Doctoral Dissertation Research: Criminal Deviance as Affect Control

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SES-0526337Linda MolmSteven NelsonUniversity of ArizonaUnderstanding the causes of crime is the basic mission of criminology. According to affect control theory, people behave largely to maintain their culturally based meaning systems. By analyzing how convicted offenders in Arizona Department of Corrections facility near Tucson typically assign and control affective meanings relating to crime, this study hopes to identify and characterize the subculturally created symbolic perspectives underlying and producing habitual criminality. Hypotheses derived from affect control theory predictions are tested by empirical analyses of fictional crime stories created by inmates during face to face interviews with those of non-criminal clients of the One Stop Job Center in Tucson. Specifically, the study examines whether inmate crime perspectives display a criminogenic subcultural meaning system in the labeling of objects or in the accepted definitions of concepts; whether and in what manner this subcultural meaning system is affected by prison associations; whether negative meanings for the self play a role; and, once data is available, whether it is a good predictor of future criminal activity. These hypotheses incorporate several of the basic assumptions that underlie well-known criminological theoretical perspectives, such as cultural deviance theory, differential association theory, and labeling theory, so this study concomitantly tests the explanatory power of important theories of crime. Affect control theory improves upon previous formulations of these important ideas, however, by using affective semantic scales to measure the content of a culture's or subculture's meaning systems and by mathematically predicting likely behaviors based on the empirically determined rules for their combination in a real life event. Broader Impacts. This study contributes to the academic discussion on the causes of criminal behavior, probing the links between culture, association, and behavior, and suggesting potentially fruitful ways of measuring cultural information. In the field of criminology this study can, if successful, rehabilitate cultural explanations of criminality, which have fallen out of favor for want of a better method to measure and predict its concepts, but which contain much that is intuitively useful. There are many practical policy implications to findings that illuminate cultural deviance and social learning processes within the prison. Implications of this research could suggest different inmate treatment programs, institutional changes, and different early intervention tactics to prevent crime in the first place.