36812_5. Offender Decision-Making and Motivation - Criminology. 03 crime as choice.
Techniques of neutralization. Techniques of neutralization ("neutralisation" in Commonwealth countries) are a theoretical series of methods by which those who commit illegitimate acts temporarily neutralize certain values within themselves which would normally prohibit them from carrying out such acts, such as morality, obligation to abide by the law, and so on.
In simpler terms, it is a psychological method for people to turn off 'inner protests' when they do, or are about to do something they themselves perceive as wrong. The theory[edit] Edwin H. Sutherland. Warr and Stafford (1991:862) studied the mechanism by which delinquency is socially transmitted.
They compared the effect of peer’s attitude and effect of peer’s behavior and found that delinquency stemmed rather from behavior of peers than the consequence of attitudes acquired from peers. This means that Sutherland’s assertion that attitude of peers is major factor of delinquency is incomplete.