theside of the poor and minorities in the so-called wars on crime and drugs. Inour knowledge destruction roles, we have shown how many common-sense,punitive interventions (e.g., boot camps) do not work (Cullen, 2005). Wealso have been one of the few interest groups in society to stand up againstmass incarceration and its untoward consequences (see, e.g., Currie, 1998;Patillo, Weiman, and Western, 2004; Simon, 2007; Tonry, 1995).

Third, studies conducted by ALC have produced information that hashelped to identify the most salient risk factors for criminal involvement(Andrews and Bonta, 2010). Ironically, this research suggests the need fora multiple-factor approach to understanding offending rather than for ageneral theory approach. It is also the case that ALC theories and studieshave, on some occasions, helped scholars developing interventions to knowwhat risk factors to target for change (see, e.g., Hawkins et al., 2003).

Fourth, the ALC paradigm has allowed criminology to grow and prosperas a discipline. ALC has encouraged scholars to value theory and to create alengthy body of theoretical explanations that fill our books (see, e.g., Cullenand Agnew, 2011; Cullen and Wilcox, 2010; Lilly, Cullen, and Ball, 2011).

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As noted, ALC also has provided a paradigm in which scholars could findseemingly unending research puzzles that could be explored for publicationand reward. As a result, knowledge production has expanded steadily andjournals have multiplied to meet the supply. In many respects, the academicdiscipline of criminology has never been healthier.

REQUIEM FOR A PARADIGM: FOUR SOURCES OFCRIMINOLOGICAL BANKRUPTCY

As a kid, I loved funerals. No, I was not morose. But as an altar boy, wegot to leave school, travel across the street to St. Gregory’s Church, andserve at requiems. If I left early and walked slowly back to school after themass was finished, I could miss almost two hours of classes.

Well, this is a funeral that I am also happy to attend. I do not regret thedeath of adolescence-limited criminology. It has, as just noted, done muchgood and perhaps fulfilled its destiny, but it has reached its end. The ALCparadigm is intellectually bankrupt.

I do not believe that my assessment is idiosyncratic. I regularly hearcolleagues greet a publication of Criminology with the lament that thearticles, although technically proficient, are not so meaningful. We alsodecry the failure of criminology to be policy relevant—to make a differencein the world (see, e.g., Uggen and Inderbitzin, 2010). We know we are introuble when we refer to our work as “so what? criminology” (Currie, 2007;Matthews, 2009) or as “antiseptic criminology” (Cullen, 2010). Althoughmore may exist, I will offer four major sources of this collective malaiseabout our discipline—or at least about adolescence-limited criminology.

ALC LEAVES OUT TOO MUCH

In reading recent Sutherland Award addresses, I was not only impressedbut also struck by how each one tended to identify something core aboutcriminology that was not being adequately investigated—whether that wasemotions, context, or some aspect of life-course criminology. When takentogether, these addresses suggest that traditional ALC is deficient in impor-tant ways. It leaves out too much.

This reality should not be surprising. When ALC embraced the searchfor an abstract general theory of crime, it chose to ignore the multiplefactors associated with crime identified by the Gluecks and by subse-quent researchers. Moreover, developments outside a pure sociologicalperspective—from biology to behavioral economics—demand serious con-sideration in our understanding of crime. Other fields are illuminating newways to see crime and new research puzzles (see Nagin, 2007). Put in the


terms of Kuhn (1970), the anomalies have become so extensive that theparadigm is collapsing.

ALC WILL NOT PRODUCE ANY MORE KNOWLEDGE OFVALUE: SOCIAL BOND THEORY AS AN EXEMPLAR

ALC research has shown that major theories of crime have likely iden-tified factors involved in criminal behavior—whether that is strain, sociallearning, defective controls, perceptual deterrence, or other processes (see,e.g., Pratt and Cullen, 2000; Pratt et al., 2006; Pratt et al., 2010; Weisburdand Piquero, 2008). But this enterprise appears to suffer from diminishingreturns. Weisburd and Piquero’s (2008) examination of “how well crim-inologists explain crime” is instructive. Based on articles testing theoriespublished in Criminology between 1968 and 2005, they concluded that the“amount of variance explained is often very low” and that the “models pro-vide relatively weak explanatory power” (2008: 453). Furthermore, “thereis no evidence of improvement over time” (p. 453). Some of these problemscould be inherent in the nature of trying to measure theories and measurecrime. The other likely possibility, however, is that ALC has reached aceiling in what the knowledge it produces can explain (see Weisburd andPiquero, 2008).

