The Susan Smith case caught national attention in the twentieth century as the entire nation followed a desperate mother’s loss for her abducted sons, to the unexpected reveal of the same mother as a merciless woman who drowned her own children. Years have past since the incident, and Smith remained incarcerated and in mourning for her irreversible actions and the forever loss of two innocent lives. In an attempt to understand Susan Smith’s abnormal dependence on other individuals and her deviant behaviour of murdering her children, Sampson and Laub’s Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control offers an explanation to the collapse of Smith’s social capital as the causation of the terrible crime.

Offender’s Background Susan Vaughan Smith