Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency

Jeff Maahs

Most classic criminology books outline an original theory of crime. Social Sources of Delinquency does not, but it maintains an important place in criminology for other reasons. Foremost, Ruth Rosner Kornhauser's book provides a unique and controversial classification of the major sociological explanations of delinquency. Her categorization of theory is unique because of its basis in the assumptions made by theorists about human nature and social organization. Because these assumptions are not explicitly stated by theorists, Kornhauser distills “pure” models from various theoretical statements. Among other contributions, her insights about the elements of pure models helped pave the way for the rebirth of social disorganization theory in the 1980s. Kornhauser's work is controversial in both substance and style. First, by introducing the term cultural deviance into the lexicon of criminological theory, Kornhauser helped to spark a rather contentious debate among criminological theorists. Adding fuel to this fire is Kornhauser's Social ...

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