This reality is exemplified by the history of Hirschi’s (1969) social bondtheory. This perspective, now more than 40 years of age, remains a vibrantpart of contemporary ALC. In fact, it is likely the most famous sociologicaltheory of crime in existence. But why should this be the case? In its fourdecades of existence, nobody—at least to my knowledge—has ever discov-ered the fifth social bond! I also do not believe that any criminologist canreliably tell me which social bond is most strongly related to delinquency.Toward this end, I am now engaged in a project to decipher this mystery.Remarkably, three of my collaborators (Tara Livelsberger, Jennifer Lux,and Lacey Rohleder) have thus far found 201 studies and 47 dissertationsthat test social bond theory; they are still searching for more.

We might expect that when a field has produced approximately 250 stud-ies, we should know a great deal about a theory in question. But this doesnot appear to be the case. In 1993, Kimberly Kempf undertook a systematicanalysis of the extant empirical literature on social bond theory. She termedher review of 71 studies “disheartening” (1993: 173) and concluded that“social control theory has not fared well” (p. 167). Findings were oftenweak and inconsistent, but this state of affairs was caused by the use ofdiverse social bond measures and no coherent strategy for how to build theperspective theoretically and empirically. “Criminology,” Kempf observed,“has not yet determined the capacity of this theory” (p. 167).

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Many years and many studies later, we might have anticipated thatKempf’s (1993) wise advice would have been followed and valuable knowl-edge construction would have taken place. Or, in the least, we might havereluctantly concluded that this theory had now been falsified and needs tobe discarded. Of course, neither of these has taken place. Kubrin, Stucky,and Krohn (2009) provided a thoughtful dissection of social bond theory.They admit that the perspective makes “intuitive sense” in that ties toparents and investments in the conventional order would seem likely to re-strain delinquent propensities. “Despite these advantages,” they observed,“equivocal empirical support for the theory is problematic,” with longitudi-nal studies in particular failing “to support the notion of a direct causal linkbetween the elements and deviance” (2009: 185).

What does this short history of social bond theory tell us about ALC? Ithink it means that we have long believed or pretended to believe that ifwe went out and produced lots of individual studies, the empirical statusof theories would somehow become known. But as the fate of social bondtheory shows, this does not seem to be the case. It is the power and thetragedy of the ALC paradigm that theories can continue to flourish andinspire empirical test after empirical test, year after year, regardless of whatthe data tell us. Quite seriously, I suspect that we would be better off as adiscipline if we called for a moratorium on studies of social bond theories,at least among our doctoral students. Make them do something different. Itis instructive that after 20 years, Hirschi himself lost his attachment to hisown theory and turned to self-control theory—a life-course change perhapsinstigated by a quality academic marriage to Michael Gottfredson!

ALC WILL NOT ALLOW US TO DO GOOD

Given my long-term trumpeting of rehabilitation (Cullen and Gilbert,1982), I find it gratifying that the professional ideology of nothing worksand impossibilism is losing its grasp on criminology (Cullen and Gendreau,2001). I see a growing thirst among criminologists to do good in the worldof crime—whether this is voiced by left realists and feminists or by thosemore interested in program evaluation (see, e.g., Daly, 2010; DeKeseredy,2010; MacKenzie, 2006; Matthews, 2010; McGuire, 1995; Sherman et al.,2002).

