Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory [1 ed.] 1412959187, 9781412959186

Citation preview

Editorial Board Editors Francis T. Cullen University of Cincinnati Pamela Wilcox University of Cincinnati

Managing Editor Kristin Swartz University of Cincinnati

Editorial Board Robert Agnew Emory University

Jody Miller Rutgers University

Mark Colvin Kent State University

Daniel S. Nagin Carnegie Mellon University

David P. Farrington Cambridge University

Alex R. Piquero Florida State University

Copyright © 2010 by SAGE Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of criminological theory / edited by Francis T. Cullen, Pamela Wilcox. v. cm. – (A SAGE reference publication) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4129-5918-6 (cloth) 1. Criminology–Encyclopedias. I. Cullen, Francis T. II. Wilcox, Pamela, 1968– HV6017.E527 2010 364.01—dc22 2010011183 This book is printed on acid-free paper. 10   11   12   13   14   10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1 Publisher: Acquisitions Editor: Editorial Assistant: Developmental Editor: Reference Systems Manager: Reference Systems Coordinator: Production Editor: Typesetter: Proofreaders: Indexer: Cover Designer: Marketing Manager:

Rolf A. Janke Jim Brace-Thompson Michele Thompson Carole Maurer Leticia M. Gutierrez Laura Notton Tracy Buyan C&M Digitals (P) Ltd. Annie Lubinsky, Rae-Ann Goodwin David Luljak Bryan Fishman Amberlyn McKay

Contents Volume 1 List of Entries   vii Reader’s Guide   xiii About the Editors   xix Contributors   xxii Introduction   xxix Criminological Time Line: The Top 25 Theoretical Contributions   xli Entries

A B C D E F

G H I J K L

1 67 131 257 281 313

349 413 465 491 497 535

Volume 2 List of Entries   vii Entries

M N O P Q R

571 655 675 681 749 765

S 799 T 935 V 977 W 989 X 1035 Y 1039

Annotated Further Readings   1043 Index   1133

List of Entries A

Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect Brain Abnormalities and Crime Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control

Abolitionism Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending Alcohol and Violence Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime Altruistic Fear Anarchist Criminology Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A Personal, Interpersonal, and Community-Reinforcement (PIC-R) Perspective on Criminal Conduct Anomie and White-Collar Crime Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence

C

Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang Capitalism and White-Collar Crime Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime Chambliss, William J.: The Saints and the Roughnecks Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention Clinard, Marshall B.: The Black Market Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity Cognitive Theories of Crime Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control

B

Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum, and Ross L. Matsueda: Gender and Reflected Appraisals Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: Moral Poverty Theory Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School Bernard, Thomas J., and Jeffrey B. Snipes: Variable-Centered Approach Blau, Judith R., and Peter M. Blau: Inequality and Crime vii

viii

List of Entries

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory Collective Security/Fear and Loathing Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency Convict Criminology Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime Crime Hot Spots Criminal Career Paradigm Croall, Hazel: Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime Cultural Criminology Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime

D

Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide

E

Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle Economic Theory and Crime

Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory England, Ralph W.: A Theory of Middle-Class Delinquency Environmental Toxins Theory Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality

F

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman Freudian Theory

G

Gangs and the Underclass Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention General Deterrence Theory Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency Goffman, Erving: Asylums Gordon, David M.: Political Economy and Crime Goring, Charles: The English Convict Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime Grounded Theory

List of Entries

H

Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory Hagan, John, and Holly Foster: Stress and Gendered Pathways to Delinquency Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter Haynie, Dana L.: Contexts of Risk Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency

I

Incarceration and Recidivism Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime Inequality and Crime Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory

J

Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

K

Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape

ix

Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime Krohn, Marvin D.: Networks and Crime Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

L

Lafree, Gary D.: Legitimacy and Crime Lafree, Gary D., and Christopher Birkbeck: Situational Analysis of Crime Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior Left Realism Criminology Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear Life-Course Interdependence Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence

M

Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency Matza, David: Becoming Deviant Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing McCarthy, Bill, and John Hagan: Danger and Deterrence McCorkel, Jill: Gender and Embodied Surveillance Media Violence Effects Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory Mental Illness and Crime Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

x

List of Entries

Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio

N

Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence Negotiated Coexistence Neurology and Crime Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory Nutrition and Crime Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency

O

Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, Jerald G. Bachman, Patrick M. O’Malley, and Lloyd D. Johnston: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior

P

Parmelee, Maurice Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime Peacemaking Criminology Peers and Delinquency Perceptual Deterrence Perceptually Contemporaneous Offenses Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The Phrenology Physical Environment and Crime Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect

Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal Postmodern Theory Prenatal Influences and Crime Prison Insurgency Theory Psychophysiology and Crime

Q

Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

R

Racial Threat and Social Control Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder Rape Myths and Violence Against Women Rational Choice and White-Collar Crime Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape

S

Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: AgeGraded Theory of Informal Social Control Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture Schizophrenia and Crime Schur, Edwin M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory

List of Entries

Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology Southern Subculture of Violence Theory Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence Stinchcombe, Arthur L.: Rebellion in a High School Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization Systemic Model of Social Disorganization

T

Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology Thio, Alex: Relative Deprivation and Deviance Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl Thornberry, Terence P.: Interactional Theory Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang

xi

Tittle, Charles R.: Control Balance Theory Tittle, Charles R., David A. Ward, and Harold G. Grasmick: The Capacity and Desire for Self-Control Toby, Jackson: Stake in Conformity Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison Turk, Austin T.: The Criminalization Process Turner, Ralph H.: Deviant Roles and the Social Construction of Behavior Tyler, Tom R.: Sanctions and Procedural Justice Theory

V

Vaughan, Diane: The Normalization of Deviance Vigil, James Diego: Multiple Marginality Theory Vila, Brian J., Lawrence E. Cohen, and Richard S. Machalek: Evolutionary Expropriative Theory Vold, George B.: Group Conflict Theory

W

Walters, Glenn D.: Lifestyle Theory Wells, Edward L., and Joseph H. Rankin: Direct Controls and Delinquency Whyte, William Foote: Street Corner Society Widom, Cathy Spatz: The Cycle of Violence Wikström, Per-Olof H.: Situational Action Theory Wilcox, Pamela, Kenneth C. Land, and Scott A. Hunt: Multicontextual Opportunity Theory Williams, Kirk R., and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and Non-Legal Sanctions Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

X

XYY Aggression Theory

Y

Yochelson, Samuel, and Stanton E. Samenow: The Criminal Personality

Reader’s Guide The Reader’s Guide organizes the Encyclopedia of Criminology’s entries into 21 schools of thought. The goal is to provide a listing that is similar to the Table of Contents found in a textbook on theories of crime. In turn, readers can use the Reader’s Guide to gain a mastery of any one theoretical school or to develop a comprehensive understanding of the development and substantive details of criminological theory as a field of study. For ambitious readers seeking to use the Encyclopedia of Criminology as a textbook, let us furnish some guidance as to how the topics are arranged and might be read most effectively. Readers also should consult the Introduction to the encyclopedia, which includes a brief history of the evolution of criminological theory, and the Criminological Time Line, which highlights key turning points in the field’s development. Thus, Topics 1 and 2 contain entries on the two schools of thought—the Classical and Positivist—that laid the foundation for the origins of modern criminology. Topic 3 reviews early American contributions to criminology, most of which explored how individual pathology was the chief source of criminal conduct. Topics 4 and 5 continue the focus on how individual differences—whether biological or psychological— explain why some people but not others violate the law. Many previous attempts to link pathological traits to crime were rooted more in ideology than in science and had disquieting policy implications. More recent scholarship, however, is based on advanced science (e.g., measures of brains and DNA) and promises to move criminology into exciting areas of inquiry. Topics 6, 7, 8, and 9 review schools of thought that composed the core of criminology in the 20th century. These perspectives rejected simplistic individual trait theories and instead showed how social conditions shape both why some individuals but not others engage in crime and why some neighborhoods but not others have high crime rates (see also Topic 15). These perspectives have become known as social disorganization theory, differential association theory, anomie/strain theory, and control theory. They were authored by the giants in the field, including Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, Edwin H. Sutherland, Robert K. Merton, and Travis Hirschi. They also would eventually form the basis of most attempts to build integrated theories of crime (see Topic 17). In the 1970s and 1980s, criminologists developed fresh ways of thinking about crime. Reflecting the turmoil of the times, some of these theories emphasized how earlier works had ignored how crime is created by the state’s misuse of its powers, including the criminal justice system, and by persistent and profound inequality in American society. These perspectives were found in labeling and sanctioning theories (Topics 10 and 11), conflict theories (Topic 12), and feminist theories (Topic 13). Another perspective that emerged criticized traditional explanations for focusing only on why individuals are motivated to offend. By contrast, a new and alternative view, expressed most notably in routine activity theory, asserted that crime was a product not only of the supply of motivated offenders but also of criminal opportunities (Topic 14). Finally, in the 1990s and beyond, works by Terrie Moffitt and by Robert Sampson and John Laub prompted scholars to understand that events from childhood to adulthood could affect the onset of, persistence in, and desistance from a criminal career. Their writings thus helped to create the study of life-course theories of crime, a paradigm that will shape criminological scholarship into the foreseeable future (Topic 16). xiii

xiv

Reader’s Guide

Finally, the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory ends with entries on special topics within criminology. These include white-collar and corporate crime (Topic 18), gangs (Topic 19), prison behavior and insurgency (Topic 20), and fear and concern about crime (Topic 21). We hope that this introduction to the Reader’s Guide serves as an informative road map as readers use this encyclopedia to travel across time and across schools of criminological thought in search of a greater understanding of the origins of criminal behavior.

1. The Classical School of Criminology Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School

2. The Positivist School of Criminology Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School Goring, Charles: The English Convict Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man Phrenology Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques

3. Early American Theories of Crime Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism Parmelee, Maurice Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency

4. B  iological and Biosocial Theories of Crime Alcohol and Violence Brain Abnormalities and Crime Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory Environmental Toxins Theory Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory

Neurology and Crime Nutrition and Crime Prenatal Influences and Crime Psychophysiology and Crime Schizophrenia and Crime Vila, Brian J., Lawrence E. Cohen, and Richard S. Machalek: Evolutionary Expropriative Theory Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature XYY Aggression Theory

5. Psychological Theories of Crime Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A Personal, Interpersonal, and Community-Reinforcement (PIC-R) Perspective on Criminal Conduct Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory Cognitive Theories of Crime Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style Freudian Theory Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model Media Violence Effects Mental Illness and Crime Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder Walters, Glenn D.: Lifestyle Theory Yochelson, Samuel, and Stanton E. Samenow: The Criminal Personality

6. The Chicago School of Criminology Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory

Reader’s Guide

Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang Turner, Ralph H.: Deviant Roles and the Social Construction of Behavior Whyte, William Foote: Street Corner Society

7. Cultural and Learning Theories of Crime Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: Moral Poverty Theory Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency Peers and Delinquency Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime Southern Subculture of Violence Theory Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory

8. A  nomie and Strain Theories of Crime and Deviance Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World

xv

Stinchcombe, Arthur L.: Rebellion in a High School Thio, Alex: Relative Deprivation and Deviance

9. Control Theories of Crime Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory Reiss, Albert J., Jr: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization Tittle, Charles R., David A. Ward, and Harold G. Grasmick.: The Capacity and Desire for Self-Control Toby, Jackson: Stake in Conformity Wells, Edward L., and Joseph H. Rankin: Direct Controls and Delinquency

10. L  abeling and Interactionist Theories of Crime Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers Chambliss, William J.: The Saints and the Roughnecks Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans Grounded Theory Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime Lafree, Gary D., and Christopher Birkbeck: Situational Analysis of Crime Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency Matza, David: Becoming Deviant Schur, Edwin M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems

xvi

Reader’s Guide

Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil

11. Theories of the Criminal Sanction Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention General Deterrence Theory Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory Incarceration and Recidivism McCarthy, Bill, and John Hagan: Danger and Deterrence Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence Perceptual Deterrence Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory Tyler, Tom R.: Sanctions and Procedural Justice Theory Williams, Kirk R., and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and Non-Legal Sanctions

12. C  onflict, Radical, and Critical Theories of Crime Abolitionism Anarchist Criminology Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency Convict Criminology Cultural Criminology Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime Gordon, David M.: Political Economy and Crime Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime Left Realism Criminology Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime Peacemaking Criminology

Postmodern Theory Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology Turk, Austin T.: The Criminalization Process Vold, George B.: Group Conflict Theory

13. F  eminist and Gender-Specific Theories of Crime Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum, and Ross L. Matsueda: Gender and Reflected Appraisals Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman Hagan, John, and Holly Foster: Stress and Gendered Pathways to Delinquency Haynie, Dana L.: Contexts of Risk Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender Rape Myths and Violence Against Women Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape

Reader’s Guide

Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl Widom, Cathy Spatz: The Cycle of Violence

14. C  hoice and Opportunity Theories of Crime Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory Crime Hot Spots Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle Economic Theory and Crime Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, Jerald G. Bachman, Patrick M. O’Malley, Lloyd D. Johnston: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior Physical Environment and Crime Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places

xvii

Wikström, Per-Olof H.: Situational Action Theory Wilcox, Pamela, Kenneth C. Land, and Scott A. Hunt: Multicontextual Opportunity Theory Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

15. M  acro-Level/Community Theories of Crime Blau, Judith R., and Peter M. Blau: Inequality and Crime Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control Inequality and Crime Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime Negotiated Coexistence Racial Threat and Social Control Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline Systemic Model of Social Disorganization Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

16. L  ife-Course and Developmental Theories of Crime Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model Criminal Career Paradigm Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior Life-Course Interdependence Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: AgeGraded Theory of Informal Social Control

xviii

Reader’s Guide

17. Integrated Theories of Crime Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory Bernard, Thomas J., and Jeffrey B. Snipes: Variable-Centered Approach Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency England, Ralph W.: A Theory of Middle-Class Delinquency Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime Krohn, Marvin D.: Networks and Crime Lafree, Gary D.: Legitimacy and Crime Thornberry, Terence P.: Interactional Theory Tittle, Charles R.: Control Balance Theory

18. T  heories of White-Collar and Corporate Crime Anomie and White-Collar Crime Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending Capitalism and White-Collar Crime Clinard, Marshall B.: The Black Market Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and WhiteCollar Crime Croall, Hazel: Individual Differences and WhiteCollar Crime Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal Rational Choice and White-Collar Crime

Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime Vaughan, Diane: The Normalization of Deviance

19. Contemporary Gang Theories Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect Gangs and the Underclass Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes Vigil, James Diego: Multiple Marginality Theory

20. T  heories of Prison Behavior and Insurgency Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison Goffman, Erving: Asylums Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment McCorkel, Jill: Gender and Embodied Surveillance Prison Insurgency Theory Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison

21. T  heories of Fear and Concern About Crime Altruistic Fear Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear Collective Security/Fear and Loathing Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear Perceptually Contemporaneous Offenses Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk

About the Editors General Editors

ASC Edwin H. Sutherland Award, and with the ACJS Bruce Smith Award and Founder’s Award.

Francis T. Cullen is Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, where he also holds a joint appointment in Sociology. He received his B.A. (1972) in psychology from Bridgewater State College and his M.A. (1974) and Ph.D. (1979) in sociology and education from Columbia University. He has published more than 250 works in the areas of crime and deviance theory, corrections, public opinion, white-collar crime, and sexual victimization. He is author of Rethinking Crime and Deviance Theory: The Emergence of a Structuring Tradition (1984) and is co-author of Reaffirming Rehabilitation (1982), Corporate Crime Under Attack: The Ford Pinto Case and Beyond (1987, 2006), Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences (1989, 1995, 2002, 2007, and 2011), Criminology (1992), Combating Corporate Crime: Local Prosecutors at Work (1998), and Unsafe in the Ivory Tower: The Sexual Victimization of College Women (2010). He also has co-edited Contemporary Criminolog­ical Theory (1994), Offender Rehabilitation: Effective Correctional Intervention (1997), Crim­inological Theory: Past to Present—Essential Readings (1999, 2003, 2006, 2011), Taking Stock: The Status of Criminological Theory (2006), and the Origins of American Criminology (2009). Cullen is Past President of the American Society of Criminology and of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Previously, he served as editor of Justice Quarterly of the Journal of Crime and Justice. He has been honored as a Fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and of the American Society of Crim­ inology, as the Outstanding Educator by the Ohio Council of Criminal Justice Educators, with the

Pamela Wilcox is Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. She received her B.A. (1990) in sociology from Miami University (OH) and her M.A. (1992) and Ph.D. (1994) in sociology from Duke University. She has published numerous works aimed at developing and testing theories of crime, victimization, and crime prevention. For instance, she is co-author of Criminal Circumstance: A Dynamic, Multicontextual Criminal Opportunity Theory (2003). Her articles have appeared in a number of sociological, criminological, and multidisciplinary journals, including Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Crime and Delinquency, Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociological Quarterly, and Violence and Victims. She has also been co-investigator on several federally funded grants aimed at collecting longitudinal and contextual data on such things as school-based offending and victimization, student fear of crime and perceptions of safety, and barrelated violence. Wilcox serves on editorial boards for the top scholarly journals in the areas of criminology and criminal justice, including Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Victims and Offenders. She previously served as Deputy Editor of Justice Quarterly.

Managing Editor Kristin Swartz is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of

xix

xx

About the Editors

Cincinnati. She received her B.A. (2006) in criminal justice from Indiana University and her M.A. (2007) in criminal justice from University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include communities and crime—specifically, social disorganization theory and the implications of U.S. incarceration policies for high-crime communities. She also has co-authored work in the areas of effective correctional intervention, victimization, and fear of crime.

Editorial Board Robert Agnew is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Sociology at Emory University. He has published five books and approximately 80 articles on the causes of crime and delinquency, with his most recent books being Juvenile Delinquency: Causes and Control (2009), Why Do They Do It? A General Theory of Crime and Delinquency (2005), Pressured Into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory (2006), and Criminological Theory: Past to Present (co-edited with Francis Cullen, 2011). He is best known for his development of general strain theory, one of the leading theories of crime and delinquency. He has served as Associate Editor of Theoretical Criminology and on the editorial boards of Criminology, Social Forces, and other journals. He has been active in many professional organizations and groups dealing with crime and delinquency. Agnew is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. Mark Colvin is Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Kent State University and a research fellow with the Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado in 1985, with a concentration in criminology. His publications investigate the links between coercion, social support and crime. He has published three books: The Penitentiary in Crisis (1992), Penitentiaries, Reformatories and Chain Gangs (1997), and Crime and Coercion (2000). He has also published articles in the journals Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, American Journal of Sociology, Crime and Delinquency, Social Problems, Sociological Quarterly, International Criminal Justice Review, and The Prison Journal. He received the

Outstanding Book Award for 2002 from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and was co-winner of the Outstanding Scholar Award for 2001 from the Crime and Delinquency Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He regularly teaches courses in criminological theory, criminal violence, punishment and corrections, and justice institutions. He is currently involved in researching the effects of coercion and social support while in prison on the psychological wellbeing and recidivism of recently released prisoners. Prior to his academic career, Colvin had worked in prisons and parole departments, and was principal researcher for the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office in its investigation of the 1980 New Mexico prison riot. David P. Farrington is Professor of Psychological Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh. He has received B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from Cambridge University, an honorary degree of Sc.D. from Trinity College, University of Dublin. His major research interest is in developmental criminology, and he is Director of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development and Co-­ Investigator of the Pittsburgh Youth Study. in addition to 490 published journal articles and book chapters on criminological and psychological topics, he has published 70 books, monographs, and government publications, one of which (Understanding and Controlling Crime, 1986) won the prize for distinguished scholarship of the American Sociological Association Crim­ inology Section. He is also editor of Cambridge Studies in Criminology. Farrington is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Academy of Medical Sciences, of the British Psychological Society, and of the American Society of Criminology and is an Honorary Life Member of the British Society of Criminology and of the Division of Forensic Psychology of the British Psychological Society. He has been President of the American Society of Criminology, the European Association of Psychology and Law, the British Society of Criminology, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He has received the American Society of Criminology’s Sellin-Glueck Award and

About the Editors

Sutherland Award, the Joan McCord Award of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, the Beccaria Gold Medal of the Criminology Society of German-Speaking Countries, the Senior Prize of the British Psychological Society Division of Forensic Psychology, the U.S. Office of Juven­ile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Outstand­ ing Contributions Award, and the Hermann Mannheim Prize of the International Centre for Comparative Criminology. Jody Miller is Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Southern California in 1996. Specializing in feminist theory and qualitative research methods, her research focuses on gender, crime and victimization in the context of urban communities, the commercial sex industry, drug markets, and youth gangs. In addition to publishing numerous articles and book chapters, Miller is the author of One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender (2001) and of Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (2008)—a finalist for the 2008 C. Wright Mills Award. Daniel S. Nagin is Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics in the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. Since January 2006, he has served as the College’s Associate Dean of Faculty. Nagin is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the American Society for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2006 recipient of the American Society of Criminology’s Edwin H. Sutherland Award (for research contributions) and is a 1985 recipient of the Northeastern Association of Tax Administrators Award for Excellence in Tax Administration. In 2008, he was selected to be a University Professor. His research focuses on the evolution of criminal and antisocial behaviors over the life course, the deterrent effect of criminal and non-criminal penalties

xxi

on illegal behaviors, and the development of statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data. His work has appeared in such diverse outlets as the American Economic Review, American Sociological Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Journal of Sociology, Archives of General Psychiatry, Criminology, Child Development, Psychological Methodology, Law and Society Review, Crime and Justice Annual Review, Operations Research, and Stanford Law Review. He is also the author of Group-based Modeling of Development (Harvard University Press, 2005). Alex R. Piquero is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice, and Governance at Griffith University in Australia. A past Executive Counselor with the American Society of Criminology, he is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel Evaluating the National Institute of Justice and co-editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. He has published more than 175 peer-reviewed articles, has been ranked as the leading publisher in criminology/criminal justice journals between 1996–2000 and 2000–2004, and his work has been cited more than 2,000 times. His research interests include criminal careers, criminological theory, and quantitative research methods. In addition to publishing in the leading journals in criminology, psychology, sociology, and public health, he is co-author (with David P. Farrington and Alfred Blumstein) of Key Issues in Criminal Careers Research: New Analyses From the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. In addition to his membership on over a dozen editorial boards of journals in criminology and sociology, he is past recipient of the American Society of Criminology’s Young Scholar and E-Mail Mentor of the Year Award, as well as of the University of Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year Award.

Contributors Robert Agnew Emory University

Dawn Jeglum Bartusch Valparaiso University

Brittnie Aiello University of Massachusetts– Amherst

Eric P. Baumer Florida State University

Leanne Fiftal Alarid University of Texas–San Antonio Shahid Alvi University of Ontario Institute of Technology

Kevin M. Beaver Florida State University Chiara Beccalossi Centre for the History of European Discourses

Danielle Boisvert Pennsylvania State University– Harrisburg Jonathan Bolen Boise State University John Boman University of Florida Cathy Borck City University of New York– The Graduate Center

Catherine M. Arnold University of Cincinnati

Valerie Bell Loras College

Adam M. Bossler Georgia Southern University

Bruce A. Arrigo University of North Carolina– Charlotte

Michael L. Benson University of Cincinnati

Lisa Growette Bostaph Boise State University

Wim Bernasco Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement

Leana Bouffard Sam Houston State University

Elyshia D. Aseltine University of Texas–Austin Sarah Bacon Florida State University Heidi M. Baez City University of New York– The Graduate Center Laura A. Baker University of Southern California David E. Barlow Fayetteville State University Melissa Hickman Barlow Fayetteville State University Stephen W. Baron Queen’s University Shannon M. Barton-Bellessa Indiana State University

Heather Y. Bersot University of North Carolina– Charlotte Joel Best University of Delaware Meghna Bhat University of Illinois–Chicago Brenda Sims Blackwell Georgia State University Randy Blazak Portland State University Kristie R. Blevins University of North Carolina– Charlotte

xxii

Anthony A. Braga Harvard University Robert Brame University of North Carolina– Charlotte Kathryn A. Branch University of Tampa Timothy Brezina Georgia State University Sarah Britto Central Washington University Michael P. Brown Ball State University David Brownfield University of Toronto

Contributors

Chris Browning Ohio State University

Francis T. Cullen University of Cincinnati

Angela N. Estes University of Cincinnati

Sarah Browning North Dakota State University

Elliott Currie University of California, Irvine

Katie A. Farina University of Delaware

Rachel Brushett University of Cincinnati

Stephanie D’Auria University of California, Riverside

Ben Feldmeyer University of Tennessee

Kevin G. Buckler University of Texas– Brownsville

Mengyan Dai University of Baltimore

Hasan Büker Turkish National Police Academy Velmer S. Burton, Jr. University of Minnesota–Twin Cities Shawn D. Bushway University at Albany Liqun Cao University of Ontario Institute of Technology Andrew N. Carpenter Ellis University Gray Cavender Arizona State University Constance L. Chapple University of Oklahoma Ted Chiricos Florida State University Ji Yoon Chung University of Pennsylvania John K. Cochran University of South Florida Julie Kiernan Coon Roger Williams University Heith Copes University of Alabama– Birmingham Barbara J. Costello University of Rhode Island

Douglas J. Dallier Western Carolina University Scott H. Decker Arizona State University Walter S. DeKeseredy University of Ontario Institute of Technology Matt DeLisi Iowa State University Osman Dolu Turkish National Police Academy Patrick G. Donnelly University of Dayton Alexander Drayer University of Cincinnati Jessica R. Dunham University of Cincinnati John E. Eck University of Cincinnati Ronald Eckert University at Albany Arlen Egley, Jr. National Youth Gang Center Lori Elis Radford University Beth Ellefson University of Cincinnati Edna Erez University of Illinois at Chicago

xxiii

Jeff Ferrell Texas Christian University/ University of Kent Bonnie S. Fisher University of Cincinnati Jamie L. Flexon Florida International University Adrienne Freng University of Wyoming David O. Friedrichs University of Scranton Kevan D. Galyean University of Cincinnati Natasha M. Ganem Savannah College of Art & Design Shaun M. Gann University of Arkansas– Little Rock Yu Gao University of Pennsylvania Jacinta M. Gau California State University, San Bernardino Krista S. Gehring University of Houston– Downtown Gilbert Geis University of California, Irvine Saran Ghatak Keene State College Brooke Miller Gialopsos University of Cincinnati Chris L. Gibson University of Florida

xxiv

Contributors

Wayne Gillespie East Tennessee State University

Nathan Harris Australian National University

Cheryl Lero Jonson Northern Kentucky University

Colin H. Goff University of Winnipeg

Jennifer L. Hartman University of North Carolina– Charlotte

Fiona M. Kay Queen’s University

Jesse Goldstein City University of New York Wendi Elizabeth Goodlin University of Southern Mississippi Jennifer Gossett Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Justin A. Heinonen University of Cincinnati April Dawn Henning City University of New York– The Graduate Center Billy Henson University of Cincinnati

Richard G. Greenleaf Elmhurst College

John D. Hewitt Grand Valley State University

Elizabeth Griffiths Emory University

John R. Hipp University of California, Irvine

Paul Groarke St. Thomas University Elizabeth R. Groff Temple University Brittany L. Groot University of Cincinnati Gisli H. Gudjonsson Institute of Psychiatry–London Elaine Gunnison Seattle University Liena Gurevich Hofstra University John M. Hagedorn University of Illinois–Chicago Mark S. Hamm Indiana State University Jared M. Hanneman City University of New York– The Graduate Center Robert D. Hanser University of Louisiana– Monroe Erin Harbinson University of Cincinnati

Andy Hochstetler Iowa State University Michael J. Hogan Colorado State University Nancy Lynne Hogan Ferris State University Yu-Hsu (Gail) Hsiao American University Dana J. Hubbard Cleveland State University Kirsten Hutzell Villanova University Sung Joon Jang Baylor University G. Roger Jarjoura Indiana University, Indianapolis Kate Jenkins City University of New York– The Graduate Center

Kimberly Kempf-Leonard Southern Illinois University Stephanie L. Kent Cleveland State University Patrick Timothy Kinkade Texas Christian University David S. Kirk University of Texas–Austin Lloyd Klein City University of New York– Kingsborough Community College Spyridon Kodellas University of Cincinnati Mark Konty Eastern Kentucky University Ronald C. Kramer Western Michigan University Charis E. Kubrin George Washington University Tasha Kunzi Arizona State University Steven P. Lab Bowling Green State University Randy LaGrange University of North Carolina– Wilmington Karen F. Lahm Wright State University Jodi Lane University of Florida

Wesley G. Jennings University of Louisville

Matthew R. Lee Louisiana State University

Shayne Jones University of South Florida

Michael Levi Cardiff University

Contributors

J. Robert Lilly Northern Kentucky University

Michael O. Maume University of North Carolina– Wilmington

xxv

Greg Newbold University of Canterbury

David C. May Eastern Kentucky University

Fawn T. Ngo University of South Florida, Sarasota

Jill A. McCorkel Villanova University

D. Wayne Osgood Pennsylvania State University

Laura S. Logan Kansas State University

Arthur Evan McLuhan University of Waterloo

Graham C. Ousey College of William & Mary

Lori Brusman Lovins University of Cincinnati

Benjamin Meade University of South Carolina

Wilson R. Palacios University of South Florida

Jennifer L. Lux University of Cincinnati

Steven F. Messner University at Albany

Paul-Philippe Pare University of Western Ontario

Michael J. Lynch University of South Florida

Doug Meyer City University of New York– The Graduate Center

Nikos Passas Northeastern Unviersity

Travis W. Linnemann Kansas State University Shelley Johnson Listwan University of North Carolina– Charlotte

Jeff Maahs University of Minnesota– Duluth Sean Maddan University of Tampa Tamara D. Madensen University of Nevada, Las Vegas Matthew D. Makarios University of Wisconsin– Parkside Aili E. Malm California State University, Long Beach Ineke Haen Marshall Northeastern University

Elizabeth A. Miller City University of New York– The Graduate Center J. Mitchell Miller University of Texas– San Antonio

Raymond Paternoster University of Maryland Francesca Patuelli University of Bologna Allison Ann Payne Villanova University

Jody Miller Rutgers University

Troy Payne University of Alaska–Anchorage

Stacy C. Moak University of Arkansas– Little Rock

Melissa Peskin University of Pennsylvania

Melissa M. Moon Northern Kentucky University

Michael Patrick Phelan Pikeville College Justin Pickett Florida State University

Kristan A. Moore University of Cincinnati

Alex R. Piquero Florida State University

Christopher W. Mullins Southern Illinois University

Nicole Leeper Piquero Florida State University

Shadd Maruna Queen’s University Belfast

Elizabeth Ehrhardt Mustaine University of Central Florida

William C. Plouffe, Jr. Kutztown University

Amanda Matravers American University

Andrew J. Myer Viterbo University

Greg Pogarsky University at Albany

Kristy N. Matsuda University of Missouri–St. Louis

Daniel S. Nagin Carnegie Mellon University

Henry N. Pontell University of California, Irvine

Ross L. Matsueda University of Washington

Mirlinda Ndrecka University of Cincinnati

Travis C. Pratt Arizona State University

Leslie A. Martino-Velez City University of New York– The Graduate Center

xxvi

Contributors

William Alex Pridemore Indiana University

Kip Schlegel Indiana University

Amy Stichman North Dakota State University

David C. Pyrooz Arizona State University

Rebecca Schnupp Slippery Rock University

Paul B. Stretesky University of Colorado–Denver

Neil Quisenberry McKendree University

Robert A. Schug University of Southern California

Christopher J. Sullivan University of Cincinnati

Adrian Raine University of Pennsylvania Ryan Randa Northern Colorado University Christine E. Rasche University of North Florida Cesar J. Rebellon University of New Hampshire Robert M. Regoli University of Colorado

Jennifer Schwartz Washington State University Christine S. Sellers University of South Florida Neal Shover University of Tennessee Simon I. Singer Northeastern University

Jody L. Sundt Portland State University Kristin Swartz University of Cincinnati William Sweet St. Francis Xavier University Gary Sweeten Arizona State University Jennifer Tanner University of Cincinnati

Jennifer Reingle University of Florida

James W. Skinner City University of New York

Bradford W. Reyns Southern Utah University

Karen A. Snedker Seattle Pacific University

Stephen C. Richards University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

Jeffrey Brian Snipes San Francisco State University

Terrance J. Taylor University of Missouri– St. Louis

Jamie A. Snyder University of Cincinnati

Richard A. Tewksbury University of Louisville

William H. Sousa University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Amy B. Thistlethwaite Northern Kentucky University

Michael J. Rosenberg University of Cincinnati Jeffrey Ian Ross University of Baltimore Aaron Roussell University of California, Irvine Emily J. Salisbury Portland State University Beth A. Sanders Texas State University Shannon A. Santana University of North Carolina– Wilmington Robert A. Sarver III University of South Carolina Upstate Heidi Scherer University of Cincinnati

Georgia V. Spiropoulos California State University, Fullerton Steven Stack Wayne State University William A. Stadler University of Missouri– Kansas City Mark C. Stafford Texas State University Darrell Steffensmeier Pennsylvania State University Benjamin Steiner University of South Carolina

Ralph B. Taylor Temple University

Bobbie Ticknor University of Cincinnati Sherry Tillinghast University of Cincinnati Marie Skubak Tillyer University of Texas– San Antonio Rob Tillyer University of Texas– San Antonio Taylor Trimboli University of Cincinnati Catherine Tuvblad University of Southern California

Contributors

xxvii

Jeffrey Ulmer Pennsylvania State University

Mark Warr University of Texas–Austin

Steve Wilson University of Texas–Brownsville

James D. Unnever University of South Florida, Sarasota

Adam M. Watkins Bowling Green State University

L. Thomas Winfree, Jr. New Mexico State University

Taryn N. Valpey University of Cincinnati

Kelly Welch Villanova University

John Wooldredge University of Cincinnati

Edward L. Wells Illinois State University

John F. Wozniak Western Illinois University

Donald West Cambridge University

Kevin H. Wozniak American University

Richard F. Wetzell German Historical Institute

Bradley R. E. Wright University of Connecticut

Alana Van Gundy-Yoder Miami University Patricia Van Voorhis University of Cincinnati Jamie Vaske Western Carolina University Michael G. Vaughn Saint Louis University Brenda Vose University of North Florida Anthony Walsh Boise State University Barbara D. Warner Georgia State University

Michele L. Whitehead University of Texas–Arlington Per-Olof H. Wikström Cambridge University Susan Will John Jay College of Criminal Justice Kirk Williams University of California, Riverside

Emily M. Wright University of South Carolina Yaling Yang University of California, Los Angeles Georgia Zara University of Turin Gregory M. Zimmerman University at Albany

Introduction What causes crime? This seemingly simple question is dauntingly complex and, not surprisingly, has yielded answers so diverse and numerous as to fill two volumes of the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory. The richness in the attempts to explain the origins of crime is, to a large extent, a direct function of the intricate nature of human beings. Human conduct reflects the components of who we are—our bodies, our minds, and our social worlds. Unraveling each of these domains—the biology, psychology, and sociology of crime—reveals a myriad of potential sources of criminality. Discerning which factors are more or less important and then detailing how they interact with one another requires much research and creative thought. But even more complexity than this is involved in the quest to illuminate crime’s causes. Thus, we must trace how criminality might vary over the life course, and how factors at one stage in life affect behavior at a later stage. We must be aware that the circumstances that may predispose a person to offend do not determine if the individual will commit a crime in any particular situation; understanding the background of crime is not the same as understanding its foreground. We now also know that crime not merely is an offender’s choice but is affected by how potential victims behave— whether they unwittingly make themselves attractive targets or take precautions that eliminate perpetrators’ opportunities to victimize them. We must comprehend further the effects on unlawful behavior of the criminal justice system we have constructed—one that, on any given day, locks up about 2.4 million Americans or 1 in 100 of us. And there is the matter of levels of analysis. Explaining why some but not other individuals engage in criminal conduct is not the same as explaining why some but not other areas—whether

neighborhoods or nations—have higher or lower crime rates. The complexity of the solutions proposed for the crime-causation puzzle is complicated still further by two considerations. First, similar to other social science disciplines, criminology has divided itself into “schools of thought.” But theorizing about crime is dynamic, not static. Thus, within these schools, classic works defining the theoretical tradition initially appear and establish a new way of thinking about crime. This is not the end of the story, however. After a period of time, subsequent writings are forthcoming that elaborate different features of the classic statement. These latter contributions may be diverse and then may themselves be elucidated—adding even more theoretical complexity. An understanding of theoretical criminology thus involves tracing the development of schools of thought, in all their twists and turns, from past to present. Second, how we think about crime is shaped not only by science or “what the data say” but also by our social experiences. Depending on the era in which we live and what we have experienced during that era, different ideas will or will not resonate with us—that is, they will strike us sensible or as “obviously wrong.” This insight—that social circumstances influence the production and acceptance of scholarly ideas—is the central thesis of the sociology of science. At any given time, therefore, the theories that are created and embraced may be due not only to the inherent logic of science but also to the social and political beliefs that scholars import into their work. Theoretical complexity is thus an inevitable feature of criminology, which is a very human enterprise in the sense that we are endeavoring to unlock the mysteries of our own behavior. The phenomenon of crime is intricate, ideas must be

xxix

xxx

Introduction

created and be elaborated over time, and those who study crime are themselves affected by their own humanness. Rather than decry this intractable fact, we should celebrate it. The wonder of criminology is that we have compiled rich answers to the crime-causation question. Some of these theoretical solutions have been foolish, if not dangerous; others have proven likely true; and still others await definitive evaluation. In any event, there is much to learn and, for those enticed by theoretical challenges, the opportunity exists to join in the search for the causes of crime. In this context, the Encyclopedia of Criminologi­ cal Theory fills a pressing need in the field of criminology to compile, under the cover of one book (albeit two volumes), a comprehensive compendium of theories of crime. Our project has a historical focus, hoping to preserve insights on crime’s origins that, as time progresses, are becoming increasingly distant and might be easily forgotten. Many of these perspectives might strike us today as biased and unsophisticated, but they were often products of the best minds of a past era. Some had real-world consequences in that they influenced crime control policy; many provided a basis for later ideas to come. Our project also has a contemporary focus. It reviews the latest thinking about crime found in today’s diverse theoretical schools. This introduction serves two purposes. Our first task is to provide guidance on how best to use the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory. We turn to this next. Our second task, which we take up later, is to provide a brief overview of the development of criminological theory. Here, we engage in story telling, alerting curious readers to the key theoretical turning points in the history of the discipline. This story hopefully provides a context for understanding the place of any given theorist that engages a reader’s interest.

How to Use the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory Similar to others in its genre, this Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory is arranged from A to Z. Accordingly, the simplest advice on how to use this book is to consult the List of Entries, find the topic of interest, and then turn to the page where the

entry on this topic begins. In short, one only has to “look it up.” This approach will be effective for readers who come to the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory on a mission to find information on single topic. But this encyclopedia is arranged to do more than this. It not only is a conduit for deepening specific knowledge on a given topic but also can be a textbook that provides a comprehensive overview of theoretical criminology. In this regard, three features of the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory can direct a reader’s effort to achieve a grounding in theories of crime. First, beyond the List of Entries, there is a second table of contents, which is called the Reader’s Guide. The guide divides the entries into schools of criminological thought—21 in all. These schools are theoretical traditions whose members are tied together by a shared fundamental view of the origins of crime. That said, theorists within any given school often differ from one another in specifics and, at times, in ways that boil up to the point of a family feud. In any event, readers will be able to grasp the diversity of criminological theorizing by reviewing the Reader’s Guide. Those who choose to read entries “school by school” will be rewarded with a systematic understanding of how views about crime differ both across and within theoretical traditions. Indeed, taking this journey will result in a wealth of knowledge that few within the field of criminology now possess. Second, we have developed a Criminological Time Line that presents the Top 25 Theoretical Contributions across the history of criminology. This time line is a way to understand the evolution of criminological theory. It seeks to accomplish this goal by highlighting 25 of the most significant contributions in the discipline. Of course, any effort to reduce a field to a small pool of works involves leaving much of value off the list. Still, this time line sensitizes readers to contributions that have had an inordinate impact on the discipline, often serving as turning points in scholars’ views on why crime occurs. For readers, it furnishes a strategy for reading a subset of the encyclopedia’s entries with the promise of gaining a special understanding of criminology’s development. In and of itself, the time line is like a pocketbook guide that can be consulted to know who major theorists are and the key theoretical insights they made.

Introduction

Third, in the remainder of this Introduction, we supply an overview of the development of criminological theory. This overview is brief and, given the diversity of theorizing, necessarily selective. Its main purpose is to show historical sequence in schools of thought. In particular, an effort is made to link shifts in ways of theorizing to shifts in society. As noted, criminologists are social creatures. Our understandings of the world are shaped not only by our minds and commitment to science but also by what we have personally and vicariously experienced. For example, if we have been exposed to the intricacies of living in an urban neighborhood wracked by poverty, disorganization, and firearm violence, there is the potential that we will be more receptive to theories of crime that emphasize social causation as opposed to individual pathology. In all, this brief history to follow is divided into five parts that bring readers on a journey that spans the origins of criminological theory to the fresh insights of contemporary scholars.

