Travis Hirschi: A Contemporary Criminologist

Travis Hirschi is a notable contemporary criminologist who is highly regarded for several reasons. Not only has his work had an extraordinary impact on the field of criminology but he is one of the only criminologists who advanced not one, but two important and influential theories of theoretical criminology. Although he himself has dismissed the biographies of important theorists as being essentially meaningless (Laub, 2002), still there is no denying the impact his life has had on his career as a leading sociologist and criminologist. Travis Hirschi was born on April 15, 1935 in Rockville, Utah. He was the fifth of eight children born to Warren G. and Orra Hirschi. His father, Warren, was a transit man on highway survey crews in Utah and Idaho. Travis Hirschi has described

One of those influences was Arthur Beeley, one of his professors. Beeley was a positivist who believed that everyone’s behavior is determined by what happens before the behavior. In addition, and in a related way, Beeley expressed the view that punishments used by the criminal justice system were rather silly, outmoded traditions (Laub, 2002). Beeley helped Hirschi become acquainted with the basic assumptions and tenets of social control history and theory (Schreck, 2014). The second was Emile Durkheim. As a graduate student working on a master’s degree in sociology and education at the University of Utah, he read Durkheim’s book “Suicide,” which emphasized how society regulates a person’s impulses and that those outside of society were basically free to do whatever they wanted to do (Schrenk, 2014). Hirschi told John Laub in an interview that, “Before I read ‘Suicide,’ I had no idea what sociology was about. I read ‘Suicide’ and said aha!...to my mind, that was the beginning of my involvement in control theory” (Laub, 2002, p.