Drift theory in criminology, developed by sociologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza, holds that most people who break the law are not committed criminals with inverted values but ordinary individuals who temporarily loosen their grip on conventional morality, drift into delinquent behavior, and usually drift back out. The theory treats offenders — especially juvenile ones — as people who share society’s moral code and learn to suspend it in specific moments through a set of mental justifications.
Sykes and Matza laid out the cognitive side of the argument in their 1957 article “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency” in the American Sociological Review. Matza then developed the full framework in his 1964 book Delinquency and Drift, which introduced “drift” itself as the psychological limbo between law-abiding behavior and crime that most juvenile offenders actually inhabit.1Encyclopedia Britannica. Neutralization Theory
What Drift Means
Drift describes a state, not a type of person. In Matza’s account, a delinquent is neither forced into crime by environment nor making a cleanly rational choice. They are loosened from social controls without being cut free from them, which creates the conditions for episodic lawbreaking.
Matza called this position soft determinism. Purely deterministic theories treated delinquents as products of poverty or deviant subcultures with no real agency. Classical criminology assumed fully rational actors weighing costs and benefits. Matza argued the truth sits between the two: delinquents retain some choice, but their choice is shaped by the temporary weakening of moral and social constraints.1Encyclopedia Britannica. Neutralization Theory
The content of what drifters act on is also familiar. Matza identified subterranean values — thrill-seeking, aggression, the pursuit of excitement, masculine toughness — as impulses mainstream culture already celebrates in controlled settings like sports, gambling, and action films. Delinquents don’t invent a new value system. They act on values that permeate ordinary life, at the wrong time or against the wrong target. Matza described a “subterranean convergence” between mainstream excitement-seeking and delinquent behavior, which is part of why offenders can hold conventional attitudes sincerely even while breaking rules.2Internet Archive. Delinquency and Drift
The Five Techniques of Neutralization
If drifters share conventional morality, something has to happen for them to act against it. Sykes and Matza argued the mechanism is neutralization: cognitive strategies that temporarily suspend moral objections. They argued these techniques come before the act, not after it, which is what makes the behavior psychologically available in the first place.
- Denial of responsibility. The person reframes the act as something that happened to them rather than something they chose. “I had no choice,” or “anyone in my situation would have done the same,” shifts agency onto circumstances.
- Denial of injury. The person minimizes the harm. A shoplifter tells herself a chain store will barely notice. A vandal insists the damage was trivial. If nobody was really hurt, the reasoning goes, it wasn’t really wrong.
- Denial of the victim. The person redefines the target as deserving. The assault victim “had it coming.” The cheated business was exploitative anyway. The offense becomes a form of rough justice.
- Condemnation of the condemners. Instead of defending the act, the person attacks the moral standing of those passing judgment. Police are corrupt, teachers play favorites, the system is rigged. If the enforcers are hypocrites, their rules carry less weight.
- Appeal to higher loyalties. The person frames the act as serving a more important obligation — loyalty to friends, family, or a group. Stealing to help a friend or fighting to defend a sibling places personal bonds above abstract legal rules.
The power of these techniques is that they don’t require rejecting conventional morality. A person can believe stealing is wrong in general while convincing themselves that this particular instance doesn’t count. That selective suspension is the heart of neutralization.
What Pushes Someone From Drift Into Action
Lowering moral barriers is not the same as pushing someone through the door. In Delinquency and Drift, Matza described two further conditions that convert the state of drift into actual delinquent behavior.
The first is preparation, which covers both the neutralization of inhibitions and the practical mental work of making the act seem reasonable. Preparation bridges the gap between the theoretical possibility of delinquency and the decision to go through with it.2Internet Archive. Delinquency and Drift
The second is desperation, a feeling of being trapped or powerless that supplies the final push. When conventional options feel closed off, delinquent action can register as the only available way to assert control. Matza described desperation as the catalyst that turns potential into behavior.2Internet Archive. Delinquency and Drift
Taken together, these elements describe behavior that is neither fully chosen nor fully compelled. The drifter has not rejected society or adopted a criminal identity. They have found themselves in a psychological space where rules temporarily lose their hold, and specific pressures move them to act. Most will drift back to conformity afterward, which tracks with what juvenile crime statistics show: the vast majority of young offenders do not become career criminals.
