Why Delinquency? 9781442653450

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Why delinquency? M A U R I C E CUSSON In this lucid, original, and provocative study, Professor Cusson advances a theory of delinquent behaviour that is both disarming and convincing. Delinquent behaviour, he reminds us, is fairly widespread among young people of all classes and backgrounds - it is not, as some would like to believe, exclusively a lower-class phenomenon. Most adolescents, at one time or another, commit acts that are violations of the law. Why do they do so? Delinquent activity affords more advantages than is generally supposed. It permits adolescents to satisfy numerous desires, to resolve very real problems, to live intensely, and to enjoy themselves thoroughly. It is one means of obtaining what most of us are looking for: excitement, possessions, power, and the defence of essential self-interests. However, only a minority of adolescents, mainly restless youngsters concerned only with the present, become deeply involved in crime. They do so because this seems to be the solution most readily available to them. Having problems at school and in the labour market, they find that doors normally open to those who enter adult life are closed to them. They associate with friends who initiate them in criminal techniques and become their allies in delinquent ventures. This association opens the way to illegal activities that will enable them to achieve their goals. Translated and adapted from his book Délinquants pourquoi?, Cusson's study is enlivened by interesting and appropriate examples drawn from a large European and North American literature. Moreover, it ranges from philosophy to the behavioural and then to the biological sciences with ease and fluidity. It will stimulate the thinking of student and general reader alike. MAURICE CUSSON is a professor at l'École de Criminologie, Université de Montréal.

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Why delinquency?

MAURICE CUSSON translated by Dorothy R. Crelinsten

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1983 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-6530-9 (paper) ISBN 0-8020-2514-5 (cloth) First published in French under the title Délinquants pourquoi? by Éditions Hurtubise HMH in 1981

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Cusson, Maurice, 1942Why delinquency? Translation of: Délinquants pourquoi? Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-2514-5 (bound).-ISBN 0-8020-6530-9 (pbk.) 1. Juvenile delinquency. I. Title. HV9071.C8713

364.3'6

C83-098573-5

The translation of this book was made possible by grants from the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation and the International Centre for Comparative Criminology. This translation, as well as the original work, has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

TO SUZANNE, FABIENNE, AND MARIANNE

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Contents Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3 1 Strategic analysis 12 PART ONE: GOALS

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Goals of the offence 25 Action 33 Bored to death or frightened to death 43 Appropriation 50 Defensive aggression 59 Vengeance 70 The catharsis hypothesis 76 Domination 85 PART TWO: OPPORTUNITIES

10 11 12 13 14

The opportunity theory 95 Confrontation with school 106 Work 116 Prisoner of the present 125 Delinquent peers 137

viii

Contents PART THREE: CONCLUSION

15 Freedom 155 16 Summing up 161 Notes 169 Bibliography 179 Index 189

Acknowledgments This book is largely a product of the professional milieu in which it was written. It would have been impossible for me to write it if I had not been able to draw constantly on the knowledge and ideas of my colleagues at the School of Criminology of the University of Montreal. I am particularly grateful to those who did not agree with me, since confrontation is the very dynamism of intellectual life. Having participated in the work of the Groupe de recherche sur l'inadaptation juvénile (Research Group on Juvénile Maladjustment) within the framework of the study Structure et dynamique du comportement délinquant subsidized by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I had direct access to this mine of research data that was gathered at great effort, in particular by Louise Biron and Marc LeBlanc. Among my colleagues at the University of Montreal, I am especially indebted to Denis Szabo. His erudition and broad views opened many horizons for me, particularly by drawing my attention to a great number of books and articles that I had missed. Father Noel Mailloux influenced my analyses of the problem of freedom, among other things; during his seminar on responsibility many ideas found here came to me. The preliminary versions of this book were submitted to readers who were discriminating and demanding. Danielle Laberge-Altmejd, Yves Brillon, and Jean-Paul Brodeur did

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Acknowledgments

not spare me their criticisms or their suggestions. And I needed them: if this book is a little bit more refined, it is due to them. Finally, I thank Micheline Côté who typed various versions of this work, often under difficult conditions.

Why delinquency?

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Introduction This book is about adolescent offenders and the crimes they commit. It will deal with acts of variable seriousness ranging from shoplifting, housebreaking, automobile theft, hold-up, and rape all the way to murder. Delinquency is fairly widespread among young people, and not only among the poor, or the sons of disreputable families. Most adolescents, at one time or another, commit acts that are violations of the law. This is surprising, at least at first, for all these youngsters know very well that what they are doing is wrong. They know very well that they can be arrested by the police and that they are risking their reputation and their future. Why, then, do so many youngsters commit these offences, highly disapproved of and often severely punished? And why are there so many who not only commit them, but repeat them? But before dealing with the answers, let us be as clear as possible about the 'why?' in 'Why delinquency?,' because it can be a fairly ambiguous question. It can be studied from at least three different angles. 1 / If we have in mind the function or the goals of the offence, the meaning of the 'why?' is: Of what use is the offence to the delinquent? 2 / We can think also of the causes. In that case, the 'why?' could mean: What are the causal factors that drive young people to delinquency? 3 / Another type of reasoning runs this way: if young people drift into delinquency, it is because something went wrong somewhere. Otherwise it would not occur. In this case the

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Why delinquency?

question is: What happened to the controls that normally prevent 'acting out'? If we are facing not one, but three questions, then obviously a theory of delinquency should be able to give three types of answers. In that case, it would be well to take a closer look at the questions. 1 / We tend easily to explain crime and delinquency by its pay-off. Why does someone steal?; simply because he needs the money! This hypothesis leads to a study of the results the delinquent wants to achieve. In this approach, juvenile delinquency is seen as goal-oriented or problem-solving behaviour. One can speak of'function' when the author is not quite aware of the purpose of his act, and of'goal' when he is. This line of investigation is often ignored in criminology, while for the biologist studying animal or human behaviour it is a central concern. At the beginning of his book on aggression, Lorenz (1963) asks: 'What is aggression good for?' A theory attempting to understand all the important aspects of delinquency will sooner or later have to answer questions such as these: What kind of benefit is derived from crime? What makes delinquency an agreeable, profitable, useful, or necessary type of behaviour? What are the aims of delinquents? 2 / Often, the 'why?' means we want to find the causes. Then the question could be put like this: What factors push young people into delinquency? In this case, one is led to search for the sociological or psychological variables that have a causal relationship with juvenile delinquency. In contemporary sociology, the search for causes mainly involves two questions: First, what is the role of social learning in the origin and development of delinquent behaviour? Second, what are the strains that drive many youths to adopt a delinquent solution? 3 /'Why delinquency?' could also mean: How is it that some adolescents do not have enough control to curb their

5

Introduction

antisocial tendencies? The problem, stated in these terms, takes for granted, implicitly or explicitly, that there are such things as inhibitions preventing people from committing delinquent acts. Considering this, the decisive question becomes: Why do some people not commit delinquent acts? It might be expected that since theft and violence can be easy and expeditious means to get what we want, these acts would be very frequent, but they are not. This being the case, the question is: What makes people obey the law? The explanation of delinquency then lies in the breakdown of the inhibitions that should be controlling such acts. The control theory of delinquency is not discussed in this book, though not because the question is unimportant. Quite the contrary: I consider it such a crucial problem that I have decided to devote another book to it.1 So we are left with questions 1 and 2: What use is delinquency to its authors? What pushes young people to commit offences? Contemporary sociology offers some answers to these questions. But, as we shall see, they are neither complete nor wholly satisfactory. A convenient way to classify sociological theories on delinquency is simply to use the three types Hirschi (1969) put forward: the strain theory, the cultural deviance theory, and the control theory. According to sociologists of the strain theory school (Merton, 1938; Cohen, 1955; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960), lowerclass youths have either a status problem or a need, induced by society, to achieve a high level of success. But these youngsters do not have the means to achieve their ends. This explains their frustration: if they face the facts, they know that it is impossible to fulfil their aspirations. At this point, delinquency occurs to them as a solution to the problem-an illegitimate means to achieve a legitimate goal and avoid frustration.

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Why delinquency?

How do the strain theorists answer our first question, about goals? According to Cohen, delinquency is a way, for lowerclass boys, of gaining status among their peers. According to Cloward and Ohlin, delinquent behaviour is a way of achieving goals deemed important by society. For the second question, about causes, strain theories cite the lack of legitimate means. Lower-class youths are led to delinquency because they face the frustration of being unable to achieve their goals by socially acceptable means. Strain theories have come under attack, especially by Hirschi (1969), Empey (1978), and Kornhauser (1978). It is now an established fact that young delinquents do not have high aspirations, at least in the academic field. Furthermore, we do not often find a discrepancy between aspirations and expectations. Another problem with strain theories is that they focus on lower-class delinquents. Since it is clear now that lower-class youths do not have a monopoly on delinquency, this introduces a severe limitation in the scope of the theory. To this well-known criticism, one can add that strain theories picture delinquents as oversocialized individuals, whose sole aspirations are of a social nature: to solve a status problem or achieve the goals proposed by society. This is a rather unlikely image of delinquents: How can one imagine that thefts and violence have nothing to do with greed, thrills, or hatred? Nevertheless there remains a crucial element in the strain theory that cannot be criticized. It is the idea that individuals who do not have access to legitimate means for realizing their ends (whatever they may be) may be tempted by illegal means. This hypothesis will soon be useful in our subsequent analysis. The term 'cultural deviance' is used to point to those theories that explain delinquency by the influence of conduct

7

Introduction

norms learned in subcultures. The theorists of this group, among them Sellin (1938) and Sutherland (1939), did not feel the need to answer the question 'What does the delinquent want to achieve by his behaviour?' They did not conceive of man as a goal-oriented animal; instead, they believed him to be a pure product of his culture. From this standpoint, the individual wants what his group wants him to want. He does not steal to get money but because he is conforming to the standards of a subculture. Therefore subcultural theories ignore the problem of goals and consider only the question of causes. On this second point, they put forward the thesis that youths are delinquent because they are socialized to norms that condone or even value what the law labels a crime. If this is the case, the cause of crime lies in internalized subcultural norms. Theories of social deviance rest on two unquestionable facts. First, young delinquents tend to associate closely with other delinquents. Second, they often commit their offences with accomplices. Considering this, it is difficult to reject the hypothesis of mutual influence among delinquents. But, from that, to conclude that there are delinquent subcultures that can change 'delinquent' conduct into normative conduct one must show that delinquents put a value on theft and aggression. But this has never been shown to date. Theories of cultural deviance are unsatisfactory because they assume that individuals submit completely to the rules of their group. The delinquent is presented as being totally moulded by his subculture and perfectly adjusted to this group (Kornhauser, 1978, 36-9). One can believe that it is possible to find a few individuals whose sole aim in life is to obey the rules of their circle, but how can one think that this applies to most delinquents, how can one think that conformity alone explains delinquency?

8

Why delinquency?

The central hypothesis of control theories is well stated by Hirschi (1969): 'A person is free to commit delinquent acts because his ties to the conventional order have somehow been broken' (3). In other words, a youth drifts into delinquency because he is no longer under the influence of social control. In this type of theory, the problem of delinquency is stated in such a way that neither the question of goals nor the question of causes is directly considered. Hirschi admits this quite frankly: The question "Why do they do it?" is simply not the question the theory is designed to answer. The question is, "Why don't we do it?" ' (34). Social control theories assume that everybody is capable of committing offences and that we all have certain unfulfilled needs. So it is not surprising that people break the law: often illegitimate means can satisfy needs more easily than legitimate means. This argument is quite convincing, but only if it does not leave us with the impression that the lack of social control can offer a complete explanation of delinquency. When one considers social control to the exclusion of all other variables, one must work on the assumption that the motivation to commit crime is constant from one individual to the other and from one situation to the other. But how can we believe that everybody in every situation has an equal drive to steal or attack others? The least that can be said is that it is an empirical question to which an answer has not yet been found. Despite its merits, then, the social control theory is incomplete; it explains in a convincing way why people respect the law but leaves aside the twofold question of the function and cause of delinquency. Traditional theories of delinquency either do not answer our question or give answers that are open to criticism. But in 1982, one cannot, as in 1969, restrict the theories about delinquency to strain, cultural deviance, and social control. In the

9

Introduction

interim, a theoretical model has emerged which is both old and new, and it breaks with the models generally accepted in criminology. In this new model, the offence is conceived as the result of a decision-making process in which choices maximizing the payoff are made in a context of limited opportunity. The authors who contributed to the development of this new model come from various backgrounds. There are economists such as Ehrlich (1979) who liken the offender to the 'homo oeconomicus,' a being endowed with rationality. But we also find psychologists, such as Patterson (1982), who show that coercion can control the behaviour of others quite efficiently. There are criminologists, such as Glaser (1978), Richards, Berk, and Forster (1979), and Conklin (1981), who argue that delinquent behaviour is determined by the results anticipated by the offenders. In criminal justice policy, this way of thinking is considered more and more self-evident. In effect, neo-classical and deterrence specialists (Tittle and Logan, 1973; Zimring and Hawkins, 1973; Andenaes, 1974; Gibbs, 1975; Van Den Haag, 1975; Wilson, 1975; Von Hirsh, 1976) base their arguments, explicitly or not, on the model of a rational man responding to positive and negative incentives. On this point, Wilson (1975) is very clear: 'The policy analyst is led to assume that the criminal acts as if crime were the product of a free choice among competing opportunities and constraints. The radical individualism of Bentham and Beccaria may be scientifically questionable but prudentially necessary' (56). It is easy to understand Wilson's low-profile approach: he writes about criminal justice policy and prefers not to wage battle on the field of causal analysis. But if the model of rational man is to be useful to the policy analyst, it must correspond to something in the dynamic of delinquent behaviour. Why do we adopt one way of reasoning when we speak

10

Why delinquency?

about fighting crime, and another - altogether differentwhen we try to understand it? Logically, we should be able to conciliate the crime theory, which the neo-classicists have barely outlined, and the facts obtained from research on juvenile delinquency. This is the object of this book. Its approach to delinquency can be called strategic analysis, an expression that places emphasis on the idea that delinquent behaviour can be explained using a model of rational man furthering his interests and trying to achieve this goal by the most efficient means. Strategic analysis should help us to answer two questions: First, what is delinquency for? Second, why do certain young people choose delinquency to achieve their ends? The strategic approach to delinquency that will be developed in this book can be briefly summarized. Delinquent activity affords more advantages than is generally supposed. It permits adolescents to satisfy numerous desires, to resolve very real problems, to live intensely, and to enjoy themselves thoroughly. From this point of view, the offence seems to be one means of realizing what most of us are looking for: excitement, possessions, power, and the defence of essential interests. This being so, it is understandable that many adolescents are tempted by delinquency. However, only a minority of them, mainly restless youngsters concerned only with the present, will become deeply involved in crime. They will do so because this seems to them the most accessible solution open to them. On the one hand, since they have problems at school and on the labour market, the doors normally open to those who enter adult life are closed to them. On the other hand, they associate with friends who initiate them in criminal techniques and become their allies in delinquent ventures. This association opens the way to illegal activities that will enable them to achieve their goals.

11

Introduction

In this book, the word 'delinquency' will be reserved for offences committed by adolescents that cause obvious harm to others and are punishable under the criminal code. This definition is clearly restrictive. Its focus is on predatory and aggressive offences that would also be punished if the minor were an adult. It ignores victimless crimes and status offences and leaves us with a limited list of infractions: petty theft, larceny, housebreaking, automobile theft, vandalism, arson, assault, robbery, rape, and homicide. Such a definition restricts the scope of our theory. But it cannot be otherwise: the first step of theory construction is to define the object precisely. Even though this definition is restrictive, it focuses on a central aspect of delinquency, the one that citizens constantly complain about and that takes up a major part of the activity of the juvenile courts.

1 Strategic analysis For a century, criminologists, single-mindedly pursuing a heavily determinist approach, have persisted in creating a very strange image of the criminal: a monstrous puppet, tied hand and foot, and committed to the manipulations of an interminable series of bio-psycho-socio-cultural factors. Criminologists have not been the only ones to arrive at this impasse psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists preceded them; but they were the only ones to have put so much relentless energy and intelligence into changing men into objects. Strategic analysis makes it possible to achieve the reversal of perspective that was needed. In sociology, this inverse reasoning has been used more or less explicitly by authors as diverse as Goffman (1959; 1963; 1967; 1969),Crozier (1963), Eckhoff (1974), and Baechler (1975; 1976). All these authors have this in common: they present man as an actor who makes decisions, works out strategies, and pursues goals. It is in the sociology of organizations that strategic analysis has been most highly developed. It stemmed from a reaction first against Taylorism, which conceived man in purely rational terms, and then against the school of human relations that saw him in essentially emotional terms. This twofold rejection led authors such as March and Simon (1958) to put the problem of human decision in terms of limited rationality. According to them, 'action is goal-oriented and adaptive' (169). However, man cannot cope with all the complexities of a problem and he cannot act with complete freedom. He is therefore obliged, when making decisions, to engage in a pro-

13

Strategic analysis

cess of simplification; thus ideal rationality gives way to various accommodations, although it is not entirely abandoned. Hence, where the desired results are concerned, man does not seek the perfect solution but one that will meet a certain number of minimum criteria. When analysing problems, we do not try to see a situation in all its ramifications, but only in terms of its general outlines. 'Rational behavior calls for simplified models that capture the main features of a problem without capturing all its complexities' (169). As far as solutions go, we do not have an unlimited list of strategies to follow in any situation but merely a few plans of action from which to choose. Crozier (1963), following the same line of approach as March and Simon, advanced the 'strategic analysis method' (203), adding the idea of power. In any organization, members seek to influence the other members. To do this, each member negotiates his participation conditionally. The strategy of individuals and groups, then, will be to preserve situations where their behaviour cannot be easily anticipated and where their participation can be conditional. Thus there develops a series of pressures and counterpressures - a power struggle - in areas where people depend on others yet are never certain what their behaviour will be. In criminology, the theory of differential anticipation advanced by Glaser (1978) resembles strategic analysis fairly closely. This theory seeks to explain delinquent or criminal behaviour by its consequences. Glaser points out that theft, for example, can have a number of positive consequences for its author (the money and stolen goods, but also the admiration of peers) and a number of negative consequences (arrest, punishment, the disapproval of his circle, guilt, etc). So it is reasonable to suppose that delinquent conduct can be determined by the consequences its author expects. This is how

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Why delinquency ?

Glaser formulates his hypothesis: 'Differential-anticipation theory assumes that a person will try to commit a crime wherever and whenever the expectation of gratification from it - as a result of social bonds, differential learning, and perception of opportunity - exceeds the unfavorable anticipation from these sources' (127). The concept of 'social bond' enables Glaser to incorporate in his model essential elements of the control theory, such as attachment to others and commitment at school and at work. The idea of'differential learning' allows him to incorporate proposals developed by the theories of cultural deviance. Glaser's theory does not go against available empirical data. But it has the disadvantage of claiming to answer all the questions simultaneously. The problems are not arranged consecutively, and an eclectic proposition emerges that takes into account a little of everything - differential association, control theories, reinforcements, 'drift,' opportunities. The fundamental hypothesis that strategic analysis leads to is that when someone means to commit a crime, he tends to choose the option that, considering his opportunities, will have the greatest advantage at the least cost. Strategic analysis sees delinquent behaviour as result-oriented, with its own rationality, taking into account the opportunities offered the actor and the behaviour of his adversaries. In my account of strategic analysis I will examine its three essential components: behaviour, results, and rationale.

Behaviour Behaviour can be defined as a sequence of acts (verbal or non-verbal) directly observable and is interpreted on the basis of what the observation reveals. What interests us in strategic analysis is what people do rather than what they are -

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Strategic analysis

human action rather than personality. Strategies are people's actions vis-à-vis the environment and above all vis-à-vis others: acts of attack and defence, and manoeuvres to influence, persuade, manipulate, dominate, restrict, and coerce others. And this is what crime is. It is a type of behaviour, an act that produces clearly visible results: money changes from one pocket to another, wounds are inflicted or people are killed. The positivists used to say that the infraction is but an abstract entity, it is the man who committed the crime that should be studied. Unfortunately, the criminal was studied so much that, on the way, examination of the act was forgotten. The crime was reduced to the status of a symptom, but a symptom that no one any longer took the trouble to describe. And after long personality investigations, a diagnosis was reached that claims to tell who the criminal is, but strangely enough, no one knows any longer what he did to warrant this label. It is generally possible to interpret behaviour on the basis of things we can observe. Behaviour is meaningful, but it is not necessary to make daring extrapolations to find out what it means. We must proceed on the basis of the subject's behaviour and on what the subject says himself about the meaning of his conduct, and we must formulate the simplest possible hypothesis to explain it, that is, organize everything into a coherent whole. What we are seeking is the immediate meaning of the act, that which is directly apparent through careful observation of a succession of a person's acts and the significance that the person gives his own conduct. This approach, which consists in simply describing behaviour, is in contrast with all those analyses that evade the study of behaviour - actually the only phenomenon on which we have a direct hold-to plunge into unverifiable interpreta-

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Why delinquency ?

lions of the 'profound' causes of phenomena. This slipping from science to speculation is current in psychology and sociology. Too often the observation of facts is neglected in favour of interpretations. It is easy to play magician by pulling out of a hat such things as tyrannical superego, sado-masochism, fear of castration, or an Oedipus complex; all that is needed is a light coat of psychoanalytic varnish. It is easy to pontificate by forever bringing up the post-industrial society, alienation, exploitation, or anomie; all that is needed is a thin coat of sociological varnish. But these verbal explanations are not informative; they do not lessen our uncertainty; they do not tell us what is happening or what we can expect. The most they provide is a rather vague intellectual satisfaction. Results In strategic analysis, the utmost importance is attached to the results of the action. These can be agreeable (pleasure, profit, prestige, and so on) or disagreeable (fear, disgust, disappointment). A distinction must be made here between the result (the consequence of the act as it is experienced by the actor) and the goal (the result that the actor proposes to achieve). (The subject of goals will be dealt with in chapter 2.) The evaluation of an act will consist in comparing its results with the actor's initial goal. Does crime pay? According to the common saying, the answer is negative, but today there are many who doubt the truth of this. It is a question that merits investigation. The incredible thing is that criminologists have never examined the results of offences. They have studied almost every imaginable Tactor' that could cause crime: atavism, physical constitution, cerebral damage, the chromosome XYY, race, climate, the press, television, poverty, riches, war, peace,

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Strategic analysis

industrialization, religion, and so on. The most improbable factors were weighed and weighed again in scholarly treatises, but nowhere did they deign to answer the simple question: What does crime yield its author?1 If adolescents and adults not only commit infractions, but also recidivate, they must derive some benefit from doing so. And the psychoanalysts who state peremptorily that delinquents are seeking punishment should not be taken too seriously: not one of them has ever done a systematic study of the consequences of delinquent activity. The importance attributed to the results of the action stems from a hedonistic concept of man, a concept that Beccaria (1764) summed up in a phrase: 'Pleasure and pain are the motivating factors of sensitive beings' (16).2 From this point of view, what man wants is what is good for him. 'Man is a creature of desire,' writes Baechler (1976), that is, 'a being always on the watch for any possibility of increasing his assets. These may be divided into three categories, power, wealth, prestige' (34). Driven by his desires, man changes his conduct according to the consequences, agreeable or disagreeable, of his former acts. And he grows and develops by satisfying his successive desires, discovering new needs and new pleasures in the results of his activity.3 If it is true that a large part of human behaviour is influenced by its consequences, agreeable or disagreeable, it would be strange indeed if delinquent conduct were an exception to the rule. So far, we have not found any difference in nature between the criminal and the normal man. This being so, it would hardly be likely that, whereas all other men seek pleasure, criminals seek pain; that whereas all men want good, criminals want evil. We must not allow ourselves to be confused by the terrible consequences of certain criminal acts, for example, the cases

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Why delinquency?

of murder followed by suicide, only to turn around immediately and plunge headlong into 'demonology,' that is, into a criminal psychology that has nothing to do with normal psychology. This is a sure way to end up understanding nothing. Limited rationality In strategic analysis, man, including the delinquent, is presumed capable, up to a certain point, of rational decisions. He can opt for the most effective solution, taking into account his interests and the circumstances that limit his freedom. This is the principle of limited rationality. Economists have recently been tackling crime analysis. They naturally see this as a rational activity. The authors of the Peyrefitte report, taking this approach, stated: 'Unless dealing with irrational human beings, which is rather exceptional in criminal cases, most delinquents, as a preliminary to their crimes, actually make a sort of cost/benefit analysis' (1977, ii, 235). This is certainly a fascinating possibility. What is the nature of the delinquent's rationale? To answer, one would have to enter his frame of reference and discover the logic that gives meaning to his act - an exciting undertaking! Ideally, a decision is rational when it leads to the choice of means that offer the best chance of realizing the goal that is sought. The concept of rationality could be broken down into four components. First, there is the goal: the author has an idea, at least in outline, of the result he would like to achieve. Second, he makes a calculation: he examines the range of means at his disposal and looks for the most effective solution, that is, one that will provide the greatest benefit at the least cost (Baechler, 1978,264). Third, he makes a choice, for his behaviour is not entirely predetermined; he has a certain

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Strategic analysis

amount of scope that gives him the possibility of choosing one or another course of action. Fourth comes the evaluation: once the act is committed, the person examines the results and asks himself to what extent the means chosen allowed him to realize his goal. The answer to this question will influence future decisions. But this ideal model is rarely found in concrete situations, where there are drastic limitations to the rationality of decisions. The person does not always have clear objectives; situations limit choice; and information is lacking. First, as Crozier and Friedberg (1977) remarked, men rarely have clear objectives. They do not know exactly where they are going or what they want. And if this is true for adults, it is even more the case for children and adolescents. To imagine that people carry out only projects that are conceived in advance and act in terms of results that are clearly foreseen is sheer idealism. There is a great deal of exploratory conduct, especially among young people. They try something 'just to see.' They do things because 'everybody does them.' They give in to the pressure of friends and act without conviction. Children undertake many things simply because adults make them do so. The consequences of such acts are very important and eventually make the person decide to take one path rather than another: 'It was more interesting than I thought.' A boy commits his first burglary simply because a friend dared him to and he wants to show him that he is not 'chicken.' Then he realizes that this is an easy and amusing way to get pocket-money. Or the contrary may occur: a person may have an intense desire to do something but, on trying it, he finds he does not like it. Brown (1965) saw his older friends taking heroin, and this seemed to him the greatest pleasure in the world. He

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Why delinquency?

dreamed of taking it and did everything possible to procure some. But when he took it, he became so sick and found the experience so disagreeable that he gave it up forever. In one sense, men are rational in terms of the results of their actions, not in terms of the goals. They do what will give them the most satisfying results. And the process that leads to this form of rationality is akin to natural selection: we do all sorts of things for very different reasons (to realize an objective, but also to pass the time, 'out of curiosity,' to see, to imitate, to conform, etc). And, in a given milieu, certain behaviour will have greater adaptive value than another. It will better ensure the survival of its author in those particular surroundings. Here, a crucial variable is the environment, particularly the immediate surroundings of the subject: his family, his group of friends, his school or professional milieu, his neighbourhood. In certain milieux where there is a great deal of violence, for example, aggression may be perfectly suitable behaviour, not because it is a required standard of conduct, but for a vital reason: to avoid becoming everyone's whipping boy. Within the range of conduct adopted for various reasons, then, some adapts better and is more effective than others in a certain context. The subject will therefore gradually abandon the least effective conduct and adhere only to that which will assure him a higher level of adaptation. After emerging victorious in a fight, for example, submissive behaviour will be abandoned more and more for attack. The second reason that decisions do not follow the ideal model of rationality is that situations give the author little choice. External forces are strong enough to compel him to adapt his goals to the situation: he cannot aim for just anything. Whereas most often our goals are neither clear nor a matter of compulsion, the situation itself obviously limits us.

21

Strategic analysis

Our friends, our enemies, our personal abilities, the material means at our disposal, the circumstances, the opportunities offered us, our social milieu all limit us not only in the choice of the means to use but also in the choice of goals. There are projects that it is realistic to undertake, others that it is not. Goals are not purely intellectual choices, more often than not external circumstances make us decide which goals are worthwhile. It is in this sense that Crozier and Friedberg (1977) state that behaviour is rational, not in relation to the objectives, but in relation to the opportunities and the conduct of others (47). Third, rationality is limited by scarcity of information. The person does not always know what he can do and what the results will be. The information is always limited, incomplete, and sometimes false. In delinquent activity, the problem of information is particularly crucial. It is almost always impossible for the delinquent to estimate exactly what his chances are of obtaining a substantial amount of loot or of being caught. After the act, decisions that seem completely irrational may be explained simply by ignorance. If the rationality of decisions is limited because men have only a more or less clear idea of their objectives, because their freedom of movement is more or less limited by circumstances, and because the information available is more or less valid, the degree of rationality of different actions will vary a great deal. In certain cases, there will be a close approximation to the ideal of perfect rationality: clear goals and a considered choice of the most effective means. At the other extreme, the action taken will be totally irrational.