The Development of Criminological Theory As noted, this encyclopedia is arranged A to Z. This format marks virtually all encyclopedias not simply because of an adherence to tradition but also because this arrangement provides the easiest way for readers to find entries. But if there is a disadvantage to the format, it is that criminological theory did not develop in alphabetical order! Understanding the field’s evolution thus cannot be grasped from studying the List of Entries. Rather, it is essential to learn about the story of how criminology has moved from past to present. It is to this story that we now turn. The Origins of Criminology

Criminology—the study of crime—emerged largely as a by-product of the Enlightenment, an era that celebrated the use of reason to understand human affairs and to direct public policy. Two great traditions, one arising in the 1700s and one arising in the 1800s, established the foundation of modern criminology. These were the Classical School and the Positivist School. Cesare Beccaria is credited with the founding of the Classical School. In 1764, when just 26 years

xxxi

of age, Beccaria published On Crimes and Punish­ ments. This short tract, authored by this scholar from Milan, would have profound effects, sending reverberations across Europe and beyond. Bec­ caria’s focus was on legal reform. The criminal justice system of his day was wracked by injustice and inhumanity. Common practices included torture and coerced confessions, unfettered judicial discretion, favoritism in sentencing, and wildly cruel sanctions such as amputation, branding, whipping, and capital punishment for minor offenses. In opposition, Beccaria argued for criminal offenses and their penalties to be inscribed in the law, for equal justice, and for sanctions to be only severe enough to achieve deterrence. We take the rule of law for granted today, but this was not the case in the 1700s. In fact, Beccaria initially published On Crimes and Punishments anonymously because he feared retribution. He was challenging the power of monarchs and princes to use the criminal law without interference and as a means to protect their advantage. His reform also comprised an implicit critique of the church’s authority. For underlying the Classical School’s legal theory was the view that crime was, in essence, a rational choice governed by pains and pleasures. The law thus could be calibrated to serve as a rational tool to achieve deterrence; legal punishments simply had to be harsh and certain enough to outweigh the reward a crime might bring. The death penalty was seen as unnecessary in most instances, because it over-punished the offense—it imposed pains unneeded to deter the act and hence was unjust. These ideas called into question the church’s view that crime and sin were synonymous. It suggested that the control of crime was a secular rather than a sacred matter that would best be handled by fashioning a rational legal system. The Classical School would be advanced further by Jeremy Bentham, the English utilitarian philosopher who passed away in 1848. Similar to Beccaria, he voiced the view that human choice was regulated by pains and pleasures, and that laws achieved most utility when they were just harsh enough to deter wrongdoing. Again, his system embraced the Enlightenment in rejecting religious views of crime and in arguing for the rational administration of criminal justice. The Classical School, however, had a fatal flaw. Its proponents were moral philosophers or legal

xxxii

Introduction

theorists who were, as has been said, “armchair criminologists.” They focused on crime and its punishment—again, often in profound ways—but at the expense of having contact with and developing detailed knowledge of criminals. The Classical School, in fact, implicitly assumed that all humans made decisions the same way: self-interest based on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Thus, how individuals differed from one another was irrelevant to the choice of crime. Holding this view, there was no compelling impetus for studying offenders. The Positivist School rejected this perspective. The Positivist School also was a child of the Enlightenment in the sense that it, too, trumpeted the secular over the sacred and the use of reason to understand crime and to guide its control. Unlike the Classical School, however, this perspective argued that the key to unlocking the mystery of crime was scientific study that would generate “positive” or empirical facts about offenders. The organizing premise was that those who commit crimes differ from those who do not—and that it is these individual differences that cause criminal conduct. Early positivists thus did not sit in armchairs philosophizing about crime but examined, probed, measured, drew diagrams of, photographed, and autopsied thousands of criminals in hopes of discovering “why they did it.” Cesare Lombroso is viewed as the founder of the Positivist School. Lombroso was a physician who eventually joined the faculty of the University of Turin, where he established the study of “criminal anthropology.” As an army physician in 1864, he first observed that wayward soldiers’ bodies were marked by tattoos. Subsequently, as he conducted the post-mortem examination of Vilella, a famous Italian brigand, he noticed an indentation on the base of the skull. In what he called a “revelation,” Lombroso suddenly made the connection that this trait also was found in lesser creatures. In turn, this led to the thesis that offenders were “atavistic reversions” or throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage—much like a savage, an ape, or an inferior animal. If this were true, then he reasoned that offenders would have bodily stigmata or characteristics that differed from non-criminals. Thus, he went about the task of comparing thousands of criminals with conventional members of society. He would publish his findings in 1876 in Criminal

Man, a book he would revise multiple times before his death in 1909. Lombroso’s most controversial claim, which he tempered as the years passed, was that most offenders were “born criminals”—a phrase, we might add, that was coined by Enrico Ferri, his student. Influenced by evolutionary thought (Darwin’s writings preceded his), Lombroso was persuaded that criminals were akin to lesser species—more degenerate and not as civilized as “normal” societal members. In the long run, however, his particular claims were less important than how he shaped the future study of crime. As Rafter points out in The Criminal Brain, Lombroso’s enduring legacy was in effecting a “paradigm shift.” in particular, he made two critical contributions. First, he advanced the idea that individual differences separated criminals from non-criminals. Again, this rejected the Classical School’s assumption that human nature varied little across people. Second, by presenting scientific evidence, he challenged others to produce data that would prove his theory wrong. In the century to follow, criminology would eventually reject Lombroso’s theory but, more significantly, would come to embrace his scientific or positivist paradigm. Scholars would embark on a search for the “criminal man” (and eventually woman) in which the Holy Grail would be finding which factors were most influential in distinguishing offenders from conformists. Importantly, the wealth of criminological theories that would follow comprised efforts to illuminate these causal factors. Transition to Modernity

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States was marked by major transformations— migration and immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and westward expansion. The end result would be the nation’s emergence as a world power. But in the process, America would face new and enormous social problems. In an era of increasingly rapid change, the question emerged as to how order would be possible as the United States made this transition to modernity. Scholars in or associated with the new sociology department at the University of Chicago took up this issue. These scholars were predominantly raised in small Midwestern farming communities.

Introduction

They found in the city of Chicago sources of both endless fascination and disquieting manifestations of social pain. The city had only 4,100 residents at its incorporation in 1833. By 1890, this figure had risen to over 1 million, which then rapidly doubled to 2 million by 1910. The urban core was beset by the influx of diverse immigrant groups, crowded into tenements in impoverished areas. The title and content of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle captured the nature of this social environment. Scholars studied diverse features of urban life, including crime and delinquency that led to the Chicago School of Criminology. The most influential contribution was made by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. As with other members of the Chicago School, they came to the city from rural communities. Importantly, they saw urban neighborhoods not as mere receptacles for society’s biologically deficient and dangerous citizens but as producers of crime. Indeed, they witnessed social conditions that, in comparison with the towns in which they were raised, were marked by “social disorganization.” The press of racial and ethnic heterogeneity, population transience, and poverty undermined these neighborhoods’ social integration and social institutions. Two criminogenic conditions were the result. First, Shaw and McKay believed that the inner city, which they called the “zone in transition,” experienced social disorganization or a breakdown in social institutions (e.g., broken families). As a result, neighborhoods in this area were unable to achieve common goals, such as preventing crime. In more concrete terms, the residents were unable to exercise informal social control over delinquent youths and other wayward populations. Second, as time passed, criminal influences in disorganized communities gained strength (e.g., delinquent gangs, vice activities, criminal markets). Criminal values or traditions emerged that rivaled conventional culture. These traditions were transmitted from one generation to the next. Thus, Shaw and McKay believed that crime was high in disorganized neighborhoods because of the lack of control and the presence of criminal values. In the years ahead, these two insights would divide into two separate lines of theoretical inquiry, becoming, in fact, bitter rivals. One perspective, social control theory, would receive its most compelling statement by Travis Hirschi who, in 1969,

xxxiii

published Causes of Delinquency. In this classic book, Hirschi presented his social bond theory. He offered the simple but powerful argument that youths that lacked ties or bonds to conventional society were most likely to be delinquent. Alternatively, conventional bonds “controlled” the natural desire to want to satisfy gratification easily and immediately, such as by stealing or becoming inebriated. Thus, youths who were attached to their parents, committed to school, involved in social activities, and believed in the moral legitimacy of the law were too invested emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally to risk being delinquent. The second perspective, differential association theory, was advanced by Edwin H. Sutherland, a member of the early Chicago School. He built on two of Shaw and McKay’s ideas: (1) that two cultures—criminal and conventional—existed in inner-city areas, and (2) that criminal values are transmitted or learned in these areas. Rejecting the theorizing of Lombroso and others who linked crime to biology or individual pathology, Sutherland argued that criminal conduct is learned—just as any other conduct is learned—through social interaction. Given that two cultures exist, it is possible to learn one more than the other. Sutherland called this the “principle of differential association.” Thus, the key determinate of crime is when an individual comes into contact with more definitions favorable than unfavorable to law violation. Later, Ronald Akers would elaborate Sutherland’s perspective with his social learning theory. Notably, although friends, Akers and Hirschi would wage a theoretical battle for more than three decades regarding the relative merits of social learning theory versus social control theory. Beyond the Chicago School and its theoretical descendants, one other perspective dominated thinking in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century: anomie/strain theory. In 1938, Robert K. Merton published “Social Structure and Anomie,” an essay that, despite being merely 10 pages long, would become one of the most cited works in sociology and criminology. Ironically, although being raised in a Philadelphia slum, Merton did not find his childhood surroundings to be excessively criminogenic. Rather, when he came to formulate his explanation of crime and deviance, he looked beyond neighborhood boundaries to probe what was uniquely problematic about America.

xxxiv

Introduction

In his view, the United States suffered from an inherent contradiction. The American Dream served as a cultural mandate that instructed everyone to pursue the goal of material success. An inherent contradiction arose, however, because the class structure provided differential opportunity to achieve success goals. In short, the cultural goal to seek success—to seek upward mobility—was universal but the means to achieve this goal were limited only to some. Merton asserted that this disjunction or gap between what Americans were taught to desire and what they could actually attain was criminogenic for two reasons. First, it strained the cultural norms that people were expected to follow in seeking success (e.g., hard work, obtain an education). This condition of normative erosion was called “anomie.” In turn, as the norms regulating conduct weakened, people were free to use the technically most efficient means—including criminal means—to achieve success. Second, the disjunction made many individuals feel strain if they personally were thrown back in their attempt to grasp the American Dream. When one’s hopes were dashed in the legitimate opportunity structure, innovation was possible. One could attempt to relieve strain by seeking success through criminal means. Notably, Albert Cohen, in his book Delinquent Boys in 1955, and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, in their book Delinquency and Opportunity in 1960, applied Merton’s ideas to the study of youth gangs and their subcultural values. Although their theories differed somewhat, these authors argued that the frustrations experienced by lowerclass urban males had serious consequences. Cut off from conventional avenues of success at school and in the workplace, these youths adapted by creating gangs and embracing antisocial subcultural values. In providing this insight, Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin helped to integrate Merton’s theory with the Chicago School. In essence, they maintained that anomie/strain theory explained why delinquent subcultures emerged and that the Chicago School explained why contact with these criminal traditions led youths into crime. America in Crisis

As the United States turned into the 1970s, three schools of thought thus dominated criminology:

control theory, differential association theory, and anomie/strain theory. This theoretical trinity was said to comprise “mainstream” criminology. The perspectives earned this label for two reasons. First, as stated, they were the major theories of crime that all scholars knew well and that most empirical work addressed. Second, they were, at most, only mildly critical of the existing social order in America. They pointed to conditions in society that could be altered to reduce crime, but they did not argue that the United States was marked by intolerable injustices in need of radical reform. There was no call, in short, to take to the streets so as to change “the system.” The events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, created a social context conducive to more radical or critical thinking about crime, sometimes called the “new criminologies.” At the beginning of the 1960s, the nation was hopeful, as President Kennedy promised a “new frontier” and President Johnson promised a “great society.” But these hopes ran aground on the shores of harsh realities. In the intervening decade or so, John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Civil rights marchers were attacked by thugs and by police dogs, and riots left innercity neighborhoods ablaze and in ruins. Protests abounded, as the Civil Rights movement spawned the Women’s Movement. Anti-business attitudes led to campaigns for greater protections for consumers against unsafe products and for the public against environmental toxins. Most significant, the intractable Vietnam War, which was taking a mounting toll in soldiers’ blood and in the public’s treasury, spawned massive protests. The shooting of student protesters at Kent State University galvanized anti-war sentiments. Watergate was the straw that broke the camel’s back, resulting in skepticism toward the government. Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider showed that taken together, these events led to a “confidence gap,” as the public’s trust in those in power—from the state to big business—plummeted. In this context—with America in crisis—many scholars were prepared to think differently about their world, including about crime. Suddenly, mainstream theories struck many scholars as tepid. These perspectives seemed to ignore what contemporary events showed were integral features of social life: corrupt state power and entrenched

Introduction

inequality. Three important schools of criminology thus flourished in this period, each of which highlighted a potential cause of crime omitted by mainstream approaches. First, labeling theory questioned whether arresting and stigmatizing offenders made them less criminal. This was the position of deterrence theory, which asserted that harsh and certain punishment scared offenders straight. Instead, labeling theory proposed that treating offenders as though they were “criminals” had the unanticipated consequence of stabilizing their lawlessness. Thus, attaching criminal labels to people prompted them to develop a criminal identity. Legal interventions, especially imprisonment, caused beginning offenders to associate with serious criminals and to be cut off from conventional society (e.g., loss of jobs and family relations). As a result, offenders became increasingly trapped in criminal roles that led them deeper into crime. They became “career criminals.” This theory was popular because it resonated with the public’s growing mistrust in the state. In its view, through its most powerful instrument— the criminal justice system—the government was not making society safer but exacerbating the problem. Most disquieting, the use of state power to disproportionately arrest and imprison minorities meant that labeling effects were felt most profoundly in impoverished neighborhoods. Second, critical or radical theory blamed capitalism, especially the extreme form found in the United States, for high crime rates—a thesis that made sense to many scholars radicalized by the sixties. This approach argued that capitalist America exposed its less fortunate citizens to what Jonathan Kozol has called “savage inequalities.” These conditions were the root causes of street crime. For those at the top of the class structure, opportunities to break the law were ubiquitous. Political corruption, corporate illegality, and other types of whitecollar lawlessness robbed the public of enormous sums of money and, unbeknownst to most citizens, also injured, sickened, and killed them (e.g., unsafe products, hazardous work conditions, dumping of pollutants into the environment). But these upperworld offenders, observed radical theorists, were insulated against prosecution because they controlled which harms in society were criminalized. In capitalist America, as Jeffrey Reiman commented, “the rich get richer and the poor get prison.”

xxxv

Third, feminist theory critiqued mainstream criminology for formulating theories written by men about men. As the Women’s Movement gained force, scholars argued that ignoring women, as offenders and as victims, was inexcusable. Influential theorists such as Freda Adler and Rita Simon proposed that the growing social and economic gender equality in American society would create growing gender equality in crime. Other scholars suggested that the cause of female criminality was their exclusion from, and thus marginalization within, the economy. Still others argued that female criminality might have gender-specific origins, including the sexual abuse of girls that might cause psychological damage and/or drive them into the streets as runaways. Feminist criminologists also called attention to the special ways in which women were victimized, blaming it on the persistence of patriarchal values. Thus, they demanded that the criminal justice system no longer ignore women’s rape, sexual abuse, and victimization by domestic violence. Again, these lines of inquiry reflected the social times in that each offered a critique of American society. Thus, labeling theory questioned the justice and effectiveness of the state’s use of power through its criminal justice system; radical theory questioned the capitalist system and the way it unfairly impoverished the poor and allowed the advantaged to enrich themselves in shady ways and with impunity from prosecution; and feminist theory questioned the legitimacy of a patriarchal system that treated women as second-class citizens, showed little interest in the sources of their criminality, and ignored their victimization at the hands of male assailants. However, a fourth innovative perspective arose that was not tied directly to the prevailing crisis in American society: routine activity theory. This approach, however, also contended that mainstream criminology was limited and had omitted an important factor in the explanation of crime. In 1979, routine activity theory was formulated by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson. They noted that mainstream criminology placed a nearexclusive focus on what motivated some people but not others to break the law. An actual criminal act, however, did not simply involve the presence of a motivated offender. For this act to occur, the offender had to have access to the opportunity to

xxxvi

Introduction

undertake the behavior in question. Cohen and Felson then made a significant advance in elucidating the concept of opportunity. They divided this construct into two components: (1) the presence of suitable or attractive targets (e.g., a television set to steal, a person to rob), and (2) the absence of capable guardianship (e.g., a burglar alarm, friends escorting one home). They proposed that a criminal act thus ensues only when a motivated offender intersects in time and space with an attractive target that lacks capable guardianship. Cohen and Felson’s perspective had two important implications—one theoretical and one practical. Theoretically, their work suggested that increases in crime rates were not always due to deteriorating circumstances (e.g., rise in unemployment or in neighborhood social disorganization). Thus, growing affluence could create more goods under less monitoring to steal (e.g., in department stores). Equal rights for women could result in more burglary (due to fewer women at home during the day guarding their residences) and in more rape (due to more women alone in public spaces, such as traveling home from work in evening hours). In short, crime was tied not simply to bad social conditions that might produce motivated offenders but to good social conditions that affected daily routine activity or lifestyles that, in turn, increased opportunities to victimize. Practically, Cohen and Felson’s focus on opportunity as a key ingredient for crime held profound implications for reducing crime. Thus, beyond trying to lower people’s motivation to commit crime— whether through rehabilitation programs or tougher laws aimed at deterrence—public safety could be enhanced by limiting opportunities to offend. This would be accomplished by making targets less attractive or by increasing guardianship. Consistent with this thinking, Ronald Clarke developed his theory of situational crime prevention. Clarke argued that the most effective way to prevent victimization was not to focus on crime’s root causes but on situational factors that might be manipulated so as to make offending more difficult (e.g., placing locks on doors, requiring exact fares on bus rides so drivers handled no money, placing tags on merchandise that set off an alarm if taken outside a store). Notably, in the ensuing years, but especially since the inception of the current century, opportunity theories and opportunity

reduction have become important ways of explaining and preventing criminal behavior. Revitalizing Older Theories

The last two decades of the 20th century proved to be fertile soil for the criminological imagination in the United States. Many of these fresh theories, however, proved to be old wines in new bottles. A number of scholars returned to traditional theories. They saw in these older approaches key insights that illuminated crime. However, they also argued that these approaches were limited and needed to be updated and elaborated. In short, they called for a revitalization of these older theoretical paradigms. Four developments are worthy of special mention. These theoretical works are significant because they were widely read and generated a host of empirical studies. Indeed they have shaped criminology in fundamental ways. First, scholars returned to the Chicago School and to Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory. A number of community-level theories were proposed. The most influential was collective efficacy theory advanced by Robert Sampson and colleagues. Consistent with Shaw and McKay, Sampson et al. argued that structural characteristics, especially concentrated disadvantage, determined a neighborhood’s organization and thus crime rate. Collective efficacy theory, however, differed in two ways from social disorganization theory. On one hand, this newer perspective linked levels of crime to the presence (efficacy) rather than to the absence (disorganization) of a neighborhood condition. On the other hand, it focused on a factor that was active rather than passive. For Shaw and McKay, social disorganization was an entrenched or static feature of certain communities. For Sampson and colleagues, however, collective efficacy was a dynamic resource that could be mobilized to solve problems. In particular, when neighbors trusted one another and were willing to exercise informal social control, they could bind together to address issues that might prove criminogenic (e.g., stop unruly youths from hanging out on a street corner, shut down a “crack house” serving as a drug marketplace). By contrast, communities in which residents were mistrustful and not socially integrated lacked the socio-political “efficacy” to fight crime when the need arose.

Introduction xxxvii

Second, Merton’s anomie/strain theory inspired two prominent theories. Thus, in Crime in the American Dream published in 1994, Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld developed institutionalanomie theory. They extended Merton’s original anomie theory, which had focused only on the interaction between the American Dream’s prescription for everyone to pursue economic success and the class structure’s restriction on upward mobility. They argued that beyond social class, the American Dream’s overemphasis on economic goals also frayed the ability of other social institutions to exercise social control. For example, families often were less effective in socializing and supervising children because parents worked long hours, including on weekends, and moved around the country so as to achieve material success. Similarly, students entered colleges not for intellectual growth and to refine their moral sensibilities but to acquire skills and credentials that would “get them a job.” At virtually the same time (1992), Robert Agnew presented a second elaboration of Merton’s paradigm through his general strain theory. He argued that Merton had elucidated one important source of strain—blockage from desired goals— but that other criminogenic strains existed. In addition, individuals might have desired stimuli removed from them (e.g., loss of a job or intimate relationship) or have noxious stimuli forced on them (e.g., victimization, life in a dangerous and physically unpleasant neighborhood). Agnew also identified factors that made a criminal response to strain more likely (e.g., weak controls, antisocial peers) or less likely (e.g., people to give a person social support, intelligence). He called these “conditioning variables.” Third, there has been a renewed interest in what we refer to as theories of the criminal sanction. In the half century following 1920, America’s incarceration rate had remained largely stable. In fact, in the early 1970s, the state and federal prison population was under 200,000. Suddenly, the number of offenders behind bars jumped upward, escalating sevenfold in the next four decades. In this context of unprecedented punitiveness, it is understandable why interest grew in the effects of criminal sanctions, especially of harsh laws and imprisonment. This expanded focus included deterrence theory and, to a less extent, labeling theory. Most significant were attempts to move beyond these perspectives to

explore the conditions under which criminal sanctions increased or decreased offending. John Braithwaite’s Crime, Shame and Re­integra­ tion (1989) was the most influential of these works. Braithwaite observed that sanctions could either be stigmatizing or reintegrative. Much as labeling theorists had argued, he held that stigmatizing reactions knife off ties to conventional society, drive offenders toward criminal opportunities and subcultures, and increase their commitment to crime. By contrast, reintegrative shaming “hates the sin but not the sinner.” Criminal acts are condemned, but offenders are welcomed back into the community if they take responsibility for their crimes, apologize to victims, and compensate victims and the community for the harms they have caused. Braithwaite’s criminological theory would prove to be an important impetus for the expansion of restorative justice programs aimed at harm reduction and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Further, it revitalized interest in theorizing about the effects of labeling and the contingencies under which sanctions exacerbate or reduce criminal involvement. Fourth, there was a renewed interest in control theory. A variety of perspectives were advanced, such as John Hagan’s power-control theory and Charles Tittle’s control-balance theory. However, perhaps the most significant theoretical contribution of this era was self-control theory authored in 1990 by Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi. In their General Theory of Crime, Gottfredson and Hirschi embraced the traditional control theory assumption that humans by nature were self-interested and craved immediate, easy gratification. The issue thus was not to explain why people commit crimes—everyone is sufficiently motivated by our natures to do that—but rather to answer this question: “Why don’t we do it?” The traditional control theory answer is that humans would “do it” except for the presence of controls that, much like a dam containing surging waters, holds back our surging criminal motivations. What differentiates control theories is the specific type of control whose presence restrains and whose absence permits motivations to actualize into criminal behavior. As might be recalled, in Causes of Delinquency, Hirschi had argued that “social bonds” serve to restrain criminal motivations. Writing two decades later with Gottfredson, he proposed that the key

xxxviii Introduction

factor was “self-control.” For Gottfredson and Hirschi, those with low self-control are impulsive, risk-taking, insensitive to others, and unconcerned about long-term consequences. They are ideal candidates for crime, because the vast majority of criminal acts require little planning, are easy to commit, and provide immediate gratification. This shift to self-control theory stood social bond theory on its head. Previously, Hirschi had placed the existence of control in the quality of social relationships. Strong bonds to conventional society made crime unappealing because, for example, parents would be disappointed or promising futures sacrificed. Gottfredson and Hirschi now proposed that the locus of control was internal, not social. Self-control was a propensity—or a trait— that individuals carried with them. Self-control, in fact, not only prevented criminal involvement but also created social bonds. People with self-control both avoided crime and succeeded at school, were employed, and had good marriages. Those without self-control committed crime and were incapable of establishing bonds to society. By implication, the relationship of social bonds to crime—the core of Hirschi’s original theory—was now seen as spurious, not causal; both the quality of social bonds and participation in crime were viewed as caused by the level of self-control. Social bond theory also assumed that involvement in crime was not stable but varied over time. During their lives, bonds might weaken, such as in adolescence when conflicts with parents occurred, or strengthen, such as when individuals made the transition to adulthood by taking jobs and getting married. This is why youths experienced legal troubles while juveniles but matured out of crime as they became young adults. But as a propensity or trait theory, self-control theory asserted that individual differences in self-control were permanent. Noting that childhood conduct problems predicted later criminal behavior, Gottfredson and Hirschi further contended that a person’s level of self-control was established early in life—by age 8 or 10. Child-rearing practices determined whether the capacity to resist immediate gratification was inculcated. Thus, children would develop selfcontrol if they were fortunate to have parents who cared enough to monitor them, could recognize wayward conduct when it occurred, and had the ability to punish misconduct effectively.

Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory had three important implications. First, it called into question virtually every sociological theory of crime, including (as noted) Hirschi’s own social bond theory. It argued that the causal relationship of social conditions to crime were in fact spurious. Thus, delinquent peer groups did not cause crime through differential association; rather it was a matter of “birds of a feather flocking together.” Second, their theory focused attention on childhood. Criminologists had mainly constructed theories of delinquency, assuming that events during adolescence were key to criminal involvement at that age. Gottfredson and Hirschi showed that criminal careers began not in the teenage years but in childhood. And third, self-control theory suggested that, beyond the mere fact of aging, all social experiences after childhood—from adolescence to the grave—were irrelevant to explaining crime. These bold assertions would reframe how scholars would think about crime and inspire fresh theoretical contributions. The Life-Course Paradigm

In 1993, Robert Sampson and John Laub published Crime in the Making. This landmark book was important for two reasons. First, the authors based their book on data collected by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck on 500 white boys ages 10 to 17 from Massachusetts reformatories and a matched sample of 500 youths from the Boston area. These boys were born in the Depression and followed until age 32. In 1987, the authors found the boxes of the Gluecks’ original data in the basement of the Harvard Law School library. They transformed this information into a modern data set that could be analyzed by computer. Notably, the design of the Gluecks’ investigation was longitudinal, making it possible to track the respondents from childhood into adulthood. Sampson and Laub realized that this would enable them to study continuity and change in offending over time. As a result, they could develop a life-course theory of crime. Second, their work directly challenged self-­ control theory. Ironically, Gottfredson and Hirschi had been Sampson and Laub’s professors in graduate school. In making sense of the Gluecks’ data, they decided to rely on Hirschi’s original social bond theory, developing an age-graded social

Introduction

bond theory. Although they agreed with Gottfredson and Hirschi that individual propensities, such as self-control, had important effects over time, they rejected their former mentors’ assertion that crime across the life course was marked by stability. Rather, their data showed not only continuity but also change in offending. The early onset of conduct problems in childhood certainly predicted later offending, but childhood difficulty did not consign a person to a criminal career. For example, Sampson and Laub showed that among adult offenders, a quality marriage or a quality job could be a turning point that bumped them off a criminal trajectory and into conformity. In 1993, another influential life-course theory was published by Terrie Moffitt. Moffitt argued that crime should be seen as a developmental process. According to Moffitt, the normative pathway involves youths avoiding problem behavior before and after the juvenile years. That is, their criminality is largely “adolescence-limited.” More disquieting, however, a small group of children become trapped in a developmental pathway that leads them to become “life-course-persistent” offenders. While in the womb, their development is compromised (e.g., mothers smoking or taking drugs), and thus they suffer neuropsychological deficits. Born with a difficult temperament to parents who are often young and impoverished, they typically receive harsh and erratic socialization. Manifesting conduct problems and lower intellectual skills, they are ill-prepared for school, where they fail academically and are rejected by other students. They are then candidates to self-select into delinquent peer groups, where they secure support for more serious offending. And on and on, deeper and deeper into crime. Moffit calls this process “cumulative disadvantage” and argues that, as this developmental sequence continues, the individuals are ensnared in life-course-persistent offending. The perspectives of Gofftredson and Hirschi (who theorized continuity in offending due to selfcontrol), Sampson and Laub (who theorized continuity and change in offending depending on the strength of social bonds), and Moffitt (who theorized continuity or change in offending depending on which developmental pathway a child was in) diverged in important ways. But taken together, they were unified in showing the importance of studying how events in childhood affect criminal

xxxix

pathways through life. The power of their collective theorizing also was a turning point in criminology. From the early 1990s until this day, the life-course paradigm has dominated theoretical and empirical scholarship. It is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. In this regard, a final theoretical development has contributed further to the view that crime can only be understood by examining the twists and turns of individuals’ lives over time: biosocial criminology. Following World War II, biological approaches were dismissed by scholars because of the dominance of sociological thinking and because of their use in Nazi Germany to justify the exclusion and murder of Jewish and other non-Aryan peoples. In the Untied States, these approaches have been employed to legitimize the eugenics movement (including the sterilization of offenders) as well as racist policies and views toward African Americans and other minorities. This dismal history made the embrace of biological theories disreputable—and rightly so. In recent years, however, biology as a field has experienced a dramatic revolution, with more sophisticated tools to unpack human nature (e.g., DNA testing). More generally, biosocial research has been undertaken on a variety of social domains that has yielded potentially progressive policy recommendations (e.g., early intervention with children, helping at-risk expectant mothers to have healthy pregnancies). Further, the clear reality is that humans enter the world not as blank slates on which society writes a script but with individual differences that shape how they react to the world and how the world reacts to them. Biosocial processes thus cannot be ignored in achieving a complete understanding of how humans develop across the life course, including whether a person is trapped in a criminal trajectory. Our biology encapsulates us and is like a suitcase that we carry with us wherever we go in our travels in life. This observation is not to embrace the crude biological determinism of past eras. But it is to say that biosocial theorizing will become an increasingly important part of criminology in the time ahead.

Conclusion We are hopeful that our excursion across the main stages in criminology’s development inspires readers

xl

Introduction

to use the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory to broaden and deepen their understanding of past and present explanations of crime. We are fortunate that the encyclopedia’s entries have been authored by knowledgeable, if not distinguished, scholars. In a short space, they invariably provide a concise but detailed account of a perspective that has endeavored to unravel a key source of criminal conduct. These entries are much like gold coins in a treasure chest, valuable in and of themselves but of immeasurable worth when taken as a whole. We should note that each entry not only reviews an area of criminological theory but also contains a list of references to key articles and/or books on the topic cited in the entry. In the “See also” section, each entry is accompanied by a list of entries in the encyclopedia on related topics that readers seeking greater expertise regarding a specific theoretical school or issue might wish to peruse. In addition, each entry’s author or authors suggested further readings and provided brief explanations for why these writings are of special relevance.

These annotations have been compiled into a section titled “Annotated Further Readings” that appears at the end of volume 2. In short, every effort has been made to link each entry to related scholarly writings both within the encyclopedia and within the field of criminology generally. Again, we trust that as editors we have organized the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory so as to make it accessible, replete with impeccable scholarship, and of use both as a source that can be quickly referenced and as a compendium of theories of crime that can be studiously explored. Most important, our goal has been to create a work that captures the rich theoretical imagination that has long nourished the criminological enterprise and that reflects our own fascination with the only partially solved mystery of why some of our fellow citizens break the law. Francis T. Cullen Pamela Wilcox University of Cincinnati

Criminological Time Line: The Top 25 Theoretical Contributions Virtually any “Top 25 List”—whether of greatest movies, best rock-n-roll songs of all time, or most influential criminological contributions—is faced with a daunting challenge: an embarrassment of riches. There are, in short, many worthy candidates for inclusion. Lest this exercise descend into sheer idiosyncratic discretion—that is, where inclusion is based simply on personal preference—some criteria must be used in compiling the roster. In our case, the key consideration is whether a theorist and his or her work created a new way of understanding the origins of crime. Thus, the theorists included here contributed insights that transformed how scholars saw crime. They uncovered previously ignored criminogenic factors and illuminated how these factors are central to crime causation. After their work appeared, it was no longer possible to study illegal conduct in quite the same way. In many cases, their writings created new schools of criminological thought that shaped thinking and empirical research for decades to follow. Most of these scholars’ theorizing continues to be read today and, in either its original or revitalized form, to inspire fresh ways of thinking about crime. Our Top 25 list is arranged along a time line. By surveying this theoretical continuum, readers will have a road map in their excursion across the history of criminology. They will be guided to see the most significant turning points in the discipline’s evolution—again, junctures at which new ways of envisioning crime were presented that had a profound influence on the field. The table to follow thus serves as a useful compendium for gaining a sense of the development of criminology as a discipline. Indeed, if the entries on this Top 25 list are consulted, readers will possess a firm foundation that will serve them well in their future studies of theoretical criminology.

Date

Theorist

School of Thought

Most Important Work Key Theoretical Insight

1764

Cesare Beccaria

Classical School

On Crimes and Punishments

Crime is not due to demons or evil spirits but to whether the benefits of the act outweigh the pains from legal punishments. Fair and rational laws are the key to crime prevention.

1876

Cesare Lombroso

Positivist School

The Criminal Man

Scientific study can explain crime by showing how criminals differ from non-criminals, especially in their evolutionary development. (Continued)

xli

xlii

Criminological Time Line: The Top 25 Theoretical Contributions

(Continued) Date

Theorist

School of Thought

Most Important Work Key Theoretical Insight

1930s and 1940s

Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay

Chicago School/Social Juvenile Delinquency Disorganization Theory and Urban Areas

1938

Robert K. Merton

Anomie/Strain Theory

1940s

Edwin H. Sutherland

Chicago School/ Principles of Differential Association Criminology; White Theory Collar Crime

Crime occurs when individuals learn definitions or attitudes that encourage illegal behavior. Criminal learning can transpire within a disorganized neighborhood or a white-collar setting (e.g., a corporate organization).

1950

Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck

Multifactor Approach

Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency

Crime has multiple causes (e.g., temperament, family) that can only be determined by studying human development in detail over a long period of time. Antisocial conduct tends to be stable across stages in the life course.

1955

Albert K. Cohen

Strain/Subcultural Theory

Delinquent Boys: The Disadvantaged boys who endure Culture of the Gang status frustration in school create subcultures that provide status through delinquent activities.

1957

Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza

Control Theory and “Techniques of Differential Association Neutralization: A Theory Theory of Delinquency”

Crime is highest in socially disorganized neighborhoods marked by a breakdown of informal social control and by the emergence and transmission of criminal traditions.

“Social Structure and A central contradiction in the United Anomie” States—everyone is taught to seek the American Dream despite a class structure that limits access to the goal of material success—weakens normative controls (creates “anomie”) and imposes criminogenic strains on individuals with blocked opportunities.

Delinquent acts can occur only when youths are able to invoke beliefs that justify breaking the law in a particular instance (e.g., “it’s okay to steal from a department store because nobody gets hurt”). These “techniques,” which are learned, neutralize the control typically exerted by conventional normative standards.

Criminological Time Line: The Top 25 Theoretical Contributions

xliii

Date

Theorist

School of Thought

Most Important Work Key Theoretical Insight

1960

Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin

Strain/Subcultural Theory

Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs

Disadvantaged youths blocked from the American Dream experience pressures or strains. They adapt by creating delinquent gangs. The type of gang created is determined by the illegitimate means available, which in turn are shaped by the degree of neighborhood organization.

1963

Howard S. Becker

Labeling Theory

Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance

A key factor in criminal careers is whether individuals are labeled and treated as deviants. Societal reaction thus does not prevent but causes criminal involvement.

1969

Travis Hirschi Control/Social Bond Theory

Causes of Delinquency

The strength of a person’s social bonds—attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief—determines whether the individual resists or succumbs to the ever-present motivation to deviate that is inherent in human nature.

1973

Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young

Critical/Radical Theory The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance

Traditional criminological theories ignore power and inequality in society. A new paradigm critical of the existing social order is needed.

1973

Ronald L. Akers

Social Learning Theory Deviant Behavior: A Social Learning Approach

Crime and deviance are socially learned behavior. A key factor is whether such conduct is differentially reinforced. If such acts are reinforced, they will be repeated.

1975

Freda Adler

Feminist Criminology

Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal

Changes in American society that create great social opportunities for women will result in more opportunities for crime as well. Female crime is socially produced and not due to sexual pathology. Female criminals warrant serious criminological study.

1979

Lawrence E. Routine Activity Cohen and Theory Marcus Felson

“Social Change and Crime Trends: A Routine Activity Approach”; Crime and Everyday Life

Crime occurs when there is an intersection in time and space of motivated offenders, suitable or attractive targets, and a lack of guardianship. Crime thus is a (Continued)

xliv

Criminological Time Line: The Top 25 Theoretical Contributions

(Continued) Date

Theorist

School of Thought

Most Important Work Key Theoretical Insight product of offenders and opportunity. Crime can be prevented by reducing opportunities (e.g., making targets less attractive, providing guardianship).

1982

Marvin E. Subculture of Violence Wolfgang and Theory Franco Ferracuti

The Subculture of Violence: Toward an Integrated Theory in Criminology

In certain locations and age groups, subcultures arise that approve of the use of violence. These values are learned and allow the use of violence without feelings of immorality or guilt.

1985

James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein

Biosocial Theory

Crime and Human Nature

Traditional criminology has ignored the role of human nature in crime. Criminal conduct is a biosocial process that reflects the interaction between individual differences (e.g., temperament) and reinforcements for illegal choices that flow from parenting and the larger social context.

1989

John Braithwaite

Reintegrative Shaming Theory

Crime, Shame and Reintegration

The quality of labeling or reacting to an offender determines future criminality. Stigmatizing shaming stabilizes crime, whereas reintegrative shaming reduces crime. Nations that use stigmatizing shaming tend to have high crime rates. Restorative justice offers a conduit to reintegratively shame offenders and prevent recidivism.

1990

Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi

Self-Control Theory

A General Theory of Crime

Individual differences in self-control, which are established in childhood, determine involvement in crime and deviant activities across the life course.

1992

Robert Agnew General Strain Theory

“Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency”

Strain is produced not only by goal blockage but also by the removal of valued stimuli and the presentation of noxious stimuli. Strain leads to crime when it is combined with negative emotions (e.g., anger) and factors that encourage criminal coping (e.g., deviant peers, low controls).

Criminological Time Line: The Top 25 Theoretical Contributions

xlv

Date

Theorist

School of Thought

Most Important Work Key Theoretical Insight

1993

Terrie E. Moffitt

Developmental Pathways Theory

“Adolescence-Limited and Life-CoursePersistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy”

Most youngsters engage in delinquency during adolescence but then desist from offending. Some youths, however, persist in offending across the life course. They tend to be born with neuropsychological deficits that are exacerbated by ineffective parenting, school failure, and exposure to delinquent peers. This process of cumulative disadvantage knifes off prosocial options and ensnares youths in a pathway of lifecourse-persistent offending.

1993

Robert J. Age-Graded Social Sampson and Bond Life-Course John H. Laub Theory

Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life

Offending across the life course is a combination of individual differences and strength of social bonds. Bonds are age-graded and thus differ by the stage in the life course. Weak family and school ties trap youths on a criminal trajectory. Imprisonment weakens bonds and is criminogenic. A key to desistance in adulthood is offenders gaining a quality marriage or quality job.

1994

Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld

Institutional-Anomie Theory

Crime and the American Dream

The American Dream leads to crime by emphasizing goal attainment through the technically most efficient means. This overemphasis on economic goals also creates an institutional imbalance in society. Crime is fostered by the weakening of non-economic social institutions (e.g., the family), which limits their social control effectiveness.

1997

Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls

Chicago School/ Collective Efficacy Theory

“Neighborhoods and Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy”

Crime rates vary by the extent to which people in neighborhoods trust one another and exercise informal social control. Socially integrated neighborhoods have the capacity to act collectively to deal with problems, such as crime, effectively. Collective efficacy itself is influenced most strongly by whether a neighborhood is marked by persistent concentrated disadvantage. (Continued)

xlvi

Criminological Time Line: The Top 25 Theoretical Contributions

(Continued) Date

Theorist

School of Thought

Most Important Work Key Theoretical Insight

1999

Elijah Anderson

Urban Subculture Theory

Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City

Inner-city neighborhoods are marked by competing cultures—one emphasizing decency and the other a street lifestyle that includes violence. The “code of the street” often dominates public interaction and mandates the use of violence when someone is “disrespected.”

A Norway. While the abolitionist movement has its strongest support in European nations, there is support for abolitionism in the United States.

Abolitionism Abolitionism, according to Stanley Cohen, is a critical thinking movement about criminology, crime, punishment, and criminal law that has been developing in Western Europe since the early 1970s. John Muncie characterizes abolitionism as a knowledge-based movement that seeks to move beyond the essentialist ideas of crime, criminality, and criminal justice to facilitate new critical insights and alternative visions of justice. The impetus of the abolitionist movement was dissatisfaction with current crime and criminal justice policy. This discontent was not only with the basic assumptions of criminal justice policies but also with the concrete consequences of criminal justice functioning, according to Louk Hulsman. Abolitionism is based heavily on deconstructionist impulses in the form of the questioning of dominant criminal justice theories and practices. There is no concrete definition of abolitionism. To some, abolition requires doing away with the entire criminal justice system and to others abolition implies the end of penal law as it presently exists. Abolition is considered possible as the concepts of “crime” and “punishment” are not considered to be absolute, fixed responses to “undesirable events.” Abolition requires a different verbiage when dealing with undesirable events as well as a different view of society, namely a vision of how society could be alternatively structured. Abolitionism advocates are primarily based in England, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and

Forms of Abolitionism Abolitionism comes in two forms: general and restricted. General abolitionism contends that the criminal justice system as a whole is a social problem and thus should be dismantled. At the core of general abolitionism is the belief that punishment itself, at least as it takes place in the current criminal and penal law model, is ineffective, inefficient, and inhumane. Proponents of general abolitionism argue specifically for alternatives to the current processes of criminal justice. It is argued that the criminal justice system should be replaced with alternative dispute settlement procedures. These community-based dispute resolutions would allow for the creation of social policy that reduces the pressure on individuals to resort to criminal means to secure their necessities. Restricted abolition deals with the abolition of a specific aspect of the criminal justice system. This form of abolition seeks to address specific aspects of the criminal justice system that have been deemed a social problem. Proponents of specific abolitionism movements seek to eliminate specific criminal justice-related sanctions and policies in order to make the system more effective and humane. Significant restricted abolition movements include death penalty abolition and penal abolition. 1

2

Abolitionism

The Prison Abolition Movement The prison abolitionist movement has been at the forefront of prison reform since the 1970s. Advocates call for the eradication of the incapacitation in its current form and scale. It is believed that prisons further exacerbate pre-existing social ills and fail to provide adequate social control. There are several major groups strongly backing penal abolition including Britain’s Radical Alternatives to Prisons (RAP), the Norwegian Association for Penal Reform (KROM), the Danish Association for Penal Reform (KRIM), and the Swedish Association for Penal Reform (KRUM). Staunch penal abolitionists are opposed to many suggested alternatives to prison. According to Mathiesen, these alternatives contain great dangers, insofar as they can easily facilitate the creation of new prison-like structures with functions similar to those of modern prisons. Strict penal abolitionists instead argue for the concept of the “unfinished” rather than for alternatives to prison. The concept of the “unfinished” maintains that the best alternatives to punishment are confined within a state of permanent and unfinished revolution. Abolitionists contend that alternatives or “better” models should only be outlined and never fully shaped or formulated. Alternatives should be offered in a conceptual scheme and should remain unfinished. It should be noted that penal abolitionists are not opposed to incapacitative institutions for persons who pose a clear danger to the safety of others. Advocates, however, maintain that the number of people who pose such a danger is few, thus only a small number of facilities are necessary, and thus incapacitation should be an exception rather than a normal practice. To date, prison abolition has not been accomplished in any major industrial nation.

Challenges to Abolitionism Abolition has been challenged as being a “vision without a strategy” (Hudson, 1998). Critics maintain that abolitionists provide arguments against the current system but fail to provide tangible alternatives to prisons and the criminal justice system. Critics contend that there is little effort spent on explaining how such reforms should be implemented. Abolitionists do not offer concrete

solutions; rather they provide a wide, nonspecific variety of potential alternatives. Critics also contend that there is no theoretical backing for the abolitionist movement. A fullfledged abolitionist theory that encompasses all of the characteristics of different abolitionist approaches does not exist, according to Rolf De Folter. The abolitionist approach lacks precise, unambiguous descriptive concepts. To date, abolitionism is still a perspective that is structured primarily by analogies and metaphors.

