Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: coercion and punishment in the fabric of social relations
- I Mental health, coercion, and punishment
- II Family socialization practices and antisocial behavior
- III Aggression and coercion in the schools
- IV Deviance, crime, and discipline
- 15 The long-term effect of punitive discipline
- 16 Parental monitoring and peer influences on adolescent substance use
- 17 The relative importance of internal and external direct constraints in the explanation of late adolescent delinquency and adult criminality
- 18 Negative social sanctions and deviant behavior: a conditional relationship
- V Measuring and predicting in studies of coercion and punishment
- Name index
- Subject index
17 - The relative importance of internal and external direct constraints in the explanation of late adolescent delinquency and adult criminality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: coercion and punishment in the fabric of social relations
- I Mental health, coercion, and punishment
- II Family socialization practices and antisocial behavior
- III Aggression and coercion in the schools
- IV Deviance, crime, and discipline
- 15 The long-term effect of punitive discipline
- 16 Parental monitoring and peer influences on adolescent substance use
- 17 The relative importance of internal and external direct constraints in the explanation of late adolescent delinquency and adult criminality
- 18 Negative social sanctions and deviant behavior: a conditional relationship
- V Measuring and predicting in studies of coercion and punishment
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
This chapter focuses on social constraint. It analyzes coercive forces that operate as potential direct internal and external controls on individual criminal offending. Our study involves four categories of constraints to build an explanatory model of individual offending. These categories of constraint are formal and informal social reactions as direct external constraints and beliefs and perceived risk of punishment as direct internal constraints. In the literature there is neither a theory nor a study that considers simultaneously these four categories of constraint. Theories and studies look at one or, at most, two types of external or internal direct constraint. This chapter addresses two questions: Are internal constraints more important then external constraints for the explanation of adolescent and adult offending? Within internal and external constraints, which type of direct control is the most important predictor of offending?
Constraints
The following literature review introduces the 12 constructs used in our comprehensive constraint model.
External constraints
Thirty-six years ago, Nye (1958) clearly distinguished between formal and informal controls: “Restraint of the individual may be exercised by police and other designated officials, or entirely by disapproval, ridicule, ostracism, banishment, the supernatural, and similar techniques used by informal groups or by society as a whole” (p. 7). In Nye's definition of external constraint we find the formal social reaction perspective. Labeling theorists state that the imposition of the official label of delinquent following a criminal activity favors development of a delinquent self-image and emergence of new and more serious forms of criminal activities.
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- Coercion and Punishment in Long-Term Perspectives , pp. 272 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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