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PART ONE

Goals

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2 Goals of the offence If we are to believe detective stories, when a detective is investigating a murder he first looks for the motive: what was the purpose of the crime? It is a natural bent of the human mind to start by looking for the objective, the goal.1 What did the criminal want? - revenge? the victim's money? It is only later that the cause of the act will be investigated: psvchological problems? poor upbringing? bad company? This is also what comes to the delinquent's mind when he is asked: Why did you do it? His spontaneous answer will be: 'For kicks'; 'Because I needed money'; 'In self-defence.' It is only after he has been in contact with psychologists, social workers, and criminologists that he will learn to reply: 'Because I was unhappy at home' or 'Because I had guilt feelings.' The 'goal' of the crime can be defined as the result that the author means to achieve by this act. The result that he wants may be self-satisfaction - the pleasure of having something, for example - or it may be the solution to a problem, such as the elimination of someone who is in his way. In the study of goals, the decisive question is: 'Why and to what end was the act committed?'2 To this famous 'why?,' the answer is, for example: 'He killed for revenge' or 'He killed for the victim's money.' This type of answer is the opposite of the one formulated in causal studies, for example: 'He killed because he was a psychopath.' In an analysis of purpose or teleology, if you prefer, the delinquent is seen not as someone who is acting out, but as a person who acts to satisfy a need or to solve a problem. The

26

Why delinquency?

goal, then, is the state of satisfaction sought or the solution anticipated. A young man has just bought a car on credit and, at the end of several months, can no longer make the payments on it. In order not to have to return the car, he commits an armed robbery. The purpose of the crime is clear: to get the money to pay for the car. To exactly what extent are the goals sought by the crime conscious? On the one hand, psychoanalysts have shown that there are unconscious goals. A person's actions may be directed toward an end he is not aware of but that an observer can discover through behaviour study. On the other hand, no one denies that some goals are sought quite consciously; this facilitates the work of the researcher. He only has to ask the author: What did you hope to achieve by this act? The meaning of the crime The 'means,' as opposed to the aim, is defined as the action used to achieve it. The crime, then, is a means to an end. But there are also goals intrinsic to the criminal activity. One steals for the pleasure of stealing. One destroys for the pleasure of destroying. It is therefore more precise to say that the crime is either a means to an end or an end in itself. Goal analysis is used to enable us to find the meaning of the crime. 'By the purpose of an act, I mean the end in view that makes it possible to interpret the particular organization of all the elements that go toward the realization of this end' (Baechler, 1975, 125). An example of murder for vengeance might be useful here. A farm hand working for 9 months on the same farm, Emile became enamoured of his employers' daughter, Eliane, aged 16 and a half; his advances were repulsed, and the boy developed a deep

27

Goals of the offence

resentment. Tired of his constant attentions, Eliane asked her parents to intervene. They therefore gave their employee to understand that their daughter was not for him. After that, the farm hand developed a bitter hatred for his employers and little by little, he conceived the idea of getting rid of them in order to rape their daughter. He took several days to prepare for this heinous crime. Taking advantage of the absence of his employers who, together with Eliane had gone to the market in the next village, he took his boss's hunting rifle and four cartridges (three buckshot and one bullet); he also searched the house and took 150 francs and a gold pendant. He then went to the stable where he placed three bundles of hay side by side, covering the middle one with a sac. It was here that he planned to rape Eliane after having tied her hands and feet with iron wire and covered her face with a napkin and some handkerchiefs. He goes to the village and has the gas tank of his motorcycle filled, intending to use it to make his escape. On his return to the farm, he takes his place on a piece of land from which he has a view of the entire yard. He passes the time reading the paper and smoking. At 12.30 the employers and their daughter return in their car. The car stops near the garage. Emile comes out of hiding holding the gun pointed groundward ready to be aimed. His employer sees him and says: 'What do you want to do?' Emile fires. Not having been hit, the employer runs away followed by his attacker; during this time, the two women, terrified, stay close to the car. Emile manages to fire again on his employer and the latter falls to the ground mortally wounded. The farmhand reloads the weapon and comes back towards the wife who tries to get away. Catching up with her, the murderer shoots at her and, not waiting to see the result of his act, he runs toward the place where he thinks he will find Eliane. But the latter had taken flight and had managed to reach a neighbouring farm.

28

Why delinquency?

Giving up the pursuit, the farmhand hides the bodies of his employers, changes and escapes on his motorcycle. On his way he buys clothes, a helmet and glasses in order not to be recognized (his description having been published in the paper). But three days after his crime, he is arrested. His two victims had been killed on the spot. (Henry and Laurent, 1974, 74-5)

The account of this double murder shows a series of actions: Emile takes the gun and cartridges, he puts the bundles of hay in place, he fills the tank of his motorcycle, he reads the paper while waiting, he shoots, and so on. These successive acts would be totally disconnected and would not make sense if no account were taken of one or several goals that become obvious in the narration: to take revenge and to rape Eliane. The goal is an essential element in the organization of the facts; it gives them unity and makes them understandable. Goals studies criticized For a long time criminologists rejected the goal-oriented approach. It was a very conscious rejection for it was contrary to the reaction of most people, who, when a crime occurs, always say: There must be a reason for it!' Authors as different from one another as the American Sutherland and the Swedish Kinberg advance the same argument for rejecting this type of analysis. According to them, criminal behaviour cannot be explained by the subjective goals because these allow no distinction between the delinquent and non-delinquent. To say that someone steals to solve his money problems is of no help because many people

29

Goals of the offence

in the same situation do not resort to stealing. They adopt solutions other than crime: they reduce their expenditures, they look for a better paying job, and so on. According to these authors, criminal behaviour has the same ends as noncriminal behaviour.3 When these authors say that crime has the same goals as any other conduct, they are making an a priori assertion that should be submitted to examination. This has not yet been done, however. There are young people who engage in vandalism and others who kill their father. Can one say, without studying the matter, that these acts pursue the same ends as any ordinary act? Men seek an infinite number of different objectives. Among all the goals men want to achieve, which are those predominantly realized through delinquent activity? This seems to be a good question. The arguments of Kinberg and Sutherland are inspired by this 'differentialist' obsession which, since Lombroso, has never ceased to haunt criminology. There has been a preoccupation with nothing other than what constitutes the difference between the criminal and the non-criminal. Like the alchemists who were ever seeking the philosopher's stone, criminologists continue to look for the difference in nature between the delinquent and the non-delinquent.4 Obviously their research will be in vain. For criminals belong to the human species, and their behaviour can be understood with the same logic as that used in the case of all men. And if we agree that delinquents are men before being delinquents, crime must be studied the same way any 'normal' behaviour would be studied. When we want to understand certain behaviour, no matter what kind, we start by seeking the objectives. This is the spontaneous approach of ordinary mortals and that of an ever-increasing number of specialists in the social sciences.

30

Why delinquency?

Goals and results The great advantage of studying the goals of delinquency is that it helps us understand the meaning of this conduct. But, even more important, it forces us to think about the results of delinquent behaviour. Since the goal is the result desired by the author of the crime, study of it enables us to understand the nature of the pleasure he derives from his antisocial act, or, if you like, his interest in having committed it. If theft makes it possible for the thief to realize his goal, he will tend to steal again when the need arises that made him seek this goal in the first place. This consideration of the results of criminal activity will perhaps furnish the key to a problem that criminologists have always faced without finding any satisfactory answer: that of recidivism. Why do certain adolescents commit only a few petty thefts and then stop breaking the law, whereas others continue to commit crimes for a long time? Actually, the term 'recidivism' does not do justice to the volume of the phenomenon. Research on self-reported delinquency has shown that the large majority of adolescents commit several occasional crimes but only a handful become firmly entrenched in an enduring delinquency. Researchers have not succeeded in explaining this phenomenon, perhaps because of the causal model used. Criminologists, except labelling theorists, were looking at factors prior to the acting out for explanations of recidivism: family milieu, association with criminals, personality traits. Despite every effort, the mystery remained unsolved. A reversal of perspective is much more promising. Let us study with as much care what follows the crime as what preceded it. Besides examining past influences, let us study hopes for the future. Human behaviour is perhaps condi-

31

Goals of the offence

tioned by the past but, more important, it is oriented toward the future. It is not a question only of asserting that the future influences the present, but of emphasizing that behaviour is structured on the basis of a sequence: the act, the result, and the second act. The second act is influenced by the result obtained by the first act.5 In the field of delinquency, this means that recidivism can be influenced by the results obtained during the first crime or crimes. If these bring desirable results, the delinquent will be more likely to recidivate, unless unpleasant consequences, prison for instance, bring new considerations into play. But this, too, falls into the domain of results. Four types of goals The objectives achieved by criminal behaviour are many. They are as numerous as the problems, desires, situations, and conflicts that may underlie them. It is difficult then, to reduce them to a few simple types. However, the analysis of a large number of crime descriptions has enabled me to pick out a small number of typical goals. These are totally consistent with the particular nature of the crimes - they 'adhere' to the act itself- and they are often consciously sought by their authors. Thirteen goals were observed and grouped according to four types: ACTION

APPROPRIATION

AGGRESSION

DOMINATION

Excitement Play

Expediency Possession Use Covetousness Moonlighting Spree

Defence Vengeance

Power Cruelty Prestige

32

Why delinquency?

The following seven chapters will be devoted to the analysis of these goals. Chapters 3 and 4 will focus on 'action.' Chapter 5 will present the goals that come under 'appropriation.' Chapters 6-8 will deal with 'aggression.' Chapter 9 will examine 'domination.'

3 Action JEAN: Exactly! You say: l l steal in order to buy this or that, a car, a Mercedes ... But in fact, that's what you have been taught to think. No ... you do it for the action, and that's really why you are a criminal, and behave differently from others ... What I mean is, you go in for armed robbery for the sake of armed robbery ... Afterwards, you tell me you go in for armed robbery for the money and that you want the money for other things! But the reason is first for the action itself... JIM: One thing proves what Jean says; it's that a fellow, after a hold-up, gets his share and never knows quite what to do with it... (Aurousseau and Laborde, 1976, 29)

'Action' is the commission of a crime in order to expend energy and to get the sensation of living intensely. Among the mysteries of criminology are the so-called gratuitous crimes. The fact is that delinquents cannot always say why they broke the law. Their 'I don't know' is often sincere. The Vaucresson researchers found that in a sample of French juvenile delinquents, 30 per cent could not give a precise motive for what they did (CFRES, 1963,121). Why this silence? Perhaps their motive was so simple and so basic that they were not aware of it. Perhaps the crime brought its author an intrinsic pleasure that was hard to define, something like 'crime for crime's sake.' This idea is rarely mentioned in contemporary criminological theories. And yet it was well known by a group of Chicago sociologists who, more than fifty years ago, made a tremendous step forward in research on crime.

34

Why delinquency?

One of them, W.I. Thomas, stated in 1923 that deviant behaviour could be explained by an essential need of man: the desire for new experiences, a need for stimulation, excitement, movement, change. Four years later, in a magnificent book on the Chicago gangs, F. Thrasher (1927) presented numerous observations that supported the hypothesis of his colleague Thomas. He noted that the activity of gangs, more particularly their delinquent activity, was aimed at breaking the monotony of daily life and at satisfying a desire for excitement. Rowdiness, gambling, thefts, attacks, the expeditions of all sorts the gangs engaged in were motivated by a desire for action, a need to use up an adolescent energy not properly channelled by adults. After that, as happens often in the social sciences, the idea was forgotten. It was swept aside by concepts that represented the delinquent as so unfortunate a being that it was no longer possible to conceive that he took pleasure in committing his offences.1 Adolescents who act out are sometimes conscious of this desire for action. Besides those who 'don't know,' there are many who acknowledge having committed a crime c for the pleasure' of it. The percentages vary according to the samples: 30 per cent of the 500 French juvenile delinquents studied by the Vaucresson team (CFRES, 1963) gave this as their motive, whereas only 19 per cent of the English juvenile delinquents observed by West and Farrington (1977) did so. In 1975, in a study of hidden delinquency among a representative sample of 1,425 boys living in the London area, Belson showed that the desire for pleasure and excitement is strongly correlated with theft: the more a boy seeks pleasure and excitement, the more he will have a tendency to steal (145-69).

35

Action

So the primary aim of the crime is simply action. Here the term 'action' is used in a sense that does not mean anything out of the ordinary. When a film is said to 'have plenty of action,' it means there is a rapid succession of exciting events. 'Action,' then, more or less means excitement. In this sense, the term implies four elements.2 First, the aim is intrinsic to the activity itself. It is undertaken for its own sake, for the pleasure or the strong sensations it brings, independently of its use in other respects. An automobile is stolen for the joyride, not for resale. A window is broken for the fun of it, not to take what is behind it. Second, there is the immediacy of the action. Here time is important. Everything happens very quickly. It is no longterm undertaking. Everything takes place in a flash. The results are quickly known. The sensations are immediate. During an attack or an armed robbery everything is over in a few minutes and there is no waiting to find out whether it was successful and how much was gained. Third, there is the element of risk, the chance. The results could be dangerous. The higher the stakes, the more action there is. Shoplifting is not bad for a beginner, but to have action one must steal a car or, even better, rob a bank. There the risks are tremendous. The stakes too are very high: one's freedom against thousands of dollars. 'What I like is action. I like risking my skin, it puts some value on it. I know you will think I'm nuts, but danger makes me high' (Mesrine, 1977, 49). Fourth, there is intensity, a characteristic that sums up the other three. The action makes it possible to live fully in the present, to have strong sensations, to push the human machine as far as it will go, to use one's brains, agility, and strength to the maximum. Serious crimes are intense moments. During a few minutes, a few seconds, the criminal

36

Why delinquency?

gambles with riches (that of others), with freedom (his own), and finally with life (his and that of others). This is the 'true life.' Mucchielli (1974) notes that at the moment the crime is being committed, young delinquents 'feel they are finally living fully and intensely' (79). The opposite of action is immediately obvious: a boring job held merely to earn a living; routine; long, exacting work; interminable studies - all small endeavours that bring results that may be sure but are slow to come. Action is the opposite of security, of organization, of the dull life. The search for action in delinquency takes two main forms: excitement and play. Excitement is in a way a primitive form of action, whereas play is a more controlled and organized activity. But let us look at this in more detail. Excitement I always felt that way when it was over. Emotionally drained and physically exhausted. Which is understandable enough, I suppose. During the planning of a robbery, you are in a constant state of excitement. From the time you disarm the guard to the time you enter the vault, all of your juices are flowing. And then comes the exhilaration of getting into the vault, the satisfaction of the escape, and a temporary sense of happiness that it has come off exactly as you had planned. (Sutton and Linn, 1976, ii) 'Excitement' refers to the strong sensations one experiences on committing a crime.3 There are a number of evocative terms for it: 'thrill,' 'kicks,' 'fun,' 'trip.' Car theft for the purpose of a joyride is a good example of the search for excitement. It is a frequent offence: Frechette and LeBlanc (1978,134) state that in Montreal, 35 per cent of

37

Action

the youngsters who appeared before the juvenile court had stolen at least one automobile and, in more than 80 per cent of the cases, the motivation was pleasure. The Vaucresson researchers gave descriptions of this type of theft that well illustrate the search for excitement: 'After a day's holiday, three boys of 16-18 years are sitting in a café; they do not know how to spend their evening. One of them spies an automobile whose owner had just entered a pharmacy; the key is in the car. He suggests taking advantage of the opportunity; they all make a dash, one takes the wheel and drives off at a great speed for about ten minutes. The joyride ends when the car is smashed against a wall' (Algan, 1970, 127). Consider a second example: 'Eight young people, five boys and three girls, decide to spend the All Saints Day holidays in a seaside villa that belongs to one of them. The two leaders, 19 and 17 years old, have already committed car thefts and are on probation. The group leaves Paris with two stolen cars (the girls unaware of the illegal origin of the cars). On the way, the gang steals nine more cars, all de luxe models (Triumph, I.D., Alfa-Roméo): the cars are abandoned as soon as they run out of gas. None of the young people has a driving permit, and there are several accidents during which one of the youngsters is killed (and left in the damaged car), another injured' (Algan et al, 1965, 124). Vandalism, the frequency of which amazes observers,4 can be explained by the search for excitement. In his autobiography, Carr (1975, 38) tells how it can be fun. We'd been smoking some weed and were really broke and hungry when we walked by this Mexican bakery. There were all kinds of pastries and cakes in the window, just sitting there. We didn't hesitate. We went around to the back of the place, giggling like a pack of

38

Why delinquency?

fools, climbed up a fence and onto the roof. I broke open the ventilation system and we all slithered down it, dropping the last ten feet to the floor. What a surprise! A huge room filled with cakes and cookies. Vat upon vat of icing and cake mix, banks of stainless-steel ovens, giant sinks, and sacks of flour for days. We started eating and smearing the stuff all over the walls, throwing bowls of icing into the ovens and ripping the sinks off the walls. I picked up a hundredpound sack of flour and broke it over one of the dudes' heads. He came up all white and coughing, his eyes looking like two pissholes in a snow-bank. Then somebody did the same to me. Another guy was breaking every dish he could find, and there was water an inch deep from the ripped-up sinks. We were sliding and skating around in the paste of flour and water, laughing hysterically and throwing shit at each other. This went on for hours until the inside of that bakery was chaos. Some manifestations of gratuitous violence are better understood in terms of excitement rather than aggression. Gangs of adolescents attack passersby, not because of hatred they do not know them - but for the amusement of frightening them and provoking a reaction. 'One night in April 1962, a man of 25 accompanied by his fiancée of 21, parks his car in a parking lot on the outskirts of Lyon. Three young boys of about fifteen, start to circle them with their motorcycles, insulting the occupants. To avoid an incident, the driver decides to drive on. But the boys follow him, continuing their taunts. In time, they spit on the windows of the car. The driver stops, gets out of the car; the boys advance towards him, threatening him; one of them says to his pal: "take out your blade." A fight ensues during which the victim's clothes are slashed. One of the attackers is found to carry a knife, a pruning knife, which he claims he used for his work' (Michard, Selosse, and Algan, 1963, 182).

39

Action

The desire for excitement can lead even to murder. This was the case of the student of sixteen referred to by Erich Fromm (1975), who killed his parents with a hunting rifle simply to know what it feels like to kill: 'I wasn't angry,' he said after this double murder, 'I wanted to know what it feels like when you kill someone' (281).5 Play These thefts were motivated only by the theft itself. There was no question of loot nor a taste for forbidden fruit. It was enough to be frightened to death. The children used to enter stores with their uncle, leaving with their pockets jammed with objects that had no value and could serve no purpose. The rule forbid taking useful objects. (Cocteau, 1929, 71) Tlay' is delinquency practised as an amusing, uncertain activity, gratuitous, subject to rules, and imaginary.6 Let us briefly go over these five elements of its definition. 1 / Delinquency practised as a game is an amusing activity. It is done for the pleasure of the act itself and not because of any need or utility. 2 / It is an uncertain activity: the result is not known in advance. Theft committed as a game is always faced with the risk of failure. If the preparation is such that it is sure to succeed, it is no longer a game. This uncertainty, furthermore, is one of the main attractions of illegal activity.7 Like the mountain climber, the delinquent puts himself in dangerous situations where the smallest error can be costly; he must therefore surpass himself, resort to force and speed in order to succeed and avoid arrest. Through this mobilization of his forces, he will discover unsuspected resources in himself,

40

Why delinquency?

and, the greater the risk, the more he will have to surpass himself. 3 / Practised as a game, the offence is a gratuitous activity. It is not for the accumulation of goods, for the solution of a problem, or for any useful purpose. 4 / It is subject to rules. It is somewhat paradoxical to say that delinquency has rules, but we must not forget that these are rules set by the delinquents themselves to increase the pleasure of the game. Thus a group of adolescents will make a rule to steal only objects that are particularly difficult of access. 5 / Delinquency as a game is imaginary. Its authors have a tendency to think of it as something unreal, outside the realm of everyday life. The delinquent playing the game puts up a partition, with work, family, and school on one side and, on the other, a fantasy world in which the rules are no longer the same. 'When you are an outlaw, it is as though you were a free agent. You are really somewhere else, in a different world ... During a robbery, you get out of the daily routine, out of what everybody else does' (Aurousseau and Laborde, 1976, 28). This impression of unreality helps to defuse the gravity of the crime in the eyes of its author. When arrested, the latter shows surprise: 'It was a game!' The delinquent refuses to accept the fact that his crime might affect his everyday life. It is as though someone would lose his job because he played a poor game of golf! Thus the imaginary nature of the delinquency makes it possible to dodge the guilt. Naturally, the problem is that the victim was not playing and the theft or the attack was anything but imaginary. If we wanted to classify delinquency as one of various types of game, it would have to be considered above all as a game of competition.8 It is competition with the victim, with companions, and, finally, with the police.9

41

Action

The delinquent seeks to outclass the victim. Take advantage of a moment's inattention to surprise him. Fool him by a trick. Dominate him by force. Find a response to his reactions. Run faster if he runs after you. There is competition with friends. This is frequently found in shoplifting. Youths organize competitions to see who will bring back the most articles, or the funniest, or the most original, or who will make the most daring theft (Algan, 1970). In gang fights, there is competition between the members of the same gang to see who is the most courageous (Short and Strodtbeck, 1965). But the most risky and exciting part is played against the police and everyone else who takes part in the fight against crime. It is a game of cops and robbers. Chessman (1954) relates that at the age of sixteen, he would amuse himself by stealing powerful cars and goading the police into chasing him 'just for the thrill of ditching them, just for the hell of it, and for prowess' (71). The competition with the police is rarely so obvious. But the intervention of the police, always possible, always feared during the commission of an offence, heightens the tension, gives it an added fillip. And when all goes well, the delinquent feels, besides relief, the satisfaction of having 'beaten the system.' In a world where people attach such importance to their safety, one would tend to think that young people who take pleasure in running risks are but an infinitesimal minority of suicidal maniacs. This is not the case at all. When Belson (1975) asked boys from London who admitted having stolen for pleasure: 'In what way does stealing give you fun and excitement?' he got, among others, these reasons: the risk of getting caught (12 per cent), getting chased (8 per cent), the sensation of doing something daring and reckless (4 per

42

Why delinquency?

cent), and knowing one was doing something forbidden (3 percent) (Belson, 1975, 168). But tastes differ. Belson finds that the risk is also just as important a reason why 33 per cent of adolescents do not get any pleasure out of stealing.10 Thus there are some who steal because they enjoy the risk and others who do not steal because it is too dangerous.

4 Bored to death or frightened to death Nothing is so intolerable to man as to be altogether at rest, without passion, without business, without amusement, without employment. At such times he is aware of his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. Immediately there will arise from the depths of his soul weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation and despair. (Pascal, Pensées, 46)

Action a vital need In the seventeenth century, juvenile delinquency had not yet become a fashionable subject. Pascal, however, was preoccupied with the problem of evil. And is it that much different? Upon reflection, he came to the conclusion that 'all men's unhappiness is due to the single fact that they cannot stay quietly in a room' (70). This is exactly what we found out in the preceding chapter concerning delinquency. In this sense, the problem is not confined to a handful of rogues who defy the law. It is the human condition. Pascal believed that man looks for noise and excitement because when there is none the thought of all his misery becomes unbearable. This is no doubt true. But there is another point. Action is a vital need of the organism, not only for man, but for animals as well. Psychologists who study animal behaviour find that when all the needs are satisfiedhunger, safety, sleep, etc-there is one other left: 'that of being physically and mentally active' (Hebb, 1966, 235).

44

Why delinquency?

This need for action, even stress, was conclusively demonstrated by the remarkable experiments on sensory deprivation (also called perceptive isolation) carried out at McGill University in Montreal. 'College students were paid $20 a day to do nothing, lying on a comfortable bed with eyes covered by translucent plastic (permitting light to enter, but preventing pattern vision), hands enclosed in tubes (so that the hands could not be used for somesthetic perception, though they could be moved to prevent joint pains), and ears covered with earphones from which there was a constant buzzing except when the subject was being given a test. These conditions were relaxed only to allow the subject to eat or go to the toilet. Few could stand the monotony for more than two or three days, the upper limit being six. The subjects became willing to listen to childish or meaningless talk that otherwise they would have avoided contemptuously - anything to break the monotony. Eventually the need became overwhelming to see, to hear, to be in normal contact with the environment, to be active' (Hebb 1966, 250-2). Similar experiments were undertaken using different methods, with similar results. For a living being, the deprivation of sensation and activity is unbearable. Deprived of stimulation subjects have hallucinations, their perception of time and space is altered, and, invariably, they ask that the experiment be prematurely stopped.1 Men, then, have a need for action, and delinquency can answer this need. But do delinquents lack action to the point of turning to illegal activity? Belson (1975, 238), in his study of self-reported delinquency among 1,425 English adolescents, showed that the more a boy suffers from boredom during his free time, the more he tends to steal. He also pointed out that boys steal more often when they do not know what to do during their leisure time.

45

Bored to death or frightened to death

In Montreal, the researchers of the Groupe de recherche sur l'inadaptation juvénile asked a large sample of schoolboys: cHow many hours a week do you spend doing nothing, just loafing?' The results show that the more the respondents pass their time loafing, the greater the tendency to commit infractions (Biron, 1977, 133). It is common observation that delinquents 'die' of boredom. They pass the entire day asking themselves what to do and desperately looking for some way to kill time (Michard, Selosse, and Algan, 1963, 149). In experimental psychology, boredom is defined as a state in which the subject seeks a higher level of excitement (Hebb, 1966, 250); delinquents who are bored look for action in any way possible. Do delinquents have a greater need for action than others? In the studies on stress and on activation, it was discovered that men seek an optimal level of activation. When they are not stimulated enough, they engage in more intense activities and when they are too stimulated they try to reduce their activities and the level of stimulation to which they are exposed. If boredom is unpleasant, so is over-excitement (Hare, 1970). However, this optimal level of activation varies with the individual. Some are happy in a state of relative peace. Others are happy only amid noise and furore. For some, the life of a notary, a monk, or a night guard would be unbearably boring. For others the life of the politician, the parachutist, or the professional athlete would be intolerable. Do delinquents belong to the category of persons who need a particularly high level of stimulation and action? On reading the autobiographies of criminals, we are prompted to answer in the affirmative. The latter tell us that

46

Why delinquency?

very early on they showed a pronounced taste for adventure. Unable to stay still in the house, they were constantly outside; they ran away; they enrolled in the army to see other countries. They liked neither home nor school because nothing ever happened there. When a theft brought them a lot of money, they were incapable of stopping there. A little later on, they would again become restless and engage in a new project, more risky, more exciting. Only prison could stop this giddy round of activities. Research comparing delinquents and non-delinquents confirms this impression. In 1936, Healy and Bronner stated that the most outstanding characteristic of delinquents was restlessness. This trait was found in 46 delinquents of a sample of 105, whereas it did not exist at all in the control group. More recently, West and Farrington (1977, 43-79) published a series of research results that show very convincingly that delinquents have a marked need for stimulation, and in every sphere of activity. These researchers had the felicitous idea of comparing the life-style of delinquents with that of non-delinquents in a sample of young working-class English boys. They found that the delinquents differed from their fellows in that they led a more restless life, incessantly in pursuit of excitement, and this in very diverse areas. Concerning recreation, West and Farrington report significant statistical differences; delinquents go out more often at night than their non-delinquent peers, they spend less time at home, they are habitues of the discothèques and pubs, and more of them drink alcohol often and to excess, smoke a great deal, and take drugs. The same tendencies are found in the area of sexual relationships. At the age of 18-19, 33 per cent of the non-delinquents had never had sexual relations, against only 7 per cent of the delinquents. The latter are sexually active at every level - the precocity and frequency of their sexual relations as well as the number of partners. With re-

47

Bored to death or frightened to death

gard to gambling, it was observed that delinquents often tend to bet large sums of money. At school, very quickly (toward the age often), those who will become delinquents are considered by their teachers and by their fellow students the most troublesome and the most daring (West and Farrington, 1973, 101). These results, which coincide exactly with the observations of Thrasher (1927), S. and E. Glueck (1950), and, more recently, Hare (1970) and Yochelson and Samenow (1976), support the statement that delinquents belong to the category of individuals who seek action and a high level of stress. Delinquency, then, seems to be a means of satisfying a very pronounced need for excitement. To satisfy this need, crime is a particularly appropriate means! It is a matter of episodes that are both intense and brief, and there are enormous risks involved in committing serious crimes. Here we have one of the paradoxical effects of penal sanctions: by making certain activities dangerous, they make them more attractive. In our organized, bureaucratized, and non-violent societies, in this world endowed with job security, acquired rights, pension funds, and insurance on every risk, in this system of standardized, monotonous piecework, what is there for the man of action, the adventuresome, the bold? There are no longer continents to discover, countries to conquer, or dangers to confront. One thing remains: crime, a daring confrontation with law and order and with the whole of society. Like the explorers, the conquerers, and the adventurers of old, criminals have found a drastic remedy for boredom. They choose to die of fright rather than of boredom. Action and growth Although the solution is of debatable merit, it is none the less a healthy reaction. For our organism to develop we need a

48

Why delinquency?

certain amount of activity, stimulation, stress, and even frustration. It is a vital need; not only do our muscles require it, but our minds as well. If the level of excitement is too low, the individual does not develop. He remains weak, vulnerable, fearful, mentally and emotionally retarded, incapable of solving simple problems or coping with the least difficulty (Tanner, 1977). Play, this more sophisticated form of action, also contributes to a person's development. Psychologists attribute an important role to play in the socialization not only of humans but also of most mammals. It makes the child or young animal physically strong, gives it motor co-ordination and a sense of co-operation. It prepares the young for serious undertakings; it assures better adjustment in the future (Wilson, 1975; Buss 1978,366).2 Thus, when an adolescent commits crimes in order to be active he is not merely escaping intolerable inactivity; he is developing physically, intellectually, and emotionally at the same time. And here we discover one of life's strange tricks. In the same way that sports contribute to physical development and are character-forming, delinquency is play that can contribute to the personal growth of those who engage in it. This is clearly the impression one gets on reading certain criminal's autobiographies, particularly that of Carr (1975). Life in the streets - the need to be constantly on the alert, to make quick decisions, to use muscular force, to be adroit, to observe, to fight, to defend oneself, to know the rudiments of various trades, how to manipulate people, how to make a good impression in order to avert suspicion - keeps the human machine in excellent condition and contributes to its development. This explains why clinical psychologists note, sometimes with astonishment, that the delinquent's ability to adapt to

49

Bored to death or frightened to death

reality 'is in certain respects remarkable and in a sense superior to that of the average subjects we call normal' (Mucchielli, 1974, 74). They know how to adjust to circumstances, to improvise; they keep cool in the face of difficulties; they show a rare assurance and have great confidence in themselves (76). 'At the beginning there was action9 Although men deeply engaged in crime often admit that what they are doing is wrong, they are nevertheless convinced that the action gives meaning to their lives.3 They are convinced that the meaning of their lives lies precisely in this constant and endless activity. Goethe wrote: 'At the beginning there was action.' Man first wants to feel that he exists, and action gives one this sensation of being alive. It is in action that we find the most elementary meaning of life. However, action for action's sake is a passion the destructive nature of which should not be minimized.4 Men of pure action almost inevitably create victims and very often get burned themselves, like the moth in the flame of the candle. But there are some who will do anything and run any risk to preserve what to them seems the only meaning of life - to stay alive, therefore active.