New Abolitionism Abolitionism has continued to evolve through the changing climate of the criminal justice system. Rather than abolishing prisons as penal abolitionists have desired, there has been a significant expansion of prison systems across the western world (Mathiesen, 1986). Even with recent trends running counter to the objectives of abolitionism, the philosophy has remained. In this climate, the objectives of the abolitionist movement have changed. Rather than focusing on full scale abolition, “new” abolitionism consists of strategies and theories intended to reduce the harm inflicted by the criminal justice system. New abolitionism is frequently linked with restorative justice, a movement aimed at addressing the claims of victims and communities of victims. New abolition is also frequently applied in arguments against procedural violations of due process and equal treatment. New abolitionism consists of more concrete concepts as well as tangible goals. Rachel Brushett See also Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Incarceration and Recidivism; Peacemaking Criminology; Postmodern Theory; Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory; Schur, Edwin M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency

References and Further Readings Cohen, S. (1991). Alternatives to punishment: The abolitionist case. Israel Law Review, 25, 729–739. De Folter, R. (1986). On the methodological foundation of the abolitionist approach to the criminal justice system: A comparison of the ideas of Hulsman,

Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime Mathiesen, and Foucault. Contemporary Crises, 10, 39–62. Hudson, B. (1998). Restorative justice: The challenge of sexual and racial violence. Journal of Law and Society, 25, 237–256. Hulsman, L. (1991). The abolitionist case: Alternative crime policies. Israel Law Review, 25, 681–709. Knopp, F. H., Boward, B., & Morris, M. O. (1976). Instead of prisons: A handbook for abolitionists. Syracuse, NY: Prison Research Education Action Project. Mathiesen, T. (1974). The politics of abolition. London: Martin Robertson. Mathiesen, T. (1986). The politics of abolition. Crime, Law and Social Change, 10, 81–94. Muncie, J. (2000). Decriminalising criminology. In G. Mair & R. Tarling (Eds.), The British Criminology Conference: Selected proceedings: Vol. 3. Papers from the British Society of Criminology Conference, Liverpool, July 1999. London: British Society of Criminology. Papendorf, K. (2006). “The Unfinished”: Reflections on the Norwegian prison movement. Acta Sociologica, 49, 127–137. Sarat, A. (1998). Recapturing the spirit of Furman: The American Bar Association and the new abolitionist politics. Law and Contemporary Problems, 61, 5–28. Scheerer, S. (1986). Towards abolitionism. Contemporary Crises, 10, 5–20.

Adler, Freda: Sisters

in

Crime

A prevailing fact within criminology is that criminal offending varies dramatically by gender. Indeed, gender is one of the strongest correlates of crime. Given the strength of this relationship, it is reasonable to expect that any theory of crime, and certainly any general theory of crime, must account for the differential involvement of males and females in criminal activity. However, little attention was given to explaining gender differences in crime until relatively recently. The publication in 1975 of Freda Adler’s book Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal marked a defining moment in the history of criminological thought. For the first time, women’s involvement in crime and its relationship to social, political, and economic structures received serious academic attention. While a handful of other scholars

3

were working on related questions at the time, no work had such broad and visible impact as Adler’s. The publication of Sisters in Crime  coincided with the women’s liberation movement. Influenced by the social and political context of the time, the central thrust of Sisters in Crime was that women were becoming more aggressive and competitive as they moved from the private sphere into the public sphere. Adler hypothesized that as women became liberated, they would gain access not only to new legitimate opportunities but also to new  illegitimate opportunities. In other words, Adler argued that female and male offenders commit crime for the same reasons. Gender differences in levels and patterns of offending are explained not by the differences between women and men but by their different levels of access to criminal opportunities. The suggestion that women’s liberation might contribute to female criminality was met with controversy. Feminist scholars and traditional criminologists alike critiqued the work—albeit for different reasons—citing methodological and theoretical shortcomings. The significant debate surrounding Adler’s work is a testament to its importance. This entry briefly traces the development of Adler’s liberation hypothesis describing the personal and professional experiences that contributed to her thoughts about crime and gender. It also considers how this pioneer work led to the development of feminist criminology.

Influential Contributions Adler graduated in 1956 with a B.A. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and also earned her Master’s in 1968 and Ph.D. in 1971 there. Reflecting on the origins of her hypothesis, which she has described as a “very simple idea,” Adler noted the importance of several intellectual, empirical, and historical influences. First, her academic training at the University of Pennsylvania shaped her approach to the study of criminal behavior. She was well trained in sociological theory and “thought like” a sociologist about gender and social structure. In addition, there was an empirical focus to her work that was heavily influenced by the pioneering research being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania at the time.

4

Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime

Adler’s quest to learn new things led her to take a criminology course taught by Otto Pollak. Pollak had recently published a book on female criminality, in which he attempted to explain female crime by focusing on the physical and psychological characteristics of women. Pollak argued that physiological characteristics such as menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause caused women to be more secretive and deceitful and that this was reflected in their criminal behavior. Pollak’s perspectives on female criminality had an important influence on Adler, although she disagreed with much of what he had to say about female criminality. Pollak’s work helped Adler bring her own counter-arguments and insights about female crime into sharper focus. For example, Adler fundamentally rejects the assumption of “essential difference” between the genders. She maintains instead that criminological theories should be able to explain both male and female criminality as well as gender differences in the level of offending. Thus, Adler’s scholarship was a significant departure from biological determinism popular at the time she was a student. Adler’s work is more consistent with liberal feminism, which emphasizes the “essential sameness” between the genders and focuses on the importance of legal rights, individual choice, and access to economic opportunities (Rhode, 1989). Another formative influence upon Adler’s scholarship was developed while working on a study of sentencing disparity in capital cases with Anthony Amsterdam. This experience piqued Adler’s interest in bias and gender disparity. Adler’s doctoral dissertation, titled  The Female Offender in Philadelphia, asked descriptive questions focusing on racial bias. In particular, research questions addressed included: What crimes did the women commit? What was the seriousness of their offenses? What effect did race have on sentence outcome? Adler’s ideas were also shaped by her field experiences interviewing drug offenders. The individuals she met on the streets, in treatment centers, and in prisons knew little about a consciousness-raising social movement, or even about “women’s lib.” Nevertheless, her observations led her to conclude that women’s attitudes and access to criminal opportunities were changing in response to changing social attitudes about gender. Adler drew on these professional experiences to write Sisters in

Crime, in which she argued that since women and men have the same basic motivations, given similar access to opportunities, they would behave in a similar manner.

Opportunity and Gender Sisters in Crime, a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize, proposed that the Second Wave of Feminism would have a major impact on female criminal activity. Of note, Adler’s use of the term opportunity was similar to Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s use of negative opportunity, that is, criminal or illegitimate behavior that is in opposition to prosocial or legitimate behavior. Thus, women who had blocked means would become “liberated” and be “given the chance to be as greedy, violent and crime prone as men” (Lilly et al., 2007, p. 215). Thus, Adler argued that female criminals face crimes in the same way as men face crime, simply as another means to reach blocked opportunities. This was in stark contrast to previous assertions that women’s criminality was pathologized and sexualized and viewed as uniquely different from men’s criminality. What was extraordinary about Adler’s hypothesis is that it advanced a sociological explanation for female criminality that suggested that female criminals were motivated by the same processes as male criminals. To support her hypothesis, and similar to other theorists, Adler utilized cross-sectional official data to illustrate that decreases in the social and economic disparities between the sexes were correlated with increases in female criminality. With regard to murder and aggravated assault, Adler reports that the rates for men were not significantly different from those of women, although both were increasing. Adler also explored female crime patterns via topics on prostitution, drug abuse, and incarceration. Moreover,  these substantive areas incorporated topics such as the intersection of race, class, and age with female offending. Notably, Adler asserts that her primary concern was that the subject of female criminality be approached scientifically and empirically, a concern that paralleled that of other University of Pennsylvania criminologists who were committed to elevating criminology to a social scientific discipline. The women’s liberation movement influenced Adler’s thinking about female criminality and

Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime

women’s access to both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures. It was also influential in shaping Adler’s beliefs about gender equality and her own unwillingness to be defined primarily by her gender or as a feminist scholar.

Public Reactions Sisters in Crime was met with much academic interest and struck a chord with the mainstream media as well. Adler’s work challenged traditionalist views about the “cult of femininity,” which asserted that women were the gentler sex who required special treatment. Traditionalists, however, also interpreted the liberation hypothesis as providing additional justification for limiting women’s liberation. Among liberal feminists, Adler’s work was valued for asserting the equality of women and advocating a sociological rather than a natural view of gender differences. Some feminists, however, met any suggestion that women’s liberation was not wholly beneficial to women and to society with strong resistance and anger. Relational feminists may have appreciated the challenge to androcentricism represented by Adler’s work, but remained committed to a view of gender that emphasized essential differences between the sexes that required legal recognition and protection. To promote the work and respond to what grew into a furor over the prospects of the new female offender, Adler went on a media tour explaining her thesis. If there was high profile crime committed by a woman, she was solicited as a spokesperson for an interview. She recollects that she did over 300 media spots, including interviews with Barbara Walters and Johnny Carson and an appearance on Face the Nation. As Karlene Faith  explains, “With reductionist finesse, and without empirical grounding, journalists spread the warning that women’s liberation would be turning out a new ‘liberated’ breed of criminal woman, as violent as any man” (1993, p. 6). Adler recalled it was “an era of profound social changes” (Hartman & Sundt, in press), which helps explain the tremendous response to her book. While Sisters in Crime gained national and international public prominence, it also inspired significant scholarly debate. For multiple reasons, critics suggested the text was incomplete and contradictory. Some criticized the work for reinforcing

5

gender stereotypes. Others criticized Adler’s methodological approach. Critics argued that Adler misinterpreted the data. The work was criticized for its over-reliance on a small sample and for a short-sighted historical perspective, which distorted the interpretation of the data. Still others asserted that female offenders’ motives were more rational and complex than a need to simply “compete” with the male offender. Finally, some maintained that male and female crime rates were never as close to convergence as Adler predicted. In sum, Adler’s proposed “masculine crime wave” among females would never materialize. Ironically, a work that was criticized as harmful to the women’s movement inspired unprecedented interest in and scholarship about women and arguably led to the development of feminist criminology. Debates about the political and scientific significance of gender differences remain hotly contested issues today. Whatever the ultimate outcome of these debates, Adler’s work helped pave the way for criminologists to move beyond simplistic and futile explanations of female criminality.

Legacy Speaking about her legacy, Adler states: “I do not care how criminology became interested in women. I am very proud to have brought women into the criminological literature—even with me as a target . . . I am still proud of what I did. I wrote the book I wanted to write” (Hartman & Sundt, in press). The importance of Adler’s work is not only, or even primarily, that it advanced a new hypothesis about crime, but that it brought gender and women to the forefront of criminologists’ thinking. Over three decades after its publication, her work still generates debate. Contemporary feminist criminology now fully engages general theories of crime that offer insight via a gendered crime analysis. Further, feminist scholarship and activism is abundant in the areas of criminal justice research and practice. Feminists scholars have brought to light prejudices faced by incarcerated women. Moreover, feminist scholarship is making great strides in addressing the victimization of women and understanding how experiences of trauma and abuse affect their involvement in the criminal justice system. New

6

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory

questions have also emerged and scholars are now exploring same sex violence, masculinities and crime, and the combined influence of race and gender on sentence disparity. Feminist criminology is now a force in the discussion about the causes of crime, a discussion that Adler initiated. Jennifer L. Hartman and Jody L. Sundt See also Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime; Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender; Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology; Steffensmeier, Darrell, J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld

References and Further Readings Adler, F. (1971). The female offender in Philadelphia. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Adler, F. (1975). Sisters in crime: The rise of the new female criminal. New York: McGraw-Hill. Chesney-Lind, M., & Pasko, L. (2004). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Faith, K. (1993). Unruly women: The politics of confinement and resistance. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Press Gang. Flynn, E. E. (1998). Freda Adler: A portrait of a pioneer. Women and Criminal Justice, 10, 1–27. Hartman, J. L., & Sundt, J. L. (in press). The rise of feminist criminology: Freda Adler. In F. T. Cullen, C. Lero Jonson, A. J. Myer, & F. Adler (Eds.), The origins of American criminology (Advances in criminological theory: Vol. 18). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Lilly, J. R., Cullen, F. T., & Ball, R. A. (2007). Criminological theory: Context and consequences (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Peterson, R. D. (2006). The female presidents of the American Society of Criminology. Feminist Criminology, 1, 147–168. Renzetti, C. M., Goodstein, L., & Miller, S. L. (2006). Rethinking gender, crime, and justice: Feminist readings. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Rhode, D. L. (1989). Justice and gender. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Smart, C. (1978). Women, crime and criminology: A feminist critique. New York: Routledge.

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory Robert Agnew’s general strain theory (GST) represents a modification and extension of previous strain theories of crime and delinquency. Whereas prior strain theories emphasized the importance of goal blockage (such as the inability of groups or individuals to achieve economic success), GST identifies several additional types of “strain.” In addition, Agnew argues that these strains tend to generate negative emotions, such as anger, frustration, depression, and despair. These negative emotions, in turn, are said to create pressures for “corrective action,” with crime or delinquency being one possible response. Since its publication, GST has attracted a considerable amount of attention and interest from the criminological community. The relative success of GST can be attributed to several factors. First, GST helps to address the limitations of previous strain theories, many of which had fallen out of favor among criminologists. Second, GST is one of the few criminological theories to highlight the role of negative emotions, such as anger and depression. In the words of Agnew, GST brings “the bad” back into criminological theory. For this reason, GST has much intuitive appeal. Also, by stressing the importance of emotional states, GST helps to fill a void in a field currently dominated by social cognitive theories. Third, GST has garnered a moderate amount of empirical support. Below, these and other aspects of GST are explored in some detail.

Development and Core Assumptions Traditional or classic strain theories (including theories authored by Robert Merton, Albert K. Cohen, Richard A. Cloward, and Lloyd E. Ohlin) emphasize the importance of goal blockage, or the inability of individuals to attain conventional goals through legitimate means. According to these theories, individuals are encouraged by the larger

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory

cultural system to pursue the goals of monetary success or middle-class status. However, when prevented from achieving these goals through legitimate means—due to their position in the class system, real or perceived lack of opportunity, or lack of resources—individuals may resort to illegitimate and innovative means of goal attainment, such as crime or delinquency. Although classic strain theories were highly influential during much of the 20th century, they were sharply criticized during the 1970s. Prominent criminologists criticized classic strain theories for their failure to explain the delinquency of middleclass individuals, for their failure to explain why only some strained individuals turn to crime or delinquency, and for their neglect of goals other than monetary success or middle-class status. Classic strain theories were also seen as lacking in empirical support. If such theories were correct, one would expect to find high levels of delinquency among strained individuals; namely, among individuals who aspire to conventional success but who do not expect to achieve this goal through legitimate means (in other words, among individuals who experience a gap or disjunction between their aspirations and expectations). Yet contrary to expectations, researchers observed that the highest levels of delinquency were to be found among individuals who lack aspirations for conventional success (e.g., among individuals who do not aspire to a college education or high-status occupation)—a fact that appears to be more consistent with social control theory than classic strain theories. Agnew developed GST in part as a response to these criticisms. In particular, Agnew broadened the conception of strain to include a wider array of potential stressors—stressors that are not limited to lower-class individuals, but that can also be experienced by individuals from middle-class backgrounds. For instance, while frustration and innovation may result when goals are seen as “out of reach” for the individual, Agnew argues that other types of goal blockage may be more consequential in terms of crime and delinquency. Although a disjunction between aspirations and expectations is the type of goal blockage most often associated with classic strain theories, Agnew points out that aspirations typically involve ideal goals or outcomes and are somewhat utopian in character. For

7

this reason, unfulfilled aspirations may not be a key source of strain or frustration. GST recognizes that the experience of goal blockage can also result from the failure to achieve expected outcomes (e.g., the failure to receive an expected income) as well as the failure to achieve outcomes that are perceived as fair and just (e.g., the failure to receive a “deserved” income). These latter types of goal blockage, in turn, are more consistently associated with the experience of anger, hostility, disappointment, and dissatisfaction. Moreover, in GST, the goals and outcomes that are important to individuals are not limited to income or middle-class status. For example, some additional goals and outcomes that are recognized by the theory, and that appear to be especially important to young males, include respect and masculine status (e.g., the expectation that one be treated “like a man”), autonomy (e.g., the goal or desire to enjoy a certain amount of personal independence), and the desire for thrills or excitement. GST, then, recognizes that individuals pursue a variety of goals beyond economic success, and it expands the notion of goal blockage accordingly. In particular, GST defines goal blockage more broadly to include the failure to achieve positively valued goals. In addition, Agnew highlights two other categories of strain, including the loss of positively valued stimuli and the presentation of noxious or negatively valued stimuli. The loss of positively valued stimuli includes a potentially wide range of negative events or experiences, including the theft of valued property, the loss of a romantic relationship, or the withdrawal of parental love. The presentation of noxious stimuli also includes a wide range of negative experiences, such as harassment and bullying from peers, negative relations with parents and teachers, or criminal victimization. According to GST, strain increases the likelihood that individuals will experience negative emotions. Anger is one possible response and is of special interest to general strain theorists. Anger occurs when strain is blamed on others, and it is believed to be especially conducive to crime and delinquency. Among other things, anger reduces one’s tolerance for injury or insult, lowers inhibitions, energizes the individual to action, and creates desires for retaliation and revenge.

8

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory

In GST, a criminal or delinquent response to strain is viewed as an attempt by the individual to cope with negative emotional states and, specifically, as an attempt to obtain immediate relief from emotional distress. For example, individuals who experience high levels of strain, and who become angry when they blame this strain on others, may experience a sense of satisfaction or relief when they strike back at the perceived source of their strain. As demonstrated in laboratory experiments, angry individuals who have an opportunity to retaliate at the source of their anger often experience a significant reduction in angry arousal. Likewise, individuals may resort to drug and alcohol use to ward off feelings of depression and despair—feelings that occur when they blame themselves for the experience of strain. Although such coping strategies are likely to exacerbate problems in the long run, such individuals may nonetheless obtain immediate relief from psychic pain. According to GST, then, offending behavior is often a response to the negative emotions generated by strain. It should be noted, however, that offending behavior does not necessarily require the experience of negative affect. At times, crime or delinquency may represent a direct response to strain, or an attempt to avoid or escape strain, as when an abused child runs away from home. Likewise, strained individuals may find that acts of aggression allow them to terminate noxious treatment. As observed by family researchers, violent children often deal with their problems (such as physical punishment or teasing by other family members) with aggression because they have learned that aggressive counterattack can be successful, forcing others to “back off.” It is important to note here that, although GST interprets offending behavior as an adaptation to strain—one that may allow individuals to cope with strain in the short run—the theory does not contend that crime is an effective solution. Crime is only one possible response to strain and, in the long run, may prove to be maladaptive, especially if it leads to other problems for the individual. Moreover, the intent of GST is not to excuse or justify criminal behavior. As Agnew is careful to note, the main purpose of the theory is to identify the processes that foster criminal conduct in the hopes that such knowledge may lead to improved strategies for the prevention and control of crime.

Criminal Versus Conventional Coping As stated earlier, one criticism of classic strain theories is that they do not adequately explain why only some strained individuals resort to crime or delinquency. Many people experience strains and stressors of various types, yet most of us do not turn to crime as a result. Rather, if we believe we have been unfairly treated, we may file a complaint. If we obtain an unexpected low grade in a college course, we may revise our study methods accordingly, attempt to negotiate with the instructor, or convince ourselves that the course was not important anyway. Likewise, if we experience a major disappointment, we may turn to a friend for emotional support and hope for a better tomorrow. In short, most people find legal ways to cope with strain. Why, then, do some individuals respond to strain with violence, theft, or drug use? GST recognizes that strain does not automatically lead to crime or delinquency. Indeed, the theory specifies a number of conditions that are said to make a criminal/delinquent response more or less likely. It is beyond the scope of this entry to discuss all of the relevant conditions, but roughly speaking, these conditions involve the nature of the strain in question, the coping abilities and resources available to the strained individual, and the extent to which the strained individual is predisposed to crime. Nature of the Strain

According to GST, strains are not created equal. Indeed, many if not most strains are relatively trivial in nature and are not sufficient to increase the odds of criminal offending. The kinds of strains that generate strong pressure for corrective action, and that are most likely to lead to criminal behavior, include chronic or repeated strains, strains that are seen as severe or unjust (and hence capable of generating strong negative emotions), strains that occur in contexts where individuals have little to lose by engaging in crime (i.e., when individuals are low in social control), and, finally, strains that can be resolved through crime. Some examples of strain that meet one or more of these conditions include parental rejection, child abuse, negative school experiences (e.g., the experience of being bullied by other students, or having teachers that frequently talk down to and publicly humiliate the

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory

individual), harsh or excessive punishment, a strong desire or need for “fast cash,” persistent unemployment or underemployment (especially for adults), homelessness, residence in an economically deprived community, and racial discrimination. Coping Abilities and Resources

Crime, of course, is not the only possible response to the types of strain described above. Individuals may instead cope in legal or conventional ways. For example, they may seek assistance from others in an effort to reduce strain, as when a child asks an older sibling for help in dealing with a bully at school. Likewise, they may try to negotiate with parents or teachers in an effort to resolve interpersonal problems. If such behavioral strategies are unavailable or ineffective, individuals may rely on cognitive or emotional coping strategies of a noncriminal nature. For example, they may try to convince themselves that the strain they are experiencing is “not so bad,” they may seek comfort or reassurance from friends, family, or religion, or they may find a distraction in music or television. According to GST, a criminal or delinquent response is most likely to occur when these conventional coping strategies are unavailable, when they prove ineffective, or when the coping resources of the individual become taxed (as may occur when the individual is subjected to chronic or repeated strain). These facts help explain why, in comparison to adults, young people have a greater tendency to deal with strain in criminal or delinquent ways. In the face of strain, young people tend to have fewer options of a conventional nature available to them. In comparison to adults, young people generally have less control over their lives and, as a result, have difficulty removing themselves from those environments in which they may face chronic or repeated strain, such as the family or school. Indeed, attempts by adolescents to escape such environments through running away or truancy are defined as delinquent by adult society. Also, when responding to strain, young people have less life experience to draw on and thus have a greater tendency to react in immature and ineffective ways. This may be especially true for young people who lack conventional social support, such as the support of a caring and lawabiding adult.

9

In addition, a criminal or delinquent response to strain is more likely to occur when individuals lack the ability or skill to cope in a legal way. For example, individuals who are impulsive, easily upset and quick to anger, who have difficulty controlling their anger, or who struggle to express themselves verbally tend to have greater difficulty enacting conventional coping strategies. Existing Predispositions to Crime

All else equal, a criminal or delinquent response to strain is more likely to occur among individuals who are already predisposed to offending behavior. Individuals who are predisposed to crime or delinquency include those who have a past history of offending, low self-control, a tendency to attribute their problems to others, few stakes in conformity, or who have extensive associations with criminal or delinquent peers.

Empirical Status A number of studies have attempted to assess the validity of GST. Although a full, comprehensive test of GST and its many propositions has yet to be conducted, researchers have managed to assess some of the core propositions of the theory. While the results of these research efforts have not always been consistent, the findings appear to indicate that, overall, GST has promise. For instance, empirical tests of GST regularly show that various strains increase the likelihood of criminal and delinquent involvement, including parental rejection, harsh or erratic discipline, child abuse, negative experiences in school, homelessness, chronic unemployment, criminal victimization, and residence in economically deprived communities. Consistent with GST, some (but not all) studies indicate that these strains tend to generate negative emotions and, for this reason, increase the likelihood of offending behavior. Notably, some of the findings in this area are based on longitudinal studies. Longitudinal studies follow individuals over a period of time and allow researchers to examine the effects of strain on the future development of crime and delinquency. The results of such studies increase confidence in the assumption that strain plays a causal role in the development of offending behavior.

10

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory

There is also evidence to suggest that criminal and delinquent adaptations are experienced by offenders as partly successful, at least in the short run, allowing strained individuals to minimize the deleterious consequences of strain on emotional well-being. In other words, crime or delinquency may be experienced by offenders as a reasonably effective coping technique, allowing them to escape or avoid strain (e.g., running away, truancy), to compensate for a lack of positive emotions (e.g., through drug or alcohol use), or to strike back at the source of strain, perhaps in an effort to restore their dignity or a sense of justice. This fact may help to explain why many individuals are attracted to crime and delinquency and why such behavior is resistant to change. It appears that GST also has potential to explain why only some strained individuals resort to crime and delinquency. Consistent with GST, certain studies indicate that a delinquent response to strain is more likely among individuals who are impulsive, easily upset, quick to anger, who lack conventional social support, or who associate with delinquent peers. As a whole, however, studies have produced mixed results in this area, indicating that additional research is needed to understand the processes that shape the likelihood of a criminal or delinquent adaptation to strain. While acknowledging the need for future research, Agnew contends that, based on the evidence collected to date, GST has earned its place as a leading explanation of crime and delinquency. In light of the mixed findings that have been reported in the research literature, it is not entirely clear that rival theorists would concur with this assessment. Nevertheless, it seems clear that tests of GST have produced moderate support for the theory and that the key propositions of the theory appear to have some merit. Consequently, the theory may have important implications for the control and prevention of crime and delinquency.

Implications for Crime Control As described above, GST is relatively unique in that it is one of the few crime theories to emphasize the importance of negative emotions, such as anger and despair. Although GST borrows heavily from other crime theories, especially when explaining why only some strained individuals resort to crime,

it is GST’s focus on negative emotions, and on negative experiences in general, that help to distinguish it from other leading explanations. While social learning theory focuses attention on the processes that lead individuals to view crime as desirable or justifiable, and while control theorists draw attention to the factors that restrain or inhibit individuals from engaging in crime, GST highlights the negative relations and negative emotions that pressure individuals into crime. Consequently, the crime control recommendations that follow from GST are relatively unique as well. The major crime control strategies that follow from GST include efforts or interventions that are designed to (1) reduce or alleviate the strains that are conducive to crime or delinquency, (2) equip individuals with the tools and skills that will allow them to avoid such strains, and (3) reduce that likelihood that individuals will cope with strain in a criminal or delinquent manner. The task of reducing or alleviating strain may seem idealistic, but existing interventions have already shown some potential to reduce the kinds of strains and stressors highlighted by GST. For example, one such intervention is designed to repair the strained relationships that have developed between parents and children in troubled families, and involves the development of a parent-child contract. With the aid of a counselor, both parent and child negotiate an agreement specifying mutual responsibilities, obligations, and privileges. If the child attends school regularly throughout the week, for instance, the parent agrees to reward such behavior by allowing the child to stay out late on the weekend. The contract provides a lesson in effective parent-child negotiation and offers a method of conflict resolution based on communication as opposed to combativeness. This approach has shown promise in reducing both parental maltreatment (one type of strain) and juvenile delinquency. Successful parenting programs also teach unskilled parents techniques that help them to avoid the strains that might otherwise lead to child abuse. For example, in addition to effective disciplinary techniques, such programs teach parents to use reframing techniques and other cognitive strategies that allow them to interpret their children’s misbehavior in ways that reduce anger-based reactions. For instance, parents may be encouraged to

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory

view noncompliance as a symptom of the child’s immaturity instead of purposeful spite. Interventions also exist that are designed to help individuals cope more productively with the strains they have already experienced. For example, among young people who have a history of abuse, anger-management programs have shown some success in reducing aggressive behavior. Such programs encourage maltreated youths to recognize their feelings, the connection between their anger and aggression, and the triggers of their anger and aggression. These programs also teach young people alternative ways of coping with anger.

Recent Advances Agnew offered his initial statement of GST as a foundation for further development. Since the publication of GST, Agnew and his colleagues have extended and elaborated the theory in a number of ways. These efforts have evolved from attempts to apply GST to a number of key issues in criminological theory, including persistent offending, gender differences in criminal conduct, and community-level differences in crime. Explaining Persistent Offending

Most offenders desist from crime as they age into adulthood. However, a small group of individuals maintain a high level of offending into adulthood. These individuals have been referred to as life-course-persistent offenders. They exhibit very aggressive behavior as young children, are highly delinquent during adolescence, and persist in serious offending as they age. Moreover, these offenders commit a disproportionate share of serious, violent crime. Why do these individuals persist in their offending? Some criminologists try to explain persistent offending in terms of the stable personality traits that these individuals are believed to possess, including traits that may be partly inherited such as low intelligence, impulsivity, hyperactivity, or low self-control. Individuals who possess these traits tend to be viewed as “mean” or “out of control” by others. As a result, these individuals have difficulty developing strong attachments to conventional others. They also are less likely to succeed at school, develop few stakes in conformity,

11

and tend to associate with criminal and delinquent peers. GST adopts a similar explanation of persistent offending but places special emphasis on the trait of “aggressiveness,” which involves irritability, minimal tolerance for frustration, and a “difficult temperament.” According to GST, aggressiveness may partly result from the experience of chronic strain in early childhood, such as harsh or erratic discipline. The trait of aggressiveness, in turn, helps to maintain persistent antisocial behavior for a number of reasons related to GST. First, being irritable and having a low tolerance for frustration, aggressive individuals are more likely than others to interpret any given situation as aversive and to blame this adversity on others. They are thus more likely to respond to any given situation with anger and delinquency. Second, aggressive individuals are often treated negatively by others and, because of their undesirable traits, may provoke negative reactions. For example, having a difficult temperament, aggressive children often frustrate parents—especially unskilled parents—and as a result are at risk of emotional and physical abuse. At school, aggressive individuals may irritate their peers and teachers, leading to social rejection. Third, aggressive individuals tend to sort themselves into environments that are characterized by high levels of strain. Because they possess a “bad temper,” for example, aggressive individuals tend to have difficulty maintaining stable relationships and employment. As a result, they may end up in poor marriages and bad jobs—environments in which they are likely to experience chronic or repeated strain. These are also the type of environments that increase the likelihood of a criminal or delinquent response. From the perspective of GST, these facts can account for persistent, high-rate offending. Explaining Gender Differences in Crime

Males are far more likely than females to engage in offending behavior, and this is especially true for serious acts of violence and theft. Criminologists have tried to explain this gender gap in a variety of ways. Some argue that socialization processes help explain why males are more likely to engage in crime. It is said, for example, that males are

12

Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory

encouraged to adopt “masculine” values that are conducive to crime, such as competition and aggressiveness. Other criminologists stress the importance of control and opportunity factors. In comparison to males, females are subject to higher levels of parental supervision, tend to have higher levels of commitment to family and school, and are less likely to associate with criminal or delinquent peers. For these reasons, it is argued, the female crime rate is much lower than that of males. GST attempts to shed further light on this issue by providing an additional explanation for the gender gap in crime. In addition to the factors described above, Agnew and his colleagues argue that this gap can be explained, in part, in terms of the different types of strains that males and females experience. In particular, evidence suggests that, while females may experience as much strain as their male counterparts, males are more likely to experience those strains that are most likely to lead to criminal adaptations, such as harsh parental discipline, negative school experiences, criminal victimization, and homelessness. Although the evidence is somewhat mixed, there is also some suggestion in the research literature that males are more likely than females to react to strain with crime or delinquency. There may be several reasons for this gendered response to strain. One possible reason is that males are more likely to respond to strain with “moral outrage,” which is especially conducive to serious violence and property crime. Although females also get angry, their anger is more often accompanied by depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions—perhaps because females tend to blame themselves for strain or because they worry more about possible harm to interpersonal relationships. A second possible reason for this gendered response to strain is that males tend to have fewer coping resources of a conventional nature (e.g., lower levels of social support). A third possible reason is that, as described above, males tend to have a higher level of association with criminal or delinquent peers, making a deviant response to strain more likely. Community Differences in Crime

Like many other leading theories of crime, GST is pitched at the social psychological level of

analyses and focuses on the relationship between the individual and his or her immediate social environment. Agnew, however, argues that processes related to social psychological strain can also be used to explain patterns of crime appearing at the level of schools, neighborhoods, and larger communities. Why, for example, do some communities have especially high rates of crime and violence? Consistent with the approach of GST, Agnew points to the persistent strains that tend to exist in high-crime communities, such as high rates of poverty, unemployment, and family disruption. These factors may contribute to crime for a number of reasons, but Agnew stresses that one such reason is that these strains contribute to high levels of anger and frustration in the resident population. Furthermore, when there exists a high density of angry, frustrated persons in the same community, this serves to increase the likelihood that residents will interact with angry, upset, and potentially hostile individuals. It also increases the likelihood that angry and potentially hostile individuals will interact with one another, which is likely to lead to an escalation in crime or violence. Although data in this area are limited, researchers have found some support for these arguments. For example, one study found that schools that harbor a high percentage of angry students tend to have more problems with student aggression, especially fights between students. It was also observed that, in such schools, students in general (not just angry students) have an elevated risk of becoming involved in fights. Presumably, students in these schools may have more encounters with angry, upset, and potentially hostile individuals, whether or not they themselves are angry. This fact leads to relatively high levels of interpersonal conflict and aggression.

Conclusion General strain theory is distinct from other theories of crime in that it highlights the importance of negative relations and argues that individuals are pressured into crime. It is also one of the few crime theories to emphasize the role of negative emotional states, such as anger, depression, or despair. From the perspective of GST, criminal and delinquent acts occur in response to the “corrective

Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory

pressure” generated by strain or associated negative emotions. Criminal and delinquent responses to strain are most likely to occur when conventional coping strategies are unavailable, ineffective, or when the coping resources of the individual have become taxed in the face of chronic or repeated strain. Empirical tests of GST have produced moderate support for the theory, indicating that it can help to inform our understanding of the etiology of crime and delinquency as well as crime control and prevention efforts. Although more research needs to be conducted on GST, thus far the theory has attracted considerable attention from criminologists and has played an important role in revitalizing the strain theory tradition. Timothy Brezina See also Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert S. Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime; Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30, 47–87. Agnew, R. (1995). Controlling delinquency: Recommendations from general strain theory. In H. Barlow (Ed.), Crime and public policy (pp. 43–70). Boulder, CO: Westview. Agnew, R. (2001). Building on the foundation of general strain theory: Specifying the types of strain most likely to lead to crime and delinquency. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 38, 319–361. Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Los Angeles: Roxbury.

Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory The beginning of the 21th century was an exciting period in which to study the causes of crime. Violence in the United States, particularly among

13

juveniles, had dropped precipitously from its levels in the early 1990s and criminologists vigorously sought an explanation. Data with which to test classic theories such as social disorganization theory had recently become available for the first time and were generating empirical support for ideas that had not previously been tested. Recent revisions of learning theory and control theory had sparked heated debate about both the causes of crime and the most effective methods with which to identify those causes empirically. Strain theory had begun a major resurgence in the literature and was generating renewed research in its own right. However, while these and other such developments generated new interest in the causes of crime, it was becoming increasingly difficult for practitioners to keep up with the latest literature, for academics to summarize it in a coherent way, and for students to leave criminology courses with a straightforward answer to a seemingly simple question: Why do criminals offend? Robert Ag­­ new’s general theory of crime represents a leading effort to integrate prior theory and research for the purpose of answering this question in a manner that is relatively succinct but simultaneously complete.

The Goals of Agnew’s General Theory Although it may seem counterintuitive, different criminological theories sometimes attempt to explain different phenomena. This occurs for two reasons. First, different theories define crime in different ways. For example, although Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi refer to their influential control theory as a “general theory of crime,” they seek to explain any behavior that serves to satiate an individual’s short-term self-interest at the expense of long-term well-being. While such behaviors certainly include acts of force or fraud for which there exist codified legal sanctions, they also include legal behaviors, like promiscuous sex or smoking, that are “analogous” to crime insofar as they satiate the perpetrator’s immediate desires at the expense of long-term well-being. In contrast to Goffredson and Hirschi’s theory, Agnew’s (2005, p. 12) integrated theory is designed specifically to explain “behaviors that are generally condemned and that carry a significant

14

Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory

risk of sanction by the state if detected” (emphasis in the original). Beyond their sometimes different definitions of crime, there exists a second reason that different criminological theories attempt to answer somewhat different questions: Different crime theories have somewhat different aims. Some aim to explain why crime exists at all, some why certain individuals are more criminal, some why certain groups (e.g., adolescents, males, ethnic minorities) are more criminal, some why certain places (e.g., neighborhoods, cities, nations) have higher crime rates, and some a combination of all or some of the above aims. While Agnew’s integrated theory is relevant to each of these, its primary aim is to explain why some individuals are more criminal than others.

Motivations for and Constraints Against Crime At its core, Agnew’s integrated theory argues that some individuals engage in more crime than others because they have higher motivations for crime and experience weaker constraints against crime. While this may seem like a self-evident observation to some, it actually provides an important distinction between Agnew’s theory and certain other theories of crime. On one hand, for example, some crime theories attribute individual differences in crime primarily to differences in motivation. This is particularly true of theories from the classical anomie/strain tradition (e.g., Cloward & Ohlin, 1960; Cohen, 1955; Merton, 1938). Such theories originated in the United States to address relatively high rates of American crime and to explain group differences in crime within the United States. In particular, they suggest that unequal opportunity for achieving the American Dream leads members of economically disadvantaged groups to possess a higher motivation for crime. However, by focusing most of their attention on the degree to which some people are disproportionately pressured into crime as a result of limited opportunities for achieving economic goals via legitimate channels, these theories beg such questions as: “Why do members of privileged groups engage in crime?” and “Why do so many members of underprivileged groups not engage in crime?” In essence,

then, these theories can be said to provide insufficient account of the reasons that individuals with relatively equal motivation for crime engage in different levels of criminal behavior. On the other hand, some crime theories (e.g., Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Hirschi, 1969) begin with the fundamental assumption that human beings are universally, and equally, motivated to seek economic (e.g., monetary wealth) and visceral (e.g., sex, drugs, alcohol) gratification. Because they believe that criminals and non-criminals are equally motivated by these desires, such theories must attribute individual differences in crime exclusively to those social constraints that serve to prevent some individuals from satiating their economic and visceral desires in criminal ways. Thus, these theories focus on the degree to which such forces as good parenting, strong marriages, and stable employment prevent some individuals from pursing their natural inclination toward self-interest via criminal means. In contrast to either of the above two approaches, Agnew’s integrated theory asserts that individuals differ substantially in terms of both their motivations for crime and their constraints against crime. Further, he asserts that crime is lowest among those who experience low motivations and high constraints simultaneously; that crime should be somewhat higher among those individuals who experience either high motivations or low constraints; and that crime is highest among those who experience both high motivations and low constraints. Motivations for Crime

While Agnew agrees with classical strain theorists that motivations for crime are higher among some individuals, he draws on learning theories (e.g., Akers, 1998; Sutherland, 1947) and on recent revisions of strain theory (e.g., Agnew, 1992, 2001) to argue that differences in motivation extend beyond differences in economic opportunity. Building on the work of Walter Reckless, he suggests that some motivations entice individuals toward crime while others pressure individuals toward crime. Among critical enticements that motivate crime, Agnew (2005, pp. 22–26) identifies “reinforcements for crime,” “exposure to successful criminal

Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory

models,” and “beliefs favorable to crime.” “Reinforcement” refers broadly to any reward that one receives immediately following a criminal behavior. Some rewards may be material or economic, but others may include social rewards like the increase in status that some individuals experience in criminal circles after having demonstrated their physical toughness (e.g., Anderson, 1999). “Successful criminal models” are those whom a prospective criminal respects and who, simultaneously, reap some form of economic or social reward for crime without getting caught. “Beliefs favorable to crime” refer to attitudes that some individuals may learn to hold and that suggest crime to be a desirable behavior in at least some contexts. Among critical pressures toward crime, Agnew draws heavily on a range of strain theories that identify both economic and non-economic strains and stressors that may serve to frustrate or anger prospective criminals. While Agnew acknowledges that all individuals experience stress or strain throughout their lives, he argues that some individuals experience substantially more strain than others. Some individuals, for example, may experience fewer opportunities for achieving their goals than do other individuals. These may include the economic opportunities associated with classical versions of strain theory, but may also include non-economic opportunities like the opportunity to pursue a favorite leisure activity. Other individuals may experience the loss of something valuable, like a job or a loved one. Still other indi­viduals may experience negative or noxious stimuli including such things as physical abuse or disrespect. While everyone experiences some such strain throughout life, Agnew’s integrated theory views these strains as forces that, combined in high numbers, can make some individuals more prone to crime than others. Just as too much air may lead a balloon to pop, too much strain may be said to promote crime. Constraints Against Crime

While Agnew disagrees with those control theorists who believe motivation to be essentially equal among all human beings, he simultaneously agrees with control theorists that individuals differ in their constraints against crime. In particular, he

15

identifies three critical categories of constraint that may serve to counteract individuals’ motivations for crime. In particular, Agnew (2005, pp. 18–22) argues that some individuals experience greater “external control,” that some individuals experience a greater “stake in conformity,” and that some individuals experience a greater degree of “internal control.” “External control” refers broadly to the negative consequences that others in an individual’s social environment may impose if they discover that the individual has committed a crime. External control includes, but is not limited to, those consequences that official authorities such as the police and the legal system may impose. Others—such as parents, friends, or employers—may also exercise external control to the degree that they set clear expectations of legitimate behavior, monitor the individual to identify violations of those expectations, and impose appropriate negative consequences for such violations in a consistent manner. Whereas external control refers to the negative consequences that might be imposed for criminal behavior, “stake in conformity” refers broadly to anything that an individual values and that he or she would simultaneously risk losing as a result of crime. Examples include the admiration or respect of law-abiding friends and family members and the long-term benefits of one’s prior educational or occupational achievements. Finally, “internal control” refers in some sense to any self-imposed sanctions that might result from crime. Individuals, for example, differ in terms of the degree to which they care about others who might be harmed by their criminal involvement and the degree to which they are able to restrain their immediate urges for the sake of long-term benefits.

