This chapter focuses on social constraint. It analyzes coercive forces that operate as potential direct internal and external controls on individual criminal offending. Our study involves four categories of constraints to build an explanatory model of individual offending. These categories of constraint are formal and informal social reactions as direct external constraints and beliefs and perceived risk of punishment as direct internal constraints. In the literature there is neither a theory nor a study that considers simultaneously these four categories of constraint. Theories and studies look at one or, at most, two types of external or internal direct constraint. This chapter addresses two questions: Are internal constraints more important then external constraints for the explanation of adolescent and adult offending? Within internal and external constraints, which type of direct control is the most important predictor of offending?

Constraints

The following literature review introduces the 12 constructs used in our comprehensive constraint model.

External constraints

Thirty-six years ago, Nye (1958) clearly distinguished between formal and informal controls: “Restraint of the individual may be exercised by police and other designated officials, or entirely by disapproval, ridicule, ostracism, banishment, the supernatural, and similar techniques used by informal groups or by society as a whole” (p. 7). In Nye's definition of external constraint we find the formal social reaction perspective. Labeling theorists state that the imposition of the official label of delinquent following a criminal activity favors development of a delinquent self-image and emergence of new and more serious forms of criminal activities.