5 Appropriation 'Appropriation' is stealing with the object of benefiting from another person's property. This definition may seem tautological: it is obvious that one steals to benefit from someone else's property! However, the preceding chapters described thefts for the sake of action, where the property of others was only a pretext or a bonus. Theft can have two very different objectives: to take someone else's property or to experience intense action. In appropriation, the theft is a means to an end, whereas when it is simply for the action, the theft with its heightened sensations is the end in itself. The thief who takes another's goods wants to use what he has stolen to satisfy a need, resolve a problem, or derive the enjoyment it affords. Appropriation is the reason most frequently admitted by adolescents. But this seems obvious and would logically be evoked more often than any other motivation. In France, the Vaucresson researchers state that among 44 per cent of juvenile delinquents the 'utilitarian' aspect of the crime is predominant: the profits anticipated are the determining factor (CFRES, 1963). The percentage increases when we cross the Channel: 60 per cent of the subjects studied by West and Farrington (1977, 35) have a rational motive. The authors also establish that the offences with the largest percentage of rational motivation are thefts of the goods in cars (79 per cent) and shoplifting (79 per cent). Among the boys who appeared before the juvenile court in Montreal, there are four offences where the utilitarian motive clearly predominates:1 personal theft: 77 per cent (74 subjects

51

Appropriation

out of 96); robbery; 67 per cent (36 subjects out of 54); burglary: 67 per cent (177 subjects out of 266); petty theft: 66 per cent (113 subjects out of 172) (Frechette and LeBlanc, 1978, 134). The fruits of theft The desire to benefit from goods illegally acquired can take various forms, depending on the nature of the stolen goods and the need that gave rise to the crime. There are six concrete motives for appropriation: expediency, possession, use, covetousness, moonlighting, and spree. Expediency 'Expediency' consists in getting out of a difficulty by using someone else's property. It is rather rare today for anyone to steal in order to survive, but it does happen. There are families that are so poor and disorganized that the children do not always get enough to eat. Then a boy with more initiative than the others will steal to get food for himself and eventually to help his family. Thefts for subsistence when running away from home are more frequent. A child leaves home either because life there is unbearable or because he has been turned away. After some time spent in vagrancy, forced by hunger, he starts to beg, then to steal in stores, markets, trains, houses, and so on. It is in this way that Shaw's (1931, 55) 'jack-roller' started his career as a thief. After adolescence, these thefts to satisfy an immediate vital need seem less frequent. It becomes theft as a means of resolving the pressing need for money. Debts are accumulating; the rent must be paid; the young man is 'broke.' To get out of the mess, he starts to steal, sometimes reluctantly. The theft

52

Why delinquency?

that at first is committed for the action can very easily become an expedient. Play has made the youth's apprenticeship easy and amusing. He has learned how to shoplift. He has discovered that it was easy and not too dangerous. There comes a day when he hasn't a cent in his pocket. He must have the money to pay his hotel room or go out with his girlfriend. Naturally, shoplifting is the answer to his problem.

Possession 'Possession' is the owning of something in order to satisfy a need to accumulate things. Here the thief is seeking the feeling of security that money or objects can bring. It is somewhat like the attitude of the miser who accumulates things hoping in this way to provide against the unexpected and whose main aim in life is the accumulation of wealth. The case of Bernard described by Debuyst and Jóos (1971) is a good example of theft motivated by the need to possess. This child had neither father nor mother and was placed in an orphanage. Sent subsequently to an observation centre, he began to take everything he wanted; he 'hides bread and butter under his bed, fills his pockets with sugar' (124). According to Debuyst and Jóos, this behaviour is a reaction to his being moved to unfamiliar and threatening surroundings. To feel more secure, he goes ahead and piles up reserves of food that make the immediate future seem less threatening' (128). It has been ascertained that lonely delinquents who steal from cash drawers, from their parents' wallets, or from others in the house are often children who are rejected, abandoned, and placed successively in several different environments (Chirol, 1971). In such cases, the thefts can be for the purpose of furnishing the child with the security that his parents were unable to give him.

53

Appropriation

Use

'Use' involves taking an object for a definite purpose, only to abandon it later on. Seventeen per cent of the London boys studied by Belson (1975, 167) steal objects because they need them and 3 per cent because they are useful to them. Some forms of automobile theft are good examples of use. A car is 'borrowed' to get to a friend's house that is some distance away, to go to work, to return home after an evening out, to use to commit an infraction, or even to go away on a holiday. 'Rather than walk, Louis, a 15-year-old apprentice, finds it pleasanter to take a motorcycle from the cellar of the house next door to go to work; in the evening he parks it behind his house, uses it for a couple of days and then abandons it.' C A group of four friends, 16 to 19 years of age, decide to go to the Côte d'Azur and "borrow" eight automobiles successively, abandoning them along the way when they run out of gas' (Algan, 1970, 127). As Algan et al (1965) point out, the development of suburbs and the increase in big urban centres 'makes rapid and often distant travel necessary. Young people frequently have to go long distances to get to work, sometimes even to school' (105). A stolen automobile is a very handy solution to this problem. Covetousness 'Covetousness' is the desire to steal objects that appeal to the author or answer a momentary desire. One takes an object because it is tempting. Among the reasons given by the London group of boys to explain their thefts, Belson (1975, 670) cites these: 'He is unable to buy the things he steals': 17 per cent; 'He steals these objects because he wants them': 25 per

54

Why delinquency?

cent; 6He steals these objects because he likes them': 3 per cent. These reasons conform well to the definition of covetousness. Shoplifting, the theft of objects in cars (also called trailer theft), and other types of stealing are often the result ofcovetousness. 'During the late afternoon adolescents loiter in a department store for the pleasure of strolling about among the crowd with music playing in the background. In the absence of any apparent surveillance, the sight of objects that they like or that answer their needs of the moment can prompt them to help themselves' (Algan, 1970, 132). The goods that are stolen are things that tempt almost any adolescent. "In two months, the loot of a gang in a Western city thus amounted to: 165 records, 2 cameras, 1 record-player, 4 transistors, 6 electric razors, a pipe, stockings, lighters, ballpoint pens, cuff-links, jewelry. Ten boys and girls scoured music stores and department stores (a total of 10 stores, visited a number of times). The tactic was simple: the youngsters used to go into the stores in twos or threes and were jointly involved in the stealing. Sometimes one of them occupied the salesperson or was on the look-out while the others rummaged about and took the objects that interested them. More rarely, one of them operated alone" ' (Michard, Selosse, and Algan, 1963, 165). About half of all shoplifting is done under the impulse of the moment or when the circumstances are favourable (Frechette and LeBlanc, 1978, 134). The act, then, is often prompted by a passing desire.

Moonlighting Moonlighting is stealing to procure a supplementary income. Young people can live on their regular resources: salary, the support of parents, or social welfare. However, they may find

55

Appropriation

that this is not enough and steal to add to their revenue, to improve their 'buying power,' to settle at the end of the month. Polsky (1967) has shown the similarity between occasional delinquency and moonlighting to supplement incomes. As such, theft offers obvious advantages: the hours are flexible and not too long. Spree A 'spree' consists in squandering stolen money on parties and excessive buying. Criminals may make a killing and find themselves with a lot of money. Almost invariably they go on a spree. They go on drinking bouts, they carouse and indulge in sexual pleasures. They become super-consumers. They go on spending sprees and squander their money at an incredible rate in clubs, expensive restaurants, whorehouses, and clothing stores: C I got 19,000 dollars one time in San Francisco and afterwards we went to a night club and closed up the bar and in a few days I didn't have anything. I never left the bar. We just closed the front door and I just told them to shut up the doors and blow this and I just kept throwing money on the bar and everybody who was in there stayed right there. We stayed there twenty-four hours a day. With that kind of money the owner would chance staying closed twenty-four hours a day. He just locked the door and everybody just stayed right there. We just sent out for food, I guess. That was about the most foolish thing I ever did. But a box man almost always is foolish with money' (King and Chambliss, 1972, 40). Others satisfy this taste for spending money, not on carousing, but on buying all sorts of things, particularly clothes. 'A thousand-dollar rip-off means you can relax for a while, right?' 'Oh no! I go through it in three or four days. I buy clothes, I go out, I get high. I get shoes, or a knit, or slacks -1 get a lot of things I don't need. You just live while the

56

Why delinquency?

money's there; that's for the day. When I've got money, I don't sleep for three or four days -you're just buying something all the time. If you've got the money that easy and that fast, it doesn't have any value' (Willwerth, 1974, 32-3). This type of ostentatious consumption explains many recidivists: they very quickly find themselves penniless. Rare are the thieves who manage to put their spoils aside, to save and become rich. This being so, it is difficult to speak of rationality. Theft is rational in the sense that it is often an effective means of getting money, but often this money is not used in a rational or useful way. The passion for buying clothes is particularly remarkable from this point of view. LARSENE: Yes, but look at Mokrane! He bought lots and lots of clothes and what did he do with them? Nothing. He didn't even wear them. I noticed that when he was living with me. He bought a cupboard full of clothes and he was always in jeans and loafers. He couldn't stand à tie, but he bought piles of them. HENRI: But it's crazy to throw away your dough like that!2 (Aurousseau and Laborde, 1976, 32) Action or appropriation?

It is not always easy to distinguish between action and appropriation. In many crimes, the game and the utility are inextricably combined. This is the case with looting, a mixed form of delinquent activity where the two objectives are pursued simultaneously. 'Looting' consists in ravaging a place (a house, store, etc) to take whatever is to be found there while having fun doing it. The delinquent is looking for excitement and at the same time taking whatever may interest him. Burglaries are often lootings.

57

Appropriation

TABLE 1 Evolution of the motivation of juvenile delinquents

Burglary Robbery

Hedonistic motivation

Utilitarian motivation

Time 2 Time 1 Two years later 14-17 years 16-19 years (percentage) (percentage)

Time 2 Time 1 Two years later 14-17 years 16-19 years (percentage) (percentage)

53

31

67

83

(AT 266)

(N 140)

(N 266)

41 (W54)

25 OV56)

67 OV54)

(N 140) 84 (/V56;

* N = number. SOURCE: Frechette and LeBlanc, 1978, 134 and 194

The distinction between action and appropriation is sometimes tenuous. Consider the spree: it is an accumulation of strong sensations. There is the excitement, the playing at being rich, the drinking to excess, the search for intense pleasure. The action is postponed. It takes place, not during the crime, but after. The aim is always the action, but what changes is that the need for action is satisfied by the rapid spending of large sums of money and not the successful carrying out of a dangerous crime. The intensity felt in committing the crime is now transferred to the intensity experienced in consumption. Whatever the distinction may be, over the years adolescents evolve from action to appropriation. This is clearly shown in the analyses of Frechette and LeBlanc (1978), who studied a sample of wards of the juvenile court at a two-year interval (see Table 1). The evolution is remarkable. Over the two years, the frequency of hedonistic motivation diminishes

58

Why delinquency?

in favour of utilitarian motivation. The youngsters who do not give up their delinquency toward the end of their adolescence gradually proceed from action to appropriation as their object. The same phenomenon was observed in France by Michard, Selosse, and Algan (1963). 'It is generally the oldest subjects who organize remunerative infractions, those who have recognized the value of money: "money that is all powerful." Although profit is not the motive for many infractions, its importance increases with the length of time the delinquency of the group continues' (194). It is only natural that at a certain age a person stops playing games. The gratuitous element gives place to utilitarian objectives. The pros and cons are more carefully considered.

6 Defensiveaggression Violence is inherent in man. Save for utopia or totalitarianism, there is no hope for its suppression. A world without conflict, without disputes, without deviants is pure fantasy. To think that violence can be stamped out by force is merely to change the meaning of the words. (Peyrefitte, 1974, I, 221)

The faces of aggression 'Aggression' can be defined as the act of attacking another person for the purpose of killing him, injuring him, or making him suffer. The crime is perpetrated against a person: it is an attack on his life, his physical integrity, his well-being. However, except in the relatively rare cases of sadism, the object of aggression is not solely to kill, injure, or make a person suffer. What do men want when they attack their fellow-man? They may do it to take their property or to profit in some other way; this is what is called instrumental aggression.1 They can also do it in self-defence, for revenge, or to dominate the other person. Consequently, if we include sadism, we find ourselves with five types of reasons for aggression: utilitarian (or instrumental), defence (defensive aggression), vengeance, power, and cruelty (the pleasure of making someone suffer). Essentially, utilitarian aggression is a variation of appropriation: the attack is for the purpose of taking someone else's

60

Why delinquency?

property. For this reason, it will not be examined in the present chapter, which will be devoted to defensive aggression. The other types will be studied in chapters 7-9. There is very little systematic data on the frequency of personal aggression per se in delinquency, at most a few indications. The Vaucresson researchers report that for 8 per cent of the subjects in their sample of 500 juvenile delinquents, 'the crime is essentially directed toward another person and is a direct attack against him. Furthermore, in 14 per cent of cases, the crime includes aggression' (CFRES, 1963). These figures give the impression that aggression per se is rare. But this is not the case. The crimes that lead adolescents to juvenile courts rarely have an aggressive goal, since although aggressive attacks are very frequent among youth, they are seldom prosecuted. The offences likely to have aggression as their goal are common assault, assault and battery, and homicides. Brawling, which according to the law can be considered assault and battery, is an everyday occurrence among adolescents and even more so among those who end up before the courts. Forty-eight per cent of Montreal students admit having been in fights during the course of a year and the percentage increases to 84 for those who have appeared before the juvenile court (Frechette and LeBlanc, 1978, 87). The large majority of fights between adolescents are not reported to the police, and this is natural. Only in the rare cases where they end in serious injury are the police informed. This is why the courts are inundated with cases of theft (more than 80 per cent of the recorded crimes) whereas crimes of c pure' violence (excluding thefts with violence) amount to no more than 5 per cent.2 Although crimes of aggression represent an infinitesimal minority of the offences prosecuted by juvenile courts, in

61

Defensive aggression

everyday life, minor forms of aggression are very common, especially among children and adolescents. The preceding remarks concerned aggression in general. We must now turn to the main subject of this chapter, defensive aggression.

Defence 'Defence' consists in attacking in order to protect oneself. When threatened, one counter-attacks. This form of aggression is a person's reaction for survival - primarily to protect his life, but also his property, his freedom, dignity, reputation, or any other interests he considers vital.3 Many brawls are explained in terms of defensive aggression. As we well know, a boy, threatened by a companion, will usually defend himself with his fists. Bandura (1973,155) reports studies showing that the best way to provoke aggression is to attack someone physically; he will most often reply with a vigorous counter-attack. Such counter-attacks have a deterrent effect. They discourage further attacks, and, because of this, the counter-aggression is all the more vigorous because it enables its author to avoid being assaulted. In other words, the aggressive behaviour is continued because it stops others from attacking. Defensive behaviour of this sort therefore becomes highly resistant to change, for the very reason that it makes it possible to escape danger (Bandura, 1973, 155-9). But defence can lead to acts infinitely more serious than ordinary fighting. Harmless to begin with, it is so linked with vital instincts that it can mobilize murderous impulses. This is the case in certain patricides. Jean-Charles had killed his father; a father who was apparently authoritarian, violent and brutal, leading a dissolute life, keeping

62

Why delinquency?

young mistresses, given to drinking and, according to his sons, guilty of incest. Jean-Charles was without doubt the most level-headed member of this Sardinian family. Calm and docile, he seemed to be 'out of tune' with his parents and his ten exuberant brothers and sisters. He was 17 years and four months. Because of his age - he was a minor according to the criminal law - he was chosen by his siblings to murder his father, with the minimum of risk. His older sisters kept telling him over and over: 'It's him or us.' Jean-Charles seemed more and more disturbed by the attitude of each of the members of the family. He had frequent nightmares, always the same: his father took his rifle and came to kill him while he was asleep ... The planning of the murder had been entrusted to one of the minor's sisters, but the investigation was unable to establish this premeditation. Whatever the case, according to a well-planned 'scenario,' the children provoked the father to violent anger which led him to threaten his family. The plan was carried out as anticipated. Totally exasperated, the father threw himself at Jean-Charles, slapped him and, confronted by his mocking air, went into another room, stood on a chair to reach the top of a cupboard on which there was a valise (according to witnesses at the scene there was a razor hidden in it). The young boy then took down a hunting rifle that hung on the wall, joined his father and challenged him 'to return and see what awaited him!' And he fired twice. Hit in the groin, the victim collapsed and died a few minutes later from a fatal haemorrhage caused by the severing of the femoral artery. The boy hung up the rifle on the wall, threw the cartridge cases into the yard and left in the direction of the constabulary... An intelligent boy, but with little schooling, Jean-Charles never showed any regret or remorse: he had acted 'according to his conscience to protect his mother, his sisters and his brothers.' (Henry and Laurent, 1974, 82)

63

Defensive aggression

In the several cases of patricide reported by Henry and Laurent, the father is considered by the family to be a threat and murder a defensive measure. The fathers are described by the members of the family as 'violent, impulsive, quick-tempered, vindictive, creating a climate of terror in the home. Each member of the group persisted in depicting him as being dangerous, capable of exterminating the whole family or part of it' (87). Murder seemed the only way out of a dead-end situation. A brief phrase clearly shows the defensive nature of

the act: 'It was him or us.' The fear of punishment can lead to murders that are also for reasons of defence. Such a case was reported in Montreal's La Presse: A young man of 17 was held criminally responsible yesterday by coroner Vincent Drouin, of the District of Terrebonne, for the death of little Chántale Chartier, aged 12, who was found dead last April 24th by children who were playing in the Mont-Rolland cemetery in the Laurentians. The little Chartier had been stabbed for having blackmailed her young accomplice several times following several burglaries. Coroner Drouin arrived at this verdict after having heard the main witness admit having stabbed Chántale Chartier several times after a quarrel they had following a number of thefts. The young man in question recounted, not without emotion, the circumstances that had led him to act as he did. According to the witness, Chántale and he had burgled several chalets in the MontRolland region during the autumn. The two of them had stolen rifles, portable radios, liquor as well as small articles, which they then sold. The children had made about $200.00 each. Once their misdeeds had been committed and the stolen articles disposed of, it seems that Chántale had blackmailed her accomplice, extorting $75.00 from him on two occasions by threatening to tell everything to the police if he did not pay. Her strategy having sue-

64

Why delinquency?

ceeded twice, the young girl had tried to blackmail her accomplice a third time, but the latter told her he had no money and would go home to get some. He had then told her to meet him at the cemetery. But instead of coming back with the money, he had returned with a hunting knife with which he stabbed her several times. (R. Gervais, La Presse, 17 May 1979) Certain murders committed during an armed robbery may be considered defensive acts, even if the original intention of the aggressor was simply appropriation. It is certain that the authors of armed robbery would greatly prefer everything to go off without any violence. If they fire on their victim or stab him, their chances of being caught increase, and, more serious still, they may then get a much longer sentence. It can happen, however, that the robber himself feels threatened. If the victim counter-attacks, or witnesses try to stop him, it is his turn to be afraid - afraid of being arrested, afraid even of being killed. In fear and anger, with everything happening very quickly, in order to defend himself, he strikes the mortal blow. He too will say: 'It was him or me.' Defensive aggression is the most natural thing in the world. Today, experimental psychologists agree that the strongest determinant of aggression is attack and not frustration, as they used to believe (Bandura, 1973; Buss, 1978). The best way of goading someone to violence is to attack him. Under such conditions, counter-attacks cannot be considered aberrant behaviour. They are necessary for life and to ensure the survival of the species. But these reactions are all the more powerful because they are biologically necessary. This explains the homicidal violence of defensive behaviour. There is nothing monstrous about the defence instinct, but what it triggers may have monstrous consequences.4

65

Defensive aggression

In the face of danger, however, there is another reaction possible, just as instinctive as attack, just as powerful and probably more so, and that is flight. A threat induces flight more often than attack. Furthermore, it seems that fear and anger are closely related. At all events, they are accompanied by the same physiological reactions (Bandura, 1973, 55). Nevertheless there must be a choice available between flight and attack. It is when flight is impossible that men, as well as animals, become aggressive. This is what happens in cases of patricide. The future murderer feels incapable of getting away from home. He is caught in the family trap. And the threat is there, immediate and constant. Escape being impossible, the child is driven to aggression and the greater the danger seems, the more deadly it will be.

Innate or learned? Is aggression an instinct? The question is particularly pertinent where defensive aggression is concerned, for it is very frequent in man and, by all evidence, is closely connected with the survival of individuals and groups. It would be tempting to answer, 'No, it is not an instinct.' In any case, it is 'No' if by that we mean some aggressive compulsion in man constantly seeking release. It is 'No' if there were such a thing as an aggressive gene. It is 'No' if we are to believe that there is such a thing as 'aggressiveness' inherent in man that would exist independently of any aggressive behaviour on the latter's part. It is because of such ideas that aggression is so poorly understood today. However, the revival of the good old debate between heredity and environment has been useful. It has enabled us to understand better when aggression is behaviour inherent in the biological nature of man and when it is the result of

66

Why delinquency?

conditioning and circumstances. According to present knowledge, there are three propositions that take into account the role of hereditary factors in aggression, and more precisely, defensive aggression. First, the human organism is programmed, as it were, to mobilize an impulse to attack or flee when there is a threat to its survival (Fromm, 1973, 221). Confronted with imminent danger, it triggers off a series of complex processes in the nervous and endocrine system that provides man with a tremendous amount of energy for either counter-attack or flight. Second, man has an innate predisposition to learn aggressive behaviour (Wilson, 1978, 114). Just as men are biologically capable of acquiring language if the learning conditions are right, in the same way they are capable of acquiring aggressive behaviour if it is shown to them. One might even say they are gifted pupils, certainly much more apt at learning to strike back than at learning to turn the other cheek. Third, men are predisposed to react aggressively in certain circumstances, particularly when attacked. Man is aggressive in the sense that there is a measurable probability that he will react aggressively under certain conditions (Wilson, 1978, 101). All this makes it possible to say that aggressive behaviour is inherent in what must properly be called 'human nature.' The expression has been so disparaged by a coalition of culturalists and Marxists that we have ended up believing that there is no such thing as the nature of man. Thus we have maintained the illusion that man is perfectly malleable and that, if we had the skill, we could create a kind of 'new man,' capable of blossoming in a utopia of some sort. In the second proposition above, it is stated that man can learn aggression. The role of experiential learning, then, is clearly recognized here. It is the primary factor in the enor-

67

Defensive aggression

mous variations in the level of aggressive acts from one individual to another and from one group to another. But how is aggression learned, particularly defensive aggression? There are two extraordinary documents that describe the mechanisms whereby aggressive behaviour is learned in certain neighbourhoods of large American cities where violence reigns. These are the autobiographies of Brown (1965) and Carr (1975). In Manchild in the Promised Land, Claude Brown (1965) tells about his childhood in Harlem in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. At the time, violence was to all intents and purposes practically obligatory for young boys. According to him, fear was permissible, but never the refusal to fight, so that the boys in Harlem were more afraid not to fight than to fight (252). The adults systematically urged the children to engage in brawling. If two little boys started a scuffle, no one ever thought of separating them. On the contrary, a circle of amused spectators would stand around and encourage them (253). It happened too that an adult would give money to a child to get him to fight (254). One day Brown, attacked by two boys bigger and stronger than he, ran home to find refuge. But from the window his father had seen him run away and was waiting for him at the door: 'He said, "Where are you runnin' to, boy?" I said "Dad these boys are out there, and they messin' with me." He said, "Well, if you come in here, I'm gon mess with you too. You ain't got no business runnin' from nobody." I said, "Yeah, Dad, I know that. But there's two of'em, and they're both bigger than me. They can hit harder than I can hit." Dad said, "You think they can hit harder than I can hit?" I said, "No Dad. I know they can't hit harder than you." ... He said, "Well, darn right I can hit harder than they can. And if you came in here you got to get hit by me" ' (256-7).

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Claude hesitated. Down below, two hefty boys awaited him and in front of him he had his father muttering about boys who ran away like little girls. He suddenly developed a terrible migraine, but at this point his mother intervened. Seeing that he looked ill, she came between her husband and her son and sent the latter to lie down. But the headache got worse. Finally Claude went down to confront his enemies. He received quite a thrashing. But the migraine had disappeared (256-8). At the other end of the United States, in the black ghetto of Los Angeles, Carr (1975) tells how the adults were not content merely to push the children to violence; they also taught them certain tricks. The neighbourhood where Carr lived when he was ten was a jungle. He was terrified every time he had to leave the house. When he ran messages for his mother, he used to run as though the devil were after him, afraid he would not come back alive. During this time, his uncle, who had just come back from the war in Korea, said to him: 'If you want to stay alive, you should become tough. You have no choice, boy; either you learn to fight now or you will be stepped on all your life.' And he undertook to teach him the techniques of GI combat. Carr practised boxing every night until he was ready to confront the neighbourhood. At first, he only wanted to defend himself, but he soon discovered that the only defence was attack. He therefore acquired the reputation of a dangerous fighter. Carr adds: 'And the more I fought the more I liked it' (21). What has just been described calls to mind what Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967) called sub-cultures of violence, that is, social milieux where aggression is an expected reaction and valued under certain circumstances. The existence of these milieux where violence is learned explains why in many large North American cities there are neighbourhoods where the rate of homicides is much higher than elsewhere. Thus in

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Montreal, year in and year out since 1944, an administrative district situated in the heart of the city registers from 10 to 30 times more homicides than any other district (Elie, 1979). A similar situation exists in other places. In Chicago, 2 per cent of the city blocks were responsible for 22 per cent of the homicides committed in the entire city. Such concentrations are not exceptional: they are found in Washington, Atlanta, Houston, and elsewhere (Elie, 1979). We must not forget that in these districts dominated by violence aggressive behaviour has a very obvious functional value, not only for the prestige it brings its authors, but also because the person who knows how to fight can defend his property, his honour, and even his life. As we say in ethology, aggression has an adaptive value.

7 Vengeance 'Vengeance' consists in attacking another person to repay an injury. It is a desire to make a person suffer who has made us suffer, to retaliate against the person responsible for an injury, to pay back evil for evil. De Greeff (1947) stated that vengeance is a manifestation of the defence instinct. It would be more exact to say that it is an extension of defensive aggression. Vengeance can have a defence function. The person who takes revenge insures himself against future attacks; he creates a reputation as a man who cannot be attacked with impunity. He 'commands respect', he makes himself feared. In vengeance, as in defence, the other party is seen as an enemy against whom one must protect oneself, but the sequence of exchanges is not the same. In defence, the aggressive act is intended to neutralize an imminent threat, whereas in vengeance it is the response to an offence. Can vengeance be considered a form of retributive justice? The main principle of this form of justice is reciprocity: to give as good as one gets in order to keep things equal. In the case of revenge, it is evil for evil. However, retributive justice, like all forms of justice, is concerned with equality: the evil rendered must be in proportion to the harm done. The retribution should be more or less equivalent to the suffering inflicted. If this balance exists, then one can speak of retributive justice. Unfortunately, however, the revenge, more often than not, is out of proportion to the offence.