The Five Life Domains Like many criminological theorists, Agnew views his theory in part as an attempt to organize the wealth of information that research has unveiled over the years about those characteristics or social experiences that are associated with a higher probability of crime. There are dozens or even hundreds of such characteristics and experiences that criminologists have found to be associated with a higher probability of crime. These include membership in gangs, poor performance in school,

16

Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory

physical parental abuse, and difficulty concentrating— just to name a few. Whereas most criminological theorists attempt to organize or categorize such variables in terms of the type of motivation or constraint against crime that they represent, Agnew instead argues that a better means of categorizing them is to do so according to which of five major “life domains” they represent. These five life domains include the self, the family, the school, the peer group, and the workplace. Agnew argues that each of these domains may both increase the motivations for crime and decrease the constraints against it. The self refers broadly to an individual’s level of self-control and to his or her level of irritability. Self-control refers predominantly to an individual’s ability to delay gratification. Irritability refers mainly to an individual’s ability to tolerate negative stimuli. Individuals differ from one another along both dimensions, and much research has found that crime tends to be higher among individuals who lack self-control and who are high in irritability. On one hand, individuals with low levels of self-control may be more crime-prone as a result of their weak constraint, particularly their weak internal control. On the other, individuals with high levels of irritability may be more prone to experience the same social stimuli as being more noxious than do those with low irritability. As such, those with high irritability may be more motivated to engage in crime as a means of coping. The family domain includes an individual’s relationships with parents, siblings, or spouses. Parents, for example, differ in the degree to which they set clear rules for their children, monitor their children to guard against rule violation, and consistently sanction rule violations. Further, children differ in the number of siblings they have, in the degree to which siblings serve as criminal models, and in the degree to which they experience such noxious stimuli as abuse at the hands of either parents or siblings. On one hand, parental socialization provides critical constraints, such as external control, against crime. On the other, parents or siblings who are abusive or criminal provide increased motivations for crime, including increased exposure to criminal models and increased strain. The school domain includes those experiences that individuals have throughout their academic

careers and with their teachers. Some students, for example, study less than others, have lower desire to achieve good grades, and do poorer in school. Likewise, some teachers provide less adequate supervision, are less apt to discipline students for rule violations, and are more apt to expose their students to negative treatment. As with the family domain, the school domain can provide critical constraints against crime such as external control or a strong stake in conformity. Likewise, it can provide increased motivation for crime such as the strain that is associated with poor school performance or negative treatment from teachers. The peer group includes three major types of interaction that may affect motivations for and constraints against crime. First, some individuals associate with close friends who are themselves involved in higher levels of crime and who may therefore increase such motivations for crime as positive reinforcement. Second, some individuals experience greater levels of peer conflict that may promote crime via increased strain. Third, some individuals are more likely to spend greater amounts of time in unstructured and unsupervised activities with peers and such activities tend to provide weak constraints against crime. Finally, the workplace domain includes both individuals’ experiences with jobs and their experiences with unemployment. Unemployment itself may be viewed as a critical source of financial strain that may promote crime as a coping mechanism. Among those who have jobs, some jobs provide better working conditions than others, thus confronting some individuals with higher levels of strain despite being employed. Likewise, some jobs provide better long-term prospects for economic advancement, thus providing greater constraints against crime by fostering a high stake in conformity.

The Web of Crime Beyond suggesting that the five major life domains each contribute to both the motivations for and constraints against crime, Agnew suggests that complex relationships exist among each of these domains and crime. Six facets of these complex relationships are particularly critical. First, each life domain is said to influence each of the other life domains. To cite one example, the

Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory

family domain is said to have a critical influence on the self. In particular, although Agnew suggests that a portion of self-control and irritability may be genetically determined, he also believes that parental socialization plays an important role in affecting the self. Similar to Gottfredson and Hirschi, Agnew suggests that parents who set clear rules and consistently sanction rule violations promote higher self-control in their children. In addition, however, Agnew builds on the work of such theorists as Terrie Moffitt to suggest that the traits of low selfcontrol and irritability may also wield a reciprocal influence on parenting. Specifically, children with these traits may be more difficult to deal with effectively and, as such, may tire their parents to the point of poor parenting that becomes less consistent as parents become increasingly strained. In a similar manner, Agnew argues that the self, family, school, peer group, and workplace all influence one another such that a crime-inducing domain increases the probability that the other domains will themselves become more crime inducing. Second, the effects of each life domain on crime are non-linear. This means that as a given life domain becomes more and more conducive to crime, its effect on crime becomes stronger and stronger. For example, a linear effect of poor parenting on crime might mean that for each time parents fail to correct a child’s misbehavior, the child engages in one further act of delinquency. One such parental failure, then, might result in one crime, a second failure would result in a second crime, a third failure would result in a third crime, and so on. A non-linear effect of poor parenting, on the other hand, might mean that the first failure to correct a child’s misbehavior in a given day may produce one further crime, a second failure might produce 5 further crimes, a third failure might produce 20 additional crimes, and so on such that each failure of parenting results in an exponentially higher rate of offending. Similarly, Agnew argues that the effects of other variables from the family domain and of other variables from all the other life domains wield non-linear influences on crime. Third, these life domains are said to interact in their influence on crime. This means that a given domain is particularly crime-inducing when one or more of the other domains are also crimeinducing. For example, having low self-control and high irritability may promote crime, but these

17

traits are particularly likely to promote crime when they are combined with crime-inducing forces from the other domains such as poor parenting or exposure to delinquent peers. In contrast, these traits may be less likely to promote crime when they occur among children who are exposed at an early age to consistent parenting and who are not provided with the opportunity to associate with delinquent peers. Fourth, crime is said to influence each of the life domains. Engaging in criminal behavior may, for example, satiate an individual’s short-term gratification, thus reinforcing itself and lowering an individual’s tendency to exert self-control. In the family domain, a youth’s delinquency may increase parental strain and, in turn, promote more impulsive and less effective parenting. In the school domain, even mild forms of delinquency like truancy (skipping school) may lead a student to fall further behind, thus hindering his or her academic progress. In the peer domain, criminal behavior may repel conventional peers and attract deviant peers who share similar values. Finally, in the domain of the workplace, criminal behavior such as drug abuse may impede work performance. Fifth, an individual’s age influences the strength of the above relationships. For example, during childhood, Agnew builds on the work of such theorists as Terence Thornberry to suggest that the self and parenting practices in the family are particularly important influences on crime. During adolescence, he believes the self continues to exert a strong influence over crime, but that the family’s influence weakens while the peer group’s influence grows stronger. Finally, during adulthood, he argues that the self and the peer group retain important influences on crime but that the influence of marriages and the workplace increase. Finally, crime and the life domains have contemporaneous influences on each other, but lagged influences on themselves. A contemporaneous influence refers to one that takes a short amount of time to appear. For example, Agnew argues that having low self-control affects one’s crime rather instantaneously such that it has an effect on one’s immediate involvement in criminal behavior. Likewise, engaging in crime may provide immediate reinforcement by satiating one’s immediate desires and, thus, lower the individual’s immediate tendency to exert self-control. On the other hand,

18

Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth

each life-domain is said to have a lagged, or longterm, effect on itself. Having delinquent friends, for example, is said to increase the long-term likelihood that a given individual will continue to have delinquent friends insofar as such friends alienate conventional others and limit one’s opportunity for socializing in the future with conventional others. Similarly, crime is said to have a lagged, or long-term, influence on itself. In other words, the longer one has been entrenched in the web of crime, the more and more difficult it may be to escape that web.

Conclusion Agnew’s integrated theory of crime represents a leading attempt to organize the existing knowledge about those factors that predispose some individuals to higher levels of crime and other individuals to lower levels of crime. It builds on a number of perspectives from such traditions as the control perspective, the learning perspective, and the strain perspective. It argues that variables derived from each of these perspectives can be organized around five major life domains that, on one hand, affect an individual’s motivations for criminal behavior and, on the other, affect an individual’s constraints against crime. While it builds on prior empirical research about personal and social variables that may cause individual differences in crime, it also includes a number of new propositions about why these variables cause crime and about how these variables are related to both crime and one another. Agnew’s theory provides a framework by which further empirical work may test these propositions for the ultimate purpose of answering the question: Why do criminals offend? Cesar J. Rebellon See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Elliott, Delbert S., Susan S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency; Thornberry, Terence P.: Interactional Theory

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30, 47–87.

Agnew, R. (2001). Building on the foundation of general strain theory: Specifying the types of strain most likely to lead to crime and delinquency. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 38, 319–361. Agnew, R. (2005). Why do criminals offend? A general theory of crime and delinquency. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Anderson, E. (1999). The code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: W. W. Norton. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review. 3, 672–682. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott. Thornberry, T. P. (1987). Toward an interactional theory of delinquency. Criminology, 25, 863–892.

Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth In 1925, August Aichhorn published his original work titled Wayward Youth in German. Translated into English in 1935, he sought to describe how Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical principles could be applied directly to his work with wayward youth in both a one-on-one setting in conventional society and in an institution. Aichhorn (1935) defined wayward youth as not only “delinquent and dissocial children but also so-called problem children and others suffering from neurotic symptoms” (p. 3). Although he utilizes Freud’s work and assumes that readers understand the principles of psychoanalytical theory, he never directly addresses the id as one of the causes of wayward behavior. Rather he focuses on the interplay

Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth

between the ego and the super-ideal (super-ego), the role of heredity, the role that a poorly developed super-ego (lack of guilt) has on the prohibition of delinquency, the existence of a predisposition toward delinquency (latent delinquency), and deficits in the libido that cause an individual to seek immediate gratification (impulsivity). In Freudian terms, though, he is describing a personality that is id-dominated (Martin et al., 1990, p. 80). Aichhorn’s contributions illustrate the expansion of Freud’s psychoanalytical principles to a delinquent population. Although Freud had discussed the formation of delinquency as a neurosis, he did not describe how we could better understand and treat delinquents in an institutional setting. For this reason, Aichhorn was considered a pioneer during his time for treating those youth who were classified as wayward. The subsequent material is organized in the following manner: First, Aichhorn’s argument for the use of education to address delinquent tendencies is reviewed; second, a brief summary of the ego development is presented; and finally, an overview of Aichhorn’s application of psychoanalysis in a training school setting is given. This discussion should provide the reader with a better understanding of how psychoanalytical principles can be used to explain both delinquent activity and how the concepts for treatment can be applied in an institutional setting.

Education as Treatment Aichhorn argues that it is a common misconception to assume that a predisposition toward delinquent activity automatically results in this behavior. Rather, evidence suggests that social influences such as parenting will either mitigate or exacerbate the condition. Aichhorn identifies two forms of delinquency: latent and manifest. According to Aichhorn (1935), every child is born in an asocial state. Failure to move into the social state in adulthood is considered dissocial behavior. A child moves from the asocial to social states through parenting and education that specifically addresses normal libidinal development. A child who does not make this natural transformation has the ability to suppress his or her instincts until provoked. This state of unconscious desires is referred to as

19

“latent delinquency” (p. 4). Extreme traumas can also result in permanent injuries to the psychic. These experiences in children who have latent delinquency tendencies may cause the child to become neurotic. While in a state of latent delinquency, there are no definite symptoms of criminal activity but the susceptibility exists. Because a child has no conscious understanding of what causes his or her behavior, one who appears in treatment in the state of susceptibility is most likely to achieve success. Altering the child’s behavior occurs through re-education or “laying bare of unconscious relationships” (pp. 4–5). The therapist must seek to “weaken the latent delinquency” as a way to “alter the ego structure of the child” (p. 41). The movement from the unconscious state to the conscious (delinquency) is referred to as “manifest delinquency” (p. 41). This is a dynamic expression of the behavior. The shift from latent to manifest delinquency is gradual. Before therapists can start the process of education, they must first understand the underlying causes of the behavior through the use of psychoanalytical training. This requires delving into the unconscious psychic of the individual to identify whether any neurosis exists and then establishing a treatment plan. Two competing perspectives on the use of education to treat individuals exist: (1) behavior is hereditary and therefore cannot be changed, and (2) education can overcome heredity. Aichhorn believed the latter. For example, if children grow up in a dissocial environment and identify with dissocial parents, then they too will be dissocial. These children may incorrectly “be designated as ‘born’ criminals” (p. 224). Even though there are generational families of criminals, it does not preclude the influence of the environment as well as the possibility of inherited traits. Aichhorn advises that not every dissocial child is a major problem. One must understand that the unconscious seeks gratification while the conscious seeks to repress this. Imitation and repression are forms of the unconscious, while the way we repress or manifest an expression is referred to as a symptom. “A symptom could be formed out of a revengeful and a moral impulse provided that both could find partial satisfaction in a single act” (p. 34). Simple punishment would only serve to exacerbate the situation. Parents who utilize corporal

20

Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth

punishment may only serve to “suppress the dissocial behavior” (p. 39) rather than addressing what caused the behavior. Failure to address the cause of the overt behavior could actually result in activities becoming more pronounced and deeply rooted.

Ego Development Before workers attempt to re-educate a juvenile delinquent, they must first understand the ego development. During infancy the autoerotic period occurs. Here the child’s sexuality (in the broader context not just via sexual genitalia) comes from having all of the needs of the body met—that is, love and affection from the parents (narcissistic libido). During the next stage, the child begins to turn self-love toward external objects (object cathexis or object libido). These objects are their loved ones with whom they begin to assume and incorporate the personality traits and characteristics of the person. The next phase, identification, can occur either independently or simultaneously with object cathexis. It is during this time period that children proceed from the unconscious to the conscious state. The amount of change in the youth’s ego depends upon the age at identification. The younger a child is at time of identification the more likely these traits will be imprinted on the youth. The Oedipus Complex is the next phase whereby the child’s first libidinal development occurs. Two paths can be followed during this stage: positive and negative. It is during this time that the child’s super-ego (super-ideal) begins to develop. In normal development, the super-ego now takes on the role formally played by their parent(s) (positive) through emulation. This emulation grows out of both love for the parents and fears of their demands. Conflict between the ego-ideal (superego) and the ego is perceived as guilt. Guilt that is too great for the conscious to handle is repressed in the unconscious and can result in either mental illness or criminality. Aichhorn proposes that criminals who are sloppy or who go back to the scene of the crime are motivated by their unconscious guilt for punishment. Given what is known about the disjuncture between the ego-ideal and the ego, Aichhorn proposes there are potentially two different

responses to delinquent behavior. For the delinquent with an “excessively severe” ego-ideal, as in the neurotic personality, the worker must be kind and gentle. For the delinquent with a dissocial personality that is uninhibited, the worker must place “increased demands” on the youth. The two differences are important because of the way transference occurs. The analyst must understand these two differences so as to create a positive relationship with the child at the first meeting. If the analyst fails to accomplish this, the treatment will be compromised. Because the analyst expects the child will initially lie, it is important to break down the barriers as quickly as possible to understand the underlying causes and address them. According to Aichhorn, the personality of the worker is as important as the methods used to enact change. The reason for this is the youth must identify with the worker (transference) in order to change the ego-ideal. The child transfers the need for parental love onto the worker whereby this person becomes the father-substitute for the child. With this positive transference, the child establishes real character change in the ego-ideal so that the youth can become a productive member of society. Furthermore, it is important to have both male and female counselors when dealing with boys in an institution. The presence of women has a libidinal effect on males.

Application of Psychoanalysis in a Training School Setting Aichhorn (1935) provides examples from his own work of how psychoanalysis used in training schools can work in a group setting to prepare youth for everyday life. The key is to have small groups (no more than 25) with similar difficulties. Aichhorn identified no specific educational methodologies used to punish the juveniles in the facility. Instead, a form of mediation to bring the scorned parties together to discuss their differences was used. Typically youth displayed one of two hate reactions in the institutional environment. In the first form, there was no attempt to conceal their reaction to their environment. This overt behavior ranged from intimation to deadly violence. The second form, which occurred less frequently, was concealed and harder to recognize. These

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

youngsters were overly obligatory, friendly, and “self-­conscious to the point of arrogance” (p. 164). While the first group experienced too little love, the second group suffered from parents who expend too much libido on the child. Relying on Freud’s work, Aichhorn argues that there are two principles that can be used to explain responses to the institutional setting: (1) the pleasurepain principle; and (2) the reality principle. The pleasure-pain principle is best exemplified in the unconscious state (super-ego) whereby the child seeks pleasure and attempts to avoid all pain. The reality principle includes the mechanism by which the conscious state (ego) seeks to regulate the impulses of the unconscious such that satisfaction is attained in a socially acceptable way. These two principles taken together rule all mental processes. The reality principle does not, however, rule out all pleasure. It just serves as the barometer for socially acceptable behavior. The transformation from the unconscious to the conscious state involves education through renunciation. The educator seeks to minimize immediate gratification and enhance the use of delayed gratification through approval rather than punishment. The key to education is the enhancement of the reality principle. Delinquency occurs because of a faulty ego. The therapist must be aware that children commit delinquent acts for diametrically opposite reasons: one for being given too much love and the other for experiencing too much punishment. In some cases, children receive a combination of the two, whereby the father may be extremely severe in the punishment of the child while the mother is overindulgent. Regardless, the worker must discover these underlying causes and focus on enhancing the reality principle.

Conclusion The results of Aichhorn’s seminal work have not been forgotten. Follow-up interviews with parents of children who had as few as one interview with Aichhorn reported changes in their child (see the 1951 edition of Wayward Youth). As James Wuluch notes, Aichhorn was one of the first psychoanalytic pioneers to apply these concepts to cure narcissistic juvenile delinquents. The influence of his works, particularly the capacity for guilt, were further tested and supported in the literature.

21

However, although the presence of love withdrawal may attach anxiety to hostile impulses, it alone does not explain the “presence of guilt and moral judgment” (Hoffman & Saltzstein, 1967, p. 56). Aichhorn was further attributed with influencing the creation of mileau therapy. Although workers may not refer to their handling of youths as incorporating psychoanalysis, the direct influence of this work can be seen in group homes and other institutional settings. Shannon M. Barton-Bellessa See also Freudian Theory; Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime; Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory; Mental Illness and Crime

References and Further Readings Aichhorn, A. (1935). Wayward youth. New York: Viking Press. (Original work published 1925) Freud, S. (1962). The ego and the id. New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1923) Hoffman, M. L., & Saltzstein, H. D. (1967). Parent discipline and the child’s moral development. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5, 45–57. Martin, R., Mutchnick, R. J., & Austin, W. T. (1990). Criminological thought: Pioneers past and present. New York: Macmillan. Wulach, J. S. (1983). August Aichhorn’s legacy: The treatment of narcissism in criminals. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 27, 226–234.

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory In 1973, Ronald L. Akers published the first of three editions of his seminal work, Deviant Behavior: A Social Learning Approach. In that book, Akers laid out the basic elements of what has become one of the most popular and widely researched theories in criminology: social learning theory. Social learning theory, in its current form, spells out the specific mechanisms by which criminal behavior is learned. In particular, social learning theory maintains that criminal behavior is more likely to result when an individual associates

22

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

more with those who engage in and approve of crime than with others who do not. Such a pattern of association provides more criminal than noncriminal role models, greater reinforcement of criminal than conforming behavior, and the shaping of more pro-crime than anti-crime attitudes that constitute the optimal environment in which criminal behavior is learned. The origins of social learning theory extend to an effort by Robert Burgess and Akers to integrate Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory with principles drawn from behavioral learning in psychology. From these beginnings, Akers crafted a highly testable general theory of deviance and conformity, which has enjoyed immense empirical support, has been applied successfully to a variety of behaviors, and has fostered prevention programs that have been effective in reducing criminal and deviant behavior in the populations these programs serve.

The Theorist Born in 1939, Akers was raised in a working-class family of modest means in a small factory town on the banks of the Ohio River in southeastern Indi­ ana. Typical of the Midwestern upbringing of that time, Akers was taught to work hard, value education, and love God. Perhaps inspired by his teachers throughout public school, he sought a college degree, the first in his family to do so, and a career as a high school social studies teacher. In 1960, he graduated from Indiana State University with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education. Akers, however, turned down a high school teaching job to pursue a graduate education in sociology. As an undergraduate, Akers developed an intellectual interest in the link between social class and crime, an interest that he further cultivated in his master’s thesis research at Kent State University. Even as a doctoral student at the University of Kentucky, Akers’s work was not devoted specifically to criminological theory. With a broader emphasis on criminology and the sociology of law and with the guidance of his mentor, Richard Quinney, Akers’s dissertation analyzed the role played by political power in the enactment of professional practice and licensure laws. Despite the absence of etiological theory in his thesis and dissertation research, Akers’s graduate

education provided substantial exposure to the criminological theories of that time. Robert Merton’s anomie theory and the theories of the Chicago School, including Sutherland’s differential association theory, were standard in any academic discussions of criminological theory. During the early 1960s, however, new developments in criminological theory were proliferating, including the delinquent subculture theories of Albert Cohen and of Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, control theories advanced by F. Ivan Nye and Walter Reckless, labeling theories proposed by Edwin Lemert and Howard Becker, and conflict theories advocated by George Vold and Richard Quinney. By the time Akers left graduate school at the University of Kentucky in 1965, he had been fully immersed in the extant criminological theory literature of that time. That year, he accepted his first position as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Washington. It was in this setting that Akers encountered colleagues that would ultimately shape his academic career and set in motion one of the most influential theories in criminology.

The Origins of the Theory Akers’s arrival in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington coincided with that of Robert Burgess, a behavioral sociologist with extensive training in operant conditioning theory. Intellectual discussions between the two assistant professors often centered on the seemingly improbable compatibility of psychological behaviorism with sociology. Psychological behaviorism based on operant conditioning principles ad­­vanced by B. F. Skinner conceptualized humans as essentially robotic and without volition, responding almost mindlessly to cues in their environment. Sociology, especially the branch that focused on individual rather than structural levels of analysis, was based on symbolic interactionism, which placed great emphasis on the capacity of humans to both influence and be influenced by their environment through their interactions with others. Nevertheless, Burgess and Akers saw congruity in the two approaches, notably that both behaviorism and symbolic interactionism, especially as Sutherland had made use of it in differential association theory, illustrated similar

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

processes by which social behavior is learned through interaction with one’s environment. From these conversations emerged a growing realization that an important contribution to the explanation of crime could be accomplished through the integration of psychological learning principles with Sutherland’s differential association theory. Reasoning that differential association theory lacked explicit discussion of the mechanisms by which criminal behavior is learned, it seemed possible to Burgess and Akers that behaviorism could supply the missing pieces. In 1966, Burgess and Akers published an article titled “A Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory of Criminal Behavior,” which reformulated Sutherland’s nine propositions of differential association theory into seven propositions that laid out in behavioral terms a more precise description of the process by which criminal behavior—like any other form of behavior—is learned. The article drew a modest and mostly positive response from those working with differential association theory, including Donald Cressey, but was not without its critics. Some sociologists were affronted by the mere introduction of behaviorism into sociology; others charged that the theory was tautological. Burgess and Akers continued to collaborate for a short time thereafter on refining differential associationreinforcement theory, especially answering to criticisms. Eventually, Burgess moved on to other intellectual pursuits; Akers continued to work with the theory, with a specific interest in demonstrating its applicability to a wide variety of deviant behaviors. The transition from “differential associationreinforcement theory” to “social learning theory” was subtle. Burgess and Akers referred in passing in their article to “social learning,” but Akers did not formally apply the term to the theory until he published Deviant Behavior: A Social Learning Approach, a textbook on the sociology of deviance in which he analyzed several forms of deviant behavior using the theory he developed with Burgess. In that book, Akers presented the seven propositions comprising differential associationreinforcement theory but devoted much of the subsequent theoretical discussion to a detailed explication of the key concepts drawn from the behavioral learning and differential association

23

theories that together formed a social learning explanation of deviance.

The Statement of the Theory Social learning theory is an integration of differential association and behavioral learning theories. It wholly subsumes differential association theory by recasting it in the context of behavioral learning principles. In differential association theory, Sutherland drew upon symbolic interactionism to emphasize that both criminal and law-abiding behavior are learned in interaction with others. Sutherland acknowledged that in American society, one is likely to associate, to varying degrees, with individuals who define law violation as favorable as well as with individuals who define law violation as unfavorable. When exposure to people with behavioral patterns and attitudes favorable to crime exceeds exposure to people with behavioral patterns and attitudes unfavorable to crime, criminal behavior is likely to be learned. When the balance is struck in the opposite direction, law-abiding behavior is likely to be learned instead. Chief among the criticisms of differential association theory was the charge that it neglected to specify the precise underlying learning mechanism involved in the process of becoming a criminal. At the time Sutherland developed differential association theory, behaviorism in psychology, with its focus on learning, was in full swing. However, the behaviorism of the 1930s and 1940s largely excluded human cognition and the assignment of meaning to human action, principles at the core of the symbolic interactionist foundation of differential association theory. The radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s further divorced behavior from mind; however, by the late 1960s, behaviorism had come increasingly under fire as cognitive psychology began to supplant it. Although Burgess and Akers claimed to draw on Skinnerian principles of operant conditioning, by 1973 Akers had tempered social learning theory with principles more consistent with the cognitive learning approach advocated by Albert Bandura. The behavioral principles involved in the social learning of deviant behavior—and conforming behavior as well—include but are not limited to notions of operant conditioning, differential

24

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

reinforcement, and discriminative stimuli. Among cognitive learning principles, Akers incorporated concepts such as imitation, anticipated reinforcement, and self-reinforcement into social learning theory. As Akers presented the theory, he discussed how these principles illuminate the specific mechanisms by which deviant behavior is learned through association with others. In his earlier presentations of the theory, Akers devoted most of his attention to the cognitive and behavioral principles underlying the social learning process. It was not until he published an empirical test of the theory using original data that the concepts of social learning theory as it is known today emerged (Akers et al., 1979). In its present form, social learning theory contains four key concepts: differential reinforcement, imitation, definitions, and differential association. The concept most solidly grounded in psychological behaviorism is differential reinforcement, which incorporates among other ideas operant conditioning, reinforcement, and punishment. Operant conditioning is distinguished from respondent conditioning as opposite processes. In respondent conditioning, a prior stimulus elicits an involuntary behavioral response, such as when food (stimulus) presented to a hungry dog elicits salivation (involuntary behavior). In operant conditioning, a voluntary behavior leads to a subsequent consequence; the nature of the consequence then determines whether or not that voluntary behavior will be repeated. Operant behaviors that are reinforced—that is, followed by a rewarding consequence (positive reinforcement) or by the cessation of an unpleasant state (negative reinforcement)—will increase in frequency. Operant behaviors that are punished—that is, followed by an adverse consequence (positive punishment) or by the cessation of a pleasurable state (negative punishment)—will decrease in frequency. Akers argues that the consequences that follow an individual’s behavior may be nonsocial, in the sense that they derive from the experience itself; for example, the ingestion of alcohol may be followed by a feeling of euphoria or nausea. However, because humans are also social beings who interact with other people, the consequences of their behavior may be social in origin as well. Thus, a given behavior may be followed, for example, by encouragement or derision from others with

whom one interacts. Consistent with the tenets of differential association theory, it is not simply a matter of whether a single consequence is reinforcing or punishing for a given behavior that determines its likelihood of repetition. Instead, it is important to assess the balance of reinforcements and punishments for a given behavior, since that behavior is likely to be followed by multiple consequences depending on the constellation of others with whom the individual interacts. In social learning theory, then, deviant behavior is more likely to increase when the social and nonsocial reinforcement exceeds the social and nonsocial punishment of the behavior. A second concept in social learning theory, drawn from cognitive psychology, is imitation. Although Sutherland maintained that the learning of criminal behavior involved far more than simple mimicry of others’ behavior, Akers included imitation as an indispensible component of the learning mechanism. Imitation occurs through observation of the behavior of others. Whether or not the behavior is reproduced by the observer depends on the degree of identification with the model, whether the model is observed to receive reinforcement for the behavior, and whether the imitation itself is anticipated to be reinforced. Likely models of deviant and conforming behavior are found within the primary group, especially parents and friends, but may also be found in secondary groups and those observed in the popular media. In social learning theory, when exposure to admired criminal role models exceeds exposure to admired conventional role models, criminal behavior is more likely to be imitated. A key concept in differential association theory that appears in modified form in social learning theory is definitions. In both differential association theory and social learning theory, definitions refer to evaluative expressions ranging from approval to disapproval of a given behavior. In differential association theory, Sutherland focuses mainly on one’s exposure to the definitions of others. In social learning theory, definitions refer primarily to the attitudes formulated by the individual following exposure to the definitions of others. Definitions may be general, oriented toward broad moral principles, or they may be specific, focused on particular acts of norm violation. Akers designates definitions

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

as positive if they approve of a given behavior, negative if they disapprove of a given behavior, and neutralizing if they acknowledge the general improbity of an act yet furnish justification or rationalization for engaging in the act nonetheless. Neutralizing definitions are more commonly found than positive definitions in promoting deviant behavior. Because the formation of one’s own definitions involves exposure to a wide array of approving, disapproving, and neutralizing beliefs of other people, it is less likely that one will develop positive definitions that make norm violation the expected course of action. Such indoctrination into positive definitions of deviant behavior may be possible in some subcultures, but would still require extreme isolation or alienation from the dominant culture. Akers emphasizes that deviant subcultures and the positive definitions they generate are not required for deviant behavior to occur; deviance is more likely to occur when the conventional values one holds offer only weak disapproval or when the deviant behavior has been successfully neutralized. The concept of definitions in social learning theory embodies the symbolic interactionist notions of interpretation and definition of the situation: determining the meaning of another’s actions or verbalizations and communicating to others how they are expected to behave. Akers also illustrates, however, the mechanism by which definitions are learned or incorporated into one’s own belief system. Through imitation and differential reinforcement, the individual takes on the attitudes expressed by admired models, provided that those expressed attitudes are observed to be followed by reinforcement. When the individual is exposed to definitions favoring or facilitating deviance more than definitions condemning deviance, and when those definitions facilitating deviance are observed to be followed by reinforcement more than punishment, then the individual is likely to accept those definitions favorable to deviance. Furthermore, once these definitions are learned, they may persist in anticipation of future rewards or they may serve as discriminative stimuli that prompt the individual into action. That is, the individual engages in deviance only in settings in which definitions favorable to deviance are expressed and reinforced.

25

The concept in social learning theory that ties together the mechanisms underlying the learning of deviant behavior is that of differential association. Similar to the concept presented in Sutherland’s theory, Akers acknowledges that interaction with others exposes the individual to specific normative content transmitted through communication. However, Akers adds a behavioral/interactional dimension to the concept of differential association, by which individuals are exposed to not only the definitions but also the behaviors of others. Like Sutherland, Akers maintains that we associate with an array of individuals, who often express a wide range of behaviors and attitudes, some unfavorable to deviance, some favorable to specific deviant acts, and some rationalizing specific deviant acts as acceptable under certain circumstances. Also like Sutherland, Akers asserts that these associations vary in frequency, duration (how much time is spent and how longstanding the relationship), priority (occurring early in childhood), and intensity (how emotionally close the relationship). These modalities of association determine the extent to which any given association will have an impact on the learning process. Those associations that are more frequent, of longer duration, and of greater priority and intensity will have a greater influence on the content of what is learned. Although Sutherland emphasized associations within primary groups, Akers identifies a broader assortment of associations, including not only parents and peers but also neighbors, co-workers, members of voluntary groups to which an individual belongs, and even impersonal (and often one-way) “associations” with those depicted in film, television, or other popular media. Within the context of social learning theory, differential association plays a pivotal role. The configuration of various associations determines which individuals serve as salient role models for the individual to imitate and which do not; which definitions are likely to be formed and which are not; and which behaviors are likely to receive more reinforcement than punishment and which behaviors are likely to receive more punishment than reinforcement. Akers emphasizes that the learning of criminal behavior involves a rather complex mechanism that takes into account interactions with both pro-crime and anti-crime individuals,

26

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

who provide both pro-crime and anti-crime models, definitions, and reinforcements. A simple association with a deviant other is far from sufficient to produce deviant behavior in an individual without taking into account any counterbalancing influences.

The Empirical Status of Social Learning Theory When Akers presented social learning theory in 1973, it drew little attention from other researchers. A few studies examined one or two concepts derived from social learning theory, but no test of the full theoretical model was conducted until Akers and his colleagues published their research on the theory in 1979. In this first full test of social learning theory, which applied the theory to an explanation of adolescent alcohol and marijuana use, Akers and colleagues systematically laid out the key concepts of the theory and provided detailed measures of those concepts. They reported substantial predictive accuracy for the social learning model. Specifically, the model explained 55 percent of the variance in alcohol use and 68 percent of the variance in marijuana use. Akers conducted two additional studies designed to test social learning theory, using measures similar to those used in the first study. The results from these studies are comparable to those of the 1979 study. The social learning model accounted for about 40 percent of the variance in adolescent tobacco use (Krohn et al., 1985) and 59 percent of the variance in alcohol use among the elderly (Akers et al., 1989). Since the 1979 article appeared, interest in social learning theory has intensified. To date, the theory has been subjected to empirical assessment in over 130 studies. Many of these studies have performed only partial tests of selected social learning variables. Most commonly measured is differential association, particularly peers’ behaviors. Definitions and differential reinforcement are measured with somewhat less frequency, and imitation is most often omitted from tests of the theory. The results of studies conducted by researchers other than Akers have not matched the success of those produced by Akers. Nevertheless, the theory has garnered overall solid support in the body of empirical literature on social learning theory.

The Scope of Social Learning Theory Throughout the development of social learning theory, Akers intended the theory as an explanation of a wide variety of deviant behaviors. In his 1973 textbook, he illustrated how social learning theory could explain drug and alcohol use, various types of criminal behavior, mental illness, sexual deviance, and suicide. He has also emphasized repeatedly that the theory is capable of explaining not only deviant but conforming behavior as well. Despite these claims of generality, the broad scope of social learning theory has seldom been examined empirically. Most tests, including many conducted by Akers, have been limited to the analysis of minor self-reported delinquency and substance use. However, the boundaries of social learning theory have recently extended into more serious types of deviant conduct. Of these, three are noteworthy because of their distinctive group context: sexual aggression, gang delinquency, and terrorism. In 1998, Akers reported in detail on two studies he conducted with others that tested the validity of social learning as an explanation of various types of sexual coercion and aggression. Within the context of social learning theory, Akers reasoned that if one associates disproportionately with groups that express acceptance and involvement in sexually coercive activities, one is more likely to engage in that same behavior. These groups are likely to provide reinforcement for sexual aggression, express rape-supportive attitudes, and serve as models to imitate. In the first study, variables drawn from social learning theory—specifically differential peer association, differential reinforcement, definitions, and modeling—performed quite well in predicting both the proclivity to use force or commit rape and actual use of nonphysical sexual coercion; however, these same variables—with the exception of differential reinforcement—did not perform as well in predicting actual use of physical sexual aggression. The effect of fraternity membership on these sexual aggression measures also appeared to be mediated by the social learning variables, indicating that membership in these all-male groups had an impact on sexual coercion only in the sense that they may have provided a rape-supportive learning environment. Describing a second study,

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

Akers also reported that in a comparative analysis, social learning surpassed social bonding, self-control, and relative deprivation theories in the ability to predict proclivity to use sexual aggression, actual use of physical sexual coercion, use of drugs and alcohol as a coercive sexual strategy, and use of other nonphysical coercive strategies. A second type of serious deviant behavior likely to occur in a group context is gang delinquency. Those who are members of a gang are more likely than non-gang members to be exposed to pro-delinquent definitions and behavior patterns, develop their own pro-delinquent definitions, and to be reinforced for delinquent behavior. L. Thomas Winfree, Jr., and his associates tested a social learning model of gang membership and delinquency. They found that among adolescents in the general population, differential association, pro-gang definitions, and current gang membership were significant predictors of groupcontext crime, defined as activities specifically engaged in at the behest of someone else or in a group setting. A third type of serious deviant conduct that often occurs within a group context is terrorist activity. Although not yet investigated empirically, a social learning explanation has been proposed to account for a range of terrorist activities. Akers and Adam Silverman suggest that through the same learning processes that criminals acquire motivations, methods, and rationalizations, terrorists learn that the violence they use against their enemies will be met with praise from their group and possibly with a desirable political outcome. Employing the specific case of suicide bombers in Gaza, Winfree and Akins also provide social learning-informed ideas about why some might engage in such suicidal acts. They suggest that a system of rewards and punishments is in place in Gaza such that violence is encouraged and rewarded, especially if it is directed at Israel; “collaborators,” or those who might challenge such beliefs and practices, are publicly and viciously murdered. Those who die in the service of the greater good will are promised their reward in Paradise, a clear non­ social positive reinforcement. Children are encouraged to mimic or imitate in nonlethal ways the actions of suicide bombers, against the day when play turns to reality. The social learning framework within which terrorist activities might be

27

explained invites future empirical research to test these contentions.

Applications of Social Learning Theory Various practitioners in a variety of social services and service delivery fields have embraced social learning theory, using all or parts of it to prevent or treat the occurrence of crime and delinquency. One example is the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC), which has developed a series of successful programs based on principles of social learning. Three OSLC programs, in particular, merit special attention. First, the Adolescent Transition Program (ATP) exposes parents and their adolescent children to family management skills (e.g., monitoring, discipline, problem solving, communications, and other effective socialization skills), the goal being to improve communication skills, self-control, prosocial attitudes, and prosocial peer associations of both pre-teens and teenagers alike. Youths engaged in chronic, high-frequency, and serious delinquencies are the object of the Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care program, the idea being to provide such children with a safer and more restrictive environment with parents who already possess the kinds of skills developed through ATP. Good behavior is reinforced in positive ways. Children are expected to participate fully in school, therapy sessions, and other prosocial aspects of intervention coordinated and supervised by a case manager—all intended to foster skills related to problem solving, social perspective taking, and nonaggression in self-expression. A third OSLC program, Linking the Interests of Families and Teachers (LIFT), views the children, their parents, their teachers, and their friends as equally important elements of a successful social learning-based prevention/intervention program, the intent being to modify the child’s interactions with teachers, parents, and peers through a three-pronged approach that targets classroom-based social and problem skills training for the child, playgroundbased behavior modification, and group-delivered parent training. What is important to note about these three programs is that the child is not treated in isolation from his or her social environment. Moreover, the other important sources of discriminative stimuli in a child’s life—the parents, peers,

28

Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory

and significant others—participate in the programming in meaningful ways, all linked to social learning theory.

Social Structure and Social Learning Social learning theory has, for most of its history, been conceptualized as a micro-level or processual theory, capable of accounting for within-group variation in deviant behavior. However, even as early as 1968, Akers linked social structure with the learning process, emphasizing that location in the social structure largely determines the specific learning environment in which the individual operates. Akers elaborated more fully on these ideas in his 1998 monograph, Social Learning and Social Structure: A General Theory of Crime and Deviance. In that work, Akers presented his initial attempt at a multilevel theoretical model describing the relationships between structural variables, many drawn from other theories in criminology, and the processual variables of the original social learning model. Akers founded his social structure-social learning (SSSL) model on arguments first advanced by Sutherland, who asserted that differential association occurs within a context of differential social organization. Communities are organized differently to either promote or condemn—on balance— deviant activities; one’s associates are determined by the way one’s community is organized with respect to deviance. Akers (1998) is careful to note that his SSSL model does not attempt to account directly for crime rates, which he conceptualized as merely aggregations of individual behaviors. Instead, he views structural and cultural conditions as determinants of patterns or configurations of associations and reinforcement, which in turn exert an influence on individual behavior. As such, social learning processes (differential association, definitions, differential reinforcement, and modeling) mediate the likely impact of social structural variables on the individual behaviors that constitute crime rates in various groups. The SSSL model links a variety of exogenous social structure variables to social learning variables, which remain as “proximate causes” of individual deviant behavior. Akers classifies these social structure variables into four categories.

Differential social organization refers to variables such as age composition or population density of a community. Differential location in the social structure, the second category, refers to sociodemographic characteristics that comprise known correlates of crime rates, including age, class, gender, and race/ethnicity. A third category is labeled as theoretically defined structural variables and includes variables drawn from established macrosociological theories that propose social disorganization, anomie, group conflict, patriarchy, class oppression and the like as possible determinants of crime rates. Finally, differential social location in groups refers to membership in primary, secondary, and reference groups such as families, peer groups, and voluntary associations. In its present form, the SSSL model is not a fully formulated theory. The lists of variables included under each social structure category are not meant to be exhaustive, and the categories themselves are not entirely mutually exclusive. For instance, some theoretically defined social disorganization variables are also presented as examples of differential social organization variables. Moreover, Akers focuses on presumed empirical correlations between structural variables and crime that are expected to be substantially mediated by social learning variables rather than on logical linkages between the social structure and social learning concepts. Despite Akers’s de-emphasis of the precise logical connection between structure and process, any future effort to delineate these linkages theoretically is likely to enhance the theory’s plausibility as well as provide guidance for empirical tests of the model. Empirical research on the social structuresocial learning model is still scarce, and few studies have utilized variables designed specifically to operationalize both social structure and social learning in ways intended by Akers. Results of these studies show promise, but as yet it is too soon to arrive at any meaningful conclusions about the validity of the SSSL model.

Conclusion From its modest beginnings in 1966 as differential association-reinforcement theory, social learning theory is now in its fifth decade as a viable explanation of crime and deviance. One of its

Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending

more powerful explanatory variables, differential peer associations, is so commonly predictive of delinquent behavior that theoretical models purporting to explain delinquency are considered incomplete if they fail to include peer delinquency as a control. The theory consistently receives empirical support, is logically capable of and empirically successful at explaining a broad array of deviant activities, and continues to demonstrate effectiveness when its theoretical principles are put into practice in delinquency prevention and intervention programs. Christine S. Sellers and L. Thomas Winfree, Jr. See also Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory; Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory; Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

29

Burgess, R. L., & Akers, R. L. (1966). A differential association-reinforcement theory of criminal behavior. Social Problems, 14, 128–147. Krohn, M. D., Skinner, W. F., Massey, J. L., & Akers, R. L. (1985). Social learning theory and adolescent cigarette smoking: A longitudinal study. Social Problems, 32, 455–473. Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan. Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott. Winfree, L. T., & Akins, J. K. (2008). Extending the boundaries of social structure/social learning theory: The case of suicide bombers in Gaza. International Journal of Crime, Criminal Justice and Law, 3, 145–158. Winfree, L. T., Vigil-Bäckström, T., & Mays, G. L. (1994). Social learning theory, self-reported delinquency, and youth gangs: A new twist on a general theory of crime and delinquency. Youth and Society, 26, 147–177.

