Making it on the Outside: Towards an Integrated Control Theory for Understanding the Reintegration Process

Abstract

Reintegration has garnered greater attention in criminology, as many releasees from prisons are being recycled back into criminal justice systems around the world. Despite this trend, the reintegration literature to date has been mainly descriptive and few studies have paid attention to the theoretical dynamics and social context surrounding reintegration. To address this gap, we suggest that the prominent debate, mainly found in American criminology, on crime causation between Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) General Theory of Crime (GTC) and Sampson and Laub's (1993) and Laub and Sampson's (2003) Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control (AGTISC) be used to advance this largely atheoretical literature. After showing that research exploring the effects of self-control and informal social control on reintegration remains largely uncharted territory in criminological theory, we propose an integrated control theory, in addition to some methodological considerations, for better understanding reintegration.