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Crimes of vengeance There are two quite different forms of vengeance: a spontaneous and impulsive reaction to harm done by someone, and the measure that is carefully considered and executed later. Carr (1975) gives a good example of impulsive vengeance. 'Easter Sunday, 1953, I went over to Hollenbeck Park with a freshly stolen hunting knife in my coat pocket and nothing particular on my mind. Church had just let out, and all the folks were strutting around in their finest storebought clothes. Down at the lake I saw a kid fishing with a beautiful new rod and reel. I stood watching him for a few minutes, fascinated with his rig till I just had to try it out. I walked over and asked him if I could; he said no without even looking back at me. Something inside me snapped. (I still don't know exactly what it was, though I know it wasn't really temper: at the time I wasn't very angry at the kid personally, and forgot all about his fishing pole.) I pulled the hunting knife out of my coat, stabbed the kid in the guts as hard as I could and said, That's what you get, punk' (Carr, 1975, 22). In this episode, there is neither deliberation nor proportionality. The blow is wholly impulsive and has no proportion to the refusal. The absence of any element of defence is also to be noted: the young fisherman was not threatening Carr in any way. It is quite possible that there is a desire for power here: Carr also strikes because of the contemptuous way the boy had refused to do what he asked. There are also the kinds of vengeance that are more thought out and that take longer in coming. Such are the reprisals taken by adolescent gangs in revenge against other gangs that have attacked them. Often it is several days or even weeks after the initial attack that the avengers carry out their plans.

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Why delinquency?

The fires deliberately set by children are generally cases of vengeance. This is what Henry and Laurent found in studying 35 cases of this kind. 'Eight of the young arsonists had set fire to goods belonging to their parents following a reprimand, punishment or not being allowed to go out. They all explained their action as vengeance against their families whom they felt were unjust or had rejected them ... Eighteen had attempted to set fire to their school or the business premises where they worked. In their eyes, it was again a matter of retaliation against injustice!' (Henry and Laurent, 1974, 60). One of these cases is particularly striking: Jean-Pierre (14 years and 10 months) set fire to his uncle's farm. The fire destroyed all the buildings, equipment and crops. The youngster, who had been brought up by his uncle and aunt from the age of 6, claims he wanted to take revenge for the ill treatment he was subjected to. Born in Indochina, of a Vietnamese mother and French father employed in an electrical company, JeanPierre never knew his mother who was dead or had abandoned the family (the information on this point is contradictory). At 6 years old, his father takes him to France and leaves him in the care of his sister and brother-in-law, who had 2 little girls, 1 and 2 years old. He paid an amount agreed upon for his board. It seems that the child was well received by the family. He went to school regularly and was a very promising pupil. He was 10 when his father returned to France, but unfortunately the latter died suddenly the day after his return, a victim of fever and cirrhosis of the liver. The electrical company, a subsidiary of P.E.D.F., pays the young Jean-Pierre a pension, but it is much less than the money paid by the father before his death. According to the testimony of the neighbours, the attitude of the uncle and aunt changed suddenly; the child is taken out of private

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school and is forced to go to the elementary school where he is the butt of the jokes of his schoolmates, who laugh at his appearance and call him 'Mao' or 'chinaman.' Jean-Pierre suffers deep feelings of inferiority and uneasiness; in spite of all this, thanks to his intelligence and his efforts, he obtains his elementary certificate, having in three years made up for a major lack of knowledge of the French language - despite a slight reading difficulty (compensated, it is true, by a good intellect and quick comprehension) - and a few gaps in arithmetic. He wants to learn his father's trade - electrician. But after having succeeded at the C.E.P., he does not go back to school and has to work on the farm of his foster family. His uncle, a labourer, crude and authoritarian, is demanding, upbraiding him constantly for his listlessness and his origins; his aunt, kinder, but a grasping woman, makes no allowances for him. This climate of insecurity makes him anxious and fearful. Deeply disturbed emotionally, he has very mixed feelings about his uncle and aunt; suffering in silence, he acts like a 'living martyr,' but he knows how to restore his pride and dignity. Was it not this whole context that leads him to commit the crime that will ruin his uncle? (Henry and Laurent, 1974, 53-4) At the age of nine, Carr (1975, 19-21) set fire to his school to take revenge on his sports instructor who had expelled him from the playing field for a week. He poured gasoline in the instructor's office and lit it, and the school burned down. Another crime, murder, can also be explained by the desire for revenge. Such was the case of Rose, reported by Gardiner (1976). Rose, a difficult and quick-tempered young girl, is patently rejected by her parents who, to get rid of her, keep placing her in various establishments. At five years of age, she is sent to a rest home for two years. She is scarcely eight when she is sent back for another two years. After this, she is

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placed with various families and ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Rose's parents, particularly her father, prefer their son, whom they allow to do anything he likes. In spite of all these placements, Rose continues her studies and is accepted at university. But her parents oppose this under the pretext that they have no money. They reserve this privilege for their son. In spite of all Rose's pleas, the parents remain adamant. Her father even arrives at the point of no longer speaking to her. Rose thinks of killing her father but tells herself that instant death would not make him suffer enough. Therefore, noting that he loves his son more than anyone, she decides that the best way of paying him back for all the suffering he had made her endure would be to kill the boy. That very night, when her brother goes to bed, she goes to kiss him, turns out the light, and kills him by hitting him repeatedly with a heavy bronze statuette. Rose's vengeance was complete. Her parents had to be hospitalized for nervous shock, and eighteen months later her father died of a heart attack (Gardiner, 1976, 209-28). Of what use is vengeance? Like other behaviour that arouses indignation, vengeance is poorly understood. Those who talk about it use all their energy condemning it so that there is none left for understanding it. Certain types of vengeance seem completely irrational. Rose's case is a typical example and is not unique. A good many crimes of passion are motivated by vengeance.! These acts are somewhat suicidal: the criminal is almost certain to be arrested and spend most of the rest of his days in prison. Blinded by passion, the murderer forgets there must be a reckoning and furthermore often attempts to kill himself.

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However, there are acts of vengeance that, in the eyes of their authors, are rational. Claude Brown, as a young man, used to make money by selling cocaine and marijuana in Harlem. One night, a heroin addict, short of drugs and showing withdrawal symptoms, held him up and stole his stock of marijuana and cocaine in order to exchange them for heroin. C I felt bad. Nobody had ever stuck me up or shit like that. I knew that this would get around, and you couldn't deal any drugs if you were going to be letting cats stick you up and take it. I knew that I'd have to get a gun, and that when the cats heard about it - cats like Bubba Williams, Big Freddie, Reno, and Tommy Holloway - they would also want to hear that the guy had been killed. This was the way the people in our set did things. You didn't go around letting anybody stick you up. Shit, if you let somebody stick you up and go on living behind it, you didn't have any business dealing drugs. Everybody who wanted some free drugs would come by and try to stick you up. I didn't want to, but I knew I had to get another piece and find that cat' (Brown, 1965, 169). He got himself a .25 calibre automatic pistol, determined to kill the person who had robbed him. But a week later, he learned that his man had been struck down by four bullets while attempting a hold-up. He was relieved: he could save face without committing murder. However, he continued to carry his weapon, determined to kill the next person who might attack him. But he did not like the idea. He decided, therefore, not to sell drugs any longer (Brown, 1965,168-71). This anecdote shows the use of vengeance in certain circumstances. The person who avenges himself preserves his reputation as a man who is to be respected. He protects himself in this way against possible attack. The person who refuses to retaliate takes the risk of letting his associates believe they can attack him with impunity.

8 The catharsis hypothesis The hydraulic model

According to an idea that comes to us from Freud, aggressiveness is a drive that accumulates in the organism and strains to be released. This is why men regularly discharge the violence that is within them. Konrad Lorenz defends this theory fairly convincingly. He describes a curious phenomenon among cichlids, a very aggressive small fish. The cichlid in captivity, which has no opportunity to discharge its aggressive energy on its neighbours, is reduced to killing its mate after several days. If, in order to prevent this unhappy event, a 'scapegoat' is put in the aquarium, or even another couple separated by a glass partition, we find that the fish releases its aggression by regularly attacking its neighbours and seems to have no more aggressiveness left to 'take out' on its mate. Lorenz says that similar phenomena take place in humans. He cites anecdotal examples such as that of his aunt who, at set intervals, discharged her aggression on her maids and who, once freed of this accumulated violence, became charming with everyone, including her new maid (Lorenz, 1969, 64-6). Thus, according to Lorenz, when instinctive behaviour cannot find expression for some time, the need to act out becomes more and more intense and anything can unleash it. In this case, 'catharsis' is recommended. The subject releases his aggression on inconsequential objects, thus dissipating his reserve of aggressive energy.

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Behind this analysis is a relatively widespread concept of aggression. Some authors speak in this case of a hydraulic model, because the reasoning is inspired by the analogy of a liquid under pressure in a closed reservoir. According to this model, the aggression would correspond to a liquid that is accumulated in a container, the walls of which would be our inhibitions. When too much aggression is built up, the pressure threatens to explode the inhibitions. The catharsis, then, is like an operation that drains off the excess aggression. If this is not done, the aggressive drive built up over a certain time becomes so strong that the inhibitions must break down, resulting in an explosion of violence. This theory of aggression, seen not as behaviour but as conserved energy, has contributed more than anything else to lead us astray, making it impossible for us to account for observed phenomena. Even worse, it leads to altogether false reasoning. When researchers undertake to verify the theory of catharsis, they discover first that their hypotheses are not confirmed and then, and much more serious, often develop results that are exactly the opposite of what the theory forecast. Aggression is not accumulated, it tends, rather, to dissipate with time without the need to discharge it. People who are frustrated or insulted and who cannot counter-attack finally calm down. They gradually regain their composure so that the more time that passes, the more the threat of violence is reduced. If the theory of catharsis were well founded, the contrary would occur: with time, the threat of aggression would increase.1 An American anthropologist, Sipes (1973), recently made an empirical verification of this theory. He based himself on the fact, well known in anthropology, that there are extremely bellicose societies and others that almost never make

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war. According to the hydraulic model, the aggressive energy is accumulated in the peace-loving societies and should therefore find some way of being released. Violent sports are an ideal way of discharging this surplus energy. It would be expected, then, that in societies that do not make war, violent sports are often practised. Sipes therefore compared ten warlike societies and ten peaceful societies in order to see if the latter went in for more violent sports. These are his findings (Sipes, 1973, 71): PRESENCE OF VIOLENT SPORTS

Warlike societies Peaceful societies

Yes 9 2

No 1 8

The results are of a clarity not often found in the social sciences. The warlike societies systematically practice violent sports (9 out of 10), whereas 8 out of the 10 peaceful societies do not. It may be concluded that the men living in the peaceful societies do not feel the need to release aggression in violent sports. Unleashed aggression The most decisive challenge to the catharsis theory comes from a series of experiments and observations that show that when aggression is expressed, it is not dissipated; on the contrary, it is increased. Bandura (1973, 148ff) reports experiments that lead to this conclusion. In general, the procedure is as follows. First, two groups of subjects were frustrated, then those in the first group were encouraged to release their aggression by hitting a large doll, while those in the second group had to wait in

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another room without saying anything. Finally, the two groups were left in a place where they were free to act aggressively or not. It was the subjects of the first group, those who had had the benefit of 'catharsis,' who were the most aggressive. Thus, when someone is encouraged to behave aggressively, his anger is aroused, and in this state he runs the risk of becoming even more nasty. The description of certain crimes of violence follow along the same lines as the above. It seems that the author of an aggressive crime is swept along by his own aggression. The more he hits, the more he feels the need to hit. Certain murders remind one of a child's fits of anger where he goes into paroxysms of violence, carried away by his own cries and gesticulations. Only the death of the victim can stop the murderer. Daniel is 16 years and 8 months. He has killed an old woman of 74 who served him as housekeeper since both his parents worked outside the home. Daniel had tried to take a 5-franc note from the old woman's purse, but the latter had surprised him and scolded him severely, threatening to tell his father. The young boy had then grabbed an empty bottle and struck her on the head while she tried to defend herself by biting his finger. Daniel got hold of a second bottle and broke it over the head of his victim. The latter called for help while the boy got a rolling-pin from the cupboard and started to deliver violent blows all over the poor woman's body. To the neighbours who had gathered under the window, he shouts: 'She is dying! She is full of blood!'... Then a few minutes later: 'Go get a doctor, quick ... She is going to die!' As a neighbour tries to enter the room, he blocks the door with the television table. The victim has time to cry out: 'He's the one who did this to me!' But the boy claims she hurt herself by falling

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Why delinquency?

down the stairs. Finally, picking up a piece of the broken bottle, he kneels over her, and in spite of her struggles, succeeds in lifting her chin and making several deep gashes in her throat, severing the artery. (Henry and Laurent, 1974, 71)

This amplification of violence, where the subject seems to be excited by his own aggressive acts, explains certain multiple murders: once the aggression is unleashed, all those who are in the neighbourhood of the originally intended victim are subject to it. The purpose of these further murders is generally to eliminate the witnesses, but only an extraordinary level of anger makes such murderous rage possible. This spiralling of the aggression also helps us to understand the unbelievable number of times a victim is stabbed during certain murders. 2 This state, often described by the expression 6He is beside himself with rage,' is well known. De Greeff (1942) referred to it à propos crimes of passion. He noted that the murderer acts in a state of 'semi-consciousness after having suddenly been carried away by a sort of interior cataclysm' (242). c An automatism of an unparalleled violence occurs and the subject is actually carried away by a driving force that gives him the strength and violence of the epileptic' (244). This aggressive intoxication can probably be explained by biological mechanisms. In situations of stress, the organism secretes various hormones that make rapid and vigorous action possible. A series of physiological changes take place so that the heart beats more quickly, the breathing accelerates, and blood flows in abundance into the muscles, etc (Laborit, 1970, 70). Under these conditions, it is easy to imagine that once the process is unleashed it is difficult to stop it and there is a danger of it going further and lasting longer than the promoters of catharsis would wish.

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The murderer was too meek In the annals of crime, especially among adolescents, there is a strange type of murderer. These individuals are mild, polite, self-effacing, and in their daily life never behave in an aggressive manner. Then suddenly, without any warning, they explode and kill one or even several persons with a terrifying violence. This paradoxical phenomenon has led certain specialists to fasten on to the theory of catharsis, even though they recognize its doubtful aspects. One of these is the American psychologist Megargee. During his research, he found 'chronically overcontrolled personalities' who give way to serious hostile actions. He reports, for example, the case of a mild-mannered bachelor whom a neighbour kept insulting regularly over a period of several weeks. One night, having been heaped with insults for forty-five minutes, he shot his tormentor four times, killing him (Megargee, 1966, 22). Megargee found that the adolescents who committed extremely violent crimes are 'good boys' more often than ordinary delinquents. At school they are good pupils. They have little or no history of previous crimes. Once institutionalized, they resort to verbal aggression less than their fellow inmates. Megargee uses the hydraulic model to explain this phenomenon. According to him, these persons systematically inhibit their aggression to such an extent that, being undissipated, it builds up more and more. There comes a time, then, when the level of aggressive impetus transcends the strength of the inhibitions. The slightest provocation is enough to tip the scales and result in all the more violence in that the compulsion has been accumulating for a long time (Megargee, 1966, 22; 1969, 1,066-7). This mechanistic explanation, where human conduct is conceived as resulting from a precarious balance between drives

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Why delinquency?

and inhibitions, is certainly not the only way of accounting for the phenomenon. Individuals characterized as being too repressed do not accumulate aggression; they are confronted, rather, with a serious problem. They do not know how to defend themselves against the petty attacks we are all exposed to every day. They do not dare counter-attack verbally, answer insult for insult. They do not have the courage to counter-attack physically, to shove somebody back when shoved. They are often annoyed by hostile people. If they have the misfortune of coming too close to this kind of individual, they become their whipping boy. They are harassed and persecuted all the more because they never retaliate. They allow people to step on them. Then comes a time when they can stand no more. They feel that their psychological integrity is threatened (constant humiliation is not very good for the self-image), and sometimes their physical integrity. They feel even more threatened because they are often timid, one of the reasons why they are not aggressive. Their back to the wall, they conceive the idea of getting rid of their tormentor once and for all. They will then attack with the full force of despair. But it is not enough to speak of despair to account for the violence of the acts that follow. De Greeff (1942) analysed the mechanism very well. He had noted that 'the crimes of the young are often more destructive than others due to insufficient courage and a considerable effort to overcome interior resistance or the fear of acting. At this moment, we see many dramatizing and hysteria-like manifestations intended as a sort of self-hypnosis, a self-induced state of trance. From this point of view, the crimes of adolescents resemble those of epileptics: unbelievable violence, savage relentlessness, a considerable number of blows or injuries. In short, crimes of the inhibited who can only overcome the resistance they feel by

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stirring up a veritable tidal wave that completely submerges them' (247). To overcome his fears, the future murderer puts himself into this state of aggressive intoxication already discussed. More or less consciously he knows that once the storm breaks he will do what he never could do in his normal state. Action or aggression? One question remains unanswered: How do we explain the phenomenon described by Lorenz where the aggressive fish that was unable to release its aggression finally killed its mate? It would always be possible to elude the question by saying that a human does not behave like a fish. But this is too easy a way out, especially as we face a real problem. In the observations reported by Lorenz, the phenomena were stretched out over relatively long periods. It takes several days for the cichlid to attack. This is perhaps the key to the problem: there is a sufficiently long time for the subjects to become bored. In effect, the release of aggression observed by Lorenz after long periods of passivity can well be explained by the general need for action that we discussed in chapter 4. It is not that aggression is accumulated like water behind a dyke, but simply that the organism lacks stimulation, it needs activity. Among highly aggressive species such as the cichlid, this need for action will naturally show itself in an aggressive manner. And the same will be true of individuals who have learned to behave aggressively. This explanation is all the more likely since there is a close relationship between action and aggression. This connection is recognized when in speaking of an energetic person we use the word 'aggressive.' This is not simply semantics. Storr

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Why delinquency?

(1973) notes that in practice it is not always easy to distinguish between 'activity' considered as a motor impulse and 'aggression.' He reports that among hyperactive children, we 'find an increase of aggression in conjunction with their increased activity' (17). The same connection is observed in the other direction: the person whose aggression is inhibited suffers a decline in activity. This relationship between action and aggression leads us to confuse them. It is probably on this confusion that a good part of the catharsis theory is based. It is thought that a violent act is explained by the need to discharge accumulated aggressive impulses, whereas in reality it is a means of satisfying a general need for action, which actually becomes more and more intense with the passage of time during which it is not satisfied.

9 Domination For it does not need much experience to realise how pleasant it is to set others to work and to move the world by a word. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1768)

'Domination' consists in committing a crime to gain supremacy over someone. It can mean superiority, in terms of either strength or status. Domination has three specific ends: power, cruelty, and prestige. Power Tower' consists in committing a crime to exercise authority over another person, that is, to force his submission. Every crime, in the sense used here, is coercive. By force, by trickery, or by ability, the delinquent controls his victim. He compels him to give up his property; he makes him suffer. The hold-up is a pure case of the exercise of power. 'Your money or your life' is the same type of alternative that the person with power proposes to the one he wants to dominate: submit or die. Physical force is a simple method of imposing one's will on another.1 When you cannot obtain what you want by persuasion or by exchange, it is tempting to demand it by force. And this is easy: all you have to do is procure a weapon. But this is a case of power as a means of acquiring something, and this has been discussed in the chapter on appropriation. The question here is power as an end in itselfthe enjoyment it affords.

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Why delinquency?

The pleasure of dominating, of making another person submit and obey, is a strong desire in man. To see our capabilities infinitely multiplied by those of men who do our bidding is an intoxicating feeling for most of us. But not everyone has access to situations where this desire is satisfied with impunity. Everyone cannot become prime minister, the president of something, a director, head of service, a foreman, or a policeman. For those who do not have access to these positions, crime can be the solution, the means of enabling them to experience the thrill of power. For them, the pistol and the knife become tools of power. They can reduce the indifferent passerby or the haughty cashier to trembling victims, submissive and obsequious. The weapon enables them to experience this pleasurable sensation usually reserved for the mighty. During bank robberies, it is essential for the criminals to impose their authority on the clients and personnel. If they do not succeed, there could be resistance and, worse still, a panic. Weapons are not enough. It is also necessary to have an air of confidence, to show assurance, to speak in tones that command obedience (Letkemann, 1973,110-12). Many robbers get real pleasure out of exercising this kind of power. 'Me, I have seen myself have fun during a robbery, burst out laughing to see how guys act when you aim at them, to see how terrified they are!' (Aurousseau and Laborde, 1976, 43). Murders, too, can provide this thrill of domination. Joey, the American hired killer, admits this in his memoirs: 'And, finally, I guess I do it because I enjoy it. I like having the power of knowing that I am it, that I can make the final decision of whether someone lives or dies. It is an awesome power' (Joey and Fisher, 1973, 98).

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Cruelty

This pleasure in knowing one has power over life and death leads us to something close to it: the pleasure of making someone suffer. 'Cruelty' consists in attacking someone for the pleasure of dominating him and making him suffer. Sadism is a mysterious phenomenon. How can anyone get pleasure out of making another person suffer? Probably the ultimate proof of one's power over another is to make him suffer, at the same time keeping him under one's thumb. This idea was convincingly defended by Storr (1973, 94) and by Fromm. The pleasure of making someone suffer is based on the desire for power. According to Fromm (1973, 288-9) the core of sadism 'is the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being.' Deliberately to make someone suffer is a means of provoking resistance that can be mastered. 'Sadism consists less in the pleasure of inflicting pain than in the desire to incite a resistance to overcome. Or better, the pleasure is derived from the anticipation of the resistance and the opportunity of overcoming it' (Baechler, 1978, 176). The behaviour of the hoodlum and the numerous petty crimes he commits are a minor manifestation of cruelty.2 The hoodlum takes pleasure in provoking, in shocking, in annoying, in harassing. With his gang, he starts a brawl in public places. He insults passersby. He loves to frighten women and old men. He bullies those smaller than he. At school, he plays the tyrant and extorts money from his schoolmates. The hoodlum plays the 'tough guy'; he provokes those he is sure he can beat and forces them either to beg for mercy or to face up and get a drubbing. All in all, the hoodlum's behaviour is hateful; its explanation is that he is

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Why delinquency?

prompted by a lust for power but does not have the position of power. Rape, of all the crimes, is probably the most strongly charged with cruelty. Beyond the sexual pleasure, the rapist is seeking this supreme domination that consists in humiliating and hurting someone who has no choice but to submit. 'Thus a young girl of 14 is raped by 5 boys of 15 to 17 years of age, under the following conditions: coming home from work one night in September at about 6.30 P.M., she crosses the fair-ground to get to her house. There she meets a group of 5 boys who start to joke with her. A friend who is with her takes fright and leaves. One of the boys asks the young girl to go with him and forces himself on her. The others spontaneously follow. They take her to an isolated spot and rape her. The operation is directed by the boy who first accosted her. He makes sure she is a virgin and after having raped her, urinates on her. One of the boys had never had sexual relations. Another, at the request of his friends, lies down on the young girl, but tells her in a whisper that he won't do anything to her. Another refuses to take part in the action and stands aside' (Michard, Selosse, and Algan, 1963, 175). The paradoxical aspect of rape is that the sexual pleasure in itself is not as great as the pleasure of dominating (Storr, 1973, 94). In certain cases of rape, the sexual enjoyment is quite secondary to the pleasure of making the person suffer. It is obvious, then, that the object is primarily cruelty. 'GerardAndre (17 years and 1 month) and Maurice (16 years and 10 months) along with a group of 5 adults, the youngest being 18 and the oldest forty-one, "brutalize" a woman of twentyeight, a mentally deficient war orphan profoundly traumatized by the bombings of 1944. Several times, under threat, the group breaks into the isolated house of the victim. Always

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under threat, each of the members begin mauling her, performing obscene acts or forcing sexual relations on her. Their treatment of her is brutal: they inject long objects into her vagina, rain blows on her face, scratch her stomach and thighs. The young woman is always left in a state of semiconsciousness' (Henry and Laurent, 1974, 106). Cases such as the one just described, where the primary pleasure is the suffering of the victim, are relatively rare, much more so than those where the pleasure is in dominating someone. This can be explained by the fact, noted in animals as well as man, that manifestations of suffering inhibit aggression. There are veritable rites of submission and appeasement that stop aggression very effectively (Lorenz, 1969; Bandura, 1973). One might suppose that only a pathological perversity could make a delinquent so insensitive that he can enjoy making his victim suffer despite his supplications and acts of submission. Prestige 'Prestige' consists in committing a crime to win admiration. The delinquent is anxious to have his ability, courage, strength, or other qualities recognized. Prestige is a quality attributed by one or several persons to someone who embodies it more than others. To obtain prestige, then, it is necessary to prove superiority and then get others to recognize it (Baechler, 1978, 22-4). Nine per cent of the London adolescents who admitted having stolen say they did it to prove themselves (Belson, 1975, 167). Furthermore, among this group there were a good number who said that the fact that they associated with thieves induced them to steal. They were asked c Why?' Of the three most frequent answers, two were related to prestige:

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'To be accepted' and To acquire prestige, to appear strong and to show no fear' (230). It is often thought that theft and violence are a source of prestige simply because in some sub-cultures people admire conduct that is opposed to the values of society as a whole.3 This is not quite so. In effect, the delinquency in itself is rarely highly regarded. It is a certain number of qualities that accompany it that are respected: ability, trickery, courage, etc. And these qualities can be appreciated as well by 'honest men' as well as by delinquents. Thus theft is very often a means of showing that one has greater ability, more skill, and more craftiness than one's comrades. The thief can in this way acquire a 'rep.' As every crime involves a certain risk, it is also an excellent occasion to prove one's courage and strength of character. Thus prestige is gained by showing the ability to face danger and keep a cool head under pressure. The daring shown by delinquents may serve to prove to others as well as to themselves that it is possible to overcome their fear, that they are not 'chicken.'4 Thieves also seek prestige through the riches they acquire at the expense of others. It is not unusual to see them distribute everything they have stolen among their friends and relatives. The 'spree' mentioned in chapter 5 is clearly marked by a desire for recognition, to show that one has succeeded. This explains the ostentatious spending, the large tips, standing the treat for everyone, the expensive clothes, and all the showy luxury of the successful thief. According to Yochelson and Samenow (1976, 283), for the criminal, money is not at all a means of acquiring comfort or security; it is essentially a measure of his success in crime, a means of giving himself airs and impressing everyone around him. Violence, too, can be a means of acquiring prestige. According to Brown (1965, 256-60), the best way for a boy from

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Harlem to be respected was to fight as ferociously as he could. This was the way he made a 'reputation.' The little boys who were admired were those who fought with everyone. And the most respected young men were those who had killed (256). Brown made himself an excellent reputation very early because he succeeded in defeating almost all his friends. But to keep this lofty image, he could not continue to fight the same boys. He had to attack bigger and bigger boys, stronger and stronger boys. In order to be sure of victory, he armed himself with a bottle, a bat, or a steel bar and struck with all his might. This is how he became 'someone' in his community. Among delinquent gangs, violence is expected under certain circumstances. Thus when the members of Chicago gangs were involved in combat with an enemy group, participation was necessary if they did not want to lose the respect of their comrades. Short and Strodtbeck (1965, 251-4) noted that the members of gangs who take the front line of battle and fight with the greatest courage and ferocity are either leaders or those who aspire to the leadership of the gang. Violence has a strange attraction for people, and not only the violent. Those who have not felt the fascination of inspiring respect and terror are rare indeed. Joey remarks with astonishment that the fact of being a hired assassin aroused interest and admiration far beyond the criminal environment in which he grew up. C I like the status it brings. I'm somebody. Straight people like to associate with me. They like to be able to brag that they know a real live killer, or that this guy can "do things" for people. And girls, when they meet me, they want to find out what it's like to be with an individual who had killed people. They want to go to bed with you. Don't ask me why, but they do. They feel you're going to be different than anybody else. You're not, and they're dis-

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appointed when they find out, but the idea of being with an animal really appeals to a lot of people. Believe it or not, there are "hit man groupies'" (Joey and Fisher, 1973, 98). There is even glory attached to being a gangster. From Robin Hood to Bonnie and Clyde, history is full of notorious robbers who were more adored than hated. It is difficult not to admire their daring and ingenious crimes. Many people cannot help but respect brute force. And how can one not envy the freedom of these men who feel restrained neither by the laws nor by their conscience?