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1968). Problems in the sociology of deviance: Social definitions and behavior. Social Forces, 46, 455–465. Akers, R. L. (1973). Deviant behavior: A social learning approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Akers, R. L. (1985). Deviant behavior: A social learning approach (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Akers, R. L. (2009). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Akers, R. L., Krohn, M. D., Lanza-Kaduce, L., & Radosevich, M. (1979). Social learning and deviant behavior: A specific test of a general theory. American Sociological Review, 44, 636–655. Akers, R. L., La Greca, A. J., Cochran, J. K., & Sellers, C. S. (1989). Social learning theory and alcohol behavior among the elderly. Sociological Quarterly, 30, 625–638. Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2009). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Akers, R. L. & Silverman, A. (2004). Toward a social learning model of violence and terrorism. In M. A. Zahn, H. H. Brownstein, & S. L. Jackson (Eds.), Violence: From theory to research (pp. 19–35). Cincinnati, OH: LexisNexis-Anderson. Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of behavior modification. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending A variety of theories have been used to explain why young girls and women become involved in criminality and the roles they play in the criminal event. Early individual-level explanations ranged from biological inferiorities and chivalrous relations to inherent gender differences to explain females’ criminality. In contrast, broader socialstructural explanations suggest that in the criminal world, opportunity structures vary by gender, and that the types of crime committed varies by gender. Given the numerous economic, political, and social gains by women over the past several decades, some scholars have suggested that traditional criminological theories cannot account for gender differences in crime, and that new theoretical approaches need to be undertaken so as to more fully understand women’s criminality. In light of this debate, Leanne Fiftal Alarid and Velmer S. Burton, Jr., used traditional theories to examine adult females’ serious offending. In the two investigations summarized below, one qualitatively assessed first whether there are differences

30

Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending

versus men in the types of crimes women commit, and second, women’s roles within these offenses. The second quantitatively tested traditional criminological theories to explain women’s self-reported offending. Succinctly, the aim of these investigations was to determine whether traditional theories could explain offending behaviors for adult felons of both genders.

Qualitative Assessment In Alarid and colleagues’ “Women’s Roles in Serious Offenses,” Richard Cloward’s theory of illegitimate opportunity structures was used to explore how lines of criminal access are shaped by gender, leading to women offenders playing secondary and minor roles in criminality. Based on qualitative data obtained from interviews with offenders, the study focused on the relationships between offense type (serious versus non-serious) and women’s crime roles (leadership versus secondary roles). It examined how differential offending opportunities impacted female offenders’ motives for committing crime due to their gendered roles in society. In terms of engaging in serious and high-risk criminal activities, the research produced several important findings. First, women often engage in dangerous and high-risk offending with male partners and/or accomplices. In these situations, the research with felony female offenders indicates that crimes in which men dominate as offenders (e.g., robbery, burglary, drug dealing), men take leadership roles in relationships with women. In contrast, it was found that with less serious or minor illegal acts—especially female dominated offenses, such as shoplifting, petty theft, or credit card/fraud offenses—men’s leadership roles are less prominent or are absent. The findings thus substantiated the assumptions of differential opportunity structures to be utilized as a theoretical framework for understanding women’s roles in serious offending activities. A second major finding, however, indicated that there were differences between racial groups. That is, African American females were more likely to independently engage (without men) in more serious/ violent crimes and to adopt a “street life” personality and outlook.

Quantitative Assessment In a second investigation, “Gender and Crime Among Felony Offenders: Assessing the Generality of Social Control and Differential Association Theories,” two traditional criminological theories—differential association and social bond theories—were tested quantitatively to assess their ability to explain female and male felons’ offending behaviors. This study found that social bond measures significantly predicted women’s violent offending, whereas differential association theory did not. In contrast, for male offenders, differential association theory was significantly related to selfreported criminality. In several related investigations assessing adults’ offending with these same theory measures, Burton and colleagues obtained similar results predicting women’s offending behaviors. In sum, these empirical investigations with traditional theories of crime reveal the utility of continuing to explore their use to account for female offending.

Conclusion Since this research, the ongoing study of gender roles and serious street crimes has generated substantial scholarly interest elsewhere. The debate over the generality or specificity of criminological theories for young girls and women continues. Moreover, the importance of understanding gender and offending within a theoretical context has been extended to its later use in objective risk assessments for women and for assessing genderspecific needs for correctional treatment. Velmer S. Burton, Jr., and Leanne Fiftal Alarid See also Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court; Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime; Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work; Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology

References and Further Readings Alarid, L. F., Burton, V., Jr., & Cullen, F. T. (2000). Gender and crime among felony offenders: Assessing

Alcohol and Violence the generality of social control and differential association theories. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 37, 171–199. Alarid, L. F., & Cromwell, P. (2006). In her own words: Women offenders’ views on crime and victimization. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Alarid, L. F., Marquart, J., Burton, V., Jr., Cullen, F. T., & Cuvelier, S. (1996). Women’s roles in serious offenses: A study of adult felons. Justice Quarterly, 12, 431–454. Burton, V., Jr., Cullen, F. T., Evans, T., Alarid, L., & Dunaway, R. (1998). Gender, self-control, and crime. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 35, 123–147. Burton, V., Jr., Evans, T., Cullen, F. T, Olivares, K., & Dunaway, G. (1999). Age, self-control, and adult’s offending behaviors: A research note assessing a general theory of crime. Journal of Criminal Justice, 27, 45–54. Chesney-Lind, M. (2006). Patriarchy, crime and justice. Feminist Criminology, 1, 6–26. Cloward, R. (1959). Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 24, 164–176. Crew, B. (1991). Sex differences in patriarchy: Chivalry or patriarchy? Justice Quarterly, 8, 59–83. Daigle, L. E., Cullen, F. T., & Wright, J. P. (2007). Gender differences in the predictors of juvenile delinquency: Assessing the generality-specificity debate. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 5, 254–286. Heilbrun, K., DeMatteo, D., Fretz, R., Erickson, J., Yashuhara, K., & Anumba, N. (2008). How specific are gender-specific rehabilitation needs? An empirical analysis. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 35, 1382–1397. Heimer, K., & Kruttschnitt, C. (2006). Gender and crime: Patterns in victimization and offending. New York: New York University Press. Manchak, S. H., Skeem, J. L., Douglas, K. S., & Siranosian, M. (2009). Does gender moderate the predictive utility of the Level of Service Inventory– Revised (LSI-R) for serious violent offenders? Criminal Justice and Behavior, 36, 425–442. Miller, J. (1998). Up it up: Gender and the accomplishment of street robbery. Criminology, 36, 37–66. Mullins, C., & Miller, J. (2008). Temporal, situational, and interactional features of women’s violent conflicts. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 41, 36–62.

31

Proctor, J. (2004). Understanding the range of female criminality: A prison-based test of three traditional theories. Women Studies Quarterly, 32, 61–85. Steffensmeier, D. J. (1983). Organization properties and sex-segregation in the underworld: Building a sociological theory of sex differences in crime. Social Forces, 61, 1010–1032. Stewart, E. A., Elifson, K. W., & Sterk, C. E. (2004). Integrating the general theory of crime into an explanation of violent victimization among female offenders. Justice Quarterly, 21, 159–181.

Alcohol

and

Violence

Many people assume that there is a relationship between alcohol and violence. Even many scholars take the alcohol-violence association for granted and believe there is little to explain. Yet innumerable people consume alcohol, often in large quantities, in countless settings every day without violent outcomes. Even in most bars, which provide a seemingly combustible mix of strangers drinking a considerable amount of alcohol, truly violent events are rare. Thus, what many assume to be true quickly turns into a challenge: if there is in fact an association, we must discover the specific moderating and mediating factors across a range of units of analysis that increase the likelihood of violence when alcohol is consumed. Thus, unlike other entries in this collection that focus on a single theory, this entry describes several theories linking alcohol to violence. While many of the theories discussed here are distinct, some overlap and may span units of analysis. This entry excludes discussion of the physiological or pharmacological links between alcohol and violence, as well as biosocial and individual-level theories of alcohol and violence. Instead, this entry covers theories that focus on the roles of the immediate context of the violent event, community-level factors, and macro-level characteristics like culture and public policy. This is not meant to slight the former. For example, whether pharmacological or social, the disinhibiting effects of alcohol on aggression cannot be ignored, nor can the fact that biology and social context interact to affect the likelihood that alcohol consumption

32

Alcohol and Violence

will lead to violence. Pharmacological and individual-level effects have received more attention in the literature, however, and so this entry concentrates on illuminating theories and research on context, community, culture, and policy. Although not exhaustive, these theories reflect the broad range of ideas found in the alcohol-violence literature contributed by criminologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and medical and public health researchers.

Social Context: The Violent Event The characteristics of settings in which alcohol is consumed may help determine whether or not violence occurs. These situational factors may include, for example, where alcohol is consumed, with whom, at what time of day, and the relationship between those who are drinking. Similarly, one way to attempt to find out if alcohol and violence are actually associated is to determine if violent events in which alcohol is present are different on these and other characteristics from violent events in which alcohol is not present. Much of the research focusing on how situational factors may moderate the association between alcohol and violence is atheoretical. Recent work, however, attempts to change this approach. William Pridemore and Krista Eckhardt, for example, used narrative data from court and police records of homicides in Russia to compare alcohol- and non-alcohol-related incidents on victim, offender, and event characteristics. The authors found consistent differences between alcohol- and non-alcohol-related homicides. Alcohol-related homicides were significantly more likely to occur at night and on weekends and to result from acute arguments; they were significantly less likely to occur between strangers, to be profit motivated or premeditated, and to be carried out to hide other crimes. On the other hand, there were no significant differences between the drinking and nondrinking samples for victim’s gender, primary weapon used, or event location. The authors follow up their analysis by proposing a new typology of homicide events, grounded in their inductive approach, based on the presence of alcohol. The authors suggest, for example, that violent events in which alcohol is present are likely to differ from those in which alcohol is not present in predictable

ways. They further argue that even when alcohol results in a violent event, the characteristics of the event may differ depending on whether it is the victim, offender, or both drinking. Whether or not the hypotheses generated from this new typology are supported by evidence from future studies, this work represents a move toward a more theoretically grounded approach when considering how the situational characteristics of the violent event may aid us in understanding the potential association between alcohol and violence. Other contextual level characteristics can also be important in moderating the association between alcohol and violence. One example is that many believe there to be a dose-response effect of alcohol on level of aggression. In other words, it may not be alcohol consumption per se that is important but, instead, how much alcohol is consumed. In an observational study of barroom aggression, Kathryn Graham and Samantha Wells found that relative to bar patrons involved in less serious aggression, patrons involved in severe aggression were more highly intoxicated. In a 2003 survey, Wells and Graham found that the level of injury respondents experienced, as well as the respondents’ own threats toward others, were greater when the respondents’ perceived intoxication level was higher. Similarly, Kenneth Leonard and colleagues found that, among men who reported an incident of male-to-male aggression in a bar, the severity of the aggression and the likelihood of injury were both higher when the amount of alcohol consumed was higher. Another theory associated with the characteristics of the event is the belief that the greater the number of participants drinking, the greater the severity of aggression. Experimental research by Leonard, for example, showed lowest levels of aggression if neither person in a two-person dyad were drinking, greater levels of aggression when at least one was drinking, and the highest levels of aggression when both were drinking. Finally, research by Graham and colleagues in 2006 revealed other contextual characteristics that moderate the alcohol-violence association. These include the rowdiness of the bar, patrons being allowed to stay around the bar after closing hours, lack of staff monitoring, and intoxication of patrons. Finally, while not exactly an event-level perspective, Robert Nash Parker and Linda-Anne Rebhun’s

Alcohol and Violence

theory of selective disinhibition deserves attention here. Their ideas span macro-, event-, and individual-level characteristics and behaviors. Key to their theory is social constraint—that is, the inhibitions individuals feel against certain behavior as a result of social norms. According to Parker and Rebhun, active constraint occurs when individuals wish to employ a certain behavior (e.g., violence) to remedy the situation, but normative expectations compel them otherwise. In the context of passive constraint, however, the failure to use the taboo behavior is perceived to work against the individual given the specific situation and thus the person may employ violence. According to Parker and Rebhun, then, “the disinhibiting effect of alcohol is to undermine the operation of active constraint” (p. 35). Thus, there is a threshold effect that can vary depending upon the amount of alcohol consumed and the characteristics of the specific situation. When the intoxication level and the specific context are enough to overcome the active constraint (i.e., when selective disinhibition occurs), violence is more likely. Of course, the context itself may be enough to overcome any constraint in the absence of alcohol. Given alcohol’s disinhibiting effect, however, consumption increases the chances of overcoming active constraint.

Structural Effects: Community, Culture, and Policy Community Characteristics

Many scholars believe community characteristics play a role in any association between alcohol and violence. While there are several possibilities, one idea that has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention is the hypothesized association between the alcohol outlets in an area and its rate of violence. It is not simply the number of outlets that matter, however, but the nature and character of places where one may purchase and drink alcohol. For example, many bars attract young males, who are statistically more likely to be involved in violent behavior (Parker, 1993), and provide a setting for social interaction that could lead to aggressive behavior. Bars are also often located in retail areas, which may provide less guardianship for potential victims since most people with whom they interact are strangers. Outlets that do not serve but sell alcohol for consumption

33

off-premises can also be problematic, according to Richard Scribner and colleagues. Research by several scholars, including Robert Lipton and Paul Gruenewald and Dennis Roncek and Pamela Maier, has provided support for these ideas. Interestingly, the characteristics of communities can moderate the association between alcohol outlets and violence. For example, in 2006, Gruenewald and colleagues found an association between the density of off-premise alcohol retail establishments in an area and its assault rate, but no such association for bars. However, there was an association between bar density and assault rates in unstable poor minority areas and in rural middle-income areas, revealing yet again the complexity of the alcohol-violence association and the importance of context. Culture

Macro-level research on alcohol and violence has yielded inconsistent results, with some studies showing an association between the two and others finding null effects. More recent research, however, has looked to more nuanced theoretical explanations, and a growing body of empirical literature provides support for these theoretical expectations. These more nuanced macro-level hypotheses owe an important theoretical debt to Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton. Their classic work revealed how what they called “drunken comportment” varies across societies as well as within societies over time and depending on social context. Such variation places relative limits on the extent of pharmacological effects and suggests a crucial role for social context and culture in the alcohol-violence association. Three specific examples of important cultural effects include MacAndrew and Edgerton’s own time-out thesis, as well as recent hypotheses about national drinking cultures and beverage preferences. MacAndrew and Edgerton argue that many societies define drinking events and alcohol intoxication as time-out situations. These are settings in which the normal rules governing interpersonal interactions, such as those proscribing violence, do not apply. This is especially true of cultures where holidays, festivals, and other celebratory events are often accompanied by hazardous drinking. A second key aspect of their theory is that there is a

34

Alcohol and Violence

popular belief within such cultures that violence is a common, if not entirely acceptable, outcome when people drink heavily. Under these conditions, there not only is an expectation of violence when one drinks heavily but, also, intoxicated persons are freed from full responsibility for their actions. Graham et al. (1998) and others have considered these theoretical claims. Although the empirical results have been mixed as they relate to specific aspects of this thesis, MacAndrew and Edgerton’s more general ideas provide the foundation for a growing area of research that considers the importance of context and culture in the association between alcohol and violence. A recent theoretical approach tying alcohol to violence focuses on the type of drinking culture in a society. Wet drinking cultures are those in which consumption rates are higher due to alcohol’s integration into the prevailing culture. For example, southern European nations like France and Spain exhibit high levels of per capita consumption due to consumption of wine at meals and other social settings, yet these nations do not appear to experience many of the more negative effects often associated with drinking. Nations with dry drinking cultures, on the other hand, tend to exhibit lower levels of overall drinking, with alcohol playing a less important role in the daily lives of their citizens. Norström (1995) has theorized that the association between alcohol and self-directed violence (i.e., suicide) will be stronger in dry relative to wet drinking cultures. While Norström’s theory is more sophisticated than this brief summary of it implies, his main idea is that heavier drinkers in dry cultures will be at greater risk of social isolation relative to heavier drinkers in wet cultures because their drinking behavior is viewed as more aberrant to the social norms. As social bonds are increasingly weakened or lost altogether as a result of drinking and concomitant behavior, these heavier drinkers in dry cultures are at increased risk of suicide. Norström’s own research on Sweden and France revealed support for this hypothesis, and the findings from several other studies are consistent with his theory. A closely related idea is the theory that, relative to overall drinking, certain types of drinking patterns are more likely to be associated with violence. Specifically, there is growing evidence to support the hypothesis that binge drinking is a

risk factor for violence. As discussed above, for example, several studies at the individual level suggest a dose-response relationship: that is, higher levels of intoxication are associated with greater aggression and more serious injuries resulting from violent victimization. There is support for this hypothesis from aggregate-level research as well. Pridemore and colleagues, for example, have shown a strong association between alcohol and homicide and suicide in Russia, and have argued that the strength of this relationship is partially due to the high levels of binge drinking in the country. Recent research by Elin Bye in Eastern Europe also reveals that the alcohol-homicide link is stronger in nations with more detrimental drinking patterns. A final recent theory linking alcohol and violence examines beverage preference. In an analysis of the United States, Gruenewald, William Ponicki, and Patrick Mitchell found no association over time between suicide and beer or wine sales, but did find a significant association between spirits sales and suicide. In a study of several Eastern European nations, Jonas Landberg revealed a stronger alcohol-suicide link in nations where distilled spirits are the beverage of choice. The work of Bye on alcohol and homicide mentioned above echoes Landberg’s findings. A more refined analysis of different beverage types and violence in Sweden by Norström in 1998 also found spirits sales to be associated with homicide. In pulling together these and various other findings from several different studies, Pridemore (2006) theorizes that the alcohol-violence link is stronger in cultures where spirits are the beverage of choice and, more generally, that there is a stronger alcohol-violence association for distilled spirits relative to beer and wine. Policy

Some scholars contend that public policy can reduce the negative outcomes associated with alcohol consumption, including violence. According to Klaus Mäkelä and colleagues, nearly every nation has policies that attempt to curb alcohol production, distribution, and consumption. Specific strategies vary widely, but common themes include limiting drinking among youths and reducing harm caused by alcohol abuse. The

Alcohol and Violence

main mechanisms employed to regulate alcohol markets in an attempt to meet these goals are price and tax measures, restrictions on availability, and restrictions on advertising, promotion, and sponsorship. The simple theory is that certain types of policy can be effective in reducing consumption, which in turn would decrease violence. Others contend, however, that policy’s impact on consumption is limited. Further, scholars have found that hazardous patterns of drinking, not alcohol consumption in itself, is more likely to be associated with violent behavior. Critics thus reasonably argue that such hazardous drinking may be largely immune from social policy. Nevertheless, there is empirical evidence that alcohol policies can reduce both alcohol consumption and related harm. Parker and Rebhun, for example, revealed that certain types of youth homicide decreased when the minimum drinking age was raised in the United States. Further, a sweeping anti-alcohol campaign in the Soviet Union in the 1980s was shown to be accompanied by substantial drops in homicide and suicide throughout the region. Finally, a recent study of another Eastern European nation, Slovenia, revealed that a national policy adopted in 2003 with the goal of reducing alcohol-related harm— via restricting alcohol availability—led to a significant reduction in suicide mortality in the country (Pridemore & Snowden, 2009).

Conclusion As stated earlier, many people assume there to be an association between alcohol and violence. Simply examining their own everyday lives and the lives of those around them, however, would lead most to realize that the vast majority of alcohol consumption is not accompanied by any violence at all. Confronted with this evidence, scholars are forced to more carefully consider the association and to allow carefully constructed theories to direct their research on the topic. When this is accomplished, the various ways that social context, community characteristics, and even culture and public policy can influence the association between drinking and violence begin to be revealed. While there is now considerable evidence linking the two, the only way to reduce the burden of alcohol-related violence is to consider systematically

35

the mechanisms through which the two are related and then to act specifically and appropriately to attenuate hazardous drinking. William Alex Pridemore See also Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle

References and Further Readings Babor, T., Caetano, R., Casswell, S., Edwards, G., Giesbrecht, N., Graham, K., et al. (2003). Alcohol: No ordinary commodity: Research and public policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Bye, E. K. (2008). Alcohol and homicide in Eastern Europe: A time series analysis of six countries. Homicide Studies, 12, 7–27. Carcach, C., & Conroy, R. (2001). Alcohol and homicide: A routine activities analysis. In P. Williams (Ed.), Alcohol, young persons, and violence (pp. 183–201). Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Crombie, I. K., Irvine, L., Elliott, L., & Wallace, H. (2007). How do public health policies tackle alcohol-related harm? A review of 12 developed countries. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 42, 492–499. Graham, K., Bernards, S., Osgood, D. W., & Well, S. (2006). Bad nights or bad bars? Multi-level analysis of environmental predictors of aggression in late-night large-capacity bars and clubs. Addiction, 101, 1569–1580. Leonard, K. E., Quigley B. M., & Collins R. L. (2003). Drinking, personality and bar environmental characteristics as predictors of involvement in barroom aggression. Addictive Behaviors, 28, 1681–1700. MacAndrew, C., & Edgerton, R. B. (1969). Drunken comportment: A social explanation. Chicago: Aldine. Norström, T. (1998). Effects on criminal violence of different beverage types and private and public drinking. Addiction, 93, 689–699. Parker, R. N. (1995). Bringing “booze” back in: The relationship between alcohol and homicide. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 32, 3–38. Parker, R. N., & Rebhun, L.-A. (1995). Alcohol and homicide: A deadly combination of two American traditions. Albany: SUNY Press. Pernanen, K. (1991). Alcohol in human violence. New York: Guilford Press.

36

Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime

Pridemore, W. A. (2006). Heavy drinking and suicide mortality in Russia. Social Forces, 85, 413–430. Pridemore, W. A., & Eckhardt, K. (2008). A comparison of victim, offender, and event characteristics of alcohol- and non-alcohol-related homicides. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 45, 227–255. Pridemore, W. A., & Snowden, A. (2009). Reduction in suicide mortality following a new national alcohol policy: An interrupted time series analysis of Slovenia. American Journal of Public Health, 99, 915–920. Roncek, D. W., & Maier, P. A. (1991). Bars, blocks, and crimes revisited: Linking the theory of routine activities to the empiricism of “hot spots.” Criminology, 29, 725–753. Värnik, A., Kõlves, K., Väli, M., Tooding, L., & Wasserman, D. (2007). Do alcohol restrictions reduce suicide mortality? Addiction, 102, 251–256. Wells, S., & Graham, K. (2003). Aggression involving alcohol: Relationship to drinking patterns and social context. Addiction, 98, 33–42.

Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime Like most psychiatrists of the early 1900s, Franz Alexander and William Healy were trained in the psychoanalytic tradition of human behavior developed by Sigmund Freud. Additionally, both of these psychiatrists were known for being quite proficient in the techniques of psychoanalytic therapy. They were concerned with individuallevel crime causation and were less interested in the typical environmental variables that were related to crime such as bad or economically poor neighborhoods. They were also not interested in what they termed “superficial” statistics that simply reported correlations between crime and easily obtainable external data. Rather, they concentrated on how the aforementioned environments interacted with specific personality types and underlying attitudes toward law and authority. Thus, the title of their book is Roots of Crime.

Psychoanalytic Tradition This explanation of crime causation was in opposition to the academic works being published during that time. Alexander and Healy conducted their

study between 1931 and 1932. Criminologists, such as Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, were publishing studies at this time regarding the ecological and environmental sources of crime. By contrast, Alexander and Healy focused primarily on the underlying reasons why certain individuals were criminal. Their reason for questioning environment-only explanations of crime was in response to the dilemma posed by this question: How can some individuals live in much worse environmental conditions, but yet criminality is seemingly nonexistent? Moreover, how can some individuals come from great means and resources, but be criminal? Alexander and Healy argued that environmental factors, such as living in a ghetto, could not explain criminality alone. Rather, those factors had to interact with an underlying psychological attitude in the individual to cause criminality. Thus, according to Alexander and Healy, the most important aspects of crime causation centered on personality type and attitudes regarding life. To examine the internal processes that led to criminality, Alexander and Healy conducted psychoanalytic case studies on juveniles. The juveniles studied were identified and known through the Judge Baker Guidance Center, which is where the authors worked and conducted the study. The Judge Baker Guidance Center’s belief was that prevention was founded on early alterations of developmental courses from criminal to non-criminal. Alexander and Healy believed that if they could study individuals who had psychologically developed a criminal life course, they could determine when that course could have been altered through psychoanalytical intervention. In short, through psychoanalytical therapy, these individuals could be readjusted, and no longer criminal. The juveniles in the study were considered the worst offenders in the system and had essentially exhausted all other intervention options such as traditional probation and general psychological treatment. They were selected primarily for exhibiting internal mental conflicts rather than coming from bad environments or bad neighborhoods. None of the juveniles chosen had any psychological diagnoses. Individuals who were from bad environments or were psychotic or suffering from neuroses were excluded. The juveniles chosen were psychoanalyzed in therapy for 10 months, which

Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime

is, as noted by Alexander and Healy, extremely short for traditional psychoanalysis. The authors explain that the juveniles chosen were essentially representative of other juveniles based on similarities in personal and emotional backgrounds gathered from previous psychoanalyses and personal records. Before proceeding to the results of the case studies conducted by Alexander and Healy, the foundational beliefs that underlie the psychoanalytical approach used need to be highlighted. First, behavior—in this case, criminal behavior—is assumed to be very complex. Second, obvious irrational behavior is sourced internally, such that atypical reasons for committing crime are considered obviously irrational. In other words, criminality resulting from living in a ghetto or having criminal friends who foster delinquency is largely reasonable and typical. Conversely, criminality in the context of well-to-do families and neighborhoods is atypical and irrational. Third, the aforementioned internal emotional conflict needs to be resolved. Finally, through this conflict resolution, personality develops and adjusts. With this in mind, what follows are the criminal personality types proffered by Alexander and Healy through psychoanalytic case studies. Other case studies are included in the book but were unsuccessful in terms of traditional psychoanalysis treatment.

The Victim of Loyalty Richard was 20 years old when he went through psychoanalysis. His past involved family turmoil and dissolution, and involvement in crime at an early age. He was exposed to crime by other family members, particularly his next eldest brother Wilbur. He admitted countless acts of burglary and theft throughout his childhood until the time of his incarceration. Through the course of analysis, the conflict believed to be causing his criminality was revealed to be his incredible jealousy of his brother Wilbur and his simultaneous adoration and dependent loyalty to him. Throughout his childhood and into his psychoanalysis, Richard was obviously loyal to his brother but was also envious of him. For example, through dream analysis, Richard mentioned consistently fighting with other boys for a girl, and he typically injured a red-headed

37

boy in each fight. In the same sessions with the analysts, he would inform them that his brother, Wilbur, had red hair. As mentioned, the source of criminality in the psychoanalytical tradition is the inability to resolve internal conflict. The conflict between his apparent jealousy and undeniable loyalty is believed to have produced Richard’s criminal personality.

The Undetected Shoplifter Sigrid was introduced into the Center as a teenager because of her proclivity to steal. She was of above average intelligence and was recognized by her school teachers as having great potential. However, as mentioned, she had a very serious problem with stealing jewelry and money from family members and friends. She was reportedly known to have been stealing and shoplifting from around age 7 or 8, but accounts from her mother reveal she was stealing from others as early as kindergarten. Her early childhood experiences centered on living next door to a group of delinquent girls who taught her about stealing and sex. Her psychoanalysis sessions illuminated her early involvement in stealing with her delinquent girl playmates. As mentioned, these girls reportedly taught her about sex and the many sexual experiences they had with boys. It was clear from her psychoanalysis that Sigrid had learned from these girls, and what she learned was in conflict with what her parents were teaching her. She was taught by her father not to steal, and he admonished her when she did. Her mother also reported teaching her sexual education at a relatively young age in response to what she was learning from the other delinquent girls. The internal conflict believed to lead her to steal was evident from her indulgence in autoerotic behavior immediately after stealing. She seemed to be unable to resolve the conflict between doing what she knew was wrong and how good it felt to do it.

The Day Dreamer David came from an affluent family that seemingly raised him quite well. Both his parents reportedly had strong work ethics and ensured that their three sons would not go without. From a young age, David engaged in truancy and theft. He often left

38

Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime

home for months at a time, and a few occasions was missing for over a year. He would typically return boasting of sexual exploits in other countries. He was known to be attractive and likeable and had above average intelligence with an expansive vocabulary. Yet he was years behind in school, and he continued to steal. Unlike the other juveniles seen at the Center, David did not seem to make a legitimate connection with any of the psychoanalysts who treated him, and most of his sessions were considered superficial at best. Also, unlike the other juveniles in this series of case studies, David did not seem to have overt conflicts that could have presumably caused his criminality. He simply stole, ran away, and claimed to have no conscience. He seemed to be understimulated, overly intelligent, and underachieving.

A Friend of Animals Elmer entered the Center at the age of 14 and began psychoanalysis when he was 20. He was the oldest of five children and reportedly started running away from home at the age of 6 until he was 14. The amount of time he stayed away from home progressed with his age, as he stayed out for months as he got older. Elmer’s running away was often accompanied by theft as he stole to support himself when he ran away and to simply buy himself food. He had been placed on multiple farms and ran away from them using horses and wagons. When he was 12 years old, he discovered that spending time with homosexual men was a good way to obtain lodging, though he claimed his experiences with these men were disgusting. His psychoanalytic sessions revealed he had a special interest in horses and other animals, and he reportedly worked hard on the farms that employed him. Elmer regarded any talk among boys regarding sex as sinful and initially denied homosexual experiences. However, he later admitted to the experiences but claimed he played a minor role in them. He was admittedly shy and bashful around girls and avoided them. For example, when his parents attempted to pair him with a girl for companionship, he resisted. When he did dream, he dreamed of animals and showed a clear adoration for animals. He seemed to be very lonely and often showed up to his sessions very

early because he had nothing else to do. Much like the day dreamer, Elmer seemed to be lonely, but without any overt reasons for conflict that would lead to criminality.

A Favorite of Women Ferdinand was also truant often, and despite having average intelligence and abilities, he hated school. His father died when he was young and only a few years later his mother died when he was 14. His psychoanalysis sessions were markedly shorter than the other juveniles included in this series of case studies. He often spoke of all the women in his life, including his mother and many sisters. He remarked that his sisters and their friends often pampered him. It seemed two things created substantial conflict for Ferdinand. First, was the death of his mother and the lack of being pampered as a result of her death. Second, at school, he was not pampered, which led to his criminality through truancy and some petty theft.

The Solitary Offender Henry started stealing at a young age. He was boastful and proud of his ability to steal, and he seemed to have little remorse for it. He was often aggressive in his psychoanalytic sessions. He was in prison when going through analysis and was reportedly aggressive to the other inmates. The reasons for his stealing were not well understood, but he certainly was egocentric, thus earning him the name “the solitary offender.”

Nobody’s Son Similar to the other juveniles, Albert ran away from home often. His mother died at birth, and he was promptly adopted. The adoptive family had one daughter of their own and another adopted son. The adoptive mother reportedly did not show much of affection to him, and the adoptive father brutally whipped him. Additionally, Albert reported that the adoptive father was an alcoholic and pervert, and claimed he engaged in minor sex acts with Albert when he was younger. Through his psychoanalysis, it was revealed that Albert had severe conflict in never feeling like he was anyone’s son. His criminality was a cry for attention

Altruistic Fear

from those around him to feel like he belonged to a family, to be a son.

Conclusion Alexander and Healy dedicated their lives to the treatment and understanding of juvenile crime. They were both well known for their advancement and refinement of Freud’s psychoanalytic techniques. Kevan D. Galyean See also Freudian Theory; Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime; Mental Illness and Crime; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

References and Further Readings Alexander, F., & French, T. M. (1946). Psychoanalytic therapy: Principles and application. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Alexander, F., & Healy, W. (1969). Roots of crime. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. Healy, W. (1915). The individual delinquent: A text-book of diagnosis and prognosis for all concerned in understanding offenders. Boston: Little, Brown. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1969). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas (Rev. ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Altruistic Fear Altruistic fear, according to Mark Warr (1992), is when someone fears that a person other than himself or herself will be the object of crime. Although social scientists have studied fear of crime for several decades, only recently have a few scholars distinguished between personal fear of crime and fear for others or made it a distinct object of analysis. Separating personal fear from fear for the safety and well-being of others is an important conceptual distinction that carries both methodological and policy implications. Distinguishing between the two types of fear of crime in surveys and interviews enhances our understanding of each phenomenon as well as of the possible inter-

39

actions between the two. Studies focused on fear for others as a distinctive object of analysis are limited in number but are conceptually rigorous and methodologically varied, representing both quantitative and qualitative research designs. Taken together, they provide a rich understanding of the analytical and practical significance of altruistic fear. Researchers have identified patterns related to altruistic fear, most notably variation by sex. Although both men and women express fear for others, the type and frequency of altruistic fear differ for men and women, as does the object of concern (e.g., spouses, children). Similarly, what one does in response to fear for others is also different for men and women. Studies trace these sex differences in altruistic fear to parallel gendered patterns in personal fear of crime as well as to gendered social roles and deeply structured divisions of caretaking. This research provides an organizational framework for the field that differentiates among the objects of fear of crime—spousal fear, parental fear, and general fear for others—and between the expression of fear for others and behavioral responses to that fear.

Spousal Fear All studies on altruistic fear demonstrate that men tend to express specific fears for their wives or partners, or spousal fear. Consistent with prior research on gender-role socialization, Jocelyn Hollander found that men defined themselves and were defined by others as protectors in focused group discussions about vulnerability and fear of crime, while women were defined as being in need of protection. Men’s fear for spouses is often linked to their perceptions of women’s greater vulnerability to attack, especially sexual assault, which is consistent with women’s personal fear of crime. Karen Snedker found that men expressed very specific fears, usually context-specific (e.g., using public transportation especially at night), for their wives or girlfriends. Further, Snedker found that married men with children were the most likely of all respondents to express fear for their spouses; this finding suggests that being a parent may make men more protective of their spouses. Evidence for women’s spousal fear is mixed. Two studies report that women expressed fear for

40

Altruistic Fear

their spouses (Madriz, 1997; Warr & Ellickson, 2000), although at a lower frequency than fear for their children. No women in two qualitative samples expressed fear for male partners (Hollander 2001; Snedker, 2006). Based on interviews and focus group data from Seattle, Hollander suggested women’s lack of altruistic fear is related to the protector role: Her participants stated that women did not share the same responsibility for protecting others as men did and that women were ineffective in the protector role. The inconsistency in results raises questions about the extent of women’s fear for adult men and spouses.

Parental Fear Reflecting parents’ roles as caretakers, the consensus of research on altruistic fear documents parents’ expression of specific fears for their children, and here, too, research points to possible sex differences in parental fear. It is clear from this literature that children are the object of women’s most pronounced fear for those to whom they felt a duty to care. For example, Esther Madriz found that almost all of the women with children in her qualitative study expressed fear about their sons and daughters. There is some disagreement as to whether men or women express more parental fear; one study found that mothers are slightly more fearful (Warr and Ellickson, 2000), another found that sex of the respondent did not predict level of parental fear (Tulloch, 2004), and still another reported that men expressed more parental fear than women (Snedker, 2006). These findings may be due to the research design of these different studies. Fear for children is dependent upon sex of the child; fear for daughters is greater than fear for sons (Warr & Ellickson, 2000), and this difference persists through adulthood (Tulloch, 2004) and does not appear to differ by sex of the parent (Snedker, 2006). Although Warr and Christopher Ellison documented similar expressions of fear by black and white parents for their daughters, Madriz found that black and Latino women were more concerned about sons and that white women were more concerned about daughters. Snedker noted that concerns for boys were often connected to concerns about gangs. Research on parental fear identifies important differences in fear by stages of a child’s

development. Tulloch identifies three salient developmental stages: (1) parents serve as protectors in early childhood and primarily use surveillance to reduce risk to children, (2) parents experience tension between protection and freedom during the transitional stage of adolescence, and (3) parents’ fear declines as children reach adulthood and achieve competency.

General Other-Directed Fear Few studies allow for the exploration of fear outside of the immediate family or household, because of their sampling frame or the focus of surveys or interviews. Yet the studies that have addressed this issue often find that female respondents also expressed fears for other family members beyond their own children, including elderly parents, siblings, cousins, and friends. In fact, even childless women expressed fears for children in general and male relatives who were not their husbands. Although Hollander found only a few instances of this phenomenon when it was related to protection of others by women, women’s greater expression of altruistic fear for others in the extended family and outside the family unit is consistent with women’s provision of social support and care giving.

Behavioral Responses to Fear for Others and Vicarious Fear Research demonstrates that individuals who express higher levels of personal fear of crime alter their behaviors, including restrictive avoidance strategies, to reduce the chances of victimization. Warr and Ellickson posit that altruistic fear might also drive precautionary changes, such as avoiding certain places at night, but their study did not collect details about the motivations of informants. In the only study designed to assess the motivations driving behavioral changes to date, Snedker found that both men and women described altering their own behavior in attempts to reduce risks for others and trying to restrict the behavior of others. Yet behavioral changes seemed to follow gendered patterns in this study: Women changed their behavior, restricted their children’s behaviors, and discussed avoidance and surveillance strategies, whereas men changed their own behavior and encouraged

Altruistic Fear

their wives to change their behavior. In this way, fear for others and personal fear of crime may have similar consequences in altered behaviors and restricted movements, but, given these gendered patterns of behavioral modification, it is unclear if the more equal distribution of altruistic fear minimizes the disproportionate impact of fear on women’s lives. Snedker points to the importance of behavioral change and action in her distinction between altruistic fear and vicarious fear. She uses altruistic fear to refer to fear for others that includes a change in behavior that motivates action and vicarious fear to describe fear for others that causes worry but does not motivate action. If an individual changes his or her behavior to benefit another person out of concern for that person, then this action may indeed be altruistic, especially when there is a cost to himself or herself. In contrast, “vicarious fear is a better overall description of the feeling of fear not linked to social action or the material payment of costs” (Snedker, 2006, p. 167). Snedker suggests that this more nuanced conceptualization may explain the gender differences in expression of fear for others, especially with regard to the distinction between kinship-based fear that may prompt action and the general concern for others that is more common in women’s accounts than in men’s and may be unlikely to lead to behavioral changes or intervention.

Altruistic Fear and Personal Fear of Crime Scholars debate the exact relationship between altruistic fear of crime and fear for oneself. Tulloch argues that the distinction between personal and altruistic fear is untenable in practice because respondents necessarily consider their own fears when responding to questions about fear for others. Thus, he argues there may be both a direct and indirect effect of personal fear on altruistic fear. In contrast, Warr and Ellison theorize altruistic fear as distinct from personal fear. Building from their work, Snedker found that people who worry about personal safety did not necessarily also worry about children or spouse, and that these fears can rightly be seen as distinct in many cases. For example, she found that women were more likely to express both personal fear and fear for others, while men expressed more fear for others.

41

Because women experienced fear for others as an additional fear to their personal fear in a way that men did not, Snedker argued that scholars can identify the separate workings of altruistic and personal fear in empirical data. The literature implicitly supports the latter perspective, as is apparent in the many analyses that compare the two types of fear felt by individuals. The findings of these comparisons suggest that for most married persons, spousal fear most closely matched personal fear; fear for children is greater than fear for oneself; and many women report more fear for others, often children, than for themselves.

Conclusion Altruistic fear is an important dimension to the fear of crime that shapes individuals’ experience of fear and may influence their own behavior as well as that of others. As in the literature on personal fear of crime, sex differences are apparent in the expression of fear for others. Scholars have reached consensus that both men and women express fear for their children’s safety and that men express fear for their wives’ but show less agreement on the extent to which women express fear for their husbands’ safety. It is important to note that these findings are based on internal comparisons because the varied research designs make cross-study analyses impossible, and that each study has limitations that need to be addressed by future researchers. Future research must also investigate race and ethnic as well as age variations through both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Future survey work on altruistic fear should draw from personal fear of crime research to include offense-specific measures that would clarify what specific crimes of concern drive fear for others and illuminate any differences or similarities between parental and spousal fear. Specifying in more detail how fears are related to different family members and non-relatives, such as friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, and building a hierarchy of fears may reveal more about the relationship between personal, vicarious, and altruistic fears. Longitudinal analysis that explores fear of crime and life trajectories are needed to assess the claim that “altruistic fear slowly gives way to

42

Anarchist Criminology

personal fear” over the life course (Warr & Ellison, 2000, p. 574). Future qualitative analysis should investigate in more depth the gendered dynamics that might account for women’s lack of reported fear for men found in quantitative studies. Additional work needs to be done to clarify the gender differences in accounts of different types of fear—altruistic fear and personal fear—and the responses they may prompt, whether altering one’s own behavior or trying to restrict others’ behavior. Exploring precautionary measures that individuals take in response to personal fear and fear for others is a particularly important area of inquiry, as are any potential links between expression of altruistic fear and support for different types of social policies, such as support for different levels of punishment. Altruistic fear of crime provides important and rich terrain for future scholarship. Karen A. Snedker See also Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model; Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots; Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear; Stanko, Elizabeth: Gender, Fear, and Risk.

References and Further Readings Ferraro, K. F. (1995). Fear of crime: Interpreting victimization risk. Albany: SUNY Press. Ferraro, K. F. (1996). Women’s fear of victimization: Shadow of sexual assault? Social Forces, 75, 667–690. Hollander, J. A. (2001). Vulnerability and dangerousness: The construction of gender through conversation about violence. Gender and Society, 15, 83–109. Madriz, E. (1997). Nothing bad happens to good girls: Fear of crime in women’s lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merry, S. E. (1981). Urban danger: Life in a neighborhood of strangers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, H. (2003). Stranger danger: Explaining women’s fear of crime. Western Criminology Review, 4, 203–214. Skogan, W. G., & Maxfield, M. G. (1981). Coping with crime: Individual and neighborhood reactions. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Snedker, K. A. (2006). Altruistic and vicarious fear of crime: Fear for others and gendered social roles. Sociological Forum, 21, 163–195.

Stanko, E. (1990). Everyday violence: How women and men experience sexual and physical danger. London: Pandora. Tulloch, M. (2004). Parental fear of crime: A discursive analysis. Journal of Sociology, 40, 362–377. Warr, M. (1984). Fear of victimization: Why are women and the elderly more afraid? Social Science Quarterly, 65, 681–702. Warr, M. (1985). Fear of rape among urban women. Social Problems, 32, 238–250. Warr, M. (1992). Altruistic fear of victimization in households. Social Science Quarterly, 73, 723–736. Warr, M., & Ellison, C. G. (2000). Rethinking social reactions to crime: Personal and altruistic fear in family households. American Journal of Sociology, 106, 551–578.

Anarchist Criminology Anarchist criminology is founded in a fundamental critique of legal authority and the law—a critique itself embedded in a broader anarchist challenge to power and control. Emerging from the political upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries, this anarchist perspective is distinctive for its comprehensive confrontation with any and all forms of domination. Put differently, anarchist theorists do not set out to critique either racial discrimination or gendered inequality or economic injustice, for example, but instead to critique these and any other manifestations of power and domination. For them, systems of external, top-down authority destroy the humanity of those they dominate, no matter what form those systems may take. In place of such authoritarian systems and arrangements, anarchists seek to create social conditions that are more egalitarian and inclusive, and more open and fluid in their dynamics. Focusing this perspective specifically on crime and legal authority, anarchist criminologists argue that the law encodes and reproduces the various privileges of the powerful, restricts and stagnates what should be an emergent process of human engagement, and thus exacerbates problems of crime and violence. In this way, anarchist criminology offers a distinctive theory of law and crime—a theory that challenges the value of law itself and that questions conventional moral equations regarding legality, crime, and justice.

