Drift

Drift Definition

Drift is a theory of deviance developed by David Matza, describing how individuals move into deviant activity gradually rather than through membership of a deviant subculture. The drifter neutralizes ordinarily accepted moral objections to deviance by supplying some justification for the act, easing themselves into rule-breaking without ever renouncing conventional values.

The Theory

Matza’s account was directed against theories that portrayed delinquents as committed members of oppositional subcultures, driven by values fundamentally opposed to those of mainstream society. In his view, most delinquency is nothing so dramatic. The focus of drift theory is deviance that is mundane and trivial — the everyday deviant act — undertaken episodically by young people who remain, most of the time, entirely conventional. Because there is no commitment to a deviant career, juvenile delinquents typically drift back into normal society as they grow older, a pattern consistent with the well-documented tendency of offending to decline with age. Central to the process are what Matza (with Gresham Sykes) called techniques of neutralization: justifications such as denying that any real harm was done, denying that there was a genuine victim, or appealing to higher loyalties, which temporarily release the individual from the moral bind of the norms they otherwise accept. Neutralization loosens social control; drift occurs in the space it opens up.

Criticism

The theory has been criticized for trivializing much seriously deviant behavior. By modeling deviance on the casual, episodic delinquency of ordinary adolescents, it arguably has little to say about persistent, organized, or violent offending, where commitment to deviant activity is deeper and the language of “drifting” seems inadequate. Even so, the concept remains influential for explaining the transient delinquency of the young and for highlighting how offenders manage the moral meaning of their own conduct.