The difficulty, however, is that ALC was never set up to provide policy-relevant knowledge. Theory testing using adolescents and self-report delin-quency yields data only loosely coupled to the design of effective interven-tions. As a result, as scholars embark on public criminology—as they tryto make a difference in the world—they will find existing criminology tobe only marginally helpful in directing policy and, in particular, in saving


offenders from a life in crime. Roger Matthews (2010: 195) captured my sen-timents in arguing that the “steady growth of a criminology lacking policyrelevance has created an expanding criminological industry that has becomeobese and is, as they say nowadays in official circles, ‘unfit for purpose.’”Indeed, it is instructive that the best models for effective interventions havebeen invented by scholars outside criminology—especially by psychologists(see, e.g., Andrews and Bonta, 2010; Henggeler, 1998; Olds, 2007). Thisreality is thus another reason why the hold of ALC is likely to weaken andwhy the paradigm is heading toward bankruptcy.

ALC’S OPPORTUNITY COSTS ARE TOO HIGH

I am hesitant to tell others that they should cease publishing ALC studies.If this activity is enjoyable and advances one’s career, then feel free topublish away! I may occasionally do so myself. But writ large, criminolo-gists’ collective investment in ALC is not a good thing. It steals time andeffort that could be devoted to more meaningful brands of research. Thisobservation leads me to reiterate a core point of this address: ALC hashad its day and has served its purpose. Doing more of the same should bediscouraged.

EIGHT STEPS TO BUILDING A NEW CRIMINOLOGY

Being a criminological curmudgeon is perhaps the easy part. Mapping outa coherent vision for the discipline’s future is more daunting. In fact, I havesearched in vain for a label that would capture the essence of what this newcriminology might be. Unfortunately, Terrie Moffitt is of little help herebecause “life-course-persistent criminology” has no intuitive appeal. At thispoint, the best I can do is to offer a working title for a novel paradigm:Cullenology! This is stupid, or course, but also not far-fetched: After all,what follows is merely my best sense of where we should head. I can offereight steps to enabling criminology to become more meaningful by movingbeyond the prevailing ALC paradigm. I will do so only parsimoniously, withthe knowledge that each step could easily merit its own essay.

Each of the steps I will identify is different, but they share a commontheme. ALC brought criminologists too far away from their subject matter:offenders and nonoffenders. Whatever else they might have gotten wrong,individual trait researchers—from Lombroso and his Italian positivists tothe Americans of Hooton and the Gluecks—had a commitment to studyingoffenders up close and personal. In many ways, our field has moved progres-sively farther and farther away from our subject matter, embracing abstracttheoretical principles and the use of secondary data sets that measure mostaspects of life with two-item scales having a reliability of .68. Criminologyhas become, as I have lamented, too antiseptic (Cullen, 2010). Contrary

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to what Sutherland suggested, we need to study the concrete conditions ofpeople’s lives in great detail.

ACCEPT THAT LIFE-COURSE CRIMINOLOGY ISCRIMINOLOGY

In his 2005 Sutherland Address, John Laub (2006: 241) “advanced theargument that ‘life-course criminology’ . . . provides a starting point foranswering . . . prominent questions facing the field.” I wish to express John’spoint more directly: Life-course criminology (LCC) now is criminology. Itis not simply another perspective that competes with, say, strain theoryor feminist theory. Rather, LCC should replace ALC as the organizingframework for the study of crime causation; it is obvious that we need tostudy what happens not only during but also before and after adolescence. Iwould submit that nearly all serious researchers already recognize that LCCis criminology.

Two important observations follow from this assertion. First, I am notarguing that other theories do not matter. Rather, it simply means thatthey should be age graded, with the effects of their factors specified con-temporaneously by age grade and into the future. Of course, Sampson andLaub (1993) realized this with regard to social bond theory, but they are notthe only ones to have this insight. For example, feminists have focused ongendered pathways and on how early physical and sexual abuse can haveshort-term and long-term criminogenic consequences (Chesney-Lind, 1989;Miller and Mullins, 2006). More broadly, most theories would be enrichedby being placed systematically within a LCC paradigm.

Second, if LCC is the organizing framework for theory and research, ourtextbooks and the way we teach criminology should begin to reflect thisreality. Current textbooks implicitly are informed by a static, ALC viewof offenders and their careers. They focus on standard theories and onstandard crime types. Although a transformation of the textbook industrywill not occur soon, we need to think about writing books and developingcourses (e.g., “Child Criminology”) that allow LCC to gradually take overour pedagogy.

