According to Sutherland's differential theory, a person learns criminal behavior from those that he or she associates with. According to this theory, a person is more likely to engage in unlawful conduct if the individual is friends with people that are deviant.
A major criticism of Sutherland's differential theory is determinism. Sutherland doesn't clearly explain what would make an individual commit a crime. It also fails to explain the origins of spontaneous criminal behavior. A person might have grown up around law-abiding citizens, but they still might decide to go on a shooting rampage one day.
Aker's social learning theory overcomes these criticisms by stating that criminal behavior is motivated by rewards and punishments. Before a person commits a crime, he or she weighs the benefits against the disadvantages of committing that crime. Furthermore, a person considers past experiences before doing any wrong. If prior experience was bad or the punishment outweighs the reward, the person doesn't commit the crime. However, Aker's theory fails to acknowledge character traits. It only talks about the environment as being the main cause of criminal behavior.
http://deviance.socprobs.net/Unit_3/Theory/DA.htm
https://criminology.fandom.com/wiki/Differential_Reinforcement_Theory
Each of these is an important theory in the study of criminality and deviance. Essentially, Edwin Sutherland argued that criminal behavior was learned, just like other kinds of behaviors. Put very simply, if people spent time around criminals and deviants, they were more likely to be criminals and deviants themselves. This is more than just a process of peer pressure—it is a process in which people learn the mindset behind deviancy as well as different ways of putting it into practice. He arrived at this theory by looking at people in similar material (economic) circumstances and determining what they had in common. They formed groups whose norms were different from other groups, and crime and deviance became expressive of "normative conflict."
However, as one sociologist observed, the most penetrating critique of Sutherland's theory was "that the theory cannot be tested empirically." The so-called "social learning" theory advanced by Ronald Akers sought to provide a quantitative foundation for understanding criminal deviance. Akers sought to look closer at the ways that people learned these behaviors, focusing on their "frequency of reinforcement." He employs the principle of operant conditioning, promoted by psychologist B.F. Skinner, to explain how people's behavior is shaped by rewards and incentives. Akers based his work on surveys of young people in such institutions as colleges, reform schools, and public schools. In so doing, he sought to address what he saw as the weaknesses of Sutherland's theory by assigning "peer association variables" that determined the frequency of contact between an individual. He argued that this enabled researchers to determine the extent to which one's group shaped their behavior. Sutherland's theory struggled to explain why some people in similar material circumstances did not commit crimes, and Akers tried to create a mechanism through which this question could be addressed quantitatively.
The extent to which this actually succeeded is a matter of debate among criminologists and other scholars. One major criticism of this theory is that it is really only effective in measuring deviance by some groups in specific circumstances (like reform schools) and not others (like Wall Street firms) who also engage in criminal deviance. Because of this problem, some have argued that "social learning theory" is really not different from Sutherland's differential association theory in practice.
http://faculty.washington.edu/matsueda/Papers/Current.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=evS5DQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=sociology+in+our+times&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKrLuQ-LzZAhUMEawKHWNvA64Q6AEIKTAA
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1043&context=hilltopreview
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