Laub's Theory Of Crime

Greenberg (1977) also emphasises that along with this apparent strain to gain independence and assert oneself, the role of economic factors and lack of opportunities is explicating the age-crime curve. He argues that because juveniles are excluded from the labour market and restricted to part time jobs that are poorly compensated, they have insufficient funds from legitimate sources to finance their desired level of social activities and are thus are motivated to commit crimes so they can actualise their perceived social needs.

Social bonds and Sampson and Laub’s theory (1995)
Theorists such as Sampson and Laub (1995) however, reject this idea that offending patterns are the result of distinct group trajectories and rather assert, in their
age-graded theory, the ongoing importance of social bonding throughout the lifespan to understanding criminal behaviour. They argue that the loosening of social bonds to parents and teachers entering adolescence, frees an individual to violate social norms (Warr, 1998) and that this greater amount of time spent with peers means that there is significantly less active parental monitoring of teenager behaviour which in turn provides greater opportunities for delinquency and antisocial behaviour (Agnew, 2003).

In childhood, offending is said to be relatively uncommon because of close-knit attachments to parents, teachers, school and formal institutions, whereas in adolescence, these social bonds are said to weaken and be replaced by peers who do not have the same restraining influence.
As such Sampson and Laub argue that youth tend to take part in more criminal activity as they aren’t being shaped by formal and informal social control, so are free to commit whatever deviant acts they see fit, and that it is not until adulthood, where various ‘turning points’ relating to marriage, employment and other critical life events distract the individual as to reduce offending and allow for normative desistance in crime as prosocial bonds are formed with society (Laub & Sampson, 2003).

1. Farrington’s integrated cognitive antisocial potential theory (ICAP)
Along similar lines, Farrington, in his integrated cognitive antisocial potential theory (ICAP), agrees on the importance of forming pro-social bonds with society in order to reduce criminal activity, as well as seeing various strains surrounding maturity gaps and other social-situational factors as contributing to criminal deviance -but rather than focusing his sole attention on these variables, he situates his explanation for criminal deviancy around the idea of one’s ‘Antisocial Potential’
(AP).