An Application of Control Balance Theory to Incarcerated Sex Offenders

In his work “Control Balance: Toward a General Theory of Deviance” (1995), Charles Tittle suggested that an individual’s “control ratio” would influence involvement in deviant behavior. We evaluated this claim by presenting evidence from a study of incarcerated sex offenders that examined their self-reported offending patterns and their presumed motivations for committing sexual crimes. We compared the scores of 288 incarcerated male sex offenders with those of a sample of university undergraduates on the Nowicki-Strickland Internal/External Control Scale. The Nowicki is a clinical questionnaire that measures the extent to which individuals feel that events are contingent on their behavior versus the extent to which they feel events are controlled externally. Also presented are results from a self-administered survey of 125 currently incarcerated sex offenders that focused on their reasons for offending and the sensations they experience both while committing their offenses and the day after committing them. Sex offenders represent a unique group that is particularly likely to register a control deficit conducive to deviance. Findings suggested that many sex offenders committed sexual deviance to compensate for a perceived lack of control over events in their own lives, and their crimes allowed them to experience sensations of power, control, and symbolic meaning—even if only temporarily. Results appeared to lend qualified support to control balance theory. This work was funded by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections through the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Research Consortium in summer and fall, 1997. The project was ostensibly designed as a study of sex offender recidivism, and as an evaluation of a sex offender treatment program. While the project gathered information from several sources, findings presented here drew primarily on information from two bodies of data. The first involved data systematically gathered from the clinical files of nearly 300 habitual sex offenders who had done time or were then doing time in a large medium security correctional facility in Oklahoma, and who had been enrolled in a sex offender treatment program at that facility. The second body of data was from a recent survey of 125 habitual sex offenders enrolled in the treatment program at the same institution which asked them about their past offending patterns and victims. That information provided a unique look at the behavior of habitual sex offenders, and allowed an explicit test of the theory of control balance among habitual sex offenders.