PART TWO Opportunities

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10 The opportunity theory Action, appropriation, aggression, and domination are goals that, when achieved through delinquent activity, have something a bit special about them. But we all see something of ourselves in this type of aim. Such ends are not exclusive to delinquents. All of us seek to satisfy our need for action through sports, games, and work. We too would like to have things, through business, a well-paid job, or saving. We all attack others with nasty words, biting humour, and slander. We also dream of power and glory. The problem of delinquency, then, is not exclusively in the area of goals. It is first and foremost a means to an end. It is impossible to avoid the question: Why resort to crime to achieve goals that could be attained by socially acceptable means? The question is all the more pertinent since crime is an uncertain method. It is an act forbidden by law, punishable, and, as everyone knows, very ill-regarded. The first thought that comes to mind is that a person must be in great trouble to resort to such procedures. Delinquency and opportunity Spontaneously, people say: 'He had no choice.' Crime is generally a second choice, something one does when there is no other way of attaining one's ends. Cloward and Ohlin (1960) made a general proposition based on this commonsense assertion: an adolescent commits crimes because he does not have the legitimate opportunity to realize his goals.

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In essence, the arguments of these two sociologists is this. Boys from working-class milieux have interiorized the success goals that American society has proposed to all its members.1 However, among the working classes, the opportunities for attaining success legally are very limited. The youth must leave school prematurely, either to go to work or because, in their families, no importance is attached to learning. Because of this, they are cut off from the means of realizing their ambitions. This gap between what these boys are led to want and what is actually possible confronts them with a serious problem of adaptation. All the more frustrating is the fact that they feel unable to reduce the level of their aspirations. They therefore look for alternative solutions. Delinquency is a possibility. But not everyone can succeed in crime. 'Illegitimate opportunities' are also limited; not everyone can be accepted in a group of criminals and gain the knowledge necessary to succeed in crime. For Cloward and Ohlin, then, each individual has access to both legitimate and illegitimate opportunities. In other words, each has a set of acceptable possibilities for success and a set of illegal possibilities. The youth who has very limited legitimate opportunities but a wide range of illegal possibilities stands a strong risk of taking to crime. The theory of opportunities can be criticized on two main counts, on the question of social status and on the aspirations of delinquents.

Social status Cloward and Ohlin's theoretical model rests on the idea that juvenile delinquency is concentrated in the lower classes. Does this hypothesis square with the facts? The question of a relationship between social classes and delinquency is still the

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subject of lively controversy. In spite of this, it is possible to give a brief outline of the state of the issue, always keeping in mind that it is still an open question. Most research on individuals has reported a significant relationship between social status and official delinquency: lowerclass youngsters have a greater chance of being arrested by the police and sent before the courts. Two reviews of the literature agree on this point. Tittle, Villemez, and Smith (1978), after having calculated 61 social class-official delinquency correlations, arrive at an average correlation of —0.25. Braithwaite (1981) reports that 44 studies out of 53 show that lower-class youngsters have a rate of official delinquency higher than that of middle-class youngsters. Despite the many studies, however, it cannot be taken for granted that there are strong correlations between social class and official delinquency. At least this is the conclusion of Hindelang, Hirschi, and Weis (1981, 188), who point out that in the majority of studies they have examined, the correlations are slight. The relationship between social status and self-reported delinquency is either slight or non-existent. In 1977, LeBlanc reviewed 27 studies in which the connection between hidden delinquency and social status was assessed. He reports that in 19 of the studies no association was found between selfreported delinquency and social status. And he could have added that in the 8 remaining studies, the differences were minor. A similar undertaking was accomplished by Tittle and his collaborators (1978), who calculated the correlations based on the figures reported in thirty-five studies. They came to the conclusion that the average correlation between hidden delinquency and social status is —0.06, which means that to all intents and purposes there is no correlation between these two variables; more precisely, there is a slight inverse reía-

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tionship between social class and delinquency: working-class youth have a slightly greater tendency to commit infractions than their comrades who are socially better placed. In contrast, Braithwaite (1981, 38), after having compiled the results of 47 studies, reports that 18 establish that lowerclass youths show a higher rate of self-reported delinquency than that of the middle or upper classes, 7 give qualified support to the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between social class and self-reported delinquency, and 22 find no significant relationship. These results might lead to the conclusion that there is a large gap between the results obtained by measuring official delinquency and those obtained from the questionnaires on self-reported delinquency. In fact, this is not always the case. Hindelang, Hirschi, and Weis (1981), on the basis of a detailed analysis of works containing measurements of both self-reported delinquency and official delinquency, conclude that most of the time the two types of measurement produce concordant results and that there is a slight negative relationship between delinquency (no matter what measurement is used) and social status. It is difficult to exclude the possibility that the relationship between social class and self-reported delinquency may actually be stronger, since the questionnaires are overloaded with minor infractions. The questionnaires on self-reported delinquency focus largely on statutory offences (missing school, running away from home, drinking, having sexual relations, etc) and on petty thefts. But there are indications that some lower-class adolescents commit many relatively grave crimes (Elliott and Ageton, 1980). Perhaps, then, minor delinquency is distributed uniformly on the social scale while serious delinquency is concentrated in the lower classes. If that is the

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case, the divergent results we obtain in the delinquencysocial status studies, depending on whether we use the questionnaire or the official data, would be due to the fact that in the first case we are measuring a minor delinquency that is fairly evenly distributed, and in the second case a more serious delinquency that would be primarily committed by youths of the lower classes. It is also quite possible that the measurement of social status used leads to underestimating the social status-delinquency relationship. In almost all the research, the social status of the young person's origin is measured: he is attributed the status of his parents. But Stark (1979, 668-9) convincingly upholds the idea that since there is a great deal of social mobility a youth's social status may not necessarily be that of his parents. How, then, does one measure the status of a youth? One solution could be to take into account his status at school as shown by his academic results. If we use this new criterion of status - which is a good predictor of the subject's future social level - then there is clearly a close connection between social status and delinquency: the higher the young person's school status, the less he tends to commit offences. Hirschi had already pointed out this fact in 1972: The lower the social class the child will enter, the more likely he is to be delinquent, regardless of his class origin' (50). If the important variable is no longer the social class of origin but that toward which the adolescent is heading, the problem must be stated in very different terms. It is no longer social stratification that has a bearing on delinquency, but the ability a person has to make a suitable place for himself in society. From all this, we may conclude that Cloward and Ohlin were not right in attributing a leading role to social class - and especially class of origin - in their theory. Though there is a

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certain relationship between social class of origin and delinquency, it is not sufficiently strong to give it the importance it was given in the differential opportunities theory. Aspirations

The aspirations of juvenile delinquents are not as high as Cloward and Ohlin believed. Research has shown that the lower the aspirations of an adolescent, the greater the tendency to commit offences (Hirschi, 1969; Biron, 1977; CapIan, 1978). In a sense, this is the opposite of what Cloward and Ohlin2 thought. Hence the tension experienced by delinquents because of the gap between their ambitions and their opportunities simply does not exist. These criticisms destroyed a good part of the theory constructed by Cloward and Ohlin. In spite of this, there remains a concept that will prove very useful in future analyses - the idea of opportunity. One need not believe that delinquents have high aspirations or that delinquency is concentrated in the lower classes to put forward the hypothesis that an adolescent from any milieu has objectives of some kind, and that if he had more legitimate than illegitimate ways of realizing his goals, he would not turn to crime. But the concept of opportunity must still be explained. An opportunity occurs when a person has the resources to take advantage of circumstances to realize his goals. It is coming upon a situation and having the ability to exploit it. The term indicates the prerequisites for effecting a solution, prerequisites that depend on outside circumstances as well as on the personal ability of the actor. The opportunity makes the action possible and effective. Because of this it is a major determinant of the choices. For example, a boy will choose an

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illegal solution rather than a legal one because, in the circumstances and considering his abilities, it seems more achievable and more accessible than a solution that would be in keeping with the law. Opportunity presents both limitations and possibilities: limitations because the opportunities are always limited by those around us, by institutions, by considerations of time and space, and by our own incompetence; possibilities because it offers freedom of choice. We can take advantage of it or ignore it; the choice is ours. The opportunities offered a person limit his scope - what he can do at a given moment and what he cannot do. It dictates the extent of freedom he has. Opportunities and goals When someone jumps at an opportunity, it is not enough for him to choose the means dictated by circumstances; often he does more: he goes after new goals. Thus opportunities can influence the choice of goals as well as the methods of achieving them. The range of available means - of opportunities - is a decisive factor in the choice of goals. Unfeasible projects are abandoned and, in the end, the objectives are adjusted to the means at hand. And because the ends are infinite and the means are not, the means available decide the goals rather than the other way around. But there is more to it than this. Man is not content to adjust his aims to his means; he discovers new goals, unsuspected in the heat of an action directed by opportunity. Crozier and Friedberg (1977, 47) remind us that adults, and even more so adolescents, do not really know what they want. The actor rarely has clear objectives, or even coherent pro-

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Why delinquency?

jects: these are many, more or less ambitious, more or less clear, more or less contradictory. He will change them in midstream, rejecting some, discovering others, as he goes along and even after the deed, if only because unexpected and unforeseeable consequences of his action force him to "reconsider his position" and "readjust his aim": what at one moment is the "means" will at another be the "goal," and vice versa.' Thus man does not necessarily set out to attain objectives, he seizes the opportunities that arise. 4He takes advantage of the situation in terms of the lesser of two evils and afterwards discovers what he wants' (274). Through the act and through the experience he discovers new goals. An example will help describe this process. It is taken from the autobiography of Carr (1975). After one of Carr's releases from prison, a friend named Willie wanted to involve him in hold-ups. Carr seriously doubted the advantage of becoming a professional armed robber, but Willie insisted, saying it was very easy. Finally Carr agreed. The two friends then went to a gunsmith and bought two rifles, sawing off the barrels so that they could hide them under their coats. Next they stole a Packard and went off to look for a place to rob. They entered the first handy grocery store, took out their guns, and demanded money. While the cashier was putting the money into a bag, Willie did his shopping: several bottles of wine, lemon juice, and so on. Carr was worried: this wasn't the time to wait to do shopping! When it was finished, they ran to the car and drove off at full speed to Esther's, a divorced woman with whom they were living. An hour later, the police rang the bell. Esther went to the door in her nightgown. She told the police she had been alone all day looking after the children and had seen no one. Hidden in the back room, the friends laughed in derision, knowing they would not be caught and that their hiding place was safe. They then divided the money, $250 each.

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After this, Carr threw caution to the wind. In his eyes, the money was there waiting to be taken. Wherever he went, he carried his rifle under his coat, and whenever he felt like it, he would rob a grocery or liquor store. His reaction to anyone's money problems was to say that there is a bank on every street corner, meaning a business that could be robbed. He would also rob elderly men who were cashing their pay cheques. Carr says he held up almost every liquor store in the neighbourhood, the sums stolen varying between $150 and $400. But the money did not last long because he spent it immediately; almost every day he would buy one or several pairs of shoes, suits, and shirts. He also liked to show that he had a lot of money. And to show off, he used to carry a Texas roll, a huge roll of money made up of one-dollar and five-dollar bills with large denominations on the outside and phoney money inside to increase its size. 'We pulled so many robberies that it became a way of life. We weren't in school and didn't have any intention of going. We were unskilled and didn't want to work anyway. Since we were spending money so fast we had to pull jobs at least once a week. We'd spend two hundred dollars a day buying everything we wanted. You spend money like this because in the back of your mind you know that you can always get more just by pulling another job. When we bought wine we'd get six or seven half gallons for the winos and get drunk with them on the street corner ... I took whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. The only thing I had in mind was figuring out how to pull off a bigger job than the last one - to make a grand slam. The thought of stopping never entered my mind' (55). The story is most informative. The opportunity here is Willie's proposal. It is also the discovery that it is possible to commit lucrative hold-ups without getting caught. But Carr had no specific objective in mind. He made his first attempt

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simply because his friend insisted. But it was by committing hold-ups that he discovered what he could obtain through this activity: first, the thrill of committing these daring thefts; next, the possibility of solving all his money problems at the point of a gun, the pleasure of spending all this money, of showing off his wealth; and, finally, the ambition to effect an even more spectacular robbery than the previous one. Thus we see that delinquency, like many human activities, can make it possible to realize several objectives at the same time. Conclusion At the very core of the theory of opportunity we find two simple hypotheses that can be expressed as follows. The greater the legitimate opportunities that arise for someone, the less the inclination to choose a delinquent activity. The greater the criminal opportunities that arise for someone, the greater the inclination to choose a delinquent activity. If these two hypotheses have any value, a study of the legal and illegal opportunities offered young people should help to understand better the criminal choices. If we accept that in modern societies salaried employment is the main source of legal opportunities and that a diploma is the principal means of obtaining a job, an analysis of the behaviour of adolescents at school and on the labour market should be of great help in verifying the first hypothesis. This will be done in the following three chapters. However, this will not suffice, for it will not clarify the reverse side of the problem, that of criminal opportunities. Cloward and Ohlin have shown the direction to follow in this regard. They showed most convincingly that delinquent peers are the sources of most delinquent opportunities. What must be done, then, is to follow their path. This will be done in chapter 14.

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The following chapters will study why some adolescents choose delinquency as a means of achieving their ends whereas others prefer to resort to legitimate means. The very nature of the question will lead me to examine not simply those who commit crimes when the opportunity arises, but those who commit more than others. It is by studying adolescents who, in a way, specialize in delinquency that we can see to what extent the theory of opportunity is valid. In this case, I shall again use the method of comparisons between delinquents and non-delinquents. The term 'delinquent' will therefore be used in a slightly different sense from that used so far. It will refer to those who commit more crimes than the average committed by their peers.

11 Confrontation with school Poor pupils It is hard to imagine the young delinquent sitting quietly at his desk in school. We think of him more as a dunce and a rebel against the authority of his teacher. This stereotype is partly true: the more an adolescent commits crimes, the more he is likely to be a poor pupil. There are numerous and converging indications on this point. Failure at school is closely associated with delinquency; this is well established. It has been clearly proven, first, by research done on delinquents arrested by the police. Their school results are poorer than the average. The large majority of them are two years behind in their school work, compared with the level they should have attained considering their age. They drop out of school and find themselves without a diploma. And all these signs of failure have nothing to do with their intellectual capacities or their social origins.1 But these studies dealing with delinquents recruited from the justice system are not to be entirely trusted, since youngsters having problems in school are apt to be overrepresented. That is why it is important to examine the extent to which this type of school behaviour is connected with hidden delinquency. This had been done by several North American researchers who used questionnaires to find out the frequency of crimes committed by their subjects and who compared this information with success or failure in school. All their results agree: the greater the number of crimes admitted by a pupil, the poorer his school results.2

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Unruly behaviour in school is also strongly associated with the tendency to commit crimes; this is the second welldemonstrated fact. Here, unruly behaviour in school means the refusal to obey the rules of the school or respect the authority of the teacher, as well as conduct that disrupts discipline in the school. Of all the variables associated with juvenile delinquency, this is one that shows the strongest correlations, both when the delinquency is measured by questionnaire and by the information derived from the criminal justice system.3 Descriptions of the behaviour of students can come from various sources: the teacher, schoolmates, or the subject who fills in a questionnaire. In every case, the results are the same. The delinquents are trouble-makers; they do everything to disrupt the class; they disobey the teacher; they answer back; they are fidgety and quarrelsome; they cheat during examinations; they come late and often play truant. 4 Furthermore, as might be expected, there is a strong correlation between failure at school and unruly behaviour (Laberge-Altmejd, 1976). The connection is easy to understand. The student who does not succeed finds little satisfaction in school, he does no schoolwork and, little by little, he sinks into an unbearable state of boredom. Unruly behaviour then becomes a distraction. He amuses himself by playing practical jokes during class and takes pleasure in making his classmates, who ask nothing better, laugh. Or he makes a game of resisting the authority of the teacher, of provoking him, of making him angry. He forces him to do something other than teaching boring subjects. This passes the time very pleasantly (Csikzenmihalyi and Larson, 1978). But whose fault is it? Who is to blame for the failure and poor conduct of juvenile delinquents: the school or the young person himself? Is it the school that did not allow certain students to succeed and thus pushed them into delinquency? Or

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did the youths not succeed because they were not interested from the start? The responsibility is shared. I shall first examine the facts that militate in favour of the delinquent being responsible. Interest in schooling

The position that delinquents do not succeed in school simply because they do not want to is based on two facts: they have no ambition to learn, and they make no effort to succeed. Let us first see to what students aspire. When researchers at the University of Montreal asked students: 'If it were up to you, how far would you like to go in your education?,' they discovered that the more offences an adolescent commits, the less he desires an education (Laberge-Altmejd, 1976; Biron, 1977; Caplan, 1978). Thus delinquents have little ambition, at least as far as schooling is concerned. This finding is exactly what American authors had already discovered, especially S. and E. Glueck (1950) and Hirschi (1969). What interests most juvenile delinquents who are still at school is how to get out as quickly as possible! This lack of ambition as regards education is not only a superficial attitude, it is expressed in their behaviour. Thus, as could well be expected, a student who has no great educational aspirations tends to spend less time than others doing his lessons and homework (Laberge-Altmejd, 1976). The pupil who lacks ambition, then, is likely to be a lazy student. All in all, the more an adolescent is delinquent, the less time he spends at his schoolwork (Hirschi, 1969; Laberge-Altmejd, 1976; Caplan, 1978). It is easy now to understand the failure of delinquents in school: they have no ambition and they do no work. But what is the cause and what is the effect? Perhaps juvenile delin-

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quents do not succeed in school because they are not interested, or perhaps they are not interested because they have experienced failure and this has discouraged them. We know that people adjust their aspirations to their actual or anticipated success. The person who has known failure will have a tendency to reduce his ambitions in order to avoid the frustration of failing. One loses interest in what one cannot attain. There are cases, in fact, where it is the failure in school that has started a process of disengagement. Thus a vicious circle is created: the failure lowers the student's aspirations, so that he does not work as hard with the result that failures become more and more frequent. However, there are also young delinquents who fail in school because from the start they were totally uninterested in succeeding at their studies. This is clearly shown in several autobiographies. The professional criminal who tells Martin (1952) about his past life, says: 'It was not that I had any difficulty studying but I was just not interested; I had no objective; I had no particular interest.'5 Another indication of this is that with equal intelligence, delinquents have poorer school results than non-delinquents (S. and E. Glueck, 1950; Peyre, 1964). It is not through lack of ability that delinquents do not succeed but through lack of interest.6 These findings show up the major error made by Merton (1938), who thought that crime was a reaction to high aspirations that could not be realized by honest means. In reality, those who violate the law are not aiming so much for success as to satisfy a pronounced taste for adventure, pleasure, and acquisition. The followers of Merton (Cloward and Ohlin, Schafer and Polk, and others) persisted in maintaining the same error. They believed that future delinquents suffer from a great deal of tension in school: frustrated by their failures, they begin to

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act out. This analysis assumes that certain students have high aspirations and yet experience failure. However, this is very rare. Even in cases where the failure in school was indeed the underlying factor, very quickly the subject develops a lack of commitment and ceases to aim for success. Thus the discrepancy between the aspirations and the results disappears. Family background and school problems

If on his arrival at school the future delinquent has no objective and no motivation, it is generally the fault of the parents. Studies show convincingly that the family has a major role to play in the origins of maladjustments in school. French studies reported a statistical relationship between an accumulation of family problems and poor functioning in school (Peyre, 1964; Malewska and Peyre, 1973; Villars, 1973). Furthermore, we find a correlation between the attachment to the parents and commitment to education (Caplan, 1978). The youngster who is in conflict with his parents does not take much interest in what he does at school. This is not hard to understand; how can someone concentrate on studies when everything is going wrong at home? A passage from the autobiography of Jodoin (1976, 8) shows the process very clearly: My mother was always ill, one asthma attack after another; as for my father, he drank a lot and lost almost all the money he earned gambling. At the time we were five children and lived meagrely. I was in first year, but my parents hadn't the money to buy me the necessary books; I therefore didn't learn anything and, in any case, I had other things to do than studying. I needed money. I saw very well that we lacked the strict necessities; I was going to school in old patched clothes and was laughed at by the other pupils. Already, at that age, I

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Confrontation with school

sometimes had strong feelings of rebellion. My parents bickered with one another, my friends made fun of me, the teacher kept picking on me ... it was too much. I therefore started to look out for myself in my own way. I used to tell my mother I was going to school and spent my days on the streets. I used to steal in the stores on Saint Lawrence Blvd., from the collection box in churches and beg on the streets.

Children have no ambition when their parents have none for them. West and Farrington (1973) showed that a mother's aspirations for her son are closely associated with the latter's success in school and that a mother's lack of professional aspirations for her son is significantly associated with delinquency. To illustrate these statements, it is enough to cite a man who, reflecting on the origin of his career in crime, says: 'I think even now that a boy can't plan his future; a boy who has no one to plan his future will simply be without any aim in life, he will end up here, there, or anywhere at all. Some boys fall into the right company, others into bad company; they have no control over their destiny, it is all chance' (Martin, 1952,21). We have only to remember our first years at school to realize how essential were the support and encouragement of our parents. How can an average child on his own accept the irksome task of learning to read, write, and do arithmetic? How can he put in the effort, how can he persevere if no one encourages him, if no one makes him do his lessons from time to time, if no one explains that it is useful and necessary to know how to read, write, and do arithmetic? Most of the parents of delinquents have an indifferent or inimical attitude toward school (Peyre, 1964; Villars, 1973). If the child does not want to go to school, they do nothing about

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it or become his accomplices. It can happen, too, that they openly deprecate schoolwork. It is hard to see how a child can succeed in school under such conditions. The impact of the school When sociologists undertake to explain the link between school and delinquency, they criticize the school system. They enumerate its defects: the conservatism, authoritarianism, 'schools like barracks,' lack of student participation in decisions, passive and pompous teaching, the negative expectations of the teachers, little content related to 'real life,' the gap between the school and the community, racial segregation, a system that is competitive and selective, poor preparation for the labour market, absence of placement and orientation services, etc.7 It is one thing to criticize the school in general, but it is another to explain why the school experience leads some students to delinquency. It must not be imagined that everything that is wrong with schools contributes to delinquency. In this case, we would come back to the Manichaean reasoning that evil begets evil. It is more logical ta identify the good and bad aspects of the school that are related to delinquency and to ask what kind of problem these pose for the students. Then we can identify those aspects of the school experience that drive a young person to opt for illegal solutions. The essential problem, then, is not that schools do not function as certain sociologists would like; it is that school is hard for any child to adjust to and particularly so for those who come from deficient families. It is enough to think of school as it is and then as it appears to the child who is forced to go there every day. School means work. There is no more play when you enter the classroom. The work takes effort and a series of tedious

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exercises. Despite all the new teaching methods, there has not yet been found a way of teaching mathematics in a playroom atmosphere. School is theory, abstraction, the world of ideas. It is the initiation of new languages, of new symbols. It is the intellectual life. It is an artificial and abstract world. It is not 'real life,' and it is not very concrete. School is a long-term thing. It takes months to master certain mathematical problems. It takes years to master a language. School is passive. The student is there to assimilate culture, not to invent it; to learn, not to create; to understand what others have discovered, not to innovate. School is routine. The schedule is established in advance. The program makes the activities predictable. School is an ordered world, monotonous, holding no surprises. It is the opposite of action, of excitement. School is submission to the authority of the teacher. In class, it is he who says what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. He imposes silence and decides what work is to be done.8 School represents all that is contrary to what interests the juvenile delinquent, to judge by the latter's goals. The delinquent likes action; he finds inaction. He likes excitement; he finds routine. He likes play; he finds work. But it is not only the juvenile delinquent that is concerned. All children are in the same situation. The clash between the laborious, strict school and the active, fun-loving child is inevitable. All children suffer from it and all of them would at one time or another like to escape this disagreeable experience. When a child, such as he is, goes to school, such as it is, he undergoes a difficult and disheartening experience. It is perfectly natural, therefore, that one day he will get his back up and refuse to go to school or do his schoolwork. This is where the parents come in. They encourage the child and explain that it is essential to study, that it is necessary in life to know

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how to read and write. Little by little the child adopts the objectives proposed to him by his parents. He agrees to work and overlook the disagreeable side of school for he wants to succeed as much as his parents want him to. But, as we have seen, the parents of boys who engage in delinquent activity tend not to have any aspirations for their children and to disparage schooling. Often they have too many problems themselves to take an interest in their child's difficulties in school. Thus some children will not find any help from their family in overcoming their school problems, no support, no encouragement. It quite often happens that, in the family milieu itself, they feel a more or less tacit encouragement to shirk their obligations: 'You don't want to go to school? All right. And if the teacher doesn't like it, I'll speak to him myself.' Here the school is partly responsible. It does nothing to alleviate the situation. A pupil fails in school and, supreme injury, he is unruly? The school system reacts with punishment, expulsion, rejection. If the problems persist too long, the 'bad pupil' is put back into one of the 'dumping' classes where teachers with little motivation teach almost nothing to pupils with no motivation at all. Both parties will keep each other busy, just waiting till the age when school is no longer mandatory. This, then, is where the school is responsible. Once the cycle of failures has begun, it is not only unable to solve the problems, it helps to aggravate them. Maladjustment in school and delinquency Why do 'bad students' commit delinquent acts? The student who fails, who won't work, who is not interested in what the school has to offer soon becomes bored. As Peyre (1964)

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puts it, his capacities are not fully used and the time spent in school becomes meaningless. To escape this state of ennui, which, as we have seen, quickly becomes intolerable, he will look for some action. Vandalism, the theft of school property, fights with classmates, and extortion at the expense of weaker schoolmates are all delinquent activities that take place in the schools and satisfy the need for action. Maladjustment in school engenders an urgent need for action; the failure it implies makes the student feel inferior, and he will seek to assert himself. The pupil who fails too often loses the esteem of his teachers, his parents (if they attach any importance to education), and his friends. This explanation can be completed by one that was furnished by Elliott and Voss (1974). They brought out the interesting fact that 'dropouts show a high level of involvement in delinquency while they are in school, and their involvement declines after they leave school' (121). According to these authors, delinquency is a way of coping with the frustration and humiliation due to failure in school. After leaving school, the delinquency diminishes because the youngster no longer has to endure this intolerable situation. But there may be another connection between delinquency and maladjustment in school, the fact that the latter reduces the subject's chances on the labour market. This brings us to the next chapter.

