Gottfredson And Hirschi Case Study

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The theory of Gottredson and Hirschi (1990) is the most popular theory in explaining crime. It originated from pure classical theory that people seek to enhance their own pleasure in committing criminal acts without special predisposition. As a whole, the theory is then called today as control theories which emphasize the prevention of crime through consequences painful to the individual in respect to their location and sanctions systems. The theory of Gottfredson and Hirschi became popular because they based it to the criminality of the individual in pursuit of self-interest in relation to self-control. The clear idea of self-control is that, people also differ in the level to which they are susceptible to temptation on the existence of social…show more content…
In general perspective, the opportunity to commit crimes or delinquencies, are boundless, however, the opportunity to commit crime are minimized in some specific crimes. Therefore, as they claim, self-control and opportunity may have connection in some specific crime, but in general view of crime, they were independent. Testing the theory of Gottfredson and Hirschi (1993), Lagrange and Silverman (1999), found out that self-control and opportunity have significant relation to the criminal propensity of a person. The study aimed to test the general theory of crime as the explanation for gender differences in delinquency. Testing the opportunity as it correlates with self-control in determining criminal tendency of a person, they used eight questions regarding parental and adult supervision. Half of their questions asked particularly about parents’ knowledge of where youths were during the course of a day and who they with. Another two questions asked whether they had a curfew. The last two questions asked particularly about the time spent with companions in the absence of
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