EMBRACE BIOSOCIAL THEORY

Every year of my academic life, since starting at Western Illinois Uni-versity at age 25, I have taught my students Merton’s (1938) typologyof adaptations. I suspect that many scholars in this audience have donelikewise in their careers, if not in this semester. Why? It directs no research.Its theoretical value is limited—and, alas, not widely understood: That is,Merton showed that strain does not lead ineluctably to crime or deviancebut can have diverse adaptations. Accordingly, strain theory has a lengthy


history of trying to explain not simply the origins of strain but also thefactors that condition or structure differential reactions to it (Agnew, 1992;Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Cohen, 1955; see also Cullen, 1984).

The reality is that we teach this typology because it is in every bookand because we always have. By contrast, how many of us teach aboutsomething that offenders carry with them every day from birth: the humanbrain? I must confess that I do not. For most of my career, I have assumedthat brains and biology did not matter. It never dawned on me that teachingMerton’s (1938) typology of adaptations rather than the brain was inde-fensible. Of course, I am not alone in this choice. It is a standard practicewithin ALC.

As we move forward, however, we can no longer pretend that biology isnot intimately implicated in human behavior and thus in criminal behavior.Knowledge about genes and how brains operate is exploding, and it is influ-encing other social scientific fields—including even sociology. Although wemust be guarded against trait theories being used to blame the victim—toexcuse “savage inequalities,” as Jonathan Kozol (1991) calls them, from anyrole in crime causation—this is not 1940s or 1950s America. The context haschanged, and we are far more attuned today to the risks of using biology forracist or repressive purposes. In the end, we truncate reality if we do notstudy what we all now know: Babies emerge from the womb with individualdifferences, which then influence the lives that they will help to create. AsRafter (2008: 251) eloquently expressed this point:

Today, new understandings of the complexity, flexibility, and indeter-minacy of genetic and neuroscientific development open the way toformulating new positions outside the old nature-nurture debate. Weno longer have to pit nature against nurture; now we can picture thetwo as working together so as to achieve gene expression and producethe individual. We can now see that biocriminology itself indicates thatameliorating social environments is the most effective of all anticrimemeasures.

EXPLORE HOW INDIVIDUALS TRAVEL THROUGH CONTEXTS

As a sociologist, I am persuaded that social context matters. But as wehave become more sophisticated in our statistics (e.g., the HLM revolu-tion!), it seems that the amount of explained variation and the amount ofour understanding of contextual effects have shrunk commensurately. It ispossible that weak contextual effects exist because, in reality, individualdifferences are what truly account for criminal choices. But I think morethan this is at work. Part of the problem is that context is undertheo-rized, so we settle for plopping all sorts of aggregated measures into our

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multivariate, multimodel equations. If only implicitly, context thus istreated as a static domain into which individuals are inserted and somehowaffected. At most, we manufacture interaction terms to see whether someindividual-level variable and some contextual-level variable interact. Theresults are typically disappointing.

I would propose an alternative, or at least complementary, strategy:exploring how individuals travel through context. The starting point wouldbe human beings and not contexts; we would study context not from thetop down but from the bottom up. The assumption would be that contextsaffect individuals mainly because they are composed of people who possessshared beliefs (culture) and engage in shared actions (social constraints).Context is thus not so much a “thing” as a living entity that exerts influencesthrough patterned interactions. From an individual’s perspective, he orshe travels through different contexts over the life course and during anyone stage in life (see, e.g., Sampson, 1997). Understanding how contextmatters thus involves following individuals as they are placed into, choose,negotiate, and are constrained by different social domains.

I am convinced that criminology took a wrong turn in the study of contextwhen it followed Kornhauser (1978) by reducing Shaw and McKay’s theoryfrom a so-called mixed model (culture and control) into a community-levelcontrol theory. The unfolding of the systemic model placed attention oninformal social control and on attempts to measure this by aggregatingcensus data or other characteristics of area residents. But where did theindividual offenders go to? Clifford Shaw (1966 [1930]) well understoodthe need to preserve the “delinquent boy’s own story,” which is whyhe collected life histories. These stories document how the youngsters’commitment to crime increased as they traveled through the contexts ofimpoverished dysfunctional families, play groups, life on the street at earlyages, delinquent gangs, older criminal clubs and groups, and correctionalinstitutions. In these accounts, context becomes more concrete and its effectundeniable.