Anarchist Criminology

Overview and Foundations Contemporary anarchist criminology is rooted in the early development of anarchist political theory of the 19th century, which produced critical analyses of law, crime, and state power. Theorists such as William Godwin (1971, p. 275) and Peter Kropotkin (1975, p. 30) noted the law’s “tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day to day,” and so to “fix the human mind in a stagnant condition.” In this way, they argued, the law embodies the limits of existing understandings, leaves individuals overly reliant on external legal regulation, and inhibits creative solutions to human problems. Kropotkin in particular went on to develop a wide-ranging sociological analysis of law and its consequences; according to Kropotkin, various dimensions of the legal structure protect the interests of wealth and property, while others serve to protect and perpetuate the power of the State itself. Moreover, Kropotkin was among the first criminologists to focus on the social causes of crime, rather than analyzing only individual or biological factors; in fact, he argued that society as a whole was implicated in every criminal act, in large part due to the strain of socially constructed inequality and deprivation. Like the early anarchist Emma Goldmann (1969, p. 109), who saw prisons as “a social crime and failure,” Kropotkin pointed out that the social fetish of law and its constant enforcement ultimately led to a further harm: prisons filled with those found guilty of one legal violation or another. There, he argued, guards are by their positions of authority made mean and vindictive, prisoners are robbed of individual identity, initiative, and dignity—and so the prison becomes a “school of crime,” guaranteed to reproduce the problems caused by the systems of law and inequality that fill it in the first place. Kropotkin, Goldman, and others were anarchist activists as well as anarchist theorists, agitating for radical political and economic change on behalf of peasants, laborers, and others, and their ideas on law and crime were initially carried into the 20th century largely by like-minded activist groups and individuals. In the United States of the early 20th century, for example, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—a radical, anarcho-syndicalist labor union—conceptualized “law and order” not as the maintenance of safe communities but as the systematic suppression of working people through

43

the imposition of laws written by and for the ruling class. More importantly for the development of anarchist criminology, they honed their anarchist analysis of law and its contradictions while developing activist strategies and tactics. Under­ standing that their work lives were strangled by a welter of management rules and regulations, the IWW would at times fight back not by disobeying these manifold rules but by obeying them so precisely as to slow work to a halt in an “on the job strike.” This strategy of turning law’s strangling saturation of everyday life back on itself was also practiced in the streets. When a town outlawed public speaking by the IWW, the union would flood the town with members who would intentionally violate the law in such numbers as to overload the court system and jails and thus eventually force repeal of the law. During the latter part of the 20th century and now into the 21st century, academic criminologists and other scholars have taken the lead in developing anarchist criminology. Harold Pepinsky, for example, has proposed collective negotiation through communist anarchism as an alternative to the rule of criminal law. Larry Tifft and Dennis Sullivan have likewise outlined the possibilities of solving social problems through responsive social interaction rather than through the punitive application of legal statutes. More recently, Randall Amster has explored the non-authoritarian ways in which anarchist communities resolve internal conflicts, and Jeff Ferrell has investigated the ways in which those defined by the law as “criminal” are often engaged in resistance to the law and to the social and economic powers protected by it. In both its more activist and its more academic forms, then, anarchist criminology has developed over the past century and a half along parallel lines, the first analyzing and critiquing traditional arrangements of law, crime, and power, and the second imagining alternative methods for resolving conflict and ensuring community.

Theoretical Developments and Orientations With the scholarly development of anarchist criminology, a number of particular theoretical models have emerged. Expanding on the notion that the law serves not only to protect economic and social privilege but often to protect and serve the very

44

Anarchist Criminology

political system that makes and enforces the law, anarchist criminologists have, for example, introduced the notion of the law as a “state protection racket.” Irreverently comparing the law to a criminal protection racket or illicit extortion scheme—where an individual or business owner is forced to pay “protection money” to thugs, lest the thugs beat up the individual or harm the owner’s business—anarchist criminologists note that many aspects of the legal system operate in just this fashion. Hidden speed traps and pervasive parking tickets serve to enrich city coffers; the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) flushes billions of dollars into the federal government each year; drug seizure laws allow state agencies to seize the property of those accused of drug-related crimes, even lacking a conviction. Like other protection rackets, these legal arrangements are in turn backed by the threat of violence and harm; after all, a person can choose not to pay a speeding ticket, or not to allow an inspection by code enforcement agents—but penalties for not doing so will range from crippling fines to business closings to imprisonment. Anarchist criminologists argue that this pattern of legal extortion backed by state-sanctioned thuggery is neither an occasional aberration nor a feature only of dictatorships and despots; instead it is an essential component of even the most “democratic” of legal systems. Such legal arrangements may at times serve other functions as well, but they certainly and systematically serve to enrich the system that enforces them and to perpetuate its power over individuals and communities. In this way, anarchist criminologists argue, these arrangements reverse traditional assumptions: rather than the law protecting individuals from social harm, perhaps the law is itself a violent social harm, designed primarily to protect those who make and manage it. Anarchist criminologists suggest a similar reversal as regards the nature of crime and criminality. The power of the legal system, they note, is not only punitive; it is also definitional. That is, legal statutes and their enforcers are able to define various human actions as criminal, whether or not those actions embody any inherent harm. And since such legal statutes are created and enforced by the powerful, it seems certain that many such actions are criminalized simply because they are associated with less-powerful groups.

Moreover, those who work to change these present arrangements of power, or who dare to resist the inequities of the state protection racket, are if anything even more likely to be categorized as criminal. If this is true, though, then “crime”— the very subject matter of criminology—itself becomes a problematic category of human behavior and a slippery subject for criminological analysis. Much crime may not be the dangerous problem people are led to believe it is, but rather everyday human behavior redefined by social inequality. In other cases, crime may simply be the label that those in power assign to acts of independent human agency or progressive social change. In this light, anarchist criminologist recall that Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and countless other activists for women’s rights, civil rights, and social equality—individuals now considered by many heroes and moral visionaries—were during their lifetimes prosecuted as criminals and outlaws. Of course, not all crime is animated by progressive politics or moral vision; many other sorts of crime are decidedly violent and harmful to people and communities. Yet even this distinction, anarchist criminology argues, is confounded by the nature of power and domination. Under the conventional criminal justice system in the United States and elsewhere, those acts defined as criminal are countered through aggressive legal enforcement and institutionalized punishment. Often, this approach is conceptualized and implemented as one sort of “war on crime” or another, with for example aggressive wars on drugs, on gangs, and on terrorism. Those caught up in these punitive “wars” are then regularly sentenced to lengthy terms in overcrowded jails and prisons, with all of this presented as a necessary corrective to the dangers of crime. Anarchist criminologists argue, though, that this approach does not decrease the dangers of crime; it amplifies them, to the point that this punitive approach actually exacerbates and perpetuates the very problems it claims to address. “Wars” on crime construct those labeled “criminal” as exterior enemies, harden emotions and spawn fear on all sides of the issue, promote the militarization of policing, and predictably lead to increased violence by police and criminals alike. As Goldman and Kropotkin understood early on, harsh punishment and imprisonment disassociate those imprisoned

Anarchist Criminology

from families and communities, push millions into prison schools of crime, and leave those who exit prison with damaged identities and few opportunities for rehabilitation and reentry into communities. In this way, anarchist criminologists contend, systems of law and punishment spawn more problems than they prevent, accelerate the damage done by crime, choke the possibilities for harmonious human communities, and so operate to perpetuate their own reasons for existence. In response to these problems, anarchist criminologists have developed a number of alternative models. In place of legal enforcement and punishment—and in an effort to free communities from increasing entanglement with proliferating laws, regulations, codes, and legal suits—anarchist criminologists like Tifft and Sullivan propose a needs-based, emergent process of conflict resolution. Unlike the conventional legal model—where laws are made in anticipation of subsequent situations that can then only be resolved by applying inflexible categories of “legal” or “illegal”—this needs-based process works fluidly and situationally. Within a broad commitment to egalitarian relations and to “mutual aid” among community members, people respond to problems as they emerge, and they do so in ways designed to resolve the problem to the satisfaction of all involved. Here the hope is that problems will be far less frequent than under present arrangements, since community members will be committed to correcting problems’ structural roots in social inequality. However, when they do emerge, they will lead not to punishment and imprisonment but to community resolution and growth. Rather than relying on laws that prohibit public begging, for example, a neighborhood might commit to feeding the homeless and to responding to their needs as they emerge. Rather than enacting harsh anti-gang statutes, a city might work with parents and families, and respond as needed to incidents of public fighting. As with Kropotkin (1975, p. 30), the law’s “tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day to day” is here replaced by just such ongoing modification and development. Other anarchist criminologists respond to problem of law, crime, and punishment with more radical proposals—radical in the sense of attempting to get at the very root of the problem itself. Given that crime is not solved by law but caused

45

by it—that is, created as a category of human conduct through the creation and application of legal statutes, and subsequently exacerbated through aggressive enforcement and punishment—many anarchist criminologists advocate for decriminalization. Kropotkin wrote of lawmakers legislating randomly, and in so doing criminalizing more and more aspects of social life—and yet, anarchist criminologists note, this process is seldom counterbalanced through decriminalization. If it were, then decriminalized issues of intoxication or sexuality or public comportment could be negotiated in ways that calm violence and reduce individual harm rather than creating new classes of criminals and prisoners. Likewise, many anarchist criminologists embrace abolitionism. If prisons inevitably serve as inequitable schools for crime, they argue, then prisons should be abolished and be replaced with programs that rehabilitate offenders, reintegrate them into communities, and so strengthen social safety.

Applications and Implications Over the past few decades, anarchist criminology not only has continued to develop in its own right but also has spawned a variety of associated practices and perspectives. A number of anarchist criminologists, for example, have applied anarchist insights in contributing to models of restorative justice. These restorative justice models emphasize an open-ended process of reconciliation between offenders and those they harm, with this process designed to meet the needs of both groups and to restore a collective sense of safety and community. Anarchist criminologists in turn emphasize that this interactive process—while preferable to the rigid application of pre-set legal statutes—must also address larger patterns of social inequality if crime and violence are to be significantly reduced. Similarly, the model of peacemaking criminology has emerged out of work in anarchist criminology. Like anarchist criminologists, peacemaking criminologists argue that violent responses to social problems only breed further violence and worsen existing problems—and that punishment, prison, wars on crime, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence are therefore inherently counter-productive. Instead, peacemaking criminologists focus on

46

Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street

developing social dynamics that can transform violent relationships—whether interpersonal, corporate, or legal—into safe and respectful relationships. Again echoing anarchist criminologists, they argue that these dynamics cannot be preordained through law-making. Instead they must be understood as long-term, emergent endeavors in which all members of a community are included. Anarchist criminology informs a number of theoretical perspectives in criminology as well. As developed in the 1960s and 1970s, both the British “new criminology” and American labeling theory embodied the anarchist critique of law and law enforcement as social institutions that create and amplify criminality rather than preventing it. Within labeling theory especially, this critical insight was subsequently integrated into models of deviant and criminal careers, secondary deviance, and master status. In these models, long-term criminality results at least in part from the official labeling of individuals as criminal and from the social and cultural consequences of this label’s ongoing enforcement. Postmodern criminology likewise draws on the anarchist sense that legal systems construct the reality of crime and justice— and that crime can therefore be theoretically “deconstructed” so as to analyze the ideologies and assumptions encoded in it. Most recently, anarchist perspectives on law and crime—and their elaboration within labeling theory, the new criminology, and postmodern criminology—have been incorporated into cultural criminology. Building on earlier anarchist themes, cultural criminology explores the political dynamics by which legal systems and media institutions construct crime and amplify public fears about crime. In turn, cultural criminology examines the often rebellious politics of those who resist being constructed as criminal. As Kropotkin, Goldman, and other early anarchist activists would appreciate, anarchist criminology is currently contributing to, and itself being informed by, a final phenomenon: the recent emergence of anti-globalization, social justice, and environmental social movements founded in anarchist orientations. Jeff Ferrell See also Abolitionism; Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Cultural Criminology; Peacemaking

Criminology; Postmodern Theory; Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

References and Further Readings Amster, R. (2003). Restoring (dis)order: Sanctions, resolutions, and social control in anarchist communities. Contemporary Justice Review, 6, 9–24. Capouya, E., & Tompkins, K. (Eds.). (1975). The essential Kropotkin. New York: Liveright. Ferrell, J. (1998). Against the law: Anarchist criminology. Social Anarchism, 25, 1–14. Ferrell, J. (2001). Tearing down the streets: Adventures in urban anarchy. New York: Palgrave. Godwin, W. (1971). Enquiry concerning political justice. London: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1793) Goldman, E. (1969). Anarchism and other essays. New York: Dover. Kropotkin, P. (1975). Law and authority. In E. Capouya & K. Tompkins (Eds.), The essential Kropotkin (pp. 27–43). New York: Liveright. (Original work published 1886) Pepinsky, H. (1978). Communist anarchism as an alternative to the rule of criminal law. Contemporary Crises, 2, 315–327. Tifft, L., & Sullivan, D. (1980). The struggle to be human: Crime, criminology, and anarchism. Orkney, UK: Cienfuegos Press.

Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City provides a vivid depiction of the social and cultural dynamics of living in poor, predominantly African American, inner-city American neighborhoods. This ethnographic work reveals the existence of an oppositional culture where most of the rules and norms of the culture go against those of mainstream culture. This oppositional culture is rooted in a social context of “concentrated disadvantage” (Wilson, 1987). These neighborhoods experience persistent poverty, are alienated from wider society, and are characterized by joblessness, drugs, interpersonal violence, and disrupted families. William Julius Wilson

Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street

argues that compared with poverty prior to the 1980s, poverty today is greater in magnitude and far more concentrated. Various historical and social forces, such as deindustrialization, segregation of the housing markets, and white flight, coalesced to create these increasingly isolated, predominantly black innercity communities. Because of deindustrialization, many jobs vacated the cities, particularly those located in the nation’s rust-belt cities. Individuals with the resources followed the jobs, leaving behind the poorest residents. Segregation of the housing markets and white flight only further contributed to these isolated communities consisting of predominantly African Americans. It is this isolation from mainstream society that has allowed the code of the street to prevail. Anderson illuminates how an oppositional culture has developed as an adaptation to the social context of concentrated disadvantage.

The Code of the Street Anderson (1999) views inner-city culture as arising from the structural conditions in which residents are enmeshed. Inner-city culture, which Anderson labels “the code of the street,” is an adaptation to the structural deprivation of these neighborhoods. This code consists of a few key elements. First, the code rejects mainstream conventional culture; therefore it is typically considered an oppositional culture. It is composed of a set of informal rules that dictate interpersonal public behavior. Second, the code places a premium on public displays of achieving respect. Anderson explains that for inner-city residents, “respect is viewed as an external entity, one that is hard-won but easily lost—and so must constantly be guarded” (p. 33). Third, and related to the importance of respect, the code promotes the use of violence in response to real or even perceived attacks. The campaign for respect and the use of violence are intertwined. Violence is frequently used to gain respect from others on the street—whether they be members of their peer group or potential transgressors. In an effort to deter interpersonal transgressions and to campaign for respect, individuals who adhere to the code feel as though they must respond with violence. While much of mainstream society views the true “nerve” as

47

walking away from a confrontation, those who live by the code view the “nerve” as fighting back. Many inner-city residents do not have educational or occupational pursuits in which to build self-worth and to gain respect. For these residents, one of the only avenues for gaining respect and a sense of self-worth is through their ability to command respect on the street. According to Anderson, this is often achieved through violence and by developing a “tough” reputation. The purpose is two-fold; it generates respect from others, which in turn provides self-protection. Self-protection is viewed as crucial for survival in high-crime neighborhoods not only because of the high crime but also because many residents lack confidence in the police to provide the necessary protection. Anderson explains that “The code of the street emerges where the influence of the police ends and personal responsibility for one’s safety is felt to begin, resulting in a kind of ‘people’s law’ based on ‘street justice’” (p. 10).

Decent or Street While the code of the street appears to prevail in many inner-city communities like those observed by Anderson, such communities are socially organized by two conflicting orientations: “decent” and “street.” Decent families are characterized by a sense of hope for the future. They espouse to mainstream norms, valuing hard work and personal responsibility. According to Anderson, “Probably the most meaningful description of the mission of the decent family, as seen by members and outsiders alike, is to instill a ‘backbone’ and a sense of responsibility in its younger members” (p. 38). The role of the code of the street for decent members of the community is often one of necessity for survival. Familiarity with the code provides a defense for decent individuals, and it allows them to navigate through the inner-city environment. Decent families have a very difficult balancing act they must execute. They want their children to internalize prosocial values but, at the same time, they do not want their children to be disrespected or taken advantage of on the street. This results in predominantly decent people resorting to what is known as code-switching. Code-switching consists of acting “street” or adhering to this code in certain

48

Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street

situations. Success in the inner-city requires the ability to code-switch—adhering to the code of the street when with the element of the street and adhering to the code of decency with all others. Street families, on the other hand, are characterized as having an artificial sense of family and community. Their home-life is often disorganized, and they frequently demonstrate a lack of consideration for others. Street parents may judge others based on the code and may even socialize their children into the code in a “normative” way (p. 45). Individuals who are street-oriented often experience frustrations over money, food, housing, and sometimes drugs and alcohol. These frustrations arise due to meek financial resources that are frequently mismanaged and are not well prioritized. These impoverished conditions, accompanied by unrelenting racial discrimination, have led to anger, bitterness, and a need to lash out at mainstream society. It is this social context of poor urban neighborhoods that has enabled the code of the street to endure. Most individuals of inner-city neighborhoods are not purely decent or street. Rather, they fall somewhere on the continuum of decent and street. The degree to which individuals are alienated from the wider society often defines where they fall on this continuum. Most individuals are generally decent, and it is those that are intimately associated with the criminal element that are the most street. Frequently, extended families are mixed with both decent and street members. The culture conflict between decent and street family members causes tension and divides within the family. For example, family members who are more street-oriented view the decent members as a threat, and they sometimes refer to them as “acting white” (p. 65).

The Role of Respect In poor urban communities, respect is a highly sought after commodity. It can provide security; and the amount of respect individuals hold often determines their level of self-esteem. Anderson (1999, p. 66) describes the role of respect in innercity neighborhoods as “a peculiar form of social exchange that is perhaps best understood as a perversion of the Golden Rule, whose by-product

in this case is respect and whose caveat is vengeance, or payback.” Children of these neighborhoods begin to understand the importance of respect and its relevance to the code very early in life. While the kind of home children are raised in—decent or street— influences the path they choose, it does not fully determine the chosen path. The environmental influences of the neighborhood also impact children’s decision making and ultimately whether they go decent or street. Anderson recognizes the importance of peer groups to inner-city adolescents and the role they play in whether youngsters turn decent or street. The peer group becomes the primary social bond and provides reinforcement for youths’ behavior. By the age of 10, most children of inner-city communities have encountered the street. They have recognized both the importance of watching their back and that an interpersonal conflict is very possible. While adolescents in all neighborhoods, white middle-class adolescents included, are insecure and searching for “who they are,” it is the adolescents of poor inner-city communities that have the most limited options for self-expression to display that they are worthwhile. These limitations of expression result in many adolescents’ reliance upon physical assertiveness to campaign for respect. It is during these conflicts and their association with the campaign for respect that “the need for being in physical control of at least a portion of one’s environment become internalized, and the germ of the code of the street emerges” (p. 68). In the campaign for respect, individuals can often worsen their circumstances. For example, primarily decent youngsters may dress like street kids in an attempt to gain respect. Frequently, however, teachers and other adults are unable to distinguish truly street kids from decent kids dressing street. Dressing this way may gain youths respect among their peers, but at the same time it further alienates them from wider society. This may lead to missing out on a job opportunity or to teachers and other authority figures treating them as though they are street. On the other hand, if youths dressed decent, then their peers may say they are acting white. Dressing decent may even put the youths in physical danger. Other youths,

Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street

who are trying to gain respect from their street peers, may view those dressed decent as opportunities to gain that respect. This is an example of an everyday dilemma of an adolescent in the poor inner-city.

The Underground Economy Many of the current conditions found within poor inner-city neighborhoods are partially attributed to the economic changes in the United States, such as deindustrialization and welfare reform. Since the advent of industrialization, the urban underclass was largely sustained through unskilled or semiskilled manufacturing jobs. However, due to the growth of the global economy and deindustrialization, most of these jobs have vacated the city, moving into the suburbs or overseas or being eliminated altogether because of technology. Deindustrialization has devastated many U.S. cities, and it is this devastation that has contributed to the “moral outrage” felt within these communities. Teen pregnancy, welfare dependency, an underground economy of drugs and crime, and the accompanying interpersonal violence have emerged. Responding to the mass departure of jobs from the city, the underground economy attempts to compensate for the joblessness. While it may provide financial resources for some individuals, the drug trade is accompanied by violence. This is because the drug trade is based on the code of the street, and violence or the threat of violence is the mechanism of social control. Opting into the underground economy is seen as attractive due to the lack of opportunity in the regular economy and the rules of the street. Drug dealing often brings respect and, to some extent, security. On the other hand, involvement in the underground economy potentially means encounters with violence, either as a perpetrator or a victim. Many residents of the community accept the underground economy, viewing it as a way to get by. Those who have not been able to obtain legitimate employment become frustrated and often feel as though they have been victimized by discrimination. This leads to further despair and alienation, which in turn feeds the oppositional culture.

49

The Mating Game Those that have fewer options, coupled with a limited sense of the future, base most aspects of their lives on the code, including their views on sex and pregnancy. To some extent, the sexual conduct of inner-city youths is very similar to all adolescents’ sexual conduct. The difference is that inner-city youths lack the vision of a future and lack the hope for a better life. Therefore, these youths see little to lose by teenage and out-ofwedlock pregnancy. According to the values and norms of the code of the street, for inner-city youths, their sexual behavior is often another avenue for achieving status. For young males, sexual prowess is seen as a sign of manhood, and the babies that they produce is evidence of this manhood. For young females, motherhood is a rite of passage to adulthood. Their babies are seen as “prizes” and used as status symbols. Many young females dream of having a middleclass life consisting of a husband and children. However, most end up with only the children to care for, primarily on their own. For young males, marriage is seen as a threat to their freedom. Due to the limited employment opportunities, many feel that they will not be able to support and provide for a family. The young fathers often leave because they are unable to support the mothers and their children. The young mothers are then left to raise the children on their own. Frequently, however, young mothers’ own mothers take over some, if not all, of the responsibilities of child care.

Decent Daddies, Grandmothers, and Old Heads Although, much of Code of the Street discusses the social ills of poor urban American communities due to structural deprivation, Anderson also depicts glimmers of optimism and hopes for the future present. These are found in the decent daddies, grandmothers, and other old heads of the communities. However, due to the drugs, violence, and joblessness, these positive role models are diminishing. Decent daddies serve as role models not only for their children but also for the entire community. They attempt to represent their race in a positive

50

Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street

light, accepting the values and norms of the wider society. They often function in a nuclear family and possess a job, thus having a means to provide for their family. Decent daddies believe in personal responsibility and hard work. They are often intolerant of excuses, such as discrimination, from others who do not meet their responsibilities in life. Further, due to deindustrialization, decent daddies are faced with new challenges of supporting their families. Also, many young males come from disorganized households, often with little or no exposure to a decent-daddy role model. Thus, with the lack of means for viable employment and the lack of exposure to a male role model, decent daddies are more scarce than ever before. Today, even those who do try to emulate the decent-daddy role often fall short. The grandmother is the preeminent domestic female role in the community, often viewed as a “pillar of strength in the black community” (p. 207). The traditional grandmother is typically associated with decency and lives according to mainstream society’s values and norms. However, some grandmothers do adhere to a more street lifestyle. The more traditional grandmother often provides a “nest” for the family and, if necessary, she takes over the role of parenting when her own teenage daughter has children. The grandmother is frequently called upon in family crises; and these crises have mounted because of the increased joblessness and the appearance of crack cocaine. Traditionally, then grandmothers were viewed as “selfless saviors of the community” or are compared to being a “lifeboat” (p. 211). Similar to the decent daddy, the grandmother’s role is increasingly threatened due to the social and structural changes of poor urban American communities. As decent daddies and grandmothers diminish and “become less effective, the multiplier effects grow, and the most impoverished pockets of the black inner-city community move closer to disintegration” (p. 236). It is this disintegration and alienation from the wider society that fosters the oppositional culture—that is, the code of the street.

Empirical Review Recently, some researchers have attempted to study the validity of Anderson’s subculture of violence thesis through quantitative research. For example,

Timothy Brezina and colleagues examined the role of perceived opportunity and victimization—two key elements set forth in Anderson’s subcultural account. First, the role of blocked opportunities is relevant to the code because poor urban residents have limited opportunities to achieve respect in mainstream culture. Therefore, the code is an adaptation to the hopelessness and alienation resulting from these restricted opportunities. The role of victimization is relevant to the code because, for many poor residents, knowing the code is necessary for survival. Individuals who are at risk for victimization, learn the code for self-protection. Therefore, prior victimization is likely to influence the development of code-related beliefs. Using the first three waves of the National Youth Survey—a delinquency self-report panel study—Brezina and colleagues found support for both of these relationships. Both perceived blocked opportunities and victimization were associated with an increased likelihood of antisocial and aggressive peers. The association with antisocial peers fostered the development of code-related beliefs, which in turn led to an increase in violent behavior. Perceived blocked opportunities and victimization also had direct effects on Time 2 violence, while controlling for Time 1. Time 2 violence had direct effects on Time 3 violence. Time 2 violence was also related to an adherence to coderelated beliefs. Further, previous victimization had a significant direct effect on violence at Time 3. This suggests that much of the violence is brought about for self-protection or by anger and not because of an adherence to the code. However, the violence, once it occurs, does promote adherence to the code. These results lend some support for Anderson’s contentions that the code is an adaptation to restricted opportunities and to the high-crime environments in which these poor people reside. Inconsistent with Anderson’s claim in Code of the Street, Eric Stewart and colleagues found that the adaptation of adhering to the code for selfprotection does not make individuals safer. They used a longitudinal sample of 720 black adolescents from 259 neighborhoods to assess whether adhering to the code served as self-protection. Their findings suggest that adhering to the code actually increases the likelihood of being victimized. Further, their analysis revealed that adhering to the code exacerbated the risk of victimization

Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street

beyond what would be expected from the poor, disorganized, and high-crime neighborhood context. In sum, Stewart and colleagues’ analysis found adhering to the code to be a risk factor for victimization rather than a protective factor, as Anderson proposed. Using the same sample of 720 black adolescents, Stewart and Ronald Simons conducted a partial test of Anderson’s subculture of violence thesis by examining whether neighborhood context, family type, and discrimination affected the adoption of code-related beliefs. Their analysis revealed support for Anderson’s thesis. Neigh­ borhood structural characteristics, living in a street family, and discrimination were significantly associated with adopting the code. Further, the analysis indicated that the code mediated about one-fifth of neighborhood effects and the effects of discrimination on violent delinquency. The code mediated about 4 percent of the effects of family characteristics on violent delinquency. The quantitative research to date is largely consistent with Anderson’s subculture of violence thesis. Research by Brezina and colleagues has suggested that perceived blocked opportunities and previous victimization are associated with an increased likelihood of adopting the code. However, adopting the code appears to be a risk factor for further victimization, rather than a protective factor, according to Stewart and colleagues. This contradicts Anderson’s claim that adhering to the code serves a self-protection function. Research has also demonstrated that not only do neighborhood structural characteristics, family characteristics, and discrimination influence whether individuals adopt the code directly, but they also affect violence indirectly through the adoption of the code.

Conclusion Anderson’s Code of the Street provides an indepth vivid picture of life in poor urban America. Economic and social changes have had detrimental effects on the urban poor. The social consequences of unrelenting poverty, joblessness, family disruption, drugs, and violence collide and result in extreme social isolation. This isolation from mainstream society has fostered the development of an institutionalized oppositional culture. In turn, it is the values and norms of the code of the

51

street that further alienate these neighborhoods from wider society. Although most of the urban poor are not entirely invested in the code of the street, it is the small minority of those who have completely embraced the code that sustain its existence. For some, they feel as though the code of the street is their only option. The positive influences of the decent daddies and grandmothers battle against the code of the street. However, again because of the economic and social changes that have so devastatingly impacted these neighborhoods, these role models are beginning to vanish. A vicious cycle of joblessness, drug addiction, and the code of the street has emerged. As one inner-city resident told Anderson, “Abandoned is what you are” (p. 323). It is that sentiment of abandonment that nurtures the code of the street. Kristin Swartz See also Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street; Katz, Jack: Seductions Of Crime; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

References and Further Readings Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, class, and change in an urban community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: W. W. Norton. Brezina, T., Agnew, R., Cullen, F. T., & Wright, J. P. (2004). The code of the street: A quantitative assessment of Elijah Anderson’s subculture of violence thesis and its contribution to youth violence research. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 2, 303–328. Stewart, E. A., Schreck, C. J., & Simons, R. L. (2006). “I ain’t gonna let no one disrespect me”: Does the code of the street reduce or increase violent victimization among African American adolescents? Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 43, 427–458. Stewart, E. A., & Simons, R. L. (2006). Structure and culture in African American adolescent violence: A partial tells of the “code of the street” thesis. Justice Quarterly, 23, 1–33. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

52

Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A PIC-R Perspective on Criminal Conduct

Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A Personal, Interpersonal, and Community-Reinforcement (PIC-R) Perspective on Criminal Conduct In the preface to the fourth edition of The Psychology of Criminal Conduct, D. A. Andrews and James Bonta indicate that they remain true to their core ideals: develop a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to criminal conduct. The Personal, Inter­ personal, and Community-Reinforce­ment (PIC-R) perspective attempts to explain criminal behavior but also advocates for the development of interventions designed to reduce its incidence. This clini­­cal relevance, as they refer to it, has taken root throughout the criminal justice system, most notably in its role in shaping the “what works” movement. While other perspectives often focus on one or two correlates of crime (e.g., neighborhood, selfcontrol), Andrews and Bonta argue that a theory of crime must be both “comprehensive and flexible” (2006, p. 143). In particular, they assert that “respect for the complexity of human behavior means that this text is very suspicious of any account of human behavior that claims that individual differences in behavior may be attributed to any single type of variable, be it biological, psychological, social, or political-economic” (p. 2). In other words, identifying a core sociological variable such as neighborhood or a core psychological variable such as cognitions misses the broader picture of the interplay between neighborhoods and cognitions. This perspective would contend that neighborhoods do not elicit criminal behavior from its residents any more than cognitions are spontaneously developed. Rather, Andrews and Bonta assert that individuals are products of both their environment and their personal characteristics.

Conceptual Framework Andrews and Bonta note that the PIC-R perspective is based on a personality and social

psychological approach—namely, cognitive social learning theory. But they also argue that there are eight perspectives that should assist in guiding our view of criminal behavior, including biological, trait, psychodynamic, sociocultural, radical behavioral, humanistic, social learning/cognitive-behavioral, and personality. But cognitive social learning theory provides the foundation for many of the PIC-R principles, particularly as it relates to their discussion of antecedents and consequences (discussed in further detail below). Like its title suggests, the theory identifies personal, interpersonal, and community factors in the explanation of criminal behavior. While the PIC-R perspective is broad in its approach, Andrews and Bonta recognize the importance of indentifying both motivational and control elements in explaining criminal behavior. The motivational elements inherent in the PIC-R perspective are those that encourage deviant or criminal behavior. These elements, such as reinforcement, help to explain both the initiation and maintenance of criminal behavior. The perspective also outlines control elements, which include both individual (e.g., self-regulation) and external sources of control. These control elements assist in explaining why certain individuals desist or avoid criminal behavior even in the presence of community risk factors. Andrews and Bonta also argue that the explanation of criminal behavior is more complex than outlined in other theories. For example, Robert Agnew’s general strain theory proposes that individuals commit crime to relieve or reduce pressures or difficulties they are experiencing. Andrews and Bonta assert that “motivation for crime extends well beyond strain” (2006, p. 143), and instead of focusing solely on the withdrawal of positive or the presence of negative events, their perspective also includes control or costs elements. The control elements also have some similarities to Travis Hirschi’s social bonding theory. However, Andrews and Bonta argue that Hirschi’s theory is too narrow in its explanation of crime. For example, while social bond theory may include elements found in Andrews and Bonta’s discussion of interpersonal factors, it ignores more individuallevel issues and the community structure. Although Andrews and Bonta discuss self-regulation, which is similar to Michael Gottfredson and Hirschi’s

Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A PIC-R Perspective on Criminal Conduct

self-control theory, they argue that focusing solely on self-control leaves out other crucial correlates of crime. Finally, they note that antisocial attitudes are one of the strongest predictors of crime and differentiate between offenders and non-offenders. Although Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s neutralization theory discusses the importance of rationalizations, Andrews and Bonta disagree that all individuals use rationalizations to drift from conventional and deviant roles. Andrews and Bonta assert that our understanding of criminal behavior must be broad and appreciate that individuals are not mere products of their environment; rather, individuals interact with their environment in complex ways. On the personal level, they discuss self-management and decision making as important contributors to delinquency. They also note that personality, age, gender, cognitions, and perceived social support can play important roles in how individuals choose to behave in certain situations. On the interpersonal level, the perspective clearly draws from social learning theory in its discussion of the relationships between individuals, family, friends, or others that model, reward, and/or disapprove of behavior. Finally, they note that social structural and cultural factors also may work to encourage or discourage criminal activity. Such factors can include neighborhood or economic conditions. The PIC-R perspective argues that it is the interaction and culmination of these factors that predict the likelihood of criminal behavior. Andrews and Bonta outline 13 principles that provide the foundation for the PIC-R perspective. Within these 13 principles, the PIC-R theory outlines the personal, interpersonal, and community reinforcement factors discussed above. But given the theory’s focus on a cognitive social learning perspective, careful attention is also paid to how the individual and interpersonal level factors motivate or inhibit criminality, specifically how factors such as attitudes, problem-solving skills, personality, and mental health interact with the reinforcement or disapproval individuals receive from significant others or their communities. They argue that individuals vary not only in their propensity to commit crime but also in their reaction to others in their environment. Responses are often predicated upon the many social cues that individuals receive and how they interpret those cues.

53

Andrews and Bonta also note that for some individuals, criminal behavior may have become a habitual or an automatic response. This is most apparent when examining motivation for drug use and continued abuse. Those addicted to drugs are often influenced by triggers in their environment. These triggers can range from high-risk situations, such as associating with certain friends, to an individual’s thoughts or feelings. These triggers can produce immediate physiological or psychological effects that can increase the likelihood of criminal behavior. The clinical applications of this perspective are apparent. Without attending to underlying correlates of crime and appreciating the processes involved in individuals’ decision making, we are unlikely to affect change in behavior. As a result, any therapy or treatment must recognize that to reduce crime, the approach must address the factors that are driving the behavior. To make prosocial behavior likely in the long term, the therapy must also be intensive and matched to the learning style of the individual. This approach to treatment follows what is termed the “what works” or “best practices” approach to offender therapy.

“What Works” and PIC-R Andrews and Bonta argue that for a theory to be empirically defensible, it must identify how the key components are associated with one another, it should predict crime accurately, it should have the potential to influence behavior through interventions, and it must be generalizable. The clinical applicability of the PIC-R perspective is most appropriately illustrated in the “what works” movement. Guiding the “what works” or best practices approach are the principles of effective intervention (Gendreau, 1996). These principles provide a framework for effective programming, and research has shown that the ability to effectively change offenders’ behavior varies based on whether these principles are followed. While not an exhaustive discussion, the PIC-R framework has provided an illustration of how these principles are related to criminal behavior. The policy developments most clearly tied to the PIC-R perspective are in the areas of risk and need assessment tools, the use of cognitive-behavioral interventions that rely heavily on reducing “thinking errors” and

54

Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A PIC-R Perspective on Criminal Conduct

providing appropriate modeling, and the use of strategies based on a system of rewards and consequences to shape behavior. Risk, Need, and Responsivity

One of the principles of effective intervention that draws heavily from the factors identified in the PIC-R perspective is the risk, need, and responsivity (RNR) model. The RNR model includes three principles focusing on the identification of risk factors and classification strategies for offender placement and therapy. First, the risk principle refers to identifying personal attributes or circumstances predictive of future behavior. Andrews and Bonta make the case that there are a variety of risk factors or correlates of criminal behavior. However, they also identify the top four—termed the Big Four— that include antisocial (1) attitudes, (2) associates, (3) personality, and (4) history. The research finds that when these factors accumulate, the likelihood of criminal behavior increases. This principle asserts that those who are at the highest risk of criminal behavior will receive the most benefit from intensive services. This is the risk principle. Second, the need principle argues that only crime-producing risk factors that are amenable to change should be the focus of treatment services. Some risk factors, such as age or past criminal history, are “static” because they are in the past and thus cannot be altered. Other risk factors, such as antisocial attitudes or associates, are “dynamic” because they can change; one can develop prosocial attitudes or hang around with different friends. Andrews and Bonta call these dynamic risk factors “criminogenic needs.” Again, it is these changeable factors that they argue should be targeted for interventions. The most promising dynamic targets are also outlined in the PIC-R perspective and include antisocial attitudes, feelings and values, poor problem-solving skills, negative associates, and impulsivity, poor self-control, and irresponsibility. Third, the responsivity principle refers to delivering an intervention that is appropriate and matches the abilities and styles of the client. Responsivity factors can range from personality styles to issues with childcare or transportation. Research finds that these characteristics may impede or act as a barrier to treatment.

The effectiveness of correctional interventions is dependent upon whether the services are varied based on risk, need, and responsivity factors presented by the individual. There has been a wealth of research in this area that will not be reviewed here. However, it is important to note that this model has had tremendous practical implications, particularly in the area of risk and need assessments (Andrews et al., 2006). Cognitions

Although the PIC-R perspective recognizes that there are a variety of factors associated with criminal behavior, Andrews and Bonta note that antisocial attitudes, also referred to as cognitions, are one of the strongest correlates of crime. Drawing from the cognitive social learning perspective, research finds that offenders tend to display limited problem-solving skills, have antisocial values and attitudes, and are known to display thinking errors. Cognitive-behavioral therapies thus provide opportunities to increase skill deficits in these areas through a system of reinforcement, prosocial modeling, and role-playing. Numerous studies have demonstrated that these programs are effective in reducing recidivism. The PIC-R perspective asserts that the emphasis should be not only on what offenders think but also on how they think and the influence on antecedents and consequences. Andrews and Bonta recognize that “behavioral antecedents and consequent controls are related to effective cognitive behavioral therapy” (2006, p. 148). Specifically, cognitive-behavioral therapies utilize reinforcement strategies and attempt to train or teach individuals to change their thought processes. For example, the therapy may attempt to treat individuals by teaching them to identify their triggers, develop strategies to remove the triggers from their environment, or develop strategies for coping with their high-risk situations when they are unavoidable. This approach to self-regulation is a crucial aspect of the success of the cognitive social learning approach. Rewards and Consequences

Several of the principles identified by Andrews and Bonta’s PIC-R perspective discuss the importance of rewards and consequences. Drawing

Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A PIC-R Perspective on Criminal Conduct

heavily from classical and operant conditional models, they argue that “antecedent stimuli are stimulus events that precede and (as opposed to neutral stimuli) control the behavior. They constitute the ‘A’ in the A-B-C (antecedent-behaviorconsequences) of behavioral analysis. Antecedent control implies that change in stimulus conditions alter the probability of the behavior occurring” (p. 145). The importance of modeling by a significant other provides an illustration of this point. Research finds that behavior resulting in a successful outcome is more likely to be repeated by observing this behavior. In their discussion of antecedent and consequent control, Andrews and Bonta note that behavioral theory provides a framework for understanding motivation and regulation of behavior and are a fundamental part of explaining the variation in criminal behavior. Finally, they argue that the delivery, density, variety, and magnitude of rewards and consequences are important. It is this interaction of factors (e.g., the personal, interpersonal, and community) and the act itself that create the foundation for the PIC-R perspective. Effective therapies must attempt to shift the benefits of criminal behavior by providing rewards for prosocial behavior and consequences for deviant behaviors. Without changing the balance of these controls, changes in individual behavior is unlikely. Although there is still significant room for improvement, there has been a commitment on the part of a number of local and state agencies to pay attention to the empirical research on treatment effectiveness or “what works” in their adoption of assessment tools and cognitive-behavioral based interventions.

Conclusion While the PIC-R perspective itself has not been the subject of extensive empirical review, the core principles have been supported in a variety of studies. By Andrews and Bonta’s own admission, the strength of this perspective rests with its practical utility or clinical relevance. The PIC-R perspective has clear implications for offender classification and treatment-service delivery. Support for this approach can be seen through the empirical literature on rehabilitation, particularly in the areas of risk and need assessment and cognitive-behavioral interventions. By identifying key

55

risk factors or correlates of crime while acknowledging that offender behavior can be changed through appropriately intensive and matched services, the theory provides a solid framework for policy development. Shelley Johnson Listwan See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 5, 373–387. Andrews, D. A., & Bonta, J. (2006). The psychology of criminal conduct (4th ed.). Newark, NJ: Anderson. Andrews, D. A., Bonta, J., & Hoge, R. D. (1990). Classification for effective rehabilitation: Rediscovering psychology. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 17, 19–52. Andrews, D. A., Bonta, J., & Wormith, S. J. (2006). The recent past and near future of risk and/or need assessment. Crime and Delinquency, 52, 7–27. Andrews, D. A., Zinger, I., Hoge, R. D., Bonta, J., Gendreau, P., & Cullen, F. T. (1990). Does correctional treatment work? A clinically relevant and psychologically informed meta-analysis. Criminology, 28, 369–404. Antonowicz, D. H., & Ross, R. R. (1994). Essential components of successful rehabilitation programs for offenders. International Journal of Offender and Comparative Criminology, 38, 97–104. Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist, 44, 1175–1184. Cullen, F. T., & Gendreau, P. (2000). Assessing correctional rehabilitation: Policy, practice, and prospects. In J. Horney (Ed.), Criminal justice 2000: Vol. 3. Policies, processes, and decisions of the criminal justice system (pp. 109–175). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. Gendreau, P., & Ross, R. R. (1987). Revivification of rehabilitation: Evidence from the 1980s. Justice Quarterly, 4, 349–407. Gendreau, P. T., Little, T., & Goggin, C. (1996). A metaanalysis of the predictors of adult offender recidivism: What works! Criminology, 34, 575–607.

