Towards an Integrative Theory of Crime and Delinquency: Re-conceptualizing the Farrington Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Farrington Theory (2003) was developed to explain offending and anti-social behaviour by working class males. This theory alleges that stability in criminal behaviour resides in the individual rather than in the environment; the social problem of crime is largely medicalized, constituting a psychological model of anti-social behaviour rather than a theory of crime and delinquency. The argument proposed in this paper is threefold: First, I argue Farrington’s theory is problematic given that it constructs deviance in a narrow and largely stable manner; therefore, this theory is better conceptualized as a psychological model of anti-social behaviour not a theory of crime. Secondly, I argue that integrated theoretical perspectives offer more nuanced and dynamic explanations and understandings of crime over the life course. As such, I attempt to address the shortcomings of Farrington’s model by reframing it in terms of an integrative framework. Specifically, I use strain theory and control theory to elucidate the importance of structural and social processes leading to crime and delinquency, and to emphasize the potential for discontinuity as well as change in criminal propensities over the life course. I conclude the paper by illuminating the implications of Farrington’s psychological model in terms of broader policy initiatives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".