More contemporary ethnographies tell similar stories (see, e.g.,Kotlowitz, 1991). Elijah Anderson (1999) perhaps most clearly illuminatedwhat I am suggesting. Youngsters from the so-called decent families livein a distinct cultural and interactional context. But when they travel intothe street and even to school, they are in a context where those raised instreet families and the “code of the street” prevails. As a result, decentkids’ choices and behavior are constrained. To be sure, all of the youths—decent and street—are situated in a hyper-segregated neighborhood con-text shaped by larger economic, political, and structural conditions. But forkids who turn to violence, the “contextual effects” on their behavior arenot distant but proximate—funneled powerfully through their cognitions,


how other youngsters think, and the situations they encounter in publicplaces.

UNDERSTAND CRIMINAL DECISION MAKING

In his 2006 Sutherland Address, Daniel Nagin (2007) made a persuasivecase for “moving choice to center stage” in criminology. Accordingly, I donot need to say too much here except to reiterate that ALC ignored thisissue of decision making. In a very real way, ALC methodology necessi-tated this omission. Self-report studies are ideally suited for measuring thebackground rather than the foreground of crime causation (e.g., questionsassessing bonds with parents or number of delinquent peers) and for mea-suring criminality or propensity (by including a multiple-item self-reportdelinquency scale with a high Cronbach’s alpha). But this technology alsomeant that many other key features of the criminal act, not easily measured,were left unstudied.

My sense is that the investigation of criminal decision making will pro-ceed along two tracks: developmental and situational. First, there is nowexpanded interest in developmental neuroscience and how it affects risk-taking behavior, including the choice of antisocial conduct, across the lifecourse (see, e.g., Steinberg, 2008). Put simply, the salience of biosocialresearch and theory promises to enrich our understanding of why choicesare made (Wright, Tibbetts, and Daigle, 2008). Within this framework, wecan probe more deeply issues such as human agency—how it emerges, isdifferentially manifested at various ages, and grows in its capacity to promptchange in offenders away from crime.

Second, the growing influence of behavioral economics also is likely toshape inquiry into how potential offenders perceive and are influencedby situations (Nagin and Paternoster, 2010; see also Thaler and Sunstein,2008). Although valuable, we must resist relying in this area exclusively onfactorial-design vignette studies with intentions to offend as the dependentvariable. Our best insights into how the decision to offend is bounded bysituational factors have been drawn from research on recent or active of-fenders (Shover, 1996; Steffensmeier and Ulmer, 2005; Wright and Decker,1994, 1997). I will return to this issue shortly.

I would be remiss if I did not highlight one other factor that must be in-corporated into our developmental and situational understanding of crimedecision making: emotions (Nagin, 2007). Most criminological theories havebeen strangely silent on the issue of emotions (for an exception, see Agnew2006). But it is now indisputable that emotions have strong neuroscientificorigins and affect decision making, both generally and with regard to crime(Massey, 2002). We also have a long history within criminology of exploringhow situational factors can induce emotions that lead to crime (see, e.g.,

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Anderson, 1999; Katz, 1988). Finally, we need to recognize the importanceof examining not only negative but positive emotions, such as empathy(Joliffe and Farrington, 2004).

KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT THE CRIME EVENT

When I ask students about the components of routine activity theory,they immediately chant “motivated offender, attractive target, no guardian-ship.” When I ask them to name the three strains at the core of generalstrain theory, they look at me like deer staring into oncoming headlights. Iwould suggest that I would obtain a similar differential reaction from anygroup of criminologists, including this one!

Despite this fact, most criminologists know a lot about criminality orpropensity and almost nothing about crime or crime events. I was ini-tially confronted with my ignorance when I read Gottfredson and Hirschi’s(1990) A General Theory of Crime and saw the power of their observationthat the nature of crime (i.e., provides immediate, unplanned gratificationthat requires little effort or skill) told us something about the nature ofcriminals (e.g., impulsive and risk-seeking, versatile in their offending, andexperience the generality of deviance). I wondered why I had not thoughtmuch about such issues previously.