56

Anomie and White-Collar Crime

Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Izzo, R. L., & Ross, R. R. (1990). Meta-analysis of rehabilitation programs for juvenile delinquents: A brief report. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 17, 134–142. Lipsey, M. W. (1992). Juvenile delinquency treatment: A meta-analytic inquiry into the variability of effects. In T. D. Cook, H. Cooper, D. S. Cordray, H. Hartmann, L. V. Hedges, R. J. Light, et al. (Eds.), Meta-Analysis for explanation: A casebook (pp. 83–127). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Listwan, S. J., Jonson, C. L., Cullen, F. T., & Latessa, E. J. (2008). Cracks in the penal harm movement: Evidence from the field. Criminology and Public Policy, 7, 423–465. Losel, F. (1995). The efficacy of correctional treatment: A review and synthesis of meta-evaluations. In J. McGuire (Ed.), What works: Reducing reoffending (pp. 79–111). Chichester, UK: Wiley. Lowenkamp, C. T., Latessa, E. J., & Holsinger, A. M. (2006). The risk principle in action: What we have learned from 13,676 offenders and 97 correctional programs? Crime and Delinquency, 52, 77–93. Pratt, T., & Cullen, F. T. (2000). The empirical status of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory of crime: A meta-analysis. Criminology, 38, 931–964.

Anomie Crime

and

White-Collar

Émile Durkheim and Robert K. Merton are the classic authors stimulating the anomie tradition, “a rich body of research and theorizing in which the concept of anomie plays a central role” (Passas, 1995, p. 92). Anomie means a low commitment to mainstream rules in entire societies or smaller social units. It is a social state in which the guiding power of normative standards is undermined by sudden social changes, disjunctions between culturally induced goals and available legitimate means, or other sources. The concept of white-collar crime was introduced to social sciences by Edwin Sutherland in 1940. This led to vigorous debates on the nature, causes, and extent of crime, on the role of powerful actors

in lawmaking and enforcement, on the role of the media, and on the social effects of different types of misconduct. Significant and expanding empirical studies have added to theoretical elaborations. According to Sally Simpson and David Weisburd, we can now speak of a true “criminology of whitecollar crime”; that is, white-collar crime is now an active area of study within the field of criminology. Neither Durkheim nor Merton associated their theories with this concept. Indeed, Merton was initially criticized for an alleged lower-class bias. His theory was interpreted as predicting too much working-class crime, as less privileged persons had objectively access to fewer legitimate opportunities to fulfill their American Dream. A core assumption in the anomie tradition is that disjunctions between culturally induced goals and accessible legitimate means to attain these goals weaken commitment to dominant norms and lead to deviance. Over-emphasis on success goals at the expense of institutionalized means is also conducive to normative breakdown, according to Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld. The analytical potential was there, but the linkage of anomie with the deviance of powerful, well-educated, bright individuals and by organizations was left to others. These scholars elaborated theoretical linkages between macro- and micro-levels of analysis in order to show how structural factors affect individual perceptions, options, decisions, and actions. In 1983, Diane Vaughan developed a theory of organizational misconduct containing the following chief elements: a competitive environment producing pressures to achieve goals, organizational characteristics shaping opportunities to violate rules, and the regulatory environment affecting social control capacities. She did this by reconceptualizing Merton’s and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s theories and by applying the new analytical framework also to the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger accident case as well as to police misconduct (1989, 1992a, 1992b). In 1990, Nikos Passas drew on Durkheim’s point about chronic anomie in the realms of industry and trade as well as on Merton’s relative deprivation and ends-means discrepancy analyses to make his own micro-macro connections. Merton specifically encouraged Passas in their encounters

Anomie and White-Collar Crime

and correspondence to link reference group analysis with anomie theory. This theoretical consolidation demonstrated how the meaning and content of success goals adopted by individuals varies from one social class to another (Passas, 1997). This means that people of different social status and power may have similar difficulties in attaining their goals, which are generated through interactions with their peers and comparative referents. Upper classes and organizations thus are subject to pressures and strain toward deviance as well. In his article “Global Anomie, Dysnomie, and Economic Crime,” Passas showed how frustrations produced by the American Dream and structural barriers in the United States are analytically similar to those produced by globalization and neoliberalism. He argued that neoliberal policies applied to both rich and poor countries with promises of prosperity, freedom, democracy, self-sufficiency, and consumerism. Safety nets and welfare arrangements shrunk through privatizations and deregulation. Economic misconduct and illegal markets were expectable outcomes in Russia and elsewhere as raised expectations were not met and inequalities widened. State protections withered at the very time they were needed most, while international rules were undermined precisely when normative clarity and legitimacy became critical. With its focus on means-ends disjunctions and on the importance of legitimacy and certainty of norms, even in hard-to-handle environments, anomie offers a powerful theoretical tool for the analysis of individual white-collar crime and organizational misconduct, which is often about how ordinary and law-abiding actors may do extraordinary things. Nikos Passas See also Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime; Vaughn, Diane: The Normalization of Deviance

References and Further Readings Clinard, M. B., & Yeager, P. C. (2006). Corporate crime. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press.

57

Cullen, F. T. (1984). Rethinking crime and deviance theory: The emergence of a structuring tradition. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenhend. Durkheim, É. (1952). Suicide, a study in sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Durkheim, É. (1964). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press. Geis, G., Meier, R. F., & Salinger, L. M. (Eds.). (1995). White-collar crime: Classic and contemporary views (3rd ed.). New York: Free Press. Kwitny, J. (1987). The crimes of patriots: The true tale of dope, dirty money, and the CIA. New York: W. W. Norton. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure. New York: Free Press. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2007). Crime and the American dream (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson/ Wadsworth. Passas, N. (1990). Anomie and corporate deviance. Contemporary Crises, 14, 157–178. Passas, N. (1995). Continuities in the anomie tradition. In F. Adler & W. S. Laufer (Eds.), The legacy of anomie theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 6, pp. 91–112). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Passas, N. (1997). Anomie, reference groups, and relative deprivation. In N. Passas & R. Agnew (Eds.), The future of the anomie tradition (pp. 62–94). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Passas, N. (2000). Global anomie, dysnomie, and economic crime: Hidden consequences of globalization and neo-liberalism in Russia and around the world. Social Justice, 27(2), 16–44. Passas, N., & Goodwin, N. (Eds.). (2004). It’s legal, but it ain’t right: Harmful social consequences of legal industries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pontell, H. N., & Geis, G. (Eds.). (2007). International handbook of white-collar and corporate crime. New York: Springer. Simpson, S. S., & Weisburd, D. (Eds.). (2009). The criminology of white-collar crime. New York: Springer. Sutherland, E. H. (1940). White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review, 5, 1–12. Vaughan, D. (1983). Controlling unlawful organizational behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vaughan, D. (1989). Regulating risk: Implications of the challenger accident. Law and Policy, 11, 330–349. Vaughan, D. (1992). The macro-micro connection in whitecollar crime theory. In K. Schlegel & D. Weisburd (Eds.), White-collar crime reconsidered (pp. 124–145). Boston: Northeastern University Press.

58

Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology

Vaughan, D. (1992). Theory elaboration: The heuristics of case analysis. In C. C. Ragin & H. S. Becker (Eds.), What is a case? Exploring the foundations of social inquiry (pp. 173–202). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Vaughan, D. (1996). The Challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture and deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology Gustav Aschaffenburg was the most important German criminologist of the first third of the 20th century. His importance derived from his authorship of the standard German survey of criminology, (Aschaffenburg, 1903; translated into English in 1913), from his work as the founding editor of the premier German-language journal of criminology and penal reform, which he edited for more than 30 years, and from his active role in the international criminological associations of the time, both in the International Union of Penal Law (Internationale Kriminalistische Vereinigung, founded 1889) and in the International Congresses of Criminal Anthropology, whose last prewar congress he hosted in Cologne in 1911. With respect to the development of criminological theory, his importance lies in shaping the most influential German response to Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal by crafting an explanation of criminal behavior that combined environmental and biological factors.

Background By training and profession, Aschaffenburg was a psychiatrist. Born into a German-Jewish family in Zweibrücken in 1866, he studied medicine and received his M.D. from the University of Strasbourg in 1890. The newly licensed psychiatrist spent the next decade working with Germany’s most renowned psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin, at the University of Heidelberg’s psychiatric clinic, which Kraepelin headed, and where Aschaffenburg advanced to associate director in 1894. In 1901, Aschaffenburg moved to Halle as head of the psychiatric ward at the Halle prison and, in 1904, he

was appointed professor of psychiatry at the Academy of Medicine in Cologne, where he remained for the rest of his career. In 1903, Aschaffenburg published the book that established him as Germany’s foremost expert in criminology. Dedicated to his teacher Kraepelin, Aschaffenburg’s Crime and Its Repression presented a systematic analysis of the causes of crime that was unprecedented in scope and sophistication. As a result, it became the standard work in German criminology and remained so for more than 30 years, into the 1930s. Translated into English, the book also won its author an international reputation. Although Aschaffenburg firmly rejected Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal, his book was not structured as a critique of Lombroso. This made it the first German criminological work that moved beyond the refutations and defenses of Lombroso that had dominated criminological writing since the publication of Lombroso’s Criminal Man in 1876. Aschaffenburg may have found it easier to emancipate himself from Lombroso because he belonged to a younger generation, having entered the psychiatric profession only in the 1890s, when Lombroso was already under attack. To mark his distance from Lombroso, Aschaffenburg introduced the term criminal psychology (Kriminalpsychologie) instead of criminal anthropology to describe his field of research. But the term criminal psychology does not really do justice to the breadth of Aschaffenburg’s approach, which encompassed what today is called criminology. For even though Aschaffenburg was a psychiatrist, his book offered a wide-ranging account of both social and individual factors in criminal behavior.

Explaining Crime The first section of Aschaffenburg’s book, on the “social causes of crime,” was based on the pioneering work of moral statisticians such as Georg von Mayr and Alexander von Oettingen, the Italian criminologist Enrico Ferri, and the official crime statistics that the newly unified German state started publishing in 1881. Based on these sources, Aschaffenburg presented a comprehensive picture of the effects on crime rates of various social factors, including geographic location (city versus country), economic conditions, alcohol

Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology

consumption, occupation, nationality, race, and religion. Aschaffenburg identified two major movements in the German crime rates over the preceding 20 years: first, a gradual increase in violent crimes such as battery; and second, periodic fluctuations in property crime, mostly theft. The first development Aschaffenburg attributed to the increased consumption of alcohol, by comparing alcohol consumption and violent crime rates in different geographic areas and at certain times (such as weekends). With regard to property crime, he endorsed von Mayr’s finding that the fluctuations in theft were correlated to changes in grain prices, observing, however, that it was not dire need but people’s difficulty in adjusting their lives to a decreased income that led them to crime. Aschaffenburg was careful in his examination of race and religion. He noted that the higher crime rates in Germany’s eastern provinces, which some blamed on the Polish population, could be explained by the economic problems of the region. Likewise, he pointed out that the high proportion of Jewish convictions for usury must be weighed against the high proportion of Jews engaged in commerce. In short, Aschaffenburg offered plausible sociological explanations for both geographic and temporal variations in crime rates, which allowed him to reject the views that certain variations were due to racial differences or to a general deterioration in the moral fiber of the nation. “The social causes,” Aschaffenburg argued, “provide the impulse to crime, but while a great part of the people are able to maintain stability, another part succumbs, some faster, some slower. It is therefore necessary to examine in detail which of the individual’s characteristics weaken its social resilience (soziale Widerstandsfähigkeit) so much that the person becomes a criminal” (1903, p. 100). Aschaffenburg began the section on “individual causes of crime” by investigating heredity. He considered research showing that close to half of all criminals descended from criminal parents, but pointed out that such statistics did not prove the hereditary transmission of an inclination to commit crimes because parental criminality provided children with a bad example and thus constituted a powerful environmental factor affecting their behavior. Regarding Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal, Aschaffenburg drew on the work of prison doctor Abraham Baer and psychiatrist

59

Paul Näcke, who had demonstrated that none of the born criminal’s supposed physical characteristics was specific to criminals. The fate of Lombroso’s assertions, Aschaffenburg argued, had now become predictable: “Whenever a new phenomenon has come under criminal anthropological investigation, the same story repeats itself. First it is asserted that a certain type of anomaly is characteristic of the criminal; then it is demonstrated that the same phenomena are also found in nondelinquents, and finally one is left with the result that these anomalies are slightly more frequent among criminals” (1903, p. 143). The book’s section on the “individual causes of crime” provided the most systematic and sophisticated analysis of the interaction of biological and social factors in the etiology of crime published in any language before World War. I Following the lead of earlier critics of Lombroso, Aschaffenburg argued that the frequency of degeneration among criminals was not surprising because “the overwhelming majority of criminals come from those strata where need and misery reign, where poorly nourished women have to consume their last energies in hard work even during pregnancy” (1903, p. 144). Thus, the social environment was doubly responsible for criminal behavior. Not only did dire need and the bad example of a morally depraved milieu directly push many people into a career of crime, but the squalor of lower-class life also led to a biological degeneration that rendered its victims “socially unfit” (sozial unbrauchbar). Drawing on Social-Darwinist ideas, Aschaffenburg contended that poverty, unhygienic living quarters, and alcoholism were creating a generation of people who were unable to compete in the Darwinian struggle for existence. Frequently far below average in their intellectual abilities, some of these individuals were liable to succumb to the temptation of crime. Speaking from his own experience as a forensic psychiatrist, he related that “after studying the [judicial] case files, I often expected to meet a rough, brutal person, whereas I actually found a quiet, docile, even good-natured, feebleminded person” (1903, p. 150). Aschaffenburg stressed that those geistig Minderwertige (literally: mentally inferior; i.e. mentally defective, abnormal) who committed crimes did not do so because of some peculiar moral defect, let alone some active drive to crime, but because they were altogether

60

Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology

socially unfit; that is, they were unable to make an honest living, mostly due to inferior intellectual abilities. The fact that Minderwertigkeit was due to social causes was ground for optimism: “If we could remove all these people from the bad soil in which they are rooted, if we could steel them through education and physical invigoration, if we could protect them against the dangers of life, we would be able to save them from ruin.” But Aschaffenburg immediately tempered these prospects with resignation: “These are utopias; life takes its course and crushes those who cannot make a go of it” (1903, p. 163). Of course, not all offenders fell into the category of “socially unfit” Minderwertige. In his classification of criminals, Aschaffenburg called this group “habitual criminals” and estimated that they constituted roughly half of all criminals. In contrast to these habitual criminals who turned to crime as a result of socioeconomic failure, Aschaffenburg distinguished a small group of “professional criminals” with an active inclination and commitment to crime. The remaining half of all criminals was mostly made up of first-time offenders who committed their crimes because of an unfortunate combination of circumstances: These were crimes due to negligence or recklessness, sudden bursts of passion or a tempting opportunity.

Leading Paradigm Aschaffenburg’s book provided the first comprehensive synthesis of the social causes of crime and made a strong case for their importance. It integrated criminal sociology and criminal psychology as mutually complementary approaches to the etiology of crime. Most importantly, Aschaffenburg dismissed the notion of an “endogenous criminal disposition,” championed by those—including his teacher Kraepelin—who sought to refurbish the concept of the “born criminal” by stripping him of his supposed (Lombrosian) physical characteristics and redefining him in purely psychiatric terms as suffering from a moral defect. Instead, Aschaffenburg argued that criminal behavior was caused by social factors acting on a degenerate population: Social causes led to biological degeneration; the resulting biological abnormalities handicapped its victims in social life; and this inferior social position—rather

than any moral defect or criminal inclination—led some of them to criminal behavior. Going through three editions in two decades, Aschaffenburg’s book quickly became the standard text in German criminology and thus displaced any remaining defenses of the born criminal with a paradigm that explained crime as the result of a complex interaction between biological degeneration and environmental factors. In 1904, Aschaffenburg founded the Monats­ schrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechts­ reform (Monthly Journal of Criminal Psychology and Penal Reform), which soon overshadowed Hans Groß’s Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik (founded in 1900) to become the primary German-language journal in the field in the first half of the 20th century. Aschaffenburg edited it for more than 30 years, until 1935. While the first part of the journal’s title hastened the replacement of the term criminal anthropology by criminal psychology as the preferred designation for medical research on the causes of crime in German-speaking Europe, the title’s reference to penal reform reflected Aschaffenburg’s fervent belief that criminology ought to provide the scientific foundation for penal reform. Published monthly, the journal carried a wide, interdisciplinary variety of articles, mainly in five areas: criminal psychology, criminal sociology, forensic psychiatry, the treatment of insane criminals and the criminally insane, and legal reform proposals. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Aschaffenburg paradigm, which stressed the complex interaction of sociological and biological factors in the etiology of crime, prevailed decisively over the competing paradigm, which had sought to redefine the notion of the born criminal in psychiatric terms as a person with a moral defect. It must also be noted, however, that although Aschaffenburg stuck to his multicausal approach, his own interests tilted increasingly in the direction of individual biological and genetic factors. In an article assessing the state of criminology in 1933, he indicated that the research of the 1920s had convinced him that, even though the environment played a role, the “ultimately decisive” factor was the criminal’s personality, and that this personality was “overwhelmingly” a matter of heredity. While he acknowledged that an individual’s personality

Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology

was affected by environmental factors, he argued that heredity provided a “fixed framework” that placed sharp limits on external influences (Aschaffenburg, 1933, pp. 830–832). At the same time, however, Aschaffenburg admitted that what was now called criminal-­biological research was still in its early stages. Summarizing the state of the field in 1933, he stated that criminal biology was “far from possessing reliable methods for examining and evaluating the personality of the criminal”; that research on human heredity met with “almost insurmountable difficulties” and would therefore be slow to produce reliable results; and that it was “currently impossible to differentiate between corrigibles and incorrigibles with criminal-psychological methods” (Aschaffenburg, 1933, pp. 825, 828, 840). In short, Aschaffenburg acknowledged that after about 40 years of research—30 years after his landmark synthesis of 1903—criminal biology was still a science in its infancy. The increasing sophistication of criminal-biological research had so complicated the questions under investigation that progress became ever more elusive.

Conclusion The advent of the Nazi regime in 1933 had devastating consequences for Aschaffenburg. Although the Nazis enthusiastically took up the search for biological explanations of crime, they infused criminological research with racism and antiSemitism. Their virulent anti-Semitism spelled the end of Aschaffenburg’s career due to the mere fact of his being Jewish. Aschaffenburg, who was 67 years old in 1933, qualified for an exemption under the 1933 Nazi law that was designed to purge Jews from the Civil Service, but by March 1934 he was pressured into retiring from his positions as professor and director of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Cologne. He was able to retain the editorship of his Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie for another year and a half, but by 1935 anti-Semitic pressures had become so great that Aschaffenburg was forced to give up the editorship of the journal that he had founded 30 years earlier. When the three new editors considered resigning in protest against Aschaffenburg’s being barred from even publishing in the journal,

61

Aschaffenburg asked them to stay on in order to prevent the journal from falling into the hands of party hacks. In his 1935 farewell editorial, Aschaffenburg cited his seventieth birthday as the ostensible reason for transferring the journal’s editorship to “younger colleagues,” and he defended criminologists and penal reformers against the charge that they were responsible for the excessive lenience of Weimar criminal justice. Insisting that criminologists and reformers had always put the protection of society first, he described the goal of penal reform in standard Nazi terminology as “freeing the Volksgemeinschaft [national community] from Schädlinge [harmful elements, parasites]” (Aschaffenburg, 1935, pp. 531–535). In 1939, Aschaffenburg emigrated to Switzerland and later to the United States, where he lectured at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore before his death in 1944. While Aschaffenburg’s use of Nazi terminology may have reflected his desire for accommodation with tough-on-crime Nazi jurists, it can also be considered as showing that Aschaffenburg failed to grasp the connection between the biological approaches to crime that he had pioneered and the anti-Semitism that would drive him out of the country a little more than 2 years later. Such failure can be seen as evidence of errors of judgment: an underestimation of the seriousness of Nazi anti-Semitism and a failure to understand that the Nazis regarded criminal biology and anti-Semitism as complementary parts of an overall eugenic-racial policy designed to rid the Volksgemeinschaft of “biologically inferior” elements. Just as important, however, Aschaffenburg’s failure to connect criminal biology to the racist and anti-Semitic components of Nazi ideology is a reminder that criminal biology and anthropological racism were not necessarily connected. Although the anti-Semitic wing of the eugenics movement and the Nazis demonstrated that one could easily attach eugenics and criminal biology to a racist and anti-Semitic agenda, this connection was not inevitable. Richard F. Wetzell See also Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes; Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School; Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency; Goring, Charles: The English Convict; Insanity and Crime: Early

62

Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence American Positivism; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Phrenology; Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency

References and Further Readings Aschaffenburg, G. (1903). Das Verbrechen und seine Bekämpfung: Kriminalpsychologie für mediziner, juristen und soziologen, ein beitrag zur reform der strafgesetzgebung [Crime and its repression: Criminal psychology for doctors, lawyers, sociologists, a contribution to the reform of criminal legislation]. Heidelberg: Winter. Aschaffenburg, G. (1933). Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalbiologie [Criminal anthropology and criminal biology]. In A. Elster & H. Lingemann (Eds.), Handwörterbuch der Kriminologie [Handbook of criminology] (pp. 830–832). Berlin: de Gruyter. Aschaffenburg, G. (1935). Rückblick und Ausblick [Looking back and looking ahead]. Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform [Journal for criminal psychology and penal reform], 26, 531–535. Becker, P., & Wetzell, R. F. (Eds.). (2006). Criminals and their scientists: The history of criminology in international perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Busse, F. (1991). Gustav Aschaffenburg (1866–1944): Leben und Werk. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Leipzig. Galassi, S. (2004). Kriminologie im deutschen Kaiserreich: Geschichte einer gebrochenen Verwissenschaftlichung [Criminology in Imperial Germany: History of a partial scientization]. Stuttgart: Steiner. Wetzell, R. F. (2000). Inventing the criminal: A history of German criminology, 1880–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence Lonnie Athens—the “maverick criminologist” (Rhodes, 1999)—grew up in a violent environment and was a victim of domestic violence. Thus, it may not be surprising that Athens developed an interest in criminology and believed that he could make some contributions in the studies of violence. Athens was determined to find the key to unlock

the mystery of why some people act violently and how dangerous violent criminals are created (Rhodes, 1999). Athens entered the field of criminology in the late 1960s to the 1970s. During that time, many criminological theories were published. Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti, based on their examinations of social environmental factors, developed the subculture of violence theory. They acknowledged that the subculture of violence usually exists in the lower socio-economic class, and the members of the subculture internalize violence as the common attitude and norm to resolve disputes (Athens, 1992). In addition, Sarnoff Mednick, a bio-social criminologist, examined violent behavior in the context of child development and parental control, proposing that punishment is the most effective means of moral training for children. Athens agreed that some children become violent due to a failure to learn from punishment. However, Athens was dissatisfied with both social environmental and bio-social theories. He argued that “the real key to discovering how people become dangerous criminals is to find some way to develop a theory . . . which integrates rather than segregates the effects of social environmental and [biosocial] factors” of the criminals’ social experience (Athens, 1992, p. 14). In effect, a careful study of people’s social experience is needed because, as John Dewey pointed out, “a social experience emerges from the special interaction that takes place between a human organism and his social environment during the process of living” (Athens, 1992, p. 15). Athens started his research by quantifying demographic variables, and examining the correlations between those variables and criminality. Soon enough, Athens discovered that quantitative analyses may be able to reveal some facts about violent actors but the motivation of why some people act violently cannot be measured and fully explained (Rhodes, 1999). After reading George H. Mead’s and Herbert Blumer’s essays illustrating how human behaviors are guided by their interpretative process of “defining objects, events and situations which they encounter” (Rhodes, 1999, p. 36), Athens (1992) changed his methods and conducted extensive qualitative interviews among violent prisoners. He attempted to understand how they interpreted the situations in which their

Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence

violent crimes were committed, what self-image they held, and how they interacted with violent social experience. With more than 20 years of work and copious amounts of interview notes, Athens was able to develop the theory of “violentization” (Rhodes, 1999, p. 112) to explain the formation of dangerous violent criminals.

The Process and Self-Image When Interpreting Violent Actions Athens (1997), following Mead’s and Blumer’s ideas of the interpretive approach of human conducts, identified factors contributing to the decision process of carrying out the violent actions. First, there are four types of interpretations associated with the situation when committing violent behaviors. Physical defensive interpretation is formed when subjects experience fear and construe that “violence is seen as the only way to prevent injury to [themselves]” (O’Donnell, 2003, p. 735) in the given situation. Frustrative interpretation is produced in situations where angry subjects think that their commands to the subordinates are rejected. Malefic interpretation illustrates the situations when the subjects view the subordinates as evil or malicious and further develop the hatred toward the subordinates. The last interpretation is frustrative-malefic, in which subjects are angry for being rejected by subordinates and determine that subordinates are malicious and hateful (O’Donnell, 2003). Second, although the interpretations described above may lead subjects to commit violent acts, subjects may not act out every time. Athens (1997) pointed out that before subjects respond to the interpretation, three phenomena go through subjects’ minds to determine whether violence should be executed. Right after the interpretation is formed, “fixed line of indication” occurs (p. 43), and subjects continue constructing a violent scheme until they physically attack the subordinates. However, before they attack their subordinates, the subjects may break up from the violent scheme, restrain their judgment, and decide not to carry out the violent plan. This phenomenon is defined as “restraining judgment” (p. 45). Nevertheless, sometimes subjects do break the fixed line of indication but only to return to it later. This is called “overriding judgment” (p. 50). In this phenomenon, subjects first form the interpretation of vio-

63

lence but restrain their judgment; and then, they redefine the situation and judge that violence is needed in the situation. At last, the violent scheme will be executed. Other than the process of interpreting the situations of using violence and determine the need of carrying out violent scheme, Athens also defined three possible self-images of the subjects at the point right before acting violently: (1) subjects who have violent self-images perceive themselves as violent individuals, and other people also feel the sense of violence from the subjects; (2) incipiently violent self-images indicate that only when subjects are willing or ready to make a violent move, other people will see violence in the subjects; and (3) subjects with nonviolent self-images are least likely to act violent. However, Athens thought the occurrence of violence can be determined by the combination of interpretations associated with violence and the possible self-images. That is, people with nonviolent self-images will act violently “only on the basis of physical defensive interpretations, and those with incipiently violent self-images do so only on the basis of physical defensive or frustative-malefic ones, whereas people with violent self-images do so on the basis of any of the four types of interpretations” (p. 68). In fact, people with nonviolent selfimages tend to interpret a more limited range of situations associated with violence than violent and incipiently violent self-images.

Four Stages of Violentization After clarifying the decision process that people go through in the course of their violent acts, Athens moved on to examine how the interaction with violent social experiences leads to the creation of dangerous violent criminals. Athens (2003) called the violence developmental process “violentization” (p. 1). Most social experiences are negligible. However, violent social experiences are usually consequential and unforgettable. Based on the interviews and interactions with violent criminals, Athens formulated four stages of violentization process and identified the social experiences which people need to go through completely in order to progress to the next stage. The four stages are brutalization, defiance, violent dominance engagement, and virulency.

64

Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence

In brutalization, subjects need to experience three steps to complete this first stage. In the first step—violent subjugation—subjects are violently dominated by their subjugators, such as parents, older siblings, and schoolmates. Subjects are violently forced to obey command and show respect to the subjugators (Rhodes, 2003). The second step is called personal horrification. In this step, subjects do not receive violence themselves. Instead, they witness what violence imposes onto people close to them, such as family members and close friends (Athens, 2003). In the third step— violent coaching—according to Rhodes, subjects are taught that “violent action is the personal responsibility” (2003, p. 127). That is, the subjects do not learn fighting skills in this step; instead they learn that it is an obligation to take violent action when being provoked. In fact, violent coaching is a core component in brutalization. The first two steps in this stage do not necessarily help construct subjects’ vicious characteristics. It is the violent coaching that sets the basis for later physical aggressiveness. In the second stage—defiance—subjects realize that they are suffering from brutalization and try to seek help to their crisis. Subjects question themselves about being coerced and how to stop the suffering. Feeling desperate, subjects search from the past violent incidents for solutions to relieve their pain. However, because the past experience was all about violence, subjects realize that the only way to overcome brutalization is to become violent. After realizing violence is the only resolution, subjects move onto the third stage—violent dominance engagements. At first, subjects will imagine themselves as the violent subjugators and self-assign other people as subordinates. Subjects start to give and then progress to issue commands and hurl insults to the subordinates. At last, violent actions are performed when subordinates resist playing along with the subjects. In addition, one important aspect in this stage is the immediate outcome of first violent dominance engagement. Since subjects are testing the newfound resolution to their crisis, the success of the test will shape their future violent behaviors (Athens, 2003). The last stage of violentization is virulency. In the last stage, three elemental processes need to be completed—violent notoriety, social trepidation, and malevolency. First, subjects experience

successful violent dominance engagement and feel that “they are not only capable of violence, but proficient in it” (Athens, 2003, p. 17). Then, because subjects pose as violent subjugators, other people start to show fear when subjects are present. Subjects feel invincible at this moment and generate the process of malevolency. In this final process, subjects are not only acting violently to resolve their crisis from brutalization but relishing any opportunity of exercising violence. In the end, the dangerous violent criminal is created.

Conclusion Athens constructed his theory by conducting intensive interviews with violent criminals. He allowed people to speak for themselves in order to find how individuals define and interpret a situation as calling for violence. Athens took account of emotions as well as cognitions for violent criminal acts. However, because Athens focused on the interpersonal nature of violent acts and actors, he ignored social structural and cultural influence of violent crimes. Ian O’Donnell criticized that Athens’s violentization still cannot explain some serious violent behaviors, such as genocide, warfare, and infanticide, in which social structural and cultural influence may have great effect. Thus, Athens’s theory is less generalizable and less likely to see the big picture. On the other hand, Ulmer supported Athens’s method of constituting the theory of violentization. Ulmer stated that although Athens’s research was not reliant on deductive hypothesis testing with quantitative data, his inductive approach and ethnographic observation still served as a great methodological mechanism for developing the theory. Athens’s unique research methods and exceptional approach to criminality creates another prospective on criminological theories. When the arguments of the decision process, self-image, and interpreting social experience are further examined, readers may find the link among Athens’s violentization theory, Ronald Akers’s social learning theory, and Howard Becker’s labeling theory. In sum, Athens’s hard work and excellent thinking have earned him a place in the world of criminological studies. Yu-Hsu (Gail) Hsiao

Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory

References and Further Readings Athens, L. (1992). The creation of dangerous violent criminals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Athens L. (1997). Violent criminal acts and actors revisited. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Athens, L. (2003). Violentization in larger social context. In J. T. Ulmer (Ed.), Violent acts and violentization: Assessing, applying, and developing

65

Lonnie Athens’ theories (pp. 1–42). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. O’Donnell, I. (2003). A new paradigm for understanding violence? [Electronic version]. British Journal of Criminology, 43, 750–771. Rhodes, R. (1999). Why they kill: The discovery of a maverick criminologist. New York: Vintage Books. Rhodes, G., Allen, G. J., Nowinski, J., & Cillessen, A. H. N. (2003). The violent socialization scale: Development and initial validation. In J. T. Ulmer (Ed.), Violent acts and violentization: Assessing, applying, and developing Lonnie Athens’ theories (pp. 125–146). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. Ulmer, J. T. (Ed.). (2003). Violent acts and violentization: Assessing, applying, and developing Lonnie Athens’ theories. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science.

B Albert Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory (B-SLT) is a general theory of human behavior that posits that cognitions, behavior, and environment interact to explain the acquisition, instigation, and maintenance of criminal behavior. While Bandura did not present his theory as a criminological theory per se, B-SLT can be applied to criminal behavior, as done in this entry.

community in the 1970s and continues to influence criminological thought today. This entry presents (1) a concise description of B-SLT; (2) a discussion of the development, explanation, and details of the theory through the presentation of its assumptions, central components, and mechanisms of learning; and (3) examples of B-SLT that demonstrate its continued use today. It does so in three distinct segments: theoretical assumptions, theoretical mechanisms, and examples of social learning theory as done in Bandura’s seminal book, Social Learning Theory.

Theoretical Overview

Theoretical Assumptions

As a learning theory, B-SLT assumes that criminal behavior is not innate but is learned as people navigate through their environment. It is the nature of this learning process that differentiates B-SLT from other learning theories (such as radical behavioral theory) and other social learning theories (such as Ronald Akers’s social learning theory). B-SLT proposes that criminal behavior is both directly and indirectly learned. In other words, B-SLT posits that people directly learn criminal behavior when they are rewarded for it (i.e., direct reinforcement) and people indirectly learn criminal behavior when they observe others get rewarded for it (i.e., vicarious reinforcement). Equally, B-SLT also theorizes that the relationship between a stimulus and its behavioral response not simply is a mechanistic one (as proposed by radical behavior theory) but also is influenced by the cognitive appraisal of the stimulus. The theory gained attention from the criminological

The theoretical assumptions of B-SLT are presented in this section. These assumptions set the context for a description of the theoretical mechanisms of the theory presented in the next section. First, B-SLT assumes that the motivation for criminal behavior is not innate (such as the destructive drives posited by psychoanalytic theory) but is explainable through an understanding of the actor in his or her environment. Therefore, criminal behavior cannot be wholly explained by any inborn tendency or predisposition for it. Rather, the desire to commit crime is learned through its positive consequences. Second, and related to the first assumption, the theory presupposes that internal factors (such as thoughts), the external environment (such as behavioral consequences), and the behavioral response to stimuli (such as criminal behavior) influence each other. This three-way interaction

Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory

67

68

Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory

process is a complex one that results in changes in behavior and the expectated consequences behavior. While a full discussion of this interaction process is beyond the scope of this entry, an important implication of this assumption is worth openly noting. According to B-SLT, criminal behavior is not the product of only internal forces such as the innate drive described in the first assumption or even attitudes toward criminal behavior as is popularly found in media speculation of crime causation. Nor is criminal behavior simply the product of external situations such as poverty or lack of employment. These unidimensional explanations are too simplistic. It is the interaction of all three domains—internal, external, and behavior— that is important. As an example, for poverty to be a factor in crime causation according to B-SLT, poverty’s contribution to crime causation would have to be discussed in terms of the positive environmental consequences that it provides for criminal behavior. Yet B-SLT also presumes that the individual himself or herself has to simultaneously be amenable to these positive environmental consequences to criminal behavior for criminal behavior to actually be performed. The third major assumption of B-SLT is a set of human abilities that make social learning possible. First, human beings have the capacity for forethought and symbolization. This ability gives them the ability to anticipate—cognitively test and calculate consequences before undertaking action so they do not have to rely solely on the inefficient process of behavioral trial and error. Since people are able to anticipate the likely outcomes of their actions, they are also able to create intentional rather than solely reactive behavior. Second, human beings can vicariously (observationally) learn behavior by observing others doing the behavior. This is another efficient ability that calls attention to the power of role models in the learning of criminal behavior. Third, human beings are able to self-regulate their behavior by setting up their own behavioral incentives for self-produced motivation. Fourth, human beings are capable of self-reflection. This ability creates the opportunity for human beings to analyze their thoughts and experiences and shift their thinking and behavior. It serves as a guide to match their internal standards of conduct to external behavior. An important component of self-reflection with B-SLT is

self-efficacy, which reflects the perception that the person has about his or her ability or belief that people have to behaviorally change. Self-efficacy is of particular importance in its application in the correctional rehabilitation process as offenders try to modify criminal to prosocial behavior. How effectively offenders are able to enact new behavioral repertoires in their daily lives is a direct reflection of their degree of self-efficacy. The assumptions discussed in this section lay the groundwork for a comprehensive discussion of working of B-SLT itself. A description of the theory is provided in the next section.

Theoretical Mechanisms Bandura states that any comprehensive theory of behavior, including criminal behavior, must be able to explain how behavior is acquired and regulated through internal and external sources. B-SLT is presented here in the same manner that Bandura introduced it in his seminal 1977 book with a discussion of the origin of behavior, the antecedent determinants of behavior, and the consequent determinants of behavior. Origin of Behavior

If human beings are not born with a behavioral repertoire that is criminal, where does criminal behavior originate? According to B-SLT, criminal behavior begins with the direct and indirect learning of it. The concept of direct learning is related to that found in radical behavioral theory (i.e., operant conditioning) but the concept of indirect learning is a wholly distinctive and crucial feature of B-SLT. Direct learning, called response consequences by Bandura, is an elementary and basic form of behavioral learning in which the person who performs the criminal behavior directly experiences the consequences of it and, through these consequences, learns to continue or discontinue the behavior. The consequences of criminal behavior, in turn, set the person’s expectation for the same consequences for the same or similar behavior in the future. Important to B-SLT is the notion of the cognitive appraisal of stimuli. It is through this process of anticipating the consequences to behavior that one criminal behavioral response gets

Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory

selected over other criminal and prosocial behavioral responses. In general, the behaviors with a perceived higher likelihood of reinforcement are chosen over the behaviors with a lower likelihood of reinforcement or a higher likelihood of punishment. In this way, anticipation for reinforcement serves as a motivational tool for behavior such that when reinforcement is predicted for criminal behavior, the motivation to do the behavior is increased and the likelihood of the criminal behavioral response is increased. It is important to specifically stress that direct learning in B-SLT is not an autonomic process (as with operant conditioning). Rather, the behavioral response to stimuli is continuously subject to cognitive appraisal by the actor before action. The process of direct learning is a powerful yet limited mechanism of learning according to B-SLT. More common, Bandura states that people indirectly, or vicariously, learn behavior as they watch its performance and its resultant consequences in a process called observational learning. People continuously learn behavior in this manner. Specifically, they learn not only how to do the behavior but also whether the behavior achieves the wanted consequences. People are able to code a symbolic representation of the behavior in a way that generally provides enough detail to perform it at a later time. Bandura is concerned about the ability of mass media to teach violent behavior through this process of observational learning. For example, as children watch violent behavior get rewarded by the environment—as often happens in the fantasy worlds of video games, television, and film—they may learn how to perform these behaviors and they may expect the same results in reality. Observational learning does not require that a physical model demonstrates the behavior for the observer. Behavior can be modeled for the observer when an observer simply sees a pictorial representation of a behavior or hears a verbal description of a behavior. Furthermore, modeling not only teaches the behavior itself but also can change attitudes and emotions about the behavior. A change in attitudes and emotions about a behavior is a powerful way to increase or decrease the probability that the behavior will be replicated by the observer. Thus, modeling not only teaches how the environment is likely to respond to criminal behavior but also changes the internal standards for this

69

behavior and can serve as a disinhibitor to perform the criminal behavior. There are four parts to the process of successful observational learning. First, the observer must be attentive to the person who is performing the behavior. Depending on the environment, some observers are constantly bombarded with potential criminal models. Not all people who model behavior are selected for observation. Models who the observer finds attractive, engaging, and/or demonstrating wanted behavior are generally more likely to gain the observer’s attention than models without these qualities. Second, the observer must be able to remember the learned behavior. Retention of behavior comes in symbolic form where the observer takes the memories of the behavior and recalls a portion or the entire observed behavior. Third, observation learning requires that the observer be able to take the recalled symbolic representation of the learned behavior and physically reproduce it. Several attempts are likely before sufficient demonstration of the learned behavior is achieved. Fourth, the motivational processes of observational learning regulate the reproduction of the new behavior. B-SLT is careful to note that not all observationally learned behavior gets reproduced by the observer. Modeled behavior is more likely to be reproduced at the time and place the observer perceives its behavioral replication to be rewarded (recall that these rewards can come from the self or the environment). Antecedent Determinants

If B-SLT suggests that criminal behavior primarily originates from either direct or indirect learning, what instigates the replication of this behavior? Bandura argues that contingency learning, or the ability to take past behavioral consequences and apply them to the present situation, serves to supply the expectations for the same behavioral response. In short, the anticipation of reinforcement or punishment activates behavior (unlike the automatic direct stimulus-response relationship proposed by radical behavioral theory). The interpretation of stimuli represents what Bandura calls the antecedent determinants of behavior. Modeling serves as a potent determinant of action because it serves to guide stimuli interpretation for the observer. As the observer watches the

70

Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory

model perform novel behavior prompted from stimuli, it may direct the observer to perceive that stimuli in a new way. But the interpretation of stimuli is also influenced by the observer’s thoughts about them. These thoughts are highly influenced by what is learned from past experiences. Bandura argues that thoughts provide cognitive control for behavior. They influence what gets perceived, how it gets perceived, and whether the consequences are desirable. Stimulus interpretation has several functional qualities. First, stimuli interpretation is generalizable in that the same behavior can be applied by the observer to inexact stimuli and environments from which the behavior was first learned. Further, learned behavior does not mean that it can only be replicated in its entirety. People are able to perform pieces of novel behavior as they see fit. Second, B-SLT proposes that stimuli do not actually have to be present in the environment to provoke a behavioral response. Self-arousal is the process of using imagined stimuli to create behavioral responses as if the stimuli were present in the environment. In this way, the observer can place himself or herself in the emotional situation of another person in the social learning event, which serves as an emotional arouser for the observer. Bandura is careful to note that the interpretation of stimuli is not infallible and that there is variation in the ability of people to socially learn. Some of this variation is found in biological differences across people, such as differences in attentiveness (i.e., attention deficits) and physical ability. For example, stimuli can be falsely generalized to inappropriate situations. This generalization problem is exemplified by a boy who suffers from physical abuse and falsely flinches in anticipation of being struck when, in fact, a teacher excitedly raises his or her arm to give the child a high-five. Consequent Determinants

As already stated in this essay, B-SLT proposes that the anticipation of reinforcement for criminal behavior increases its likelihood and the anticipation of punishment decreases its likelihood. But the anticipation of a consequence does not mean that the consequence actually occurs when the behavior is performed. B-SLT is careful to

theorize that behavior is regulated by its extant (versus anticipated) consequences. There are three ways that behavior is regulated according to B-SLT: externally, vicariously, and internally (selfproduced). These will be discussed in terms of reinforcement (versus punishment) for criminal behavior. External reinforcement can be described as desirable consequences for criminal behavior provided by the environment. These positive consequences can be either tangible or symbolic in nature. External reinforcement occurs when criminal behavior is performed and the environment reinforces the behavior. As an example of this type of regulation, a gang member receives an increase in social status because he physically assaults a rival gang member. Vicarious reinforcement occurs when the observer watches the model of criminal behavior get reinforced for it by the environment. Bandura claims that vicarious reinforcement is a more effective and efficient regulator of behavior than direct external reinforcement because it allows the observer to exclusively watch the unfolding of the contingency between behavior and reinforcement rather than be distracted with the performance of the behavior. As an example, those fellow gang members who are watching the barrage of reinforcement provided to the aggressive gang member provides for them a vicarious reinforcement experience. People are able to self-produce their own reinforcement for behavior, which serves as the third regulator of behavior. Behavior is continually compared to internal standards of conduct such that people generally act in ways that match the view of themselves. These internal standards are not specific to situations but serve as templates that people carry with them across situations. When people behave in ways that complement their internal standards of behavior, reinforcement occurs. In this way, when a person has the internal standards of criminal conduct, criminal actions are likely self-reinforcing and prosocial actions (if the criminal opportunity is present) are likely self-punishing. If a person has the internal standards of prosocial conduct, criminal conduct is likely self-punishing where prosocial behavior is likely self-reinforcing. Self-induced consequences are an important behavioral regulator because it provides for a form of internal control of behavior

Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory

rather than the reliance on inevitably inconsistent external consequences.