12 Work Is the delinquent lazy?

In the abundant depictions we have of criminals, there is one particularly clear stereotype, and that is that they have a horror of working.1 They steal because they are too lazy to gain their living in any other way. Is this true? It is certainly not true if it means that delinquents lack energy. They can be extremely energetic in activities that interest them. It is also untrue in another sense: juvenile delinquents find paying jobs sooner than their friends who commit no crimes. In Montreal, Louise Biron (1977) was amazed to find in her sample of students a positive correlation between delinquency and salaried jobs. It means that the more offences a student commits the more he tends to work for money at night or on weekends. In 1950, S. and E. Glueck made a similar observation; juvenile delinquents have a greater tendency to work after school than do non-delinquents. They would work as door-to-door salesmen, delivery boys, newsboys, and shoeshine boys. Delinquents are not content only to work while they are still at school; they hurry to leave school in order to join the labour market (Villars, 1973). But there are more surprises. West and Farrington (1977) have calculated that delinquents of 17-18 earn more money on the average than a comparable group of non-delinquents, and in totally honest activities. This is explained by the nature

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of the jobs chosen by the one and the other. The delinquents have unskilled jobs that start with relatively high salaries but offer no chance of a career. They are barmen or delivery boys, for example, jobs that are well paid from the start but offer little chance of promotion. The non-delinquents prefer to become apprentices or choose jobs that pay less but lead to a promising career. In France, Villars (1973) observed that juvenile delinquents would also choose the same type of job: messenger, work in the hotel trade, pedlar, handyman, caddy, waiter in a café, door-to-door salesman. These jobs do not require much skill and do not afford the possibility of acquiring very much skill. However, they are fairly well paid and - an added advantage - give a certain amount of freedom. The hours are flexible, and there are possibilities for travel. If, to this preference for a good salary rather than interesting work, we add their low level of education and their lack of professional training, it is clear that delinquents will be reduced to minor jobs, irksome, monotonous, unstimulating, and, all in all, alienating: loading trucks, delivering parcels, washing dishes, and so on. It is not surprising, then, that job instability is another characteristic of the young delinquent; 83 per cent of those studied by Villars (1973) constantly change jobs. Social workers who work with delinquents know that there is no problem finding them jobs; the problem is in convincing them to keep them. 'The penitentiary authorities believed that, considering my character and the peculiarities of my personality, I would find it hard to get a job. Actually it was very easy to get myself hired... The only problem was that I never succeeded in keeping my job for long. It never failed: after a certain time I didn't get along any more with the foremen and I left for another construction site. I worked as a bricklayer and the

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days were completely taken up. A bit too much, for my taste. So much so that after several months - in fact two months, during which I worked at least five sites -1 had had it and quit. I didn't want to work like a slave any more' (Jodoin, 1976,39). As we see, it is often the delinquents themselves who take the initiative in leaving their job, either because they have had enough, or to take on a better-paid job, or even because they can no longer 'stand the look' of their boss. In the latter case, they often take advantage of the departure to tell the boss what they think of him and to insult him roundly. They may be dismissed because of coming in late or repeated absences. Some say they are absolutely incapable of getting up in the morning. Such is the case for Paul: cHis boss even went so far as to telephone him in the morning, but Paul would hang up and go back to sleep' (Laflamme-Cusson and Manseau, 1979, 73). Poor work, nonchalance, disagreeable behaviour toward bosses and colleagues are also reasons for many dismissals. Under these conditions, most delinquents make no progress on the labour market. Villars states that there is a gradual deterioration of the work situation of these subjects. There is a marked contrast between this profile and the job situation of young workers who commit no crimes. The latter keep the same job for several years and become more and more qualified in their field. They serve an apprenticeship, gather experience and knowledge, and get a series of promotions that enable them to improve their situation substantially (Debuyst, 1960; West and Farrington, 1977). With what we have just learned, it is not surprising that delinquents have a negative attitude to work. Seventy-eight per cent of the boys studied by Villars are dissatisfied with their trade or their job, and among the different levels of dissatisfaction, the one that predominates, by far, is passive

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acceptance, resignation. 'Work is seen as a physical restraint, alien to one's personal aims and interests, a mere way of making money. It is as though the work were not really a part of life, as though the numerous hours spent at the job were neutralized, as it were, intellectually cut off and emotionally censored' (Villars, 1973, 39). Sometimes it is not only a question of passive acceptance, but a real disgust for the work and for everything surrounding it. This was the case for Jacques Mesrine, who considered work a 'shameful sickness' (1977, 53): 'I didn't like the trade I was engaged in. I didn't like receiving orders from my boss; in a word, I didn't like the restrictions. The climate between him and me was tense. His florid face, his obsequious manners made me sick. I had a crazy desire to punch him in the face. Several times we had arguments. It's true I didn't work very hard, but enough for the wages I was paid' (Mesrine, 1977,51). These accounts give some valuable indications as to what at work interests and does not interest young people who have taken to plundering and attacking their fellows. First, delinquents are not interested in the work itself but only in the money.2 They work first and foremost for the 'dough.' While still at school, in order to make money they acquire a small trade. They quit school for a paying job. Finally, they change jobs to get better pay. They succeed, moreover, in getting what they want: they earn more money than their peers, apart from what they make from their thefts. Work in itself does not seem to interest them. In general, they are not satisfied with their jobs. They get neither intrinsic satisfaction from them, a feeling of worth, nor the pleasure of getting ahead. Second, they have a desire for change. Delinquents constantly change jobs and trades. They prefer active work with little routine: barman, messenger, salesman.

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Third, they have no thought of a career. They give up studies that would lead to interesting professions in order to earn money as soon as possible. They prefer well-paying jobs to promising jobs. They change jobs too often to become skilled and to receive promotions. Obviously they are not moved by any plan for a career. They have a short-term attitude and refuse to sacrifice an immediate gain to ensure the future. This lack of any plan is a crucial factor to which we must return further on. Choosing between work and crime Before you start to get into theft, you don't have fifty choices: either you go to work or you go on hold-ups, and most of the time, there's no third solution. The problem is this: ITS EITHER THE FACTORY OR THE HOLD-UP!

(Aurousseau and Laborde, 1976, 17) There are youths who, toward the end of their adolescence, have to make a choice of major importance: whether to enter the working world or take to crime. Obviously not all adolescents have to make this choice, only those who have already had some success in delinquency and who have no particular liking for work. For them, the advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives are the following: to make a lot of money quickly but not regularly, or receive a moderate but regular salary;3 to lead a life of freedom and adventure outside the law, or submit to the restrictions and monotony of the life of a salaried worker; to lead an exciting but dangerous life, or have a boring life without any risk. It is one or the other. It is generally impossible to do both because crime and work are not compatible. This could already be foreseen among the young people whose behav-

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iour at work was studied. They look for work and find it. But as they are engaged in criminal activities besides, they do not adapt well to the labour market. They never succeed in becoming interested in what they are doing. They work badly. They change jobs too often. This instability leads us to suspect that work and delinquency are irreconcilable. It has been said ad nauseam that if delinquents do not work it is because their criminal record prevents employers from hiring them. This is partly true, but ignores an essential point: it is very difficult to be involved in crime and to keep a job as well. It is impossible to do both at the same time. Anyone who works while at the same time engaging in delinquent activity is caught between two opposing life-styles. It is hard to go regularly to work, to be disciplined, serious, efficient, and methodical during the day and after five o'clock to find one's friends, seek adventure, attack passersby, go to bed in the wee hours of the morning, and, finally, get up early to go to work. It is physically impossible to keep this up for very long; Jones (Willwerth, 1974) tells how, when he was working, he lacked sleep so much that he used to fall asleep on his feet. It is also psychologically impossible. How can anyone bear the discipline of work, tasks that require concentration, and long hours of tedious activity when he goes with friends who scorn work, and when he leads a life infinitely more stimulating and exciting besides? Sooner or later he will have to choose between work and delinquency. There are young people who refuse to work because they are too involved in their antisocial activities. They lead the exciting life of the young hoodlum and are incapable of interesting themselves in a job. By stealing they easily acquire large sums of money and therefore cannot see why they should take on long hours of work for a meagre salary. In a gang, they find friendship and esteem, so why should they have to put up with both the boss and the narrow-minded types with

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whom they must work. All in all, no job interests them because crime is their whole life. There are others who reject the very idea of work at all and this leads them into crime. Jean, in Parole de bandits, had this experience. 'Right from the start, we won't work in any factory. It's not for us. We are therefore obliged to commit armed robbery, because we refuse to work' (Aurousseau and Laborde, 1976, 45). But if a person does not work, he must live, not only in terms of having enough to eat but also in the broader sense of having something to do. Work is much more than a means of earning a living, it is a way of life, of self-affirmation, of selfrealization, of spending one's energy. And if one does not work, it is essential to have an alternative. Crime can be the solution. But why this refusal to work? Delinquents see it as a degrading type of slavery. At work, they look upon themselves as paid slaves. Not all criminals have parents who are unwilling to work. Sometimes the contrary is true. They see their fathers working from morning to night at what they regard as thankless and poorly paid jobs. They see only the negative aspects - the fatigue and waste of time. They have the intolerable impression that their parents have made a mess of their lives, that the job has taken up all their time and energy, and that, in the end, they are no better off. This contempt for work comes from the conviction that it is degrading, that it takes everything and gives nothing in return. And with it goes a certain sense of superiority. Criminals like to think that they are not one of those 'dopes' who have to work to live: I had a habit of looking about me, of observing those around me in the street, in the metro and the small restaurant where I used to

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have my lunch. What did I see? Sad faces, tired looks, people worn out by poorly paid jobs, but obliged to work in order to survive, unable to afford anything but a strict minimum. Beings condemned to perpetual mediocrity; beings all alike in their dress and their financial problems at the end of the month. Beings unable to satisfy their smallest desires, condemned forever to dream about the luxuries in shop windows and the trips offered by the travel agencies. Stomachs that are the regular clients of the daily special and cheap red wine. Beings who know their future since they have none. Robots, exploited and taken in, obeying the laws more out of fear than honesty. Subdued, beaten, slaves of the alarm clock. I was part of it through necessity, but I felt like a stranger to these people. I wouldn't accept it. I didn't want my life to be arranged for me in advance or decided by anyone else. If I wanted to make love at six in the morning, I wanted to take the time to do it without looking at my watch. I wanted to live unrestricted by time, for the first restriction of man began when he started to calculate time. All the current phrases of daily life kept ringing in my head ... No time to ...! Come on time ...! Gain time ...! Waste time ...! Me, I wanted cto have time to live' and the only way to do it was not to become a slave. I knew my theory was irrational, that it was inapplicable for founding a society. But what was this society, with its high principles and its laws? (Mesrine, 1977, 51) It sometimes happens, however, that this looking upon work as slavery is based on a particularly painful experience. Such is the case of Ernest Dor, who had been sentenced to hard labour for armed robbery. Debuyst tells this (1960, 248-9) of Dor's experience on the labour market: The year that still stands out in his memory was when he was fourteen and started to work. Not knowing any French, he left with a friend for the Flemish part of the country to work in a sugar factory and spend the season there. The work was exhausting and the hous-

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ing conditions deplorable. On his return to Campine - in his own country - he became a docker, then a bricklayer. The distance from his father's house made it necessary for him to leave at four in the morning and come home late at night. This deadly dull life affected him all the more as the work was way below his intellectual and imaginative capacities. It destroyed all his personal potentialities. Toward the age of 18, he was disgusted by the fact that people could idle away their time and go around in cars while others, like him, were tied to their jobs like slaves. This 'slavery' was felt all the more keenly as Ernest necessarily came in contact with the wealthy when he went through the city or to the movies which showed him this 'other life.'

Another example is that of Stéphane who was working from seven in the morning to eleven at night as a cook and had to leave, worn out after four months (Laflamme-Cusson and Manseau, 1979). When work ceases to be an opportunity for self-realization and degrades the person doing it, a life of crime becomes tempting. You can have free time, do what you want, have money without any sweat, and live an exciting life.

13 Prisoner of the present He can also compromise his future well-being by insisting on seeking at any price to satisfy all his whims, by getting out of any task that demands a minimum of effort, by refusing all discipline as an unbearable restriction, by arrogating to himself the right to annoy everyone with impunity. (Mailloux, 1979, 11)

A fixation on the present One interpretation emerges from the observations presented in the previous two chapters: the more an adolescent commits crimes, the less he is involved in establishing a career. The absence of academic aspirations, poor schoolwork, dropping out of school, indifference to promising jobs, and professional instability all mean that the delinquent has no long-term project. This attitude toward the future contrasts with what we know of most adolescents. Around the age of fifteen, the latter generally start to think seriously of their career. They have an idea, vague at first, but more and more precise, of the profession in which they would like to engage. This plan for the future determines their attitude to school and gives new meaning to their academic work. Nuttin has shown that this way of planning one's activity over the long term has no equivalent among animals. The latter satisfy their needs very simply. When they are hungry, they hunt for food, keeping on until they find it; when they

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have satisfied their hunger, they stop. Man does not act only when he feels the need. He does not seek immediate satisfaction, but looks to 'the realization of a situation in life that can satisfy his future needs' (Nuttin, 1961, 63). He undertakes a continuous and long-term project that will enable him to accumulate the means to ensure his livelihood for a long time. If this is true, the human being has a type of motivation that is not simply the search for immediate gratification or for the intrinsic pleasure that activity brings: man strives for a result that will come about only in the distant future. But the behaviour of delinquents does not seem to be determined by long-term perspectives. They are motivated by the hope of a quick profit or intrinsic satisfactions, but not by thought of the future. This inability of juvenile delinquents and criminals to organize their present activities in terms of future benefits has struck observers for a long time. It is a recurrent theme in criminology.1 Unfortunately, little systematic research has been done on this important question. The term 'presentism,' then, describes this phenomenon. Tresentism' is behaviour marked by a lack of perseverance in the pursuit of long-term projects. It is a kind of inconstancy that makes a person unable to pursue any activity that does not have a specific motivation or the results of which are not immediate. He lacks persistence. Presentism can be broken down into two closely interrelated elements: the hold of the present and the immediate satisfaction of a desire. 1 / As the term indicates, the main component of presentism is what Fraisse, in his Psychologie du temps (1967, 195), called 'the hold of the present.' Fraisse explains that men have a temporal horizon, past and present perspectives that are created by their efforts to remember past events and to

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imagine a future that conforms to their aspirations. The temporal horizon varies with each individual. It is more or less far-reaching, with some people more oriented to the past, other to the future. As Mucchielli (1974, 52) showed, delinquents have an extremely limited temporal horizon, particularly their projective horizon, that is, the one looking toward the future. This method of functioning was highly evident in the sample of juvenile delinquents in institution studied by Villars (1973). 'One of the most striking findings that an observer of juvenile delinquents can make is the tendency to live for the moment, related to the incapacity or refusal to think realistically about the future' (161). Most often the delinquent goes from one extreme to the other: either he refuses to look ahead - 'Life will provide the answer' - or he dreams up grandiose and totally unrealistic projects. This does not coincide with what researchers found among normal adolescents. Cottle and Klinberg (1974, 93) discovered that youngsters at about fifteen years of age have more and more realistic views about the future. Their professional expectations no longer are in the nature of fantasy as are those of the pre-adolescent. They stop dreaming of becoming a cowboy, actor, or sheriff and speak of their plans in terms of academic or professional training. Furthermore, Cottie and Klinberg ascertained that the more deeply involved an adolescent is in his present activities, the more he is oriented toward a distant future. It is when the present is satisfying that one can realistically plan for the future. For delinquents, the future is seen not as something that motivates the present activity, but as an escape from the present situation. They are unable to anticipate a workable future. And since their present actions have no continuity with the future, they become prisoners of the present. They

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are at the mercy, then, of the events and emotions of the moment. Without any anchorage in a future goal, they are swayed by immediate circumstances. 2 / The immediate satisfaction of a desire is directly due to the dominance of the present. Fraisse (1967, 189 and 197) cites studies showing a close relationship between the scope of the temporal horizon and the ability to sacrifice an immediate satisfaction for a more distant goal. The broader a person's temporal perspective, the greater the tendency to choose a large but delayed reward to an immediate, but lesser reward. It is in this sense that Cohen (1955) was right in speaking of hedonism: there is a pleasure cult among delinquents, but of an immediate pleasure, for which he is ready to pay his future happiness. Stemming in a direct line from presentism are two characteristics which criminologists are well aware of: intolerance of frustration and a sense of injustice. Caught up in the present, the delinquent cannot bear frustration. This is quite understandable. Having no plans, he has no reason to accept difficulties and painful situations. He does not see why he should give up his present well-being. If the whole meaning of his life is the pleasure of the moment, any frustration will be a downright insult. Defeat has no part in a process of goal achievement. The restrictions of working, the schedule to keep, the irksome tasks to be done will be seen as a complete loss, and therefore intolerable. Furthermore, the presentist will tend to say he has been wronged every time someone makes a decision that frustrates him in any way. He will react aggressively to the restrictions that stem from circumstances or life in society. He interprets them as annoyances deliberately inflicted by a malevolent authority that objects to his being happy. He experiences a sense of injustice, which was so well analysed by De Greeff

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(1950, 278 and 290). According to him, delinquents consider any disagreement unwarranted and react to it stubbornly. When a person is incapable of accepting difficulties with composure he becomes a protester. Origins of presentism Two factors seem to be at the root of presentism: the absence of parental discipline and repeated failures. The consequences of a lack of discipline at home were well described by Lemay (1973, i, 456ff). The parents, through weakness or indifference, do not put a limit on the demands of the child. The latter is never refused, forbidden, or given any rules to go by. This situation increases his demands immeasurably. They finally become tyrannical and end up sooner or later by coming up against the refusal of those who have to bear the cost; but by then it is too late. The child will not have learned to postpone the satisfaction of his desires or to accept frustration. Rather, he will have got into the habit of mobilizing all his forces toward the immediate realization of his wants. The child who arrives at school afflicted with this inability to put the realization of his desires in a temporal horizon is in great danger of experiencing failure after failure. This is what happens most of the time to juvenile delinquents. As we have seen, their life is punctuated with failures. The personal history of juvenile delinquents is above all the history of their failures and frustrations. Indeed, there is a true conditioning of failure by failure' (Villars, 1973, 166). Normally, an occasional failure does not compromise a person's development. Frequently, the opposite occurs. The failure may act as a stimulus. It shows the person concerned that he or she has not successfully accomplished the task and is

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faced with an obstacle to surmount. C A limited but variable dose of failures can exert a good influence on the person and his future behaviour. Beyond this variable limit, it becomes inhibitive, if not paralyzing' (Nuttin, 1961, 158). A person who experiences bitter failure every time he undertakes something will come to associate any task with failure. He will know that every undertaking is in danger of ending up in the disappointment and humiliation that comes with failure. The infallible way of avoiding this frustration, then, is to no longer undertake anything. The delinquent no longer tries. He is uncommitted. He no longer undertakes anything serious. He escapes in amusement and excitement. Thus the ability to undertake any project is broken down by repeated setbacks. Presentism in delinquency It is easy to see how presentism leads to the violation of the laws: if the prohibition stands in the way of the quick satisfaction of a desire, it is disregarded. But there is more: there is a close relationship between presentism and delinquency.2 By its very nature, the offence makes almost instant satisfaction possible. This is what the analysis of 'action' presented in chapter 3 shows; the crime provides immediate strong sensations. Furthermore, the theft quickly satisfies the covetousness of the moment without long-term activity being necessary. And aggression is often the violent reaction of a person who cannot bear to be frustrated. But then we have all heard about carefully planned crimes. This could mean that though delinquents are presentists when they are in the labour market, they cease to be when they commit crimes; they are then able to plan and strive toward long-term goals. In this case, the idea of presentism

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does not apply. It would therefore be better to avoid the issue altogether by saying that delinquents have no goals in the working world because they have no interest in it. However, the question whether delinquents are presentists in delinquency as well must also be examined. The answer will depend largely on whether we consider one or the other of two extremely different types of persons engaged in crime - delinquents who fail and those who succeed. The 'delinquent who fails' may be defined as an individual who, according to his own expectations, has not realized the objectives he sought by his criminal activity. His thefts have not amounted to much. He constantly finds himself in prison. He lacks prestige among his peers. It is clear that delinquents who fail are presentists in their delinquent activity. They are not committed to a project. They act on impulse and without any planning. They do not select their targets, and, because of this, their gains are ridiculously low. There is nothing in all their crimes that in any way resembles a career profile - only a pitiful succession of unprofitable misdeeds. They are constantly caught and spend years in prison, first, because they act without preparation and, second, because they commit crimes that bring down public vengeance on them. The guy who goes to prison is the stupid jerk who tried to mug some old man or rape a broad or hold up some nickel-dime grocery store' (Joey and Fisher, 1973, 25). These men are failures in the eyes of more successful criminals, who hold them in contempt. They see them as petty thieves, dangerous to collaborate with because they are blunderers, unstable, unpredictable, and talk too much. At the other end of the continuum are the delinquents who succeed, those who make profitable thefts, who spend reía-

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lively little time in jail,3 who are respected by their peers and declare themselves satisfied with what they get out of crime. These men say they have turned to crime because they have chosen to do so, because it interests them, and because it is profitable, and not because they were hard up or the victims of circumstance. Moreover, they can describe in every detail how they prepare an expedition: the gathering of information, the careful planning and recruitment of competent accomplices, and so on. In this élite of crime, one discovers qualities lacking in the presentist: a stability, that prevents one from giving in to impulse, the strength of character to withstand the interrogations of the police, honesty in sharing the loot, and, the essential virtue, discretion. As one criminal interviewed by Letkemann (1973, 20) remarked, this type of criminal much more resembles the 'square' than the small fry in the prisons. The delinquent who has been successful is a prudent man. In a business that is already dangerous enough, he has learned to avoid useless risks. Before undertaking a venture, he calculates his chances, and, if he is not relatively sure, he drops it. This concern to minimize the risks will gradually lead him to abandon brutal and shocking crimes for more discreet activities. The more a crime is apt to arouse public indignation, the greater the risks for its author. Citizens who feel threatened will be more disposed to collaborate with the police, and the latter will be more motivated to pursue the investigation. And a similar process takes place at court: the more obvious the injury, the stronger the will to punish. In this regard, Joey, a hired killer, is an interesting example. He is typical of the successful delinquent. He says that, in all, his illegal activities have netted him $4 million. He served only a few short terms in prison and was never found

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guilty of one of the numerous murders he committed. The key to his 'success' is probably to be found in this comment: The professionals in this business rarely get time. Why? Because we go out of our way not to antagonize the honest citizen. We let people come to us' (Joey and Fisher, 1973, 25). This may be surprising coming from a hired killer, but he explains further on that most of the people he killed were members of organized crime, and this does not anger the citizens and even less the police. But what explains much better why Joey spent so little time in prison is the list of illegal activities he was engaged in along with his murders: illegal gaming and betting, usury, drug trafficking, smuggling cigarettes, the making of pornographic films, etc. These are what is called 'victimless crimes,' that is, illegal acts committed with the consent of the victims and that cause no one any direct injury. In other words, they are violations of the law but not crimes in the limited sense proposed at the beginning of this work. Thus when delinquents cease to be presentists, they seem to turn to activities that are no longer delinquent in the strict sense of the term. When the criminal becomes concerned about middle- and long-term effectiveness, when he wants to minimize the risks, he stops attacking people's property or their person. He can then take several paths: honest work, shady but discreet activities (receiving and concealing, for example), and 'organized crime' which, basically, consists in offering citizens goods and services not allowed on the market by law. The outlaw who can finally carry out long-term projects discovers that he can do more profitable, more satisfying, and safer things than robbing and attacking people. It is therefore understandable that there are so few delinquents who are not presentists.

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Why delinquency?

Presentism and interpersonal relationships Presentism poses problems beyond those of respect for the law or adaptability to work. It extends to interpersonal relations as well. Apart from any law and even any norm of conduct, the man who wants to preserve his relations with others should feel bound by a certain number of obligations that stem from the need for reciprocity and solidarity among men. We give in exchange for what we get. We help our friends. We give back what we have borrowed. We feel bound by a secret. We feel responsible for our children's well-being. We feel obliged to assume our part of the burdens of everyday life. With our friends, our wife, our children, in fact with everyone with whom we have an enduring relationship, we must know how to keep our word, respect our commitments, do our part. This is the basis of confidence. When this does not exist, the relationship is compromised. Demands and suspicion arise. And this respect for the given word is not just a 'bourgeois value.' It is a quality recognized everywhere, including the world of thieves, to the extent where they are ready to kill someone, for example, who is a stool pigeon. Clearly the cult of immediate pleasure cannot go hand in hand with respect for one's obligations. The presentist who does what he wants when he wants to is inevitably an irresponsible person. An obligation is precisely something one does even if it conflicts with what one would like to do. And a promise is kept whether one likes it or not. A presentist is neither a man of duty nor a man of his word. The first victims of the delinquent's refusal to fulfil his obligations will be those who live with him under the same roof. Whether it be his parents, his wife, his mistress, or his children, they will have to resign themselves not to expect much

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from him. This is why it is rare to see a family living regularly on the proceeds of theft. Thieves contribute only episodically to the needs of their families. Even worse, they do not always succeed in providing for their own needs. They are constantly short of money and must sponge on their relatives. Jones, the New York mugger whom we have already met, is a striking example of this inability to live by theft. When he is active, going regularly to assault people on the street, he can make more than $100 a day. Willwerth (1974, 32-4) believes that Jones can make up to $20,000 a year, free of taxes of course. Thus he makes much more money than most of the people of New York. But Jones sponges on his mistress who receives a social welfare allowance. He is constantly borrowing money from his friends, his parents, and his mistress. True, he takes drugs that cost a great deal, but it is hard to explain why, in spite of the money he robs at knife-point, he is unable either to contribute to the expenses of the lodgings he shares with his girlfriend or to buy himself a car, to say nothing of putting money in the bank. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that delinquents are on bad terms with the people around them.4 This state of things is generally explained by saying that delinquents suffer from 'emotional indifference' (Pinatel, 1963) or an inability to enter into relationships with others (Frechette, 1970). This analysis is debatable. A distinction must be made here between two things that are too often confused: having conflictual relationships with one's relatives and being incapable of having a relationship with others. Delinquents have the first characteristic without having the second. They get along badly with their relatives but are generally quite capable of entering a relationship with others and of maintaining, at least for some time, a warm one.

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Referring to this so-called emotional indifference in delinquents, Roumajon (1977) states: 'I, who have had contact with dozens of delinquents, would say that the characteristic trait of the great mass of delinquents would be the contrary, that is, an acute sensitivity and an excessive sentimentality where a mother, a mate or a child is concerned' (156). The delinquent's difficult relationships with those close to him is much better explained in terms of presentism than in terms of emotional indifference. It is not a question of love, it is one of living up to his commitments. For love is not enough, there must also be a contribution to the relationship. The delinquent might very well be warm, but if he continually shirks his duties, if he never keeps his word, if he will never make any sacrifice, he will eventually exasperate those who live with him. Inevitably there will be conflicts,» and often a confrontation will be initiated, not by the delinquent, but by his family who refuses to be exploited any longer.

14 Delinquent peers In the three preceding chapters, we have found that legitimate opportunities gradually become closed to juvenile delinquents. First at school and later on the labour market, boys who commit crimes have less chance than others of realizing their ambitions. It now remains to examine the other side of the problem - criminal opportunities. It is not enough, as Cloward and Ohlin (I960) pointed out, to have little chance of succeeding in legal ways to be automatically successful in crime; in this area too, the means necessary for success must be available, and these are not given to everyone. How does an adolescent get into a life of crime? What does he need to be successful and keep on in this kind of venture? The answer can be found in analysis of the delinquent's social life. It is well-known in criminology that criminal opportunities have, above all, a social origin. It is delinquent peers who open the doors to illegal activities. The facts It is firmly established in criminology that the more an adolescent keeps company with delinquent friends, the more he will tend to commit crimes himself. One must admit that mothers did not have to wait for the researchers to know that one must beware of the harmful influence of 'bad companions.' However, it would be snobbery to ignore this fact; it is merely common sense.

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Why delinquency?

In this area, there has always been a tendency to confuse the influence of delinquent peers and the phenomenon of gangs. A whole folklore exists concerning gangs. The term immediately makes us think of these small armies bearing fascinating names, having their initiation rites, their leadership, their symbols of membership, not to mention their ever-present motorcycles. Such groups actually do exist. Periodically they are talked about in the newspapers for the bloody fights they indulge in, their settling of accounts, their gang rapes, etc. But the importance of organized gangs in the criminal activity of youth has been greatly exaggerated. The crimes committed within the framework of these groups represent only a small fraction of juvenile delinquency. Furthermore, these gangs are far less organized than we think. Lack of organization is the rule, and the groups are temporary. Finally, there are many gangs that do not engage in criminal activities. Much more important and constant in the general picture of juvenile delinquency is the influence of individuals on one another. What deserves attention is not so much the adolescent gang but the interpersonal relationships likely to encourage delinquent behaviour. Adolescents commit their crimes with one or more accomplices. Those who commit crimes have a tendency to frequent delinquents like themselves. We have known for a long time that more than 80 per cent of the boys arrested by the police commit their crimes with accomplices (Shaw and McKay, 1942). The most recent studies merely confirm this tendency. Frechette and LeBlanc (1978, 134) showed that in most of the crimes committed by a sample of 470 adolescents who appeared before the Montreal Juvenile Court several youths took part. Furthermore, the tendency of a delinquent to have delinquent friends is also very strong. S. and E. Glueck (1950,

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163), though not inclined to attribute much importance to this phenomenon, had to bow to the evidence: 98 per cent of the delinquents in their sample had delinquent friends as against only 7 per cent among non-delinquents. Similar results were reported by almost all the authors who examined this question.1 The same result was observed in a representative sample of Montreal students. There is a positive correlation between the commission of crimes and having friends who have been arrested by the police (Caplan, 1978, 160). 'Birds of a feather flock together'

No one denies that delinquents befriend other delinquents. It is undeniably true. But where there is disagreement is in the interpretation given this phenomenon. There are two opposing theories. According to some, boys who are delinquents from the start will tend to go around with delinquents like themselves. According to others, those who associate with juvenile delinquents are pushed into violating the law under their influence. The first position was defended mainly by criminologists with a psychological orientation.2 It is reflected in the saying 'Birds of a feather flock together.' Basically, the idea is that there are young people who are delinquents due to their personality or family background and who, because of this, seek the company of delinquents like themselves. They do not become delinquents through association but rather choose bad company because of their deviant tendencies. This theory can be defended. To a certain extent, children and adolescents choose their friends in terms of their own affinities. Studies in social psychology have shown, moreover, that people seek out others on the basis of their similari-

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ties (Newcomb, Turner, and Converse, 1965). Kinberg's (1959) observations show most convincingly that 'persons predisposed to crime are attracted by criminal elements and by milieux favourable to crime' (179). People have a flair for finding their likes in an unknown group, and delinquents are no exception to this rule. In large cities, it is easy for someone interested in shady activities to find friends with the same interests as his own. The opposite theory was obviously defended by sociologists. They say that a person becomes a criminal because of the pernicious influence of delinquent companions. On this point, it is impossible not to refer to Sutherland who, in 1939, proposed his famous theory of differential association: a person becomes a criminal because of an excess of definitions favourable to crime over unfavourable ones. In other words, an individual becomes delinquent because he is more often and more intensely exposed to criminal models than to noncriminal models. There are numerous indications that support the theory of the criminogenic influence of delinquent companions. First, there is a very strong correlation between the presence of delinquent friends and delinquency, no matter what controls are applied. There is no third variable that succeeds in nullifying this correlation (Caplan, 1978, 328). If personality traits or family variables were 'true' factors in the creation of delinquency, the correlation between 'delinquent friends' and 'delinquency' would fall to zero when these were applied, but this is not the case. Second, when adolescents who commit thefts are questioned, they say they are convinced that association with thieves does, in fact, incite them to steal (Belson, 1975, 237). Third, when recidivist delinquents one day stop committing crimes, breaking off their relationships

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with their delinquent friends is an important factor in this step (West and Farrington, 1977, 133). These facts, and many others presented in this chapter, warrant the conclusion that the criminogenic influence of delinquent peers is greater and more significant than the tendency of delinquents to choose friends who have similar interests. It is surprising that authors as well-informed as Yochelson and Samenow should reject the idea that delinquent peers can play a role in the evolution of delinquency. In effect, they are denying the concordant teachings of sociology, social psychology, and scientific psychology. One of the basic truths of these sciences is that man is influenced by others. He conforms to the pressures of the groups to which he belongs. He follows the leader. He changes his behaviour in accordance with the reactions of others. By this conformity, he seeks the approval of those around him. And he avoids doing anything that would risk their disapproval. How, then, can it be claimed that these mechanisms based on normal psychology do not apply to delinquents? It is simply absurd. This said, some boys can associate with delinquents for years without committing any crimes,3 whereas others not only submit to this influence, but look for it. This brings us to the simple truth that to succumb to the influence of others we must be receptive; we must be willing to accept it. This receptivity depends in large part on the legitimate opportunities open to an individual. A boy who has relatively few legitimate opportunities will look for a way of realizing his ends and will therefore be in a state of vulnerability that may eventually bring him to associate with delinquents and succumb to their influence. The results of research agree with this analysis. Caplan (1978, 328) showed that students who are maladjusted in school have delinquent friends more often than

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Why delinquency?

do others. The boy who sees legitimate opportunities closed to him because he is not doing well in school will tend to keep bad company and will be quite disposed to follow these friends in their illegal activities. How is the influence of delinquent peers exercised? The phenomenon differs greatly depending on whether they are beginners or are a little more experienced. This is why it is important to distinguish between two stages in the process of criminal apprenticeship: a phase of reciprocal contagion and a phase of technical learning. The phase of reciprocal contagion is an initiation period during which small groups of friends encourage each other to commit petty crimes. The phase of technical apprenticeship is a period of consolidation during which the delinquents acquire the skill and relationships necessary to commit crimes that are difficult to carry out. Reciprocal contagion During the phase of reciprocal contagion, most crimes are not very complex and generally not very serious: bicycle theft, shoplifting, vandalism, brawling. Nevertheless the delinquency can also be more serious and potentially more carefully planned, for example, robbery and auto theft. But these crimes are committed by rudimentary methods. A house will be burglarized by entering through a window the owners had forgotten to lock. Chalets are robbed by breaking a window. An auto is stolen when the key has been left in the ignition. At this stage, the crimes mainly serve four purposes: excitement, play, prestige, and covetousness. During this phase, the criminogenic influence of friends does not consist in the transmission of techniques4 but in a process of propagation and of reciprocal stimulation that can be separated into four elements: imitation, instigation, assistance and approval.