The scholarship of those who study crime events, including advocatesof routine activity theory, are so neglected that Ronald Clarke (2010)suggested that they may wish to break off from criminology into a newfield called “crime science.” He is willing to leave the study of propensityto us and take with him the study of crime and crime reduction. In hisview, environmental criminologists—as they are often called—“have led anuncomfortable existence on the edges of criminology for many years” andare just “now coming in from the cold” (2010: 276). It is instructive that atASC meetings, they are birds of a feather flocking together. Most often,they just attend their own conference that goes by the acronym of ECCA(Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis). If you have not heardof this society, it means that you likely know nothing about crime—but youshould.

Indeed, crime science relies on diverse perspectives to enrich our un-derstanding of the details of the criminal event, seeking to uncover factorsthat can be manipulated to reduce opportunities for victimization. Scholarsat times worry that such “criminologies of everyday life” (Garland, 2001:127) might divert attention away from underlying issues of social injusticeand be implicitly conservative because of a willingness to see offenders asthe enemy. But crime science is ideologically neutral. Its premises can beused, for example, to understand and prevent the sexual victimization of


women—hardly a concern of conservative commentators (see, e.g., Fisher,Daigle, and Cullen, 2009).

The mistake of crime science is to assume that “motivated offenders”can be taken for granted and, in turn, to give only marginal attentionto the way in which criminal decision making is bounded by factors thatoffenders import into the crime situation. It is at this point that propensity(or criminality) and opportunity co-mingle. My advisor, Richard Cloward(1959: 168), avoided this problem through his concept of “illegitimatemeans.” He understood that engaging in a crime was a matter not only ofthe act being possible (what he called an “opportunity structure”) but alsoof acquiring the cognitions and skills needed to perform the act (what hecalled a “learning structure”). Access to the illegitimate means to offendthus had a situational component (the act was possible) and a life-coursecomponent (the actor had developed the capacity to complete the specificcrime in question).

My only point is that it would be a mistake to place criminal propensityinto one field (criminology) and crime events into another field (crime sci-ence). The challenge is for traditional criminologists to put out the welcomemat to crime scientists and to understand that the future of criminology willbe advanced by exploring systematically the nexus between propensity andopportunity—between offender and situation.

TALK TO OFFENDERS, NOT TO HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENTS

As noted, ALC was built predominantly on self-report studies of high-school students. It is instructive that Sutherland (1956 [1931]) did not writean essay on the “high school as a criminological laboratory,” but he did onthe “prison as a criminological laboratory.” It would not have dawned onhim not to talk to offenders about why and how they committed criminalacts.

Is there any special value, however, in talking with offenders? I couldprovide many examples of the salient insights drawn from such data collec-tion, but let me discuss just one. It struck me that although I can supply nodefinitive total, self-report studies have been so plentiful that they likelyhave an overall N in excess of, say, 200,000 participants. What has thisresearch told us about desistance? Not much.

Now let me give you another number: 117. This number has resulted in atransformation in our understanding of desistance, leading to new theoriesand to new proposals for how to intervene with offenders called creativecorrections (see Brayford, Cowe, and Deering, 2010; Veysey, Christian, andMartinez, 2009). Where does this number come from? Well, this numberrepresents the total number of offenders—mostly adult to aged white-maleoffenders—interviewed by Shadd Maruna (n = 65) and by John Laub and

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Robert Sampson (n = 52). Based on these interviews, we now have at thecore of desistance theory the concepts of “redemption scripts” and “humanagency” (Maruna, 2001; Sampson and Laub, 2003). My advice: Go speakwith offenders; you, too, might get famous!

REVOLUTIONIZE THE ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

I sense a yearning among criminologists to look out in the expansive seaof research studies and to have some guidance as to what it all tells us aboutcrime and its control. But as a field, we generally are not very good at takingall this knowledge and reducing it into a form where we can all agree onwhat we know and what we do not know. As a field, we are sometimescloser to intelligent design, where belief trumps data, than evolutionaryscience, where systematic attempts have been made to organize what isknown (Dawkins, 2009).