Examples of B-SLT B-SLT is an active criminological theory today, found as a comprehensive theory of criminal behavior and, similarly, of behavioral change. Examples of the application of B-SLT are provided here in the latter case, as a central theory in correctional rehabilitation (Van Voorhis et al., 2007). Effective correctional rehabilitation uses the theoretical mechanisms of this theory to create a correctional environment that promotes prosocial behavior by recognizing the importance of direct and indirect learning, the appraisal of stimuli, and contingency control. For instance, a National Institute of Corrections–sponsored program called Thinking for a Change uses B-SLT to teach prosocial behavior to offenders. The program consists of 21 lessons that are taught in a group. New behaviors are introduced to the group in a four-step process. First, the new behavior is modeled by the facilitators. The group of offenders can observe the behavior being performed. The behavior gets symbolically stored by the offenders. Second, the offenders are asked to perform the observed behavior, a process called role-play. Performing the behavior allows the offender to practice the behavior in a safe environment where the third step, performance feedback, can be given. Performance feedback consists of the facilitator and other offenders correcting behavior and provided reinforcement for it. The last step, called generalization training, is the process where the offenders practice the newly learned behavior in their everyday lives and return to the classroom to discuss the experience. B-SLT is not just found with the correctional programs; it can be adapted by correctional facilities. Therapeutic communities are correctional rehabilitative facilities that try to exercise total control of the environment. They teach prosocial behaviors to offenders using all employees as models of prosocial behavior. They also take special care to consistently and appropriately reward prosocial behavior and punish antisocial behavior throughout the facility (and not just the program classroom). While B-SLT has not been empirically tested in its entirety (a difficult task to do given its complexity), partial empirical evidence for the theory is

71

present. It is often noted in public circles that low socioeconomic status (SES) is directly related to delinquency. This relationship is often thought to exist at both the micro-level (individual) and the macro-level (neighborhood). A study conducted almost 15 years ago calls this direct relationship at the individual level into question. Citing the inconsistent relationship between these variables in the literature, researchers found that parental management (based in social learning principles) serves as a mediator of the SES-delinquency relationship (Larzelere & Patterson, 1990). Thus, when parental management does not provide proper monitoring and contingencies for behavior, the relationship between low SES is present. But when parental management is well done, the relationship between the SES and delinquency goes away. A second empirical study supports the importance of observing behavior in the activation of negative behavior. Besides parents, one of the most important influencers of delinquency among youth is peers. According to a social learning model, peers are important because they function as salient models of behavior. A unique study asked whether social learning theory was right to suggest that the observation of behavior is an important facet of learned behavior. These researchers found that the transmission of attitudes from peer to peer was not enough to produce delinquency and that a strong and direct relationship between peer behavior and delinquency was present (Warr & Stafford, 1991). This study affirmed the observational learning component of social learning theory; the modeling of delinquency serves as a direct teacher of delinquency. Georgia V. Spiropoulos See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention; Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime; Peers and Delinquency; Psychophysiology and Crime

References and Further Readings Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bandura, A. (1979). The social learning perspective: Mechanisms of aggression. In H. Toch (Ed.),

72

Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum, and Ross L. Matsueda: Gender and Reflected Appraisals

Psychology of crime and criminal justice (pp. 198–236). New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston. Bandura, A. (2007). Albert Bandura. In G. Lindzey & W. M. Runyan (Eds.), A history of psychology in autobiography (Vol. 9, pp. 43–75). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Larzelere, R., & Patterson, G. (1990). Parental management: Mediator of the effect of socioeconomic status on early delinquency. Criminology, 28, 301–324. Thinking for a Change [Online]. Retrieved June 2008 from http://www.nicic.org/T4C Van Voorhis, P., Braswell, M., & Lester, D. (2007). Correctional counseling and rehabilitation (6th ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Warr, M., & Stafford, M. (1991). The influence of delinquent peers: What they think or what they do? Criminology, 29, 851–865.

Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum, and Ross L. Matsueda: Gender and Reflected Appraisals While traditional criminological theories have predominantly focused on explaining male criminality, some recent theorists have explored important gender differences in offending. Dawn Jeglum Bartusch and Ross L. Matsueda are among the contemporary researchers who have examined delinquency patterns according to gender, and they have made noteworthy contributions to criminological theory through their symbolic interactionist approach to understanding gender socialization, the application of individual deviant labels, and reflected self-appraisals. Their work has emerged as an important explanation for variation between male and female delinquency. The symbolic interactionist perspective of Bartusch and Matsueda is rooted in the earlier works of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, and others who argued that human actions are best understood in terms of the meanings that other significant individuals attribute to those behaviors through various interactions and communications. This assignment of meaning results in what Charles Horton Cooley referred to as the looking glass self, which involves the individual’s acceptance of those definitions applied by significant others.

While conventional labeling theories focus primarily on the effects of negative labels applied to individuals in response to initial acts of delinquency that lead to self-fulfilling prophecies of future delinquency (Lemert, 1951), Bartusch and Matsueda advance these ideas by classifying the process of self-image development as a reflected appraisal. This addresses the different ways individuals perceive others to perceive them that vary by gender. Initially, Matsueda determined that reflected appraisals and parental labeling influenced the self-images of male juveniles and likelihood of future delinquency. Bartusch and Matsueda expanded this approach by examining differences between males and females in the labeling process and development of reflected appraisals. They found that variation in gender roles affects the strength and content of social control as well as individual reflected appraisals, which explains why females participate in less delinquency than males. They concluded that “as symbolic interactionism proposes, the self as an object is an important locus of social control: those who see themselves from the standpoint of others as rule violators are more likely to engage in delinquent behavior” and that males were more likely to see themselves in this manner (p. 160). The authors found that both males and females experience a similar process of labeling and development of reflected appraisals, and that parental labeling significantly affects juveniles’ reflected appraisals, which then predicts future delinquency. Importantly, however, they note that the process of labeling and its effects on delinquency vary by gender, which accounts for the wide gap between male and female offending frequencies. Bartusch and Matsueda’s research confirmed that several characteristics influence reflected appraisals. Negative parental labeling of children as “rule violators” varies by gender and is influenced by background variables such as race, income, and broken home status. In particular, when these variables reflect structural disadvantage, females are more likely to be negatively labeled by their parents. Prior delinquency appears more likely to result in “rule violator” labels for females, despite less frequent delinquency involvement than males. The research also found that the assignment of this negative label is more likely to

Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School

result in future delinquency only for males. Bartusch and Matsueda attribute this outcome to the effects of labeling and gender socialization, suggesting that the meanings juveniles assign to their delinquent labels may vary by gender. They suggest that females may accurately perceive the negative label assigned by their parents and alter their behavior accordingly, while males may be less concerned with their reflected image or possibly even interpret the label differently. Interestingly, Bartusch and Matsueda also found that males are more likely to be falsely accused of delinquent behavior. The authors assert that false accusations are likely the result of gender socialization and based on social stereotypes of delinquency. They observed that males who are falsely accused exhibit what others characterize as “bad attitude” and that falsely accused females are more likely to come from various types of disadvantage. The gender-oriented research of Bartusch and Matsueda has contributed to the growing theoretical research addressing gender and delinquency. Their work is noteworthy for broadening the approach of traditional criminological theories that focused nearly exclusively on male criminality and for creating a framework for gender-specific models. In particular, their research has supported subsequent studies endeavoring to explain gender differences in adolescent drug use, adolescent delinquency, violent crime, family strain, sexual risk, attachment, parent-child interactions and shame, and self-control. Katie A. Farina and Kelly Welch See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender; Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime; Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency

References and Further Readings Bartusch, D. J., & Matsueda, R. L. (1996). Gender, reflected appraisals, and delinquency: A cross-group test of an interactionist theory of delinquency. Social Forces, 75, 145–177.

73

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Cooley, C. H. (1922). Human nature and the social order (Rev. ed.). New York: Scribners. Felson, R. B. (1985). Reflected appraisal and the development of self. Social Psychology Quarterly, 48, 71–78. Heimer, K. (1996). Gender, interaction, and delinquency: Testing a theory of differential social control. Social Psychology Quarterly, 59, 39–61. Heimer, K., & Matsueda, R. L. (1994). Role-taking, role commitment, and delinquency: A theory of differential social control. American Sociological Review, 59, 365–390. Koita, K., & Triplett, R. A. (1998). An examination of gender and race effects on the parental appraisal process: A reanalysis of Matsueda’s model of the self. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 25, 382–401. Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social pathology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Matsueda, R. L. (1992). Reflected appraisals, parental labeling, and delinquency: Specifying a symbolic interactionist theory. American Journal of Sociology, 97, 1577–1611. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School Cesare Beccaria was an Italian Enlightenment philosopher, politician, and economist whose celebrated book On Crimes and Punishments condemned the use of torture, argued for the abolition of capital punishment, and advocated many reforms for the rational and fair administration of law. Beccaria’s ideas about legal and penal reforms, which influenced intellectuals and statesmen throughout Europe and in North America, inspired many significant reforms in the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century. Beccaria influenced the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham who, along with Beccaria, produced the foundational ideas of the Classical School of Criminology. Many of the reforms that Beccaria advocated remain aspirations for contemporary systems of legal justice, including punishment proportionate to the severity of the crime and

74

Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School

the development of a system of published laws and legal procedures applied equally to all without interference by the particular interests of rulers, judges, or clerics and without providing favorable treatment to individuals of higher social, political, or economic status.

Intellectual Foundations Beccaria was the first reformer systematically to apply to law the intellectual principles and political ideals of the Enlightenment. His work on the law applied two concepts developed by other Enlightenment thinkers: first, a social contract political theory, according to which political authority is legitimate because it was consented to by individuals within a society who joined together for mutual benefit; and, second, a utilitarian theory of ethics, according to which the rightness or wrongness of actions depends on the extent to which those actions lead to individuals’ happiness or unhappiness. Similar to other Enlightenment thinkers, Beccaria expressed a fundamental faith in the power of rationality. To a large extent, his reforms are based on the thought that human beings are rational creatures who can collaborate in peace to their own mutual benefit. When he applied them together, Beccaria’s utilitarianism, his social contractarianism, and his optimism about human rationality led him to argue that, because society exists for the sake of its members’ mutual benefit, social institutions should be arranged rationally to serve that end. In this process, efforts should be made first to respect and protect individuals’ rights to enjoy those benefits and, second, to support and enforce individuals’ obligations to cooperate peaceably with each other to fulfill each other’s needs for security and prosperity. Beccaria used this understanding of society to critique legal institution, traditions, and practices he believed failed to respect the rights of individuals, that enforced obligations and imposed punishments in an unfair manner, and that were mired in irrational violence. He also rejected the administration of justice he judged to be systematically corrupted by authorities who lacked legitimacy under the lights of social contract theory, who acted immorally according to the judgments of utilitarianism, and whose behavior failed to live up to Beccaria’s ideals for rational human cooperation.

Beccaria’s Social Critique and Rejection of Legal Tradition Beccaria’s use of these Enlightenment methods and ideas conformed to a shift in the common understanding of what legitimates social arrangements that occurred during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Following the Reformation and Enlightenment, this new understanding of society embraced the use of instrumental reason to create a more “civilized” way of life that rejected the violence that marked earlier eras. What emerged, and what Beccaria’s legal reforms promoted, was the ideal of a rational society arranged so that all its members could enjoy greater freedom, more security, and more prosperity than was possible in earlier times. Beccaria’s acceptance of this model of a rational society caused him to break with European traditions that included acts of excessive violence, both personal (e.g., honor duels) and political (e.g., tyranny and massacres). More generally, Beccaria rejected traditions and practices that he considered to be marked by “the horror of the crimes which afflicted our forefathers, who became by turns tyrants and slaves” and that included irrational and wicked laws and criminal procedures that reflected, in Beccaria’s arresting words, “humanity groaning under the weight of superstition, greed, the ambition of a few staining with human blood the coffers of gold and the thrones of kings, hidden betrayals, public massacres, every nobleman a tyrant . . .” (p. 18). In short, Beccaria found the legal traditions of Europe wholly objectionable, and his calls for reform ultimately rested on a radical rejection of those traditions.

Key Areas of Reform To replace those objectionable traditions, Beccaria insisted that reforms must respect and support the true right of the state to punish criminals, which he argued was based neither on divine authority nor on the whims or political need of sovereign rulers. Instead, and in accordance with his social contractarianism, Beccaria argued that all political obligation among the members of a society, including the obligation to obey the law and to subject oneself to punishment for crimes, was grounded on the fundamental purpose of a society to provide for its

Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School

members’ needs for security and prosperity. For Beccaria, therefore, a fundamental requirement for a rational and just system of criminal justice was a system of laws and legal procedures designed to promote and preserve the social bonds that make it possible for a society to meet those two fundamental needs. Each of the legal reforms Beccaria advocated was intended to support the role of criminal justice in sustaining a rational society devoted to its members’ security and prosperity. Thus, for example, when arguing for rational reform of criminal punishments, Beccaria argued that reforms must respect and support the role of punishment in maintaining those social bonds. Vitally important, Beccaria argued, was “the restraint necessary to hold particular interests together, without which they would collapse into the sold state of unsociability. Any punishment that goes beyond the need to preserve this bond is unjust by its very nature” (p. 11). Many of the legal reforms that Beccaria advocated reflected the same twinned goals of removing the cruelty and irrationality from past practices and traditions and creating new systems of rational laws and processes that supported the development of a fully legitimate, fully rational state that Beccaria’s Enlightenment sensibilities set as his political ideal. It was on this idealistic basis that Beccaria argued for practical reforms like the proportionality between crimes and punishments, the rational classification of crimes, the rational use of credible witnesses, the rational use of evidence, and a prohibition against secret accusation. Several of the reforms that Beccaria advocated were based on his belief about the importance of individuals’ understanding both what the laws and legal procedures are and also why they serve the mutual benefit of all. Thus, he called for education about laws and legal procedures that were published openly, distributed widely, and written in a manner that avoided legalistic jargon and in language comprehensible to all who fall under their authority. This is why Beccaria concluded that “we see how useful the printing press is, which makes the general public, and not just a few individuals, the repository of the holy law” (p. 18).

Arguments Against Torture Beccaria’s general call for reform to make accessible to all a rational system of laws and criminal

75

procedures that supports a society dedicated to the security and prosperity of all its members was greatly influential and, as seen below, occasioned legal innovations and reforms around the world. Two of the reforms he advocated are worthy of special note: his arguments against the use of torture and his arguments for the abolition of capital punishment. When Beccaria published On Crimes and Punishments, torture had long been commonplace in Western Europe to determine innocence or guilt, to compel confessions, to identify accomplices, and to punish. Acts of torture included savage mutilation performed as part of a criminal investigation and extended public spectacles culminating in a convict’s execution. Beccaria offered five main objections to the use of torture. First, he considered torture wickedly cruel and disproportionately harsh even in response to the worst crime or the most extreme circumstances. Second, Beccaria argued that the use of torture promotes the development of inadequate criminal justice procedures. For example, it fosters investigative processes that rely on torture victims who will bear false witness against others or will affirm false confessions in order to end their torment. Third, Beccaria argued that torture was unnecessary for investigating, prosecuting, and punishing crimes. Fourth, he argued that violent criminals become habituated to violence in a way that can allow them to withstand torture. Fifth, he argued that the use of brutal methods of torture can serve to coarsen an entire society and so contradicts the goal of creating enlightened, peaceful, and prosperous civilization. This is why he concluded that the widespread use of torture in Europe “is a standing monument to the law of ancient and savage times” (p. 41). Beccaria considered torture to be a vestige of a more violent and less civilized age that undermines the development of a rational, fair, and effective system of criminal justice. Therefore, he concluded, enlightened rational societies must foreswear torture.

The Abolition of Capital Punishment Famously, Beccaria also called for the abolition of capital punishment. He offered three main arguments: first, that the death penalty is not useful

76

Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School

within a rational and well-ordered criminal justice system; second, that capital punishment is illegitimate under a social contractarian theory of political obligation; and, third, that the irrevocable nature of the death penalty is incompatible with the fallible human judgments that are necessarily involved in sentencing someone to death. Beccaria’s first argument, about the utility of capital punishment within a rational and well-ordered system of criminal justice, relied on the two philosophical foundations of his conception of an enlightened society: utilitarianism and social contractarianism. A utilitarian assessment of capital punishment, Beccaria argued, must conclude that the use of the death penalty has numerous bad consequences for individuals, for societies, and for the administration of law. As with the case of torture, he maintained that the violence of capital punishment coarsens individuals and societies by reinforcing violent passions that an enlightened and rational society should strive to reduce. Thus he concluded that the “death penalty is not useful because of the example of savagery it gives to men” and argued that the abolition of the death penalty has the extreme social utility of promoting the development of a peaceful and rationally ordered society (p. 70). Beccaria also asserted that capital punishment was incompatible with the legitimacy of political authority grounded on a social contract designed, in part, to defend individuals against threats to their lives. Since “deep in their souls . . . men have always believed that no-one and nothing should hold the power of life and death over them” (p. 70), he observed, individuals who chose to be governed under a social contract would not choose to subject themselves to the possibility of capital punishment. For this reason, he concluded, legal and political authorities have no right to institute capital punishment. Beccaria’s third argument against capital punishment was based on his analysis of human weaknesses and limitations, including the fallibility of human judgments. He noted that the irrevocability of death is inconsistent with the fallibility even of the most judicious human judgments. It is a fundamental fact of human existence that our judgments are fallible and are subject to many forms of error and corruption. In turn, these limitations mean that capital punishment must be abolished if we

are to avoid the horrible outcome of mistakenly executing innocents.

Beccaria’s Worldwide Influence Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments met with immediate literary and political successes. Beccaria’s critiques and suggestions for reforms were accepted by many leading European intellectuals and by several prominent heads of state, including Catherine the Great, who sought unsuccessfully to hire Beccaria to plan legal reform in Russia, and by Peter Leopold, who in 1786, as Grand Duke of Tuscany (and several years before becoming the Holy Roman Emperor), became the first European head of state to abolish capital punishment. Beccaria’s ideas inspired many other European heads of state to take up legal or penal reform, for example in Prussia, Sweden, and the Austrian Empire. On Crimes and Punishments was translated quickly into English and had significant influence on legal and prison reforms in England and North America. In England, Beccaria’s ideas influenced the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the jurist William Blackstone, and the prison reformer John Howard. In North America, Beccaria’s book influenced John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. In France, Beccaria’s ideas influenced the development of two extremely important documents, the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, a fundamental political document of the French Revolution, and the post-revolutionary Code Napoléon of 1804, which influenced the development of legal codes around the world. Despite these successes, Beccaria’s ideas also generated significant critiques. For example, the great German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant defended capital punishment as the just and necessary punishment for some crimes. He criticized Beccaria as acting “from motives of compassionate sentimentality and affected humanity” and concluded that Beccaria’s arguments for abolishing the death penalty were “pure sophistry and distortion” (p. 158). Against Beccaria, Kant advocated a retributive account of punishment based on the principle of lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”). Although Kant agreed with Beccaria that punishment must fit the crime, Kant’s ethical theories led

Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime

him to reject Beccaria’s utilitarian conception of punishment as serving the greater social end of deterring others from future criminality. The 19th century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel offered another significant critique. He rejected Beccaria’s account of punishment and arguments for the abolition of capital punishment by rejecting the social contract theory upon which they rest. The leading French Enlightenment figure Voltaire, who was a strong influence on Beccaria, was a gentler critic. He accepted and promoted many of Beccaria’s ideas but rejected his arguments for the abolition of capital punishment. Finally, some of the social institutions Beccaria criticized so harshly resisted his calls for reform. For example, the Vatican denounced Beccaria’s secular and anti-clerical arguments and, until 1962, kept On Crimes and Punishments on its index of condemned titles. Beccaria has garnered less scholarly attention in recent decades, although one notable exception is found in the work of the prominent French social theorist Michel Foucault, who provocatively denied that Beccaria’s legal reforms were grounded in Enlightenment humanism. The extended attention Foucault paid to Beccaria’s ideas demonstrates the power of his writings to inspire contemporary theorists.

Beccaria’s Relevance Capital punishment, torture, the fairness and rationality of our laws and legal processes, the equal administration of justice, the efficacy of punishments for deterring criminal behavior, and the social utility of well-publicized systems of laws each remain important issues within contemporary societies and for students and scholars of criminology. Beccaria engages these issues in a clear and insightful philosophical manner that illuminates presentday social concerns and scholarly debates. For this reason, Beccaria’s writings retain far more than historical interest and remain worthy of close attention even despite the subsequent development of theories of crime that reject the Enlightenment optimism about human rationality that so inspired Beccaria. Andrew N. Carpenter See also Abolitionism; Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School; General Deterrence Theory

77

References and Further Readings Beccaria, C. (1995). On crimes and punishments and other writings (R. Bellamy, Ed. & R. Davies, Trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1764) Davis, D. (1957). The movement to abolish capital punishment in America, 1787–1861. The American Historical Review, 63, 23–46. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.) (2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975) Hegel, G. (1952). Philosophy of right (T. Knox, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1821) Kant. I. (1991). The metaphysical elements of the theory of right. In H. Reiss (Ed.), Kant’s political writings (2nd ed., pp. 131–175). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published in 1797) Maestro, M. (1973). Cesare Beccaria and the origins of penal reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Voltaire, F. (2008). Commentary on the book On Crimes and Punishments by a provincial lawyer. In A. Thomas (Ed.), On crimes and punishments and other writings (A. Thomas & J. Parzen, Trans.) (pp. 113–150). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. (Original work published 1766)

Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime Academic discussions on crime in the 1950s and 1960s centered on factors such as mental illness, social oppression, and inequality. The trumpeting of these potential causes of crime, among others, led to shifts in social policy, including the expansion of rights of the criminal population. Toward the latter part of the 1960s, a major challenge to mainstream criminological thought and to the social policies emerging as a result was set forth by Gary S. Becker, a prominent figure in the field of economics. He argued that focusing on issues such as social oppression and mental illness both cultivated and supported an approach to criminal behavior that reduced accountability—the apprehension and conviction of offenders—and thus ultimately compromised the safety of law-abiding citizens (Becker, 1993). In his groundbreaking contribution to criminology, Crime and Punishment: An Economic

78

Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime

Approach, Becker applied basic economic theory to crime and sanctions. Rejecting the notion that criminals had fundamentally different motivations than law-abiding citizens, he drew upon the ideas of the Classical School theorists and began with a very simple assumption: Human beings are rational. Becker’s ideas were met with some initial skepticism. This is not surprising given the context of criminology in 1950s and 1960s, combined with the fact that Becker, an economist, was posing a challenge to the dominant criminological thought as an outsider. Trying to explain crime—a phenomena typically considered irrational—from a field based on the assumption of rationality seemed like an anomaly to some.

Rational Criminals Underlying Becker’s economic approach to crime and punishment is the assumption that human beings are rational—that is, people weigh the costs and benefits of their actions and compare them among potential alternatives. Therefore, according to this perspective, some people commit crime while others do not essentially because “crime pays” for some and does not for others. Becker sought to answer two interrelated questions: “How many resources and how much punishment should be used to enforce different kinds of legislation?” (1968, p. 170, emphasis in the original). To address these issues, he followed the economists’ traditional model of choice and argued that both criminals and non-criminals seek to anticipate the consequences of their actions through cost-benefit analyses, and ultimately attempt to maximize welfare “as they conceive it” (1993, p. 386). Becker does not assume that the motivations of individuals engaging in criminal behavior are necessarily different from the motivations of lawabiding citizens, but rather asserts that it is the expected costs and benefits calculated by criminals and non-criminals that differ. For criminals, the rational analyses is ultimately favorable to the rewards of crime over the financial rewards of legal activities, after taking into consideration the likelihood of apprehension and conviction, as well as the severity of punishment (Becker, 1968). In this sense, both the criminal and non-criminal

are rational; they each assess the respective outcomes of certain activities among a range of alternatives and ultimately choose the route that best achieves his or her objective. Becker (1993) suggests that public policy and employment and educational opportunities also influence the amount of crime.

Human Capital If those engaging in crime do so because they conceive it to be the best means to an end, one logical mechanism would be to reduce the benefits and increase the costs associated with the outcomes of illegal activity. Another option suggested by Becker is to increase the appeal and accessibility of legitimate work (or legal activity) through investing in educational and job training programs. Investments in these programs are central to the idea of human capital—a key concept in the field of economics. Human capital refers “to the knowledge, information, ideas, skills and health of individuals” (Becker, 2002, p. 3). The idea of human capital was greeted with hostility in the 1950s and 1960s. It was considered demeaning in that it “treated people like machines” (1993, p. 392). Despite the skepticism of many people, Becker (2002) asserts that human capital is actually the most important form of capital in the United States. By investing in human capital, legitimate opportunities become more appealing.

Punishment Becker argues that the costs of a wide range of punishments can be converted into monetarily comparable equivalents. While only the cost of fines can be directly measured, the cost of imprisonment, for example, could be measured as “the discounted sum of the earnings forgone and the value placed on the restrictions in consumption and freedom” (1968, p. 180). The existence of variation in the sum of earnings forgone necessarily implies that the associated costs of a given prison sentence will be greater for some offenders (those who earn more) than others. Optimal decisions are defined as decisions that minimize the social loss (in income) for a given

Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime

offense, whereby “loss is the sum of damages, costs of apprehension and conviction, and costs of carrying out the punishments imposed” (1968, p. 207). By manipulating the probability or certainty of punishment (p) and the punishment per convicted offense (f), the social loss in income from crime can be minimized. Becker argues that a rational public policy should indirectly assure that “crime does not pay” through selecting appropriate values of p and f. More specifically, the expected utility of crime can be reduced by increasing the certainty or severity of punishment. Under the expected utility model, Becker (1968) argues that “risk-preferrers” are more responsive to changes in the probability of conviction than they are to the severity of punishment if convicted. Alternatively, “risk-avoiders” are quite responsive to changes in the severity of punishment because for them, even a low probability of punishment can have a substantial deterrent effect. Becker (1968) has advocated for heavy reliance on fines, pointing out that most alternative punishments hurt members of the broader society as well as the offender. Other types of punishment should therefore only be used in circumstances in which the offender is unable to pay a monetary fine. By evaluating the total social cost of punishment as the cost to offenders plus (or minus) the costs (or gain), it becomes evident that net social cost of fines are minimal, as they are essentially monetary transfers. Conversely, since punishments such as imprisonment and probation also ultimately hurt other members of society, the associated social costs typically exceed the cost to offenders.

Conclusion Becker’s contribution to criminology is valuable not only as a theoretical perspective that provides a general explanation of crime, but also because it outlines a specific mechanism through which formal punishments deter (Piliavin et al., 1986). The identification of this mechanism has several implications for public policy. As Becker (1968, p. 209) notes: The main contribution of this essay, as I see it, is to demonstrate that optimal policies to combat

79

illegal behavior are part of an optimal allocation of resources. Since economics has been developed to handle resource allocation, an “economic” framework becomes applicable to, and helps enrich, the analysis of illegal behavior.

Under the assumption that criminals engage in rational decision making upon choosing among a range of legal and illegal activities, Becker argued that crime prevention efforts should focus on making crime an irrational option. This entails increasing the costs and reducing the benefits of illegal activities. In addition, this can be achieved by increasing the appeal of legitimate (or legal) activities through investing in human capital. Finally, Becker maintains that an efficient system of punishment must consider the net social costs involved, and therefore he advocates policies that primarily rely on fines. Taryn N. Valpey See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School; Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities; General Deterrence Theory; Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; McCarthy, Bill, and John Hagan: Danger and Deterrence; Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime

References and Further Readings Becker, G. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76, 169–217. Becker, G. S. (1993). Nobel lecture: The economic way of looking at behavior. Journal of Political Economy, 101, 385–409. Becker, G. S. (2002). The age of human capital. In E. P. Lazear (Ed.), Education in the twenty-first century (pp. 3–8). Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Ehrlich, I. (1974). The supply of illegitimate activities: An Economic approach. In G. S. Becker & W. M. Landes (Eds.), Essays in the economics of crime and punishment (pp. 68–134). New York: Columbia University Press. McCarthy, B. (2002). New economics of sociological criminology. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 417–442.

80

Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers

Piliavin, I., Thorton, C., Gartner, R., & Matsueda, R. L. (1986). Crime, deterrence, and rational choice. American Sociological Review, 51, 101–119.

Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers Howard S. Becker, American sociologist and jazz musician, was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1928. His formal education in social science and human behavior came from study under sociologist Everett C. Hughes at the University of Chicago. Becker cites Hughes as his mentor and among his favorite sociologists (Becker, 2009). Becker’s approach to the exploration of labeling, deviance, and deviant careers transcended the symbolic interactionist theoretical landscape and classical criminology in the social sciences. Becker’s contribution to sociological and criminological inquiry posed a new objective to researchers and theorists: to no longer accept a definition of crime or a criminal act as an absolute, but rather to explore the criminal justice system processes, the constructions of the definition of deviance, the results of the imposition of sanctions to individual self identification, and the potential lifetime selfimage penalty for behavior deemed to be deviant, illegal, or not within the boundaries of socially constructed rules. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of farreaching social change in the United States. What emerged during this time of societal transformation and conception of a vision for the Great Society promoting equality under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was (1) an inquiry regarding the influence of positions of authority or power and (2) a reexamination of society’s view of what had been considered to be the status quo. Subsequently, the importance of economic status, race, and social class were among frequent topics of social discussion and debate as evidenced through historical events of the period, such as the movement for civil rights. It was during this era of progress and change that those who were most interested in developing a further understanding of deviance and crime were receptive to a new theoretical perspective that addressed how society

defines behaviors and the impact of these definitions on the individual. Early labeling theorists argued that one of the most important perspectives to examine criminality, or more specifically deviance and acts that disregard social consensus regarding acceptable behaviors, is not solely from the viewpoint of the individual but also through social interactions. Instead of focusing on criminal or deviant behaviors themselves, labeling theorists attempted to explore how behaviors result in being defined by society as deviant and what outcomes social construction of a definition of crime has for those who participate in deviant acts. Frank Tannenbaum and Edwin Lemert identified the meaning of crime to the individual, often projected through a person’s self-image, as a critical perspective from which to explore deviance. Tannenbaum’s research findings discussed the interactions, specifically the conflicts, between youths and adults in an urban neighborhood environment. These interactions, according to Tannenbaum, revealed that when adults identified youths according to their “bad” behaviors, the youths themselves began to define themselves in the same way. Lemert’s theoretical viewpoint included the process of deviant labeling in terms of “primary deviance,” or breaking the rules, and “secondary deviance” created by the social reactions to deviance. Lemert argued that the reaction or stigmatization of deviant labeling through identification of an individual as a “deviant” could prevent him or her from pursuing legitimate, non-deviant opportunities. Daniel Curran and Claire Renzetti discuss Lemert’s theoretical view by providing the example of the label of “alcoholism.” Once individuals are identified as an alcoholic, they may no longer receive invitations to social gatherings, thereby making them more isolated. Therefore, labeling theory was incorporated into sociological and criminological study. It was under this theoretical foundation that Becker’s views on labeling and deviance by definition were formed. One of Becker’s most prominent works, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, published in 1963, followed the work of earlier social theorists in examining the impact of criminal or deviant labeling and future delinquency. In this book, Becker argued that an individual who

Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers

is viewed by other members of society as a person who cannot or chooses not to follow the rules of the group is an “outsider.” In comparison, the outsider may not agree with the socially constructed rule and view those passing judgment as the true outsiders. In this regard, other modern scholars have attempted to study the cultural processes of the courts, the police, and the correctional system in an attempt to more fully understand the inner workings of the criminal justice system. In a similar interpretation, Becker stated the importance not only of observing the creation and enforcement of rules, but also of observing characteristics and attributes of those creating, implementing, and enforcing these rules in society. Still, Becker presented the importance of examining the processes of rule breaking and rule enforcement of both formal and informal social constructs and controls in order to gain a more complete understanding of deviance. In the first chapter of Outsiders, Becker discussed rules that exist primarily in name and less so in practice, such as laws that remain on the books but are rarely if ever enforced. He emphasized his theoretical perspective dealt with those rules and formal laws that are used in practice and are “active” rules among members of society. Further, Becker noted that the definition of deviance may vary among groups or societies. Becker’s theoretical viewpoint challenged the acceptance of rules by members of society and attempted to examine the acceptance of socially constructed rules as they pertain to specific acts. He also stated that by accepting these rules without question or consideration, members of society are “accepting the values of the group making the judgment” (1963, p. 4). As a result, under this theory, behaviors that are considered acceptable to one group are not always acceptable to another. This can be seen through exploration of formal controls and variances in laws from one country to another or in the same geographic location during different time periods. The label of deviance resulting in perceived criminality under Becker’s theoretical approach transcends all other labels and other members of society identify that individual as a criminal first and foremost. This criminal is propelled into a continued deviant career or role by the public

81

perception and belief in his or her criminality. Restated, the deviant label, according to Becker, supersedes all others and steers that individual into an identity of deviance. In Outsiders, Becker also discussed what he referred to as models of deviance. He describes behaviors in terms of conforming (those that are in agreement with society’s rules adopted by consensus), pure deviant, falsely accused, and secret deviant. These behaviors were believed to develop simultaneously or sequentially. Becker argued, however, that to explore deviance from multiple viewpoints, a sequential model was most appropriate so as to observe changes individually through each stage in the sequence in which he believed behaviors occur. Further, a factor that serves as cause in one behavioral change may have little or no impact on a later change, which he argued is the basis for observing the behavior of a deviant. A deviant career is created by the presence of a group of non-conforming acts committed by an individual against socially constructed rules, regardless of whether the individual was aware he or she was violating a societal rule. Another basic tenant of labeling theory states that formal and informal social controls through the process of deviant labeling in some situations increase criminal behavior because of the social reaction to the deviant association and self-image issues such labeling creates and reinforces. A term introduced by Becker to describe those in society who benefit from attaching deviant labels to others, moral entrepreneurs, is found as a title to one chapter included in his work on deviance, Outsiders. The introduction of the concept of moral entrepreneurs was considered bold in that it challenged social scientists to consider power relationships within society, individuals who were directly or indirectly in authority or influential positions, and the concept that some members in society may benefit from deviant labeling of others. Becker’s views also considered the impact the deviant label had on further immersing the individual in deviant social groups. Criticisms of labeling theory in general often include arguments encompassing individual rational choice and free will. Becker stated in 2009 that deviance should not be considered representative of a bad person, but instead is the outcome of

82

Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: Moral Poverty Theory

another member in society defining the person’s action as being a bad one. Becker’s contribution to the labeling theoretical perspective and to modern understanding of deviant careers could be considered in addition to other theoretical perspectives as another lens through which to view the phenomenon of deviance for scholars and practitioners in the social sciences. Peter Kraska notes that Becker’s contribution to the body of knowledge regarding deviance charges researchers with understanding the process that defines acts as deviant and to seek an understanding of the reaction of society as well as the criminal justice system to deviance. His classic examination of deviance in Outsiders was also among the first works that included multiple empirical findings beyond theoretical postulations in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience (Becker, 2009). Michele L. Whitehead and Robert A. Sarver III See also Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans; Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems; Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil

References and Further Readings Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press. Becker, H. S. (2009). HOWIEs home page [Online]. Retrieved May 31, 2009, from http://home.earthlink .net/~hsbecker/index.html Bernberg, J. G., Krohn, M.D., & Rivera, C. J. (2006). Official labeling, criminal embeddedness, and subsequent delinquency: A longitudinal test of labeling theory. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 43, 67–88. Cole, S. (1975). The growth of scientific knowledge: Theories of deviance as a case study. In L. A. Coser (Ed.), The idea of social structure: Papers in honor of Robert K. Merton (pp. 175–220). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Curran, D. J., & Renzetti, C. M. (2001). Theories of crime. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Kraska, P. B. (2004). Theorizing criminal justice: Eight essential orientations. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social pathology: A systematic approach to the theory of sociopathic behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Tannenbaum, F. (1938). Crime and the community. Boston: Ginn. Vold, G. B., Bernard, T. J., Snipes, J. B., & Gerould, A. L. (2009). Theoretical criminology (6th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, F. P., III, & McShane, M. D. (2010). Criminological theory (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: Moral Poverty Theory In their book Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs, William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters introduce their moral poverty theory. They define moral poverty, discuss its influence on violent crime and drugs in America, and offer solutions to the problem of moral poverty. The following sections examine the major points of moral poverty theory presented in Body Count. The crime rates in the United States consistently increased from the 1960s to the 1990s. However, more important to the arguments made in Body Count was that there was a dramatic escalation in juvenile crime during the late 1980s and 1990s. Along with the rise in juvenile crime, there was an increase in drug use (especially crack-cocaine) and gangs. Bennett and his co-authors contend that the main cause of this increase in crime and drug use is moral poverty. Moral poverty is defined as “the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach the young right from wrong” (p. 13). They proceed to explain that moral poverty involves being without parents, guardians, relatives, teachers, and so on that can teach children to “feel joy at others’ joy; pain at others’ pain; satisfaction when you do right; [and] remorse when you do wrong” (p. 14). According to Bennett et al., children who grow up in a situation of moral poverty lack people in their lives that can “teach these lessons by their own everyday example, and who insist that you follow suit and behave accordingly” (p. 14). They contend that the most serious

Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: Moral Poverty Theory

moral poverty environments are designed to create vicious and violent street criminals.

Moral Poverty and Its Influence on Crime and Drugs In an article on moral poverty written for Juvenile Crime: Opposing Viewpoints, DiIulio notes that most people in America grow up in environments where they are taught the difference between right and wrong and are rewarded for delaying gratification and respecting other people. DiIulio argues, however, that some people are not raised in such environments but, rather, spend their childhood in moral poverty. Moral poverty is said to begin early in a child’s life. According to DiIulio, unconditional love is virtually nonexistent but abuse is commonplace. Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters argue in Body Count that the rise in youth violence should not come as a surprise since the number of reports of child abuse and neglect had jumped from 669,000 in 1976 to 2,989,000 in 1993. The number of incidences reported has more than quadrupled. They argue that by enforcing child abuse and neglect laws, we may be able to improve the moral poverty situation. Moral poverty is not just created by child abuse and neglect. Bennett and his colleagues also note that children who are born out of wedlock are at a greater risk of being morally impoverished. They use this cause as an explanation of the differences in crime rates between white and African American youths. They report that, for data from 1970 to 1992, black youths consistently accounted for a larger percentage of births to unmarried mothers than white children. Bennett and his co-authors specifically state that it is moral poverty, as opposed to economic poverty, that causes juveniles to turn to crime and drugs. They explain that this is why so many juveniles who grow up in poor, disadvantaged neighborhoods do not turn to a life of crime. These juveniles are raised in families with moral health (the opposite of moral poverty), and this insulates them from criminal influences. In Body Count, Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters state that there are two characteristics that are instilled in children raised in morally impoverished environments: “lack of impulse control” and “lack of empathy” (p. 57). In his later article, DiIulio refers to these characteristics as being “radically

83

present-oriented” and “radically self-regarding” (p. 113). In having no control over their impulses or being present-oriented, juveniles who grow up in families consumed with moral poverty have no understanding of the future and therefore they pursue activities that can allow them to obtain immediate gratification. Being self-regarding or not being able to empathize with others allows these juveniles to place no value on the lives of the people that they victimize. These characteristics are similar to elements that Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi include in their self-control theory. The combination of these characteristics, according to the authors, increases the chances that a juvenile will give in to the temptations of crime or drugs, or both. Bennett and his colleagues note that a large proportion of crime is related to drug and alcohol use. They state that studies have found that alcohol and drugs increase the likelihood of an individual becoming violent. Bennett et al. argue that drug use can be seen as a catalyst to crime because it causes individuals to become morally irresponsible.

Super-Predators Perhaps the aspect of moral poverty theory that has received the most attention is the prediction of “super-predators.” These super-predators are what the children from morally impoverished families can become. The authors predicted that the juvenile criminals to come would be much worse than before. They referred to this new breed of juveniles as super-predators. According to Bennett and his colleagues, “super-predators” are “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more pre-teenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious communal disorders” (p. 27). They argue that it is growing up in a society consumed by moral poverty that has created these super-predators. They note that to these new superpredators right and wrong do not mean anything. In Body Count, the authors point out that a majority of street crimes are committed by men under the age of 25. They postulate that the number of men under the age of 25 will increase significantly over the next 10 or so years. They further state that a large percentage of these young men will be raised in environments stricken by

84

Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: Moral Poverty Theory

moral poverty, which will increase the likelihood of them becoming violent criminals. Bennett et al. also use predictions by James Q. Wilson to further their argument. Wilson estimated that the number of juveniles between the ages of 14 and 17 would increase by 1 million from 1995 to 2000, half of whom would be male. Based on the finding from the Philadelphia Birth Cohort study that 6 percent of the boys in the study committed 50 percent of the crime, Wilson predicted that 6 percent (or 30,000) of these young males would become repeat offenders (DiIulio, 1997). Based on these predictions, Bennett and his colleagues refer to America as a “ticking crime bomb” (p. 21). However, the continued dramatic rise in juvenile crime that was predicted by Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters did not occur. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, juvenile crime did rise from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s but then decreased every year for an entire decade. The rate of juvenile arrests for violent crimes was cut nearly in half (49 percent) between 1994 and 2004. In 2005 and 2006, the number of juvenile arrests for violent crimes increased but was still lower than the number of arrests in any year during the 1990s. The prediction of juvenile super-predators also has turned out to be incorrect. According to OJJDP, juveniles have seen a greater decrease in arrest rates than adults for most crimes in the period between 1997 and 2006.

Solutions to the Problem of Moral Poverty Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters point out that the war against moral poverty must combat drugs (including alcohol) and crime. They assert that this war cannot be fought just in the criminal justice system, but that it must be fought in families, schools, churches, and the media. While Bennett and his colleagues mention that cracking down on the enforcement of child abuse and neglect laws might help the moral poverty situation, the main solution that they offer for the problem is religion. In DiIulio’s article, he cites that research has found the religion can help to improve many different socioeconomic problems. DiIulio also states that many people familiar with the criminal justice system have suggested to him that religion is the answer to reducing crime. It is

noted that religion seems to be particularly important among black juveniles in urban areas. DiIulio argues that for churches to help with the problem of moral poverty, public funds should be used so that local churches can become safe havens for youth living in moral poverty. Churches can also provide a number of other services