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Imitation: 'Imitation' is copying a crime committed by a friend. Belson (1975, 23) had asked the London youths who admitted that their association with thieves had prompted them to steal why this was so. Among the many answers, the one that came second in terms of frequency was that they wanted to copy their mates and be like them. There is no mystery about this tendency to imitate the conduct of delinquent peers.5 People tend to behave like everyone else because there is a good chance of winning approval when we do as others do or because we have found that what someone else has done has had the results we would like to achieve. It is not surprising, then, that we follow the example of others. The adolescent who sees that a friend has his pockets full of money after a theft easily concludes that crime does pay and that he would perhaps be interested in doing the same thing. Instigation: 'Instigation' is being induced to commit a crime because of the pressure brought to bear by friends. Adolescents often act out because a friend has encouraged them to do so or because they have been dared to (Belson, 1975, 230). Rarely do young people force another to commit an illegal act. Rather it is a combination of pressures, incitements, provocations, and invitations that are all the more effective in that the person at whom they are aimed feels his reputation at stake. Assistance: The presence of obliging friends and accomplices makes it easier to commit an offence. In the company of another or several others the delinquent act seems much easier. The group gives courage; it lessens the sense of responsibility; it gives assistance and support.

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Why delinquency?

Approval: * Approval' is the knowledge that friends consider the offence commendable. Many crimes would be avoided if their authors were not assured of their friends' approval. If one associates with thieves, the reaction of one's immediate social circle will be very different from that of associates who respect the law. What would provoke indignation elsewhere is received with a laugh or even congratulations. Chiricos et al (1977) showed a strong correlation between delinquency and the degree of approval or disapproval of this conduct received from the respondent's friends. This finding, and others bearing on the smoking of marijuana, enable us to believe that approval is a very important variable: the more a boy's friends approve of delinquency, the more he will tend to commit crimes.

Technical apprenticeship Whereas at the first stage the adolescent is initiated in delinquency in a climate of collective excitement, at the second stage, he is involved in something more serious. Those who persist in their delinquent activities beyond adolescence tend to drop petty theft for a criminality that is better planned and technically more developed. They are no longer interested in petty theft for two reasons: it is not profitable enough, and it is no longer very exciting. They want to get out of the mediocrity of this interminable series of furtive little acts. They dream of daring, spectacular, and profitable ventures. But then the difficulties and dangers increase. They naturally begin to look for methods that will afford the maximum gains with a minimum probability of being caught. There is no longer any question of playing with fire and taking useless risks. The next step is to acquire some skill. It will also be necessary to work with competent partners.

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We often think it is easy to steal. This is true for the miserable petty thefts practised by children and adolescents. But it is not so for thefts that are aimed at valuable goods. Even a crime that looks simple, such as shoplifting, requires a certain skill when it is a question of valuable objects. The reader can judge by this passage from the autobiography of a Canadian thief (Jodoin, 1976,48-9): To operate, we used to enter the Toronto department stores in a group. We were three guys and two dames. I was the youngest of the gang, but it was I, just the same, who came up with the idea of a gimmick that proved very useful. I took a cardboard box of about one foot deep and a foot wide by a foot long. Then I wrapped it in fancy paper and tied it with a red ribbon with a huge bow. And there it was, a magnificent gift box - only it had one side missing. As we walked through the stores, I held the box in my arms with the missing side against me, and we had nothing more to do than put the things we were stealing in this hiding place. We entered a department store with this and went up to the sixth floor to look at the fur coats. We separated, of course: we needed one of us to hold the attention of the saleslady, another to choose the most expensive coat, etc. When I saw that the coat had been chosen, I quietly approached the one who was playing the role of client. While the other woman was talking to the saleslady, she took the chosen coat and, as soon as I had come near her, she folded it and stuffed it quickly into the box which I had turned so that its empty side was facing her. Then I left, not hurrying, holding the false side of the parcel against my chest. I looked quite innocent, it didn't show at all. As we neared the exit, my accomplices joined me. They were on their guard; they had to see that no one stopped me on the way. At last we were outside and had a good laugh, it was so easy. Then we would begin again. They were coats worth seven to eight thousand dollars; but we sold them at a loss and they didn't bring us much in

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Why delinquency ?

the end. But I didn't care, for I was doing it for the adventure, for the pleasure of taking risks and playing with danger. We did this for a month, then we turned to jewellery. All went well... almost too well. That's why I said it would be better to stop while there was still time. In any case, I had had enough of Toronto. I dropped everything and came back to Montreal.

A crime such as burglary, which is not one of the most complicated, after all, presents all sorts of technical problems that have been solved by criminal groups. Thus burglars who have been to the right school have learned how to solve a whole series of difficulties: how to know the houses where there is the best chance of finding money and objects of value, how to force a lock, how to break a window without* making any noise, how to silence an alarm system, where to search in the house, how long you can stay in the house without taking the chance of being surprised, what precautions to take to be sure of escaping if someone should come in, and how to sell the stolen goods at a profit. Well-trained muggers also have one or two tricks that are very useful in an activity that is particularly risky: how to choose your victim (some 'good victims' are homosexuals, drunks, unaccompanied women); how to know if the victim has a lot of money; where to find weapons; what weapon to choose (Jones preferred a knife rather than a revolver: it makes less noise; it is more frightening; and without killing him, you can injure the victim sufficiently to 'convince' him to hand over his money) ; how to handle the victim so that he will not resist, call for help, or laugh in your face; how to prepare for escape, etc. When it comes to bank robbery, the difficulties increase. First of all, the bank has to be 'cased' in order to know the layout, the comings and goings of the personnel, the fre-

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quency of police patrols, etc. The robber has to foresee the difficulties of parking in front of the bank. He must surprise the employees in order to prevent them from sounding the alarm, and if it has been sounded, he must know how long it will take for the police to arrive. He must know how to control strategic areas (the counter, the main door, the manager's office). During the robbery he must keep an eye on the people in the street, the clients who enter the bank, and everyone who was already in the bank. It is also essential to have certain techniques for controlling the victims and making them comply. To do this, there are two main methods: terrorize people by a show of brutality that immobilizes them and makes them helpless; or assume the composure of someone who knows his business, does not want to see any blood run, but is determined to get what he wants - this method has the advantage of achieving submission and avoiding panic at the same time (Letkemann, 1973, 107-16). It is always possible to discover the solutions to these problems oneself, but it is much better and quicker to learn them from other thieves. In any case, the help of partners is occasionally needed for certain ventures. But how does one come in contact with the people who have these techniques? They are obviously difficult to reach and hardly take kindly to those who ask too many questions. The petty thieves one meets in the street generally do not know much. The only places where there is a good chance of meeting some delinquents who know a thing or two are in institutions for juvenile delinquents and in prison. In institutions for juvenile delinquents, there are a good many boys who are not there for the first time, even if they are not professionals. In the course of conversation which, in these establishments, is often about criminal matters, it is always possible to learn quite a few useful tricks.

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Why delinquency?

But it is in prisons that the true specialists are to be found. This is why some tough youths gladly accept their first sentence of imprisonment: at last they have the chance of getting the know-how they are sadly lacking. The stay in prison can be considered the theoretical phase of criminal apprenticeship. The prisoners tell each other about the crimes they have committed; they describe the methods that have proved effective and the mistakes to be avoided; they discuss the planning necessary for a bank robbery; they exchange opinions on what is necessary to commit the perfect crime. During this period of enforced inactivity, the delinquent thinks about his past crimes, not to repent, but to make a note of the errors to avoid. He prepares himself for a career of better-prepared crimes, more profitable and less risky. And at the same time, he takes advantage of the opportunity to establish contact with inmates who could become his accomplices later on. Friends and successful delinquency

Associating with delinquents can turn someone to crime in two different ways; first, by urging him to engage in a career of crime, second, by promoting recidivism. This second type of influence is probably more important than the first. By their presence, delinquent friends change the outcome of the crime, making it more agreeable and more effective, therefore more apt to be repeated. Committed by several persons, a criminal act does not have the same results as one undertaken alone. First, with several participating, it is possible to maximize the financial gains. This is obvious from the preceding paragraphs. Delinquent companions instil the necessary knowhow, furnish information as to the places that are worth

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robbing, participate in the planning, and provide necessary assistance in cases where it is impossible to act alone (bank robberies, the theft of heavy objects, etc). They also facilitate the sale of stolen goods. Second, the help of accomplices reduces the probability of being caught red-handed. During the execution of the crime, the fact of having partners makes the undertaking much less hazardous. When there are several working together, things are done much more quickly, leaving no time for the police to arrive. With accomplices, it is easier to frustrate the police or any citizens who might attempt to make an arrest. With accomplices, it is possible to put up a better defence in case of rifle-fire. With accomplices, escape is much faster. However, accomplices can always be informers. And this danger is very real. Despite the 'law of silence' - and death to anyone who breaks this law - delinquents commonly 'give away' their accomplices. There is no honour among thieves no criminal morality that would inhibit them. Only fear seems to ensure a minimum of discretion. But members of the underworld are not always able to know what is said in the police stations and do not always have the courage to kill traitors. Working with thieves means collaborating with individuals who are weak, unstable, and incapable of sacrificing themselves for a principle. Presentism is prejudicial to criminal groups as well as individuals. The delinquents themselves admit this.6 Third, the presence of delinquent friends enhances the intrinsic pleasure of the crime. With others along, it soon becomes a game. The intensity of the action increases with the number of partners. Without going so far as to say delinquency is a social game, it is not always very amusing to steal on your own. Besides, some delinquent schemes require the presence of friends, as in competitions to see who will make

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Why delinquency?

the most daring theft, who will bring in the most amusing loot. A still more important factor should be mentioned, and that is the added pleasure of working together. Vandalism is not much fun when you are alone. The presence of friends who smile and laugh, who take part and get each other excited, is necessary to give an illegal enterprise its flavour and intensity. Practised alone, theft is a nerve-racking activity and rather dull; with partners, it changes into a joyful and exciting lark. Fourth, in bad company, to engage in crime becomes a means of acquiring prestige. An act that would meet with the indignation and disapproval of honest folk wins approval and recognition among rogues. The crime is then reinterpreted: it is no longer a violation of the law, but becomes a manifestation of strength, courage, or intelligence. With his friends, the delinquent is no longer forced to pretend or lie; he has no fear of punishment; he no longer has to hide his guilt. After a successful venture, he is entertained, slapped on the back, congratulated; there is general celebration. In short, the presence of delinquent friends increases the probability that crime will become profitable, safe (at least for a short while), amusing, and praiseworthy. One does not have to be a behaviourist to agree that a person who has done something that has agreeable results will tend to do the same thing again. We repeat conduct that brings us pleasure and abandon that which is fruitless or has disagreeable results. A person who attacks others with success has every chance of becoming aggressive. And a person who makes substantial profits when he steals is in danger of acquiring the habit of stealing. Thus, associating with criminals contributes to the perpetuation of criminal activity. It promotes the continuation of

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conduct that, without such support, would probably disappear after a few more or less unsuccessful attempts. Conclusion

The facts presented in this chapter enable us to conclude that association with delinquent peers can contribute to the expansion of the opportunities open to a youngster. It furnishes him with the means of achieving his ends. As such, in the field of delinquent conduct, it does the opposite of what occurs at school and on the labour market: rather than blocking opportunities, it opens them up. In one sense, 'bad companions' offer freedom. They afford the subject opportunities that school and vocational experience have drastically restricted. From this point of view, to say that delinquent peers 'cause' delinquency does not take the entire process into account. What should be said is that they afford the possibility of choosing criminal solutions.

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PART THREE

COHClUSÎOn

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15 Freedom The moment has come for criminology to face the truth: the only real cause of a crime is none other than the one who commits it, the criminal, that is, a free man, responsible for his acts, while subjected, like all of us, during the course of his lifetime, to hazards that can weaken his rationality and his control. (Mailloux, 1979, 20)

The problem Throughout this book, the delinquent has been presented as a person who pursues goals, chooses among the means available, and tries to maximize his gains. Freedom constantly has presented itself as an indispensable concept. But this freedom was wholly relative: the delinquent's room to manoeuvre seemed remarkably narrow at times. Crime was presented here as a choice that is strongly limited. This analysis runs counter to two extreme positions: one, which presents the delinquent as the victim of circumstance,1 the other, less popular among criminologists, which presents him as a completely free agent. These two opposing attitudes are observed among the delinquents themselves. Some describe themselves as the victims of circumstance, forced by factors beyond their control to commit their illegal activities. Others proudly assume the responsibility for their acts and, adopting a rather Promethean attitude, say they deliberately chose a life of crime for the pleasure, the wealth, and the power it gave them.2

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Why delinquency?

Put in terms of absolute determinism or absolute freedom, the problem is insoluble. It would be better to examine when, and to what extent, the person who acts out is free to choose. The most reasonable attitude is simply to admit that man can, on occasion, make choices but that this freedom is limited. This is the way De Tocqueville presented the problem (1840, 372): 'Providence made the human species neither entirely independent, nor entirely a slave. True, it draws a fatal circle around every man which is inescapable; but within its vast limits, man is powerful and free; and therefore people.' In other words, human conduct is not totally conditioned. It is not programmed down to the last detail. There is still an undetermined area in which men can evolve and act on their own.3 The moment we agree that freedom and determinism both exist, it becomes necessary to analyse their relationship. However, this cannot be done through the traditional causal approach where the 'factors' of crime are conceived in simple terms of cause and effect. It might be said, for example, that failure at school, instability, or presentism (to use the variable already examined) 'cause' crime. There would then be a direct relationship between the factor and the behaviour. Admittedly, these variables exercise an influence - a believable conclusion drawn from the fact that they are in correlation with delinquency. But these correlations are never very strong, and we can thus suppose that there is no direct causal relationship. The problem therefore consists in finding out how the determinisms come into play. The analysis in this book is designed to show that their influence is mediated by the decisions of persons who pursue goals and choose from among the means available. From this point of view, the different variables associated with delinquency can act in two ways. First, where goals are concerned, they give rise to prob-

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lems that the delinquent must resolve or needs that he must satisfy. Second, with regard to opportunities, they make only certain means accessible. The interplay between freedom and determinism is therefore conceived in this way: the adolescent is more or less limited to seeking certain goals and having a limited number of means from which to choose. Freedom and determinism in goal-planning

In contemporary discussion, the major argument of the determinists against freedom of choice bears directly on goals. Thus the philosophers Edwards (1958) and Hospers (1958) agree that men can do as they want but deny that they can pursue the goals they want. According to them, the fact that man can do what he wants is not enough to prove that he is a free agent. We have to go further and prove that his motives, too, were unrestricted. But according to them, this is not the case. For ultimately our motives stem from our personality, which is fashioned by our heredity, our surroundings, our childhood - factors over which we have no control. Thus, even if man is free to act as he thinks best, he is not free to want whatever he likes. He cannot choose his heredity, his parents, or the experiences that made him what he is. In the final analysis, then, man is not free and the goals he pursues are determined by factors beyond his control. This argument is convincing at first, but it does not stand up under closer examination. In the chapters devoted to goals, we have seen that these goals were subject to various determinisms which can be analysed in terms of biological, psychological, and social needs. Thus biological determinisms seem to be responsible for the need to be active, which can move certain people to look for intense activity through delinquency. It is also biological determinism that is at the basis of

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defensive aggression - let us call it the 'survival instinct.' Psychological determinisms may have prompted the need to possess and thus to steal, or the need to dominate that will lead to delinquency for the sake of power and prestige. Finally, social determinisms, for instance the pressures of a consumer society, may have been at the bottom of many thefts either because of covetousness or for additional income. But to agree that the goals we pursue stem from various causes does not warrant the conclusion that there is no freedom of choice. Between a causal factor and the precise goal the subject is pursuing there is a process that can be controlled by voluntary and rational decisions. There may well be a psychological need to possess, but most people exercise control over this need. They adjust their aspirations to their incomes and learn to be content with what they have. In the same way, someone may have a need for prestige from early childhood, but if he does not succeed in becoming a movie star, he will eventually be satisfied with being admired by his circle of friends or at work. We too easily accept the idea that we are slaves to our motivations. Mailloux (1971) refuted this idea by stating that man is capable of 'eluding the grip of a motivation and of replacing it by another he considers more suitable to his aspirations' (375). The smoker who stops smoking or the gourmand who becomes a weight-watcher are examples of persons who escape a compulsion to act in a certain way. We can go even further: a person's whole development is a process during which he becomes, to a certain point, what he wants to become. Our personality is the result not only of our heredity and our environment but also of our efforts to be the kind of person we would like to be. Recently Mailloux (1979) convincingly defended this point of view. He pointed out that the child makes deliberate and voluntary choices every day

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and through these becomes what he would like to be. For example, each time he decides to go to school, every time he resolves to study hard, he is assuming his own development. A child of this type who 'socializes himself stops wanting to have his immediate desires satisfied: 'What is important from then on is being proud of what he is' (17). Even if we accept that our motivations are completely beyond our control, the conclusion that we have no freedom would not be warranted, simply because freedom can be found in our choice of means. Let us consider 'action.' The need to be active is probably inherent in our biological nature, and some of us, due to our constitution, may have an excess of energy to expend. It is readily agreed then, that it is impossible to escape this need. But there are a hundred ways of satisfying it: sports, work, community work, hobbies, etc. We have only to choose. And the choice is very real: there is a big difference between engaging in vandalism to satisfy this need for excitement and playing football or becoming a workaholic.

Freedom and determinism in the face of opportunity Freedom and determinism play a simultaneous role in the sphere of opportunity as well. The abilities of the person, the assistance received, and the opportunities that arise are subject to a great many restrictions that limit his freedom without eliminating it completely. Failure at school, instability at work, presentism, and delinquent peers - all variables that were traditionally considered criminogenic factors - are analysed here in terms of opportunities. They will contribute to blocking or opening up the subject's opportunities. He will therefore have a limited number of choices to make, because some will be accessible and some not. The sum of these opportunities will constitute his margin

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Why delinquency?

of manoeuvrability, in other words, the amount of freedom he can enjoy. In the chapters devoted to the school and the labour market, the factors examined restricted the delinquent's opportunities and therefore limited his freedom. Because of painful experiences in school, and failures, delinquents find no satisfaction in school; they leave prematurely without much education and therefore have less chance of success on the labour market. They then have to be satisfied with dull jobs without any prospects for the future. There, too, opportunities are closed to the delinquent. Of all the factors likely to restrict the delinquent's scope, presentism is probably the most important. It seriously handicaps anyone who suffers from it. Incapable of pursuing longterm goals, he cannot organize his activities so that they will ensure the satisfaction of his future needs. The presentist can hardly provide for his needs by legitimate means. He is not free to succeed in life by honest activity because he is incapable of persevering. There are factors associated with delinquency, however, that open up opportunities and, as such, contribute to increasing the subject's freedom. One of these is delinquent peers. Not everyone can become a criminal. One must have the example, the help and encouragement of friends. One must also learn a certain number of techniques. If on the one hand most delinquents' freedom is limited because they are unable to succeed in honest activity, on the other hand they have a freedom that many others do not have: that of being able to succeed in crime. For just as there is freedom, more or less, to succeed in a job, there is freedom, more or less, to succeed in crime.

16 Summing up Goals In these pages, delinquency - meaning offences that cause another person injury - was understood as a means to various ends. From there, it was necessary to answer the question: To what end was the infraction committed? This led me to construct a typology of goals that adolescents pursue through their delinquency. These goals, thirteen of them, are the following: GOALS

TO WHAT END IS THE OFFENCE COMMITTED?

Action

To expend energy and have the sensation of living intensely

Excitement

To experience a thrill

Play

For the pleasure of engaging in an activity that is uncertain, gratuitous, and imaginary

Appropriation

To profit from another person's property

Expediency Possession Use Covetousness Moonlighting Spree

To get out of trouble To satisfy a need to acquire goods To use something, only to abandon it later on To satisfy the whim of the moment To obtain a supplementary income To squander money on parties and excessive buying

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Why delinquency?

GOALS

TO WHAT END IS THE OFFENCE COMMITTED?

Aggression

To kill, injure, or make another person suffer

Defence Vengeance

To attack in self-protection To repay an injury

Domination

To gain supremacy over someone

Power

To exercise authority over another, to compel his submission For the pleasure of dominating and making another person suffer To win admiration

Cruelty Prestige

To the question, 'Why delinquency?,' the preceding list makes it possible to answer: 'Delinquency enables its authors to realize objectives that are vital to man.' Delinquency is a means of feeling the intoxicating pleasure of intense activity; it brings riches that are otherwise inaccessible; it is a reaction for survival in the face of danger; it permits self-assertion. Criminal activity is one answer to what men have always looked for: pleasure, wealth, security, power, and glory. This fact is of paramount importance: the juvenile delinquent wants to satisfy basic human needs. This is why it can be said that crime is deeply rooted in human nature: it is one means, among many, of fulfilling these basic needs. And for the same reason, we understand the permanence of crime in human societies. It is not apt to disappear, for it offers a way of satisfying needs that will arise as long as man continues to be man. As long as there will be men, there will always be some who will be tempted by these expeditious means that enable them to live, to survive, and realize their manhood.

163

Summing up

Opportunities The idea of opportunity developed by Cloward and Ohlin (1960) has become a key element in the study of delinquency, understood as a means of realizing the goals just enumerated. Opportunities were defined here as circumstances that a person can take advantage of to realize his goals. Whether an adolescent takes the path of delinquency or not will be determined largely by the nature of the opportunities offered him. In this regard, two hypotheses have been suggested. 1 / The more legitimate opportunities an adolescent has, the less he will tend to choose delinquent activity. 2 / The more criminal opportunities an adolescent has, the more he will tend to choose delinquent activity. In other words, there is a greater chance that an adolescent will turn to delinquency if he has a narrow range of legitimate opportunities, but a broad range of criminal opportunities. Legitimate opportunities were studied by analysing the record of delinquents in school and on the labour market. In school, delinquents do not do well and behave badly. They have no ambition to learn, they do little work, and they leave school prematurely. On the labour market, they often have well-paid jobs, considering their age and qualifications, but they remain confined to inferior jobs without any future. Their instability at work is marked. They are gradually driven to choose between work and delinquency. Because of their performance at school and later on the labour market, more and more legitimate opportunities are closed to them. They are unable to realize their goals by acceptable methods. Neither studies nor work allow them to satisfy their need to be active, to acquire goods, or to prove themselves. Analysis of the young delinquent's patterns of behaviour brought to light a characteristic of major importance - près-

164

Why delinquency ?

entism, that is, conduct marked by a lack of perseverance in the pursuit of a long-term project. The term 'presentism' covers numerous traits observed in the behaviour of delinquents in school and at work: inability to involve themselves in their school work, dropping out of school, looking for jobs that offer immediate earnings, instability, and the absence of any plans for a career. But this trait affects other spheres of activity. The presen tist's relationships with others are jeopardized by his inability to fulfil his obligations and to reciprocate. He is often incapable of achieving his ends other than by illegal activity. Being unable to stick to any effort for very long, he has to fall back on crime, on rudimentary solutions, to obtain the things he wants or to assert himself. But precisely because of this inability, the young lawbreaker is unable to organize his delinquency. Most of the time it is crude, impulsive, and ineffective. And those who develop beyond presentism have a tendency to turn to activities that are no longer delinquent in the strict sense of the term. Presentism is the delinquent's Achilles' heel. It stands in the way of his efficiency, not only at work, but also in his chosen field. A study of the delinquent's associates brought to light the dynamic of criminal opportunity. This analysis shows that the more a boy associates with delinquents, the more he tends to commit crimes himself. Delinquent peers open up illegal opportunities, first by a process of reciprocal contagion, through imitation, instigation, assistance, and approval, and then by a process of technical training that gives the adolescent a skill that will increase his chances of success in his criminal endeavours. In the end, the delinquent will acquire the know-how and technical knowledge he needs in his career, and he will have made contacts in the underworld that

165

Summing up

he can use to get help and the information necessary for the execution of his crimes. Thanks to his associates, crime will become an effective way for the delinquent to achieve his goals. Acting together with one or several partners, he can maximize his financial profits, derive greater pleasure out of the execution of his crimes, and acquire the prestige of his friends' recognition. Are they happy? This question is seldom asked in works of this kind, but it should be. Delinquency makes a good number of goals materialize, but does it bring happiness? There are some men who, after an active criminal career, say they are satisfied with what it gave them: 'I went into this business because it allowed me to live the way I wanted, I had the dough I wanted. No regrets. Crime pays, and how!' (Joey and Fisher, 1973, 10). For others, such as Maclsaac (1968), crime not only afforded money, but also a life of ease - free, amusing, full of surprises; an intense and exciting life. But only a minority see things this way. There are a large number of delinquents whose poignant testimony convinces us that the few pleasures obtained through crime are paid for dearly. In his death-cell, Chessman (1955) wrote: 'And it is tragic to think that thousands of youngsters are following in my footsteps and are at the dawn of a disastrous career such as mine. And, unless something is done for them, they will never discover their true selves. They will live short and terrible lives' (135). ' What Selosse (1978, 509) calls 'the suffering of juvenile delinquents' applies not only to a few losers who spent years in prison and cannot stand the thought of spending any more, but can also be measured to some extent among a large num-

166

Why delinquency?

her of adolescents who have committed crimes even though they have never been arrested. Some studies were done in Montreal to evaluate the personality of juvenile delinquents. Tests were made up of a series of statements to be answered by 'true' or 'false.' We did not learn much about the criminal personality2 through these tests, but they can contribute some valuable indications concerning the question that concerns us. In effect, among the statements to which the delinquents answer 'true' more often than do non-delinquents, there are some that express a state of profound dissatisfaction, for example: 'I often feel sad and alone,' 'Other people are happier than I am,' 'It seems to me that wherever I am, I would like to be somewhere else,' 'Most of the time I feel anxious.'3 These statements consistently proved to be in correlation with self-reported delinquency both in samples of normal students and in samples of adolescents who had appeared before a juvenile judge (Côté, LeBlanc, and Bayhreuther, 1978; Biron, 1979). This means that apart from arrest and all the difficulties that ensue, the more a youngster commits crimes, the greater his tendency to say he is unhappy. This unhappiness that delinquents suffer from is understood when we consider the aims their crimes prevent them from achieving. There are at least two things that cannot be obtained by criminal activity: security and affection. Crime cannot offer its authors security. To engage in crime means living an unpredictable and dangerous life, having an uncertain and hazardous source of income, never being sure of tomorrow, taking enormous risks, being constantly on the alert, and developing a paranoid attitude in order to survive. It means living the short and terrible life of which Chessman spoke. Also, delinquency cannot win affection. It gives rise to fear, distrust, censure, and hostility. And the delinquent lives con-

167

Summing up

stantly in the climate he creates. He must therefore give up the idea of trusting and easy relationships, of lasting friendships, tenderness, and love. And the friendship he will find among those like him will be a very poor substitute for what he will have lost. There is another reason why delinquents are not happy. It is difficult for presentists to be happy. First, the slightest frustration infuriates them. They make a scene over the smallest difficulty, the shortest delay, or the least deprivation. They battle daily over trifles. They are full of resentment. They do not have the minimum patience and stoicism necessary to face everyday annoyances with composure. Tortured by a limitless greed and trying to support exorbitant demands, delinquents condemn themselves to an eternal state of dissatisfaction. Incapable of deriving any satisfaction from studies, work, or the simple pleasures of a peaceful life, they look for thrills and costly pleasures. But they achieve merely Pyrrhic victories. Thanks to the stolen money, they spend a few good moments, but very quickly they find themselves as miserable as before and have to start all over again.