In response, efforts to organize knowledge have been undertaken,bearing important fruits. I can point briefly to the following prominentexamples: Michael Tonry’s long-running Crime and Justice: A Review ofResearch series; initiatives to show “what works” in crime prevention, mostnotably The Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group (Farrington,Weisburd, and Gill, 2011; see also Lipsey and Cullen, 2007; MacKenzie,2006; Sherman et al., 2002); scholars taking stock of the empirical statusof their theories (Cullen, Wright, and Blevins, 2006); attempts to compilethe central conclusions of major longitudinal studies (Piquero, Farrington,and Blumstein, 2007; Thornberry and Krohn, 2003); meta-analyses andsystematic reviews of criminogenic risk factors (Ellis, Beaver, and Wright,2009; Loeber and Farrington, 1998); the construction of an “evidence-basedpolicing matrix” that organizes evaluation studies and shows visually themost promising enforcement strategies (Lum, Koper, and Telep, 2011);guides by crime scientists, such as the series developed by the Center forProblem-Oriented Policing, that outline evidence-based recommendationsfor how best to prevent specific types of crime and disorder (see, e.g.,Clarke and Eck, 2005); and multiple-volume works devoted to synthesizingextant research on specific topics such as the National Institute of Justice’sCriminal Justice 2000 and the National Research Council’s Understandingand Preventing Violence.

Again, these diverse endeavors are welcomed and valuable—but they arenot enough. They remain on the fringes of the discipline, read by a selectgroup of scholars. Somehow, we need to revolutionize how we organize ourknowledge to make it more accessible to all criminologists. I do not haveguidelines for how this might be accomplished. But I can offer two ideas toget the ball rolling, so to speak.


First, the editors of our major journals should begin to privilege articlesthat seek to organize knowledge. We now reward scholars for undertakingsingle research studies that present new information, which is why theydevote their time to producing ALC studies rather than to organizing theextant literature. But as I have tried to show through my discussion of theempirical status of social bond theory, these efforts often lead nowhere.Of course, I am not trumpeting the publication of mere literature reviews.Rather, what I have in mind are sophisticated quantitative and qualitativereviews that derive clear propositions and establish on a given topic what weknow and what we need to know. If journals are receptive to such articles,then they will be submitted!

Second, I am most excited about this recommendation: We should estab-lish “What-We-Know Websites.” Over the past three years, Cheryl LeroJonson, Daniel Nagin, and I have been exploring the effects of impris-onment on recidivism—a salient but inexplicably neglected topic (Nagin,Cullen, and Jonson, 2009). Cheryl has meta-analyzed this research, confirm-ing the finding that prisons have a null or criminogenic effect on recidivism(Jonson, 2010). I believe that I have now persuaded her to start, withinthe next year, “Cheryl’s Prison Website.” My vision is that, among otherrelated information, she would have on the website the updated effect sizesof the impact of custodial versus noncustodial sanctions. As new evaluationsare conducted, authors would send them to Cheryl who would, once ortwice a year, meta-analyze them and update what we know about prisoneffects.

Writ large, this approach could result in numerous What-We-Know Web-sites on a variety of topics—from the empirical status of theories, to theimpact of various risk factors on crime, to the effectiveness of specific in-terventions. Unlike published literature reviews—which give us an accountof what we know at one point in time—these websites would be dynamic,importing in and synthesizing new knowledge as it appears. It also hasthe potential to allow many scholars to participate in the organization ofknowledge. Unlike journals, space on the Internet is unlimited. There arepitfalls, not the least of which is that the knowledge placed online would notbe peer reviewed. But if ASC worked to set standards and train scholars inhow to administer quality websites, these problems might be minimized. Inany case, the pressure is on Cheryl to get this website up and running! Let’ssee where it might lead.

TAKE DOING GOOD SERIOUSLY

There is simply no escape from the stubborn reality that criminal be-havior will evoke criminal justice control. The question is whether these

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sanctions will be exclusively punitive—as they have been disproportion-ately in recent decades—or seek to improve the quality of the lives ofoffenders and their victims.