How Drift Theory Compares to Other Criminological Theories
Drift theory becomes clearer against the theories it was arguing with.
Subcultural theories, especially Albert Cohen’s and later Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s, portrayed delinquent youth as members of groups with their own oppositional values. Delinquency, in that view, flows from commitment to a deviant subculture. Matza found this unconvincing because actual delinquents showed too much attachment to conventional values to fit the picture. They felt guilt, admired law-abiding people, and drew moral lines about who was a fair target.
Social control theory, most associated with Travis Hirschi, starts from the opposite premise: everyone would offend if nothing stopped them, so the real question is what bonds keep people conforming. Hirschi focused on the strength of attachments, commitments, and beliefs. Matza focused on the process by which those bonds temporarily weaken without snapping. Both treat crime as what happens when conventional ties loosen, but they disagree on whether delinquents are fundamentally different from everyone else.
Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory holds that criminal behavior is learned through interaction with people who hold favorable attitudes toward lawbreaking. Drift theory borrows the idea that neutralization techniques are learned rather than invented, but Matza placed far less weight on deviant peers. For him, mainstream culture itself supplies enough contradictory values to enable drift without requiring immersion in a criminal subgroup.
Criticism and Empirical Problems
Drift theory has drawn serious objections, and some remain unresolved.
The hardest problem is empirical. Testing whether neutralization actually precedes delinquent behavior, rather than serving as a convenient after-the-fact rationalization, is methodologically difficult. If you interview someone after they offend, you cannot easily separate a genuine cognitive precondition from a retroactive excuse. Some research has found that neutralization attitudes predict later delinquency more strongly than delinquency predicts later neutralization, which supports Matza’s timeline.3SAGE Journals. Exploring the Temporal Dynamics of the Neutralization/Delinquency Relationship The broader empirical record is mixed.
Travis Hirschi raised a deeper challenge, arguing that neutralization is beside the point because the real issue is weak social bonds. People do not need to neutralize moral objections if their attachment to conventional norms was never strong. Michael Hindelang’s research supported that critique, finding that juveniles who had already offended were more likely than non-offenders to accept their behavior as legitimate, which suggests the attitudes followed the behavior rather than preceding it.
The theory is also quiet on persistence. Drift explains episodic delinquency well but does not account for the minority of offenders who settle into long-term criminal careers. If drift is a temporary state, what distinguishes those who never drift back? Matza mostly sidestepped the question by focusing on juvenile delinquency rather than adult crime.
Finally, because drift is an internal psychological state, it resists direct measurement. Researchers can document behavior and attitudes, but the subjective experience of moral limbo Matza described does not quantify neatly. That has kept drift theory more useful as a conceptual framework than as a generator of easily testable predictions.
Why the Theory Still Shapes Criminal Justice Thinking
Before Sykes and Matza, the dominant framework split the world into conformists and deviants with opposing value systems. Drift theory replaced that with a picture in which most offenders are conformists who temporarily act otherwise. That turns out to describe juvenile delinquency reasonably well: most young people who break the law do so sporadically, feel some guilt about it, and age out by their mid-twenties.
Neutralization has traveled especially far. Researchers have applied it well beyond street crime, to corporate fraud, environmental violations, domestic violence, and political corruption. Wherever people who consider themselves basically decent engage in behavior they know is wrong, the framework helps explain how they reconcile the contradiction. White-collar offenders are prolific users of denial of injury (“it’s just a technicality”) and condemnation of the condemners (“the regulations are absurd”).
The theory also carries a practical implication for the criminal justice system. If most offenders are drifters rather than committed criminals, interventions that strengthen conventional bonds and disrupt neutralization should outperform pure punishment. Restorative justice programs, which require offenders to confront the actual harm they caused, directly target denial of injury and denial of the victim. Mentoring programs that reinforce conventional attachments address the loosened bonds that make drift possible in the first place.