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Notes Introduction 1 Le contrôle social du crime, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France Chapter one: Strategic analysis 1 Recently, criminologists have started to study the question. See for example, Glaser, 1978, chapter 5, and Conklin, 1981, 272-83. 2 There were profound thinkers who attributed a key role to the seeking of pleasure in their analyses of man and society: Hobbes, Bentham, Montesquieu, Rousseau. Political economy, which, after all, is the most advanced of the social sciences, proceeds from a homo oeconomicus who seeks to maximize his satisfactions. One of the most thorough branches of psychology - behaviourism - rests entirely on the law of effect of Thorndike, who says that, in the main, behaviour followed by satisfaction will be repeated and that which is accompanied by disagreeable consequences will have less chance of repetition. Romans (1974), proceeding from a 'success' proposition very similar to the law of effect, did an excellent synthesis of social behaviour. Consequently, there is no reason to be intimidated when so-called subtle minds claim that this is a simplistic and reductionist view of man; we are in good company. 3 It is understood of course that the search for pleasure is not the only element of human conduct. Moral conduct, for example, is impossible to reduce to a calculation of advantages and disadvantages. I expect to go into this question more thoroughly in another book. Chapter two: Goals of the offence 1 Throughout this book, the words 'objective,' 'end,' 'goal,' 'object,' 'aim,' and 'purpose' are used in the same sense.

170

Notes to pp 25-39

2 The formula is Baechler's (1975). My whole approach in this chapter was inspired by his brilliant analyses. It was his book on suicides that gave me the idea of analysing delinquency in terms of goals. I am most grateful to him. 3 See Kinberg, 1959, 290, and Sutherland and Cressey, 1966, 89. 4 There are numerous differences between delinquents and non-delinquents, but they in no way make it possible to deduce a difference in nature. Comparisons between delinquents and non-delinquents have contributed information that should not be ignored; the problem is to know how to interpret the findings. 5 Homans (1974, 16) presents an argument that clarifies this point. Chapter three: Action 1 Bordua (1961) made some interesting observations in this regard. 2 The following is inspired by the excellent article by GorTman (1967), aptly titled 'Where the Action Is.' 3 Miller (1958) describes clearly the connection between excitement and delinquency. 4 Frechette and LeBlanc (1978, 128) state that vandalism is practised by 22.8 per cent of the youths who appear before the juvenile court. It is the fifth most frequent infraction. Richards, Berk, and Forster (1979, 83) observe: 'Vandalism is among most commonly reported types of delinquency ... Nearly half of the junior high students admit at least one instance of minor school damage.' 5 As this example shows, the goal clearly cannot be the full explanation. How can one commit such a heinous crime for so futile a reason? Why did the inhibitions against killing not come into play? We still have a great deal to explain. 6 In Les Jeux et les hommes, Caillois (1958) defines the game as an activity having six characteristics. It is gratuitous, different, uncertain, unproductive, subject to rules, and imaginary. Certain crimes are so like games that I had only to transpose Caillois's definition with a few minor changes. 7 Michard, Selosse, and Algan (1963) made a number of observations on the role of the attraction of risk in gang delinquency.

171

Notes to pp 40-56

8 Caillois (1958) describes four types of games: competitive (team sports, boxing), gambling (betting at cards), representational (the theatre), and vertiginous (skiing, horsemanship). 9 Belson (1975, 168) reports that 22 per cent of the boys questioned got pleasure and excitement mainly from the fact of outwitting people and getting away with it. 10 To the question 'How is it that stealing does not give you fun?,' the answers were: the risk of arrest (19 per cent), fear of the consequences (6 per cent), and nervousness and fear (8 per cent) (Belson, 1975, 168). Chapter four: Bored to death

1 See Tanner (1977) as well. 2 Richards, Berk, and Forster (1979, 193) argue that youths invest their leisure time in delinquent behaviour. This investment has the function of providing information about the cost, benefits, and risks involved in delinquency and of testing the limits of proper behaviour. 3 4 I wont lie to you. What I do is wrong - deep, deep down I believe this. But man, it gives me life' (Willwerth, 1974, 45). 4 Hitler, a criminal of an altogether different kind from those we are studying, had this action cult, as evidenced by some of his words: 'Only the man immersed in action is aware of the nature of the Universe'; 4 Man is on this earth to act. Only when he acts does he fulfil his natural destiny'; 'Only action and unceasing activity give meaning to human life' (Rauschning, 1979, 300-1). Chapter five: Appropriation

1 These figures may be slightly inflated because, as I have already mentioned, utilitarian motives come more easily to the mind of the respondent. 2 Contrary to what one may think, this phenomenon is not exceptional. It is reported also by Willwerth (1974) and Carr (1975).

172

Notes to pp 59-74

Chapter six: Defensive aggression 1 Authors such as Berkowitz (1952) and Fromm (1973) make a distinction between 'instrumental' (or functional) aggression and 'hostile' aggression. In instrumental aggression, violence is used as a means to obtain something else. Thus youths who knock down passersby to grab their purses are resorting to this type of aggression. In hostile aggression, the primary aim of the attack is to destroy, injure, or make the other person suffer. The jealous husband who kills his wife is giving way to hostile aggression. The distinction is useful but relative, for what we call hostile aggression is often a means to a different end: revenge or self-defence. It has no intrinsic goal such as the definition implies. 2 This is a good example of the difference between the text of the law and what people do about it; they refuse to define ordinary attacks as an infraction. 3 Luckenbill (1977) has shown that, among adults, criminal homicide is very often a reaction to a moral offence (an insult, humiliation, ridicule). In such cases, the aggressive act is to protect one's selfimage and save face. 4 From this point of view, it is hard to see how Erich Fromm (1973) can say that defensive aggression is a 'benign' form of aggressiveness as opposed to the cruelty and destructiveness of 'malignant' forms. There are far more defensive murders found in the annals of crime than sadistic murders, and the one type is not much more 'benign' than the other. If Fromm means that defensive aggression is benign in the sense of being natural, we agree. But the term gives rise to confusion. There are many natural phenomena that are 'evil.' Chapter seven: Vengeance 1 De Greeff (1942) reports that of 87 crimes of passion for 'emotional' reasons, 40 were perpetrated because of 'unrequited love' and 21 because of an 'injustice suffered.'

173

Notes to pp 77-96

Chapter eight: The catharsis hypothesis

1 Megargee (1969, 1,069) cites research to the same effect and admits that aggression does dissipate by itself with time. In spite of this, however, he is not resigned to abandoning the hydraulic model completely. 2 This does not mean that aggression always engenders more aggression. In the case of most murderers, all signs of aggression seem to disappear once the murder has been committed. Unfortunately, we do not know why in certain cases the aggressive act engenders a spate of violence, while in others, this does not happen. Chapter nine: Domination

1 Among several species of animals, domination is closely related to aggression; the dominating animals are the most aggressive. They are also the best fed, occupy the best places, and have the choice of the females. In other words, among certain animals, to be aggressive is to be dominant, and to be dominant is to have the best chance to survive and reproduce (E.O. Wilson, 1975). 2 Thrasher (1927) has given an excellent description of the hoodlum that follows along these lines. 3 This was the position defended by Cohen (1955). Since then, it has become part and parcel of the ideas accepted in sociology. 4 Chessman (1954, 63-4) at the wheel of a car was madly daring. He says that it was a way of showing the friends who accompanied him that he was the most courageous. Braly (1976, 12) reports too that his courage gave him a feeling of superiority. When something was so risky that his friends refused to participate in it, he used to laugh at them and go alone. Chapter ten: The opportunity theory

1 On this point Cloward and Ohlin were inspired by the celebrated article by Merton (1938), 'Social Structure and Anomie.'

174

Notes to pp 100-9

2 However, Cloward and Ohlin made the subtle distinction that those who become delinquents have no aspirations toward membership in the middle class but only toward improving their economic position. Chapter eleven: Confrontation with school 1 See S. and E. Glueck (1950), Peyre (1964), Schafer and Polk (1967), Villars (1972), and Malewska and Peyre (1973). 2 See Hirschi (1969), Empey and Lubeck (1971), Laberge-Altmejd (1976), and Biron (1977). 3 See S. and E. Glueck (1950), Malewska and Peyre (1973), West and Farrington (1973), and Laberge-Altmejd (1976). 4 The significance of this relationship between disruptive and delinquent behaviour can be contested by arguing that two similar things are measured here. There is some truth here, but there are differences none the less. Unruly behaviour as it has been defined comprises three elements: first, infractions of school regulations that forbid cheating during examinations, make school attendance obligatory, etc; second, resistance to authority: disobeying, answering back, etc; third, disruption of discipline in the school: disturbing the class, fidgeting, etc. Is this delinquency? It certainly is not so in the strict sense I have adopted. These types of conduct are not infractions of the criminal code and do not necessarily cause tangible injury to others. We are therefore justified in distinguishing between delinquency and maladjustment, free to next study the covariations between these two variables. However, the relationship between the two is striking. Disruptive behaviour defines infractions of school regulations, and delinquency infractions of the law. Hence the result arrived at by researchers is not surprising, even though it is not tautological: the tendency to violate the school rules goes together with the tendency to violate the rulings of the criminal code. In other words, deviance in school has a correlation with delinquency. 5 Based on rich clinical material, Yochelson and Samenow (1976) state categorically that future criminals go to school only because they are obliged to. They are interested in other activities more exciting than studying.

175

Notes to pp 109-20

6 However, it is difficult to ignore the role of intelligence, at least that which is measured by tests. Hirschi and Hindelang (1977) report that most of the studies on the question show that there is a relationship between IQ and delinquency and that this relationship continues to exist when the social class is held constant. It seems that the delinquent samples have an IQ eight points lower than those taken from among the general population. 7 See Schafer and Polk (1967) for an example of these criticisms of the school. 8 For the moment, this is what school is. There are a few schools that accept selected students, have exceptional teachers, have more money than the others, and succeed in attenuating certain irksome aspects of school. But for the rest, the 'school barracks' is here for a long time to come. We simply do not have the resources or teaching methods that can transform the learning experience into one that is easy and amusing. Chapter twelve: Work

1 This is Lombroso's (1899) expression. This Italian doctor did more than anyone else to give a scientific guise to the popular prejudice regarding criminals. 2 It is mistakenly believed that most workers do not like their jobs and are resigned to them merely in order to survive. Americans have done a great many surveys on satisfaction at work. Based on the surveys done between 1958 and 1973, Reitz (1977, 269, 273) reports that 81-92 per cent of workers say they are satisfied or very satisfied with their work. Moreover, 73 per cent of workers find it very important that the work itself be interesting (salary or security being secondary). 3 For many delinquents, the big problem is that they want a lot of money immediately. They realize that they cannot make a salary that would satisfy this need and that stealing enables them to get much more than they could get by working. It is in these terms that the criminals whose lives are told by Brannon (1948) and Martin (1952) present the problem.

176

Notes to pp 126-39

Chapter thirteen: Prisoner of the present 1 It would be tedious to enumerate all those who have discussed this one way or another, but certain authors should be mentioned in particular. Lombroso (1895) spoke of the improvidence of delinquents. Sociologists also noted this phenomenon. Thus Cohen (1955, 30) spoke of short-run hedonism. He reported that the juvenile delinquent never bothers about long-run goals. He never plans his activities or budgets his time. Other authors also made some interesting observations on the subject, including Pinatel (1963), Redi and Wineman (1964), Algan et al (1965), Debuyst and Jóos (1971), Lemay (1973), and Mucchielli (1974). 2 This relationship is so close that presentism is often an integral part of psychological definitions of the delinquent. Thus Lemay (1973) includes in his definitions of the delinquent subject the fact that he possesses 4 an egb totally centred on the satisfaction of his needs' (451). 3 The delinquent deeply involved in crimes against persons and property and who is never arrested is probably a myth. The chances are that after 10, 20, or 50 robberies he will finally be arrested. The successful delinquent will not escape prison, but during his lifetime he will not spend more than approximately 2 or 3 years in prison, whereas the failure will do a total of 10, 20, or even 30 years. 4 Among the many studies, both psychological and sociological, on this subject, we must mention Short and Strodtbeck (1965), Hirschi (1969), Frechette (1970), and Caplan (1978). I would furthermore point out that the data of Hirschi and Caplan deal with subjects who had not been arrested by the police. This characteristic, then, has nothing to do with the social reaction. Chapter fourteen: Delinquent peers

1 Short (1957) reported strong correlations between the self-reported delinquency of his subjects and that of their friends. Reiss and Rhodes (1964), who were studying pairs and triads, state that boys choose their intimate friends among other boys who, like them, are delin-

177

2 3

4

5

6

Notes to pp 139-49

quent or non-delinquent. West and Farrington (1973) report that the number of crimes committed by the friends of the subjects is strongly associated with the delinquency of the subjects themselves. Belson (1975) notes that the younger a boy is when he starts to go with thieves, the more he steals himself, and the more friends he has who steal, the more he has a tendency to steal (236-7). S. and E. Glueck (1950), Kinberg (1959), and Yochelson and Samenow (1976). This is the case for boys who have one or several delinquent brothers. It is also the case for those vagrants who are constantly in the company of members of the underworld without ever turning to crime. Belson (1975) had a sample of normal and relatively young boys. They were therefore subjects who had every chance of being in the first phase. And he shows (230) that it is very rare that those who steal have learned any technique. We go back to Tarde who, in 1890, defended the idea that crime is learned by imitation. Recent works in experimental psychology have shown the prime importance of 'modelling' in learning. Bandura (1969; 1973) explained that modelling or learning by observation comprises four stages: observing the behaviour of the model, memorizing the conduct observed, reproducing it: putting into practice what is seen, and reinforcing this conduct. Akers et al (1979), in a study of 3,065 high school students, state that a fairly strong (0.38) correlation exists between the smoking of marijuana and the fact of having observed that persons who are admired smoke it. 'If I had worked alone, it would have been nothing more than sticking a gun into the teller's cage and taking whatever was on hand. Not very much satisfaction there, and not very much money either. Working with others, you are at the mercy of your crime partners, and honor among thieves is a myth. You involve yourself with a very low grade of person when you become a thief. The vast majority are basically unstable and therefore unpredictable. I was convicted of the Manufacturers Trust job because for the third time in my life one of my crime partners betrayed me. Against all logic; against his whole track record. Against, even, his own self-interest' (Sutton and Linn, 1976, 11).

178

Notes to pp 155-66

Chapter fifteen: Freedom 1 This is the dominant position in criminology, where it is presented as being so self-evident it requires no explanation. One of the most outstanding exceptions is the American Matza (1964; 1969). 2 This attitude is frequently found in the autobiographies of criminals. It is particularly marked in those of Karpis and Trent (1971), Sutton and Linn (1976), Joey and Fisher (1973), and Mesrine (1977). 3 The problem of madness, which can effectively nullify the subject's freedom, has been excluded. In the present analysis the problem is limited to the same delinquent who has no obvious symptoms of mental illness, even though his method of functioning - presentism, for example -may make us believe he is not completely 'normal.' Chapter sixteen: Summing up

1 See also Willwerth (1974, 138), Brown (1965, 123), and Carr (1975, 199). 2 These tests are only a combination of disparate opinions placed on a scale by procedures similar to the factorial analysis. We do not know exactly what these scales measure. All we know is that they are in correlation with delinquency. However, certain isolated statements can give us some interesting indications. 3 These statements are part of a social maladjustment scale developed by Jesness (1963).

Bibliography Akers, R., M. Krohn, L. Lanza-Kaduce, and M. Radosevich (1979) 'Social Learning and Deviant Behavior: A Specific Test of a General Theory' American Sociological Review 44: 636-55 Algan, A. (1970) 'Les conduites délinquantes des jeunes: Étude descriptive et différentielle' Annales de Vaucresson no. 8: 116-80 Algan, A., M. Mazerol, M. Henry, and J. Selosse (1965) Vols et voleurs de véhicules à moteur Paris: Cujas for Centre de formation et de recherche de l'éducation surveillée, Vaucresson Andenaes, J. (1974) Punishment and Deterrence Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Aurousseau, D., and M. Laborde (1976) Parole de bandits Paris: Le Seuil Bachman, J., P. O'Malley, and J. Johnston (1978) Adolescence to Adulthood: Change and Stability in the Lives of Young Men Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan Baechler, J. (1975) Les Suicides Paris: Calmann-Lévy - (1976) Qu'est-ce que l'idéologie? Paris: Gallimard - (1978) Le Pouvoir pur Paris: Calmann-Lévy Bandura, A. (1969) Principles of Behavior Modification New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston - (1973) Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Beccaria (1764) Des Délits et des peines reprinted 1965 Genève: Librairie Droz Belson, W.A. (1975) Juvenile Theft: The Causal Factors London: Harper and Row Berkowitz, L. (1962) Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis New York: McGraw-Hill Biron, L. (1977) Les Modalités de l'engagement et la délinquance Montréal: Groupe de recherche sur l'inadaptation juvénile, Université de Montréal

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Pollock, D. (1973) Appelle-moi un bon voleur: Autobiographie St-Hubert, Que: Transformation Polsky, N. (1967) Hustlers, Beats and Others Chicago: Aldine Rauschning, H. (1979) Hitler m'a dit Paris: Le livre de poche Redi, F., and D. Wineman (1964) L'Enfant agressif Paris: Fleurus Reiss, A.J., and A.L. Rhodes (1964) 'An Empirical Test of Differential Association Theory' Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 1 no. 1: 15-18 Reitz, H.J. (1977) Behavior in Organizations Homewood, 111: R. Irwin Richards, P., R.A. Berk, and B. Forster (1979) Crime as Play: Delinquency in a Middle Class Suburb Cambridge, Mass: Ballinger Roumajon, Y. (1977) 7/5 ne sont pas nés délinquants Paris: Laffont Rousseau, J.J. (1762) Emile ou de l'éducation English translation 1911, London: Dent Schafer, W.E., and K. Polk (1967) 'Delinquency and the School' in The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force on Juvenile Delinquency Washington, DC: us Government Printing Office Sellin, T. (1938) Culture, Conflict and Crime New York: Social Science Research Council Selosse, J. (1978) 'La délinquance à l'adolescence: appel, essai ou erreur' Revue de neuropsychiatrie infantile 26 no. 10-11: 503-11 Shaw, C.R. (1930) The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story Chicago: University of Chicago Press, reprinted 1966 Shaw, C.R., and H.D. McKay (1942) Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas Chicago: University of Chicago Press Short, J.F., jr (1954) 'A Report on the Incidence of Criminal Behavior, Arrests, and Conviction in Selected Groups' Research Studies of the State College of Washington 22: 110-18 - (1957) 'Differential Association and Delinquency' Social Problems 4 no. 3: 233-9 Short, J.F., jr, and F.I. Nye (1958) 'Extent of Unrecorded Delinquency, Tentative Conclusions' Journal of Criminal law, Criminology and Police Science 49: 296-302 Short, J.F., jr, and F.L. Strodtbeck (1965) Group Process and Gang Delinquency Chicago: University of Chicago Press, reprinted 1974

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Index accomplices 149 action 33-49,159,161; and growth 47-9; a vital need 43; defined 33; elements of 35; need of delinquent for 45-7 aggression 59-84, 162; and action 83-4; defined 59; hereditary factors in 66; innate or learned? 65-9; learned 67; learning of 66; unleashed 78-80 aim, intrinsic 35 Algan,A. 37,38,41,45,53,54, 58,88 appropriation 50-8, 161; defined 50 approval 144 arsonists 72 aspirations 6, 108, 109, 111; of juvenile delinquents 100-1 assault 60 assistance 143 attitude: to work 118; toward the future 125 Aurousseau, D. 40, 56, 86, 120, 122 automobile theft 53 Baechler,J. 12,17,18,26,87,89, 170

Bandura, A. 61, 64, 65, 78, 89, 177 bank robbery 146 basic human needs 162 battery 60 Beccaria 9, 17 behaviour, defined 14 Belson,W.A. 34,41,42,44,89, 140, 143, 171 Bentham 9, 169 Berkowitz, L. 172 Biron,L. 45,100,108,116 Bonnie 92 boredom 44 Braly, M. 173 Brannon, W.T. 175 brawls 61 Brown, C. 19,67,75,90,91 burglary 146 Caillois, R. 170, 171 calculation 18 Caplan, A. 100, 108, 110, 139, 140, 141 car theft 36-7 career 120 Carr,J. 37,48,67,68,71,73, 102, 103 catharsis hypothesis 76-84

190

Index

causes 4 Chambliss, W.J. 55 Chessman, C. 41, 165, 166, 173 choice 18 Cloward, R. 5, 6, 95, 96, 99, 100, 104, 109, 137, 163,174 Clyde 92 Cocteau, J. 39 Cohen, A.K. 5, 6, 128, 176 Conklin, J.E. 9 conséquences 17 contempt for work 122 control 4 control theory of delinquency 5, 8 Cottle,T.J. 127 covetousness 53-4, 161; defined 53 Crozier, M. 12, 13, 19,21, 101 cruelty 87-9, 162; defined 87 cultural deviance 6, 7 culture 7 daring 47 Debuyst, C. 123 decision 12 defence 162; defined 61 defensive aggression 59-69 DeGreeff, E. 70,80,82,128 delinquency, defined 11,105 delinquent friends 137-9 delinquent gangs 91 delinquent peers 164-5 delinquent who fails 131 Delinquents who succeed 131-3 determinism 156, 157 differential anticipation 13,14

differential association 140 differential learning 14 domination 85-92, 162; defined 85 Eckhoff,T. 12 economists 18 Edwards, P. 157 Ehrlich, I. 9 Elliott, O.S. 115 Empey, L.T. 6 evaluation 19 excitement 36, 39, 161; defined 36 expediency 51-2, 161; defined 51 failure at school 106 Farrington, O.P. 34, 46, 47, 50, 111,116,118,141 Ferracuti, F. 68 Fisher, D. 86,92, 131, 133, 165, 178 flight 65 Forster, B. 9 Fraisse, P. 126, 128 Frechette, M. 36,51,54,57,60, 135,138 freedom 155, 160; and determinism in goal planning 157-9; and determinism in the face of opportunity 159-60 Friedberg, E. 19,21,101 friends and successful delinquency 148-51 Fromm, E. 39, 66, 87, 172 function 4

191

Index

gangs 138 Glaser, D. 9, 13, 14 Glueck, S. and E. 108, 109, 116, 138 goal 4, 16, 18,21,25, 158, 161, 163; defined 25 goals and results 30 goals of the offence 25-32 goals studies criticized 28 goals types 31 Goethe 49 Goffman, E. 12 gratuitous violence 38

influence of delinquent companions 140 information 21 instigation 143 intensity 35 interest in schooling 108-10 Jesness, C.F. 178 job instability 117 Jodoin, C. 110, 118, 145 Joey 86,92,131,132,133,165,178 joyride 36 Karpis, A. 178 Kinberg, O. 28, 29, 127, 140, 177 King, H. 55 Klinberg, S.L. 127 Kornhauser, R.R. 6, 7

happiness 165 Hebb, D.O. 43, 44, 45 hedonistic concept of man 17 Henry, M. 28, 62, 63, 72, 73, 80, 89 Hindelang, M.J. 97, 98, 175 Hirschi, T. 6, 8, 97, 98, 99, 100, 108, 175 Hitler, A. 171 Hobbes 169 hold of the present 126-8 hold-up 85 Homans, G.C. 169-70 homicides 60 hoodlum 87 Hospers, V. 157 human nature 66 hydraulic model 76-8

Laborde, M. 40, 56, 86, 120, 122 Laurent, G. 28, 62, 63, 72, 73, 80, 89 LeBlanc, M. 36, 51, 54, 57, 60, 97, 138 legitimate means 6 Letkemann, P. 86, 132, 147 limited rationality 12, 13, 18 Linn, E. 36, 177, 178 Lombroso, C. 29, 175, 176 looting 56 Lorenz, K. 4, 76, 83, 89 lower class delinquents 6

imitation 143 immediacy 35 immediate satisfaction 128

Mailloux,N. 125, 155,158 maladjustment in school and delinquency 114-15

192

Index

March, J.G. 12, 13 Martin, J.B. 109, 111, 175 Megargee, E.I. 81,173 Merton, R.K. 5, 109 Mesrine,J. 35,123, 178 Michard, H. 38, 45, 54, 58, 88 Montesquieu 169 moonlighting 54-5, 161; defined 54 motivation 158 Mucchielli, R. 36,49,127 mugger 135, 146 murder 39, 63, 64, 79, 86; and vengeance 73; multiple 80 Nuttin,J. 125-6,130 objectives 19 Ohlin, L. 5, 6, 95, 96, 99, 100, 104, 109, 137, 163, 174 opportunities 151, 159, 160, 163; and goals 101-4; criminal 137 opportunity, defined 100 opportunity theory 95-105 overcontrolled personalities 81 Pascal, B. 43 patricides 61-2, 63 Patterson, G.R. 9 pay-off 4 peers of delinquents 137-51 Peyrefitte, A. 18,59 play 39-42, 161; defined 39 pleasure 34 positivists 15 possession 52, 161

power 85-7, 162 presentism 126-37, 160, 164; and interpersonal relationship 134-6; defined 126; in delinquency 130-4; origins of 129-30 prestige 89-92, 150, 162; defined 89 prisons 148 purpose 26; of the crime 25 rape 88 rational behaviour 13 rational man 10, 20 recidivism 148 reciprocal contagion 142-4; defined 142 restlessness 46 results 16 Richards, P. 9 risk 35, 90 robbery 40, 86 Robin Hood 92 Roumajon, Y. 136 Rousseau, J.J. 85, 169 sadism 87 Samenov, S. 47, 90, 141, 174, 177 school: and delinquency 106-15; impact of 112-14; problems and family 110-12 Sellin,T. 7 Selosse, J. 38, 45, 54, 58, 88,165 sensory deprivation 44 sexual relationship 46 Shaw, C.R. 51 shoplifting 41,54, 145

193

Index

Short, J.F.Jr 41,91 Simon, H.A. 12, 13 Sipes, R.G. 77-8 social classes and delinquency 96-100 social status 96 sociology of organizations 12 spree 55-6, 57, 161; defined 55 Stark, R. 99 Storr, A. 83, 87, 88 strain theory 5, 6; critics of 6 strategic analysis 10, 12, 13, 14,21 Strodtbeck, F.L. 41,91 subcultural norms 7 subculture 7 Sutherland, E. 7, 28, 29, 140 Sutton,W. 36,177, 178 Tarde, G. 177 technical apprenticeship 144-8; defined 142 theft 50-8, 90 theories of social deviance 7 Thomas, W.I. 34 Thorndike 169 Thrasher, F. 34, 173 Tocqueville, A. de 156

Trent, B. 178 troublesome 47 unhappiness 166-7 unruly behaviour in school 107 use 161; defined 53 utilitarian motive 50 vandalism 37 Vaucresson 33, 34, 37, 50, 60 vengeance 70-5, 162; and retributive justice 70; defined 70; functions of 74-5 victimless crimes 133 Villars,G. 111,116,117,118,129 Voss, H.L. 115 Weis, J.G. 97, 98 West, D.J. 34, 46, 47, 48, 50, 111, 116,118, 141 Willwerth,J. 56,121, 135 Wilson, E.O. 66 Wilson, J.Q. 9 Wolfgang, M.E. 68 work 121 ; and delinquency 116-24 Yochelson, S. 47, 90,141,174,177