As I have argued, our discipline’s embrace of the nothing works doctrineand impossibilism has compromised criminology’s influence on criminal jus-tice policy and practice. We have contributed valuable work to knowledgedestruction—showing what does not work—but have not done much toshow what does work through knowledge construction. Lacking persuasiveprescriptions for reducing crime, we have often surrendered the crimecontrol arena to those with a ready-made solution to the crime problem:Lock up offenders for lengthy sentences. If there is one thing I have stoodfor in my career, it is that we should never, never withdraw from the policy-making arena. We must give answers; we must be about doing good wheredoing harm so often now prevails.

The problem is that we cannot give half-baked answers when askedwhat do to about crime. I do not believe that most criminologists under-stand how difficult it is to design a quality, evidence-based intervention. Ihave come to admire my Canadian friends—the late Don Andrews, JamesBonta, and Paul Gendreau—because they truly have taken seriously thechallenges of intervening—of doing good—in offenders’ lives (see Andrewsand Bonta, 2010). Indeed, for over three decades, they worked to constructa coherent treatment paradigm (Cullen, 2011). I use the word “paradigm”because their approach involved the following: 1) a general theory of hu-man behavior—cognitive-social learning—which led to a set of coherentprinciples on how best to intervene with offenders; 2) an evidence-basedunderstanding of the risk factors for recidivism that were amenable tochange (e.g., antisocial attitudes); 3) an evidence-based choice of interven-tion techniques (e.g., cognitive-behavioral programs) that were responsiveto and thus capable of changing these risk factors; 4) an evidence-basedfocus on high-risk offenders, showing that attempts to change low-riskoffenders were often criminogenic; and 5) the development of technologycapable of implementing their treatment model (e.g., the Level of ServiceInventory offender-assessment instrument).

Regardless of whether you wish to adhere to the specifics of theCanadians’ paradigm, they remain exemplars in showing that successfulinterventions must be theoretically sophisticated, rooted in the science ofoffending, and use interventions capable of transforming offender behav-ior. As is warranted, their ideas are informing corrections across NorthAmerica, if not beyond. By contrast, criminologists can no longer play atpolicy and practice, suggesting implausible interventions that will neverlead anywhere or trying to implement progressive versions of boot campsand scared straight programs. If we cannot develop effective evidence-based interventions that are capable of controlling crime by doing good,


our collective irrelevance in policy and practice will continue. Criminologywill remain a “so what?” field.

CONCLUSION: CHOOSING OUR FUTURE

Edwin Sutherland was concerned not only with his specific research con-tributions and narrow career interests but also with the future of criminol-ogy as a scientific discipline. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that an addresshonoring Sutherland should be an occasion on which we, as members of adiscipline we all cherish, reflect on the status of criminology—on its paststrengths and accomplishments and on its limits and challenges.

John Laub (2004) wonderfully described how criminology has a disci-plinary life course that experiences various turning points. But as Johnhas also shown in his work with Robert Sampson, change is not inevitable.Even though I have argued that the ALC paradigm is cracking under theweight of its inadequacies, it is not hard to imagine that our general way ofdoing criminology could persist for another decade or two. For criminologyto change, we must choose a different future. So, here and now, I amurging that we amass a large collective dose of human agency and turn in adifferent direction.

Mostly, I am speaking to the younger generation of scholars in our field.My generation’s criminology has done much good, but it need not be yourcriminology. Our contributions should be appropriately honored, but thereis no obligation to show allegiance to our paradigm. There is much work tobe done exploring new criminological vistas—and fun to be had doing it. Itrust that you will choose your—and criminology’s—future wisely.

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Francis T. Cullen is Distinguished Research Professor of Criminal Justiceand Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. His recent works includeUnsafe in the Ivory Tower: The Sexual Victimization of College Women, theEncyclopedia of Criminological Theory, The Origins of American Crimi-nology, and Correctional Theory: Context and Consequences. His currentresearch focuses on the organization of criminological knowledge and onrehabilitation as a correctional policy. He is a past president of both theAmerican Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal JusticeSciences.

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Cullen 2010