Techniques of Neutralization

Gresham Sykes and David Matza's "Techniques of Neutralization" was written largely in response to Albert Cohen's Delinquent Boys. Sykes and Matza challenged Cohen's thesis almost immediately, arguing that he had grossly overstated the differences between delinquents and nondelinquents. By the first criterion above, attention from other scholars, the theory has been an unqualified success. It is one of the best known and most frequently cited theories in criminology, and by 2003 it had been cited more than seven hundred times in the scholarly literature. Neutralization theory was never intended to be a complete theory in itself. The concept of cause is not as popular in social science circles as it once was, but if people understand it in a probabilistic rather than an absolute sense, there is no need to abandon this useful concept. Studies based on interviews and personal narratives are numerous, but they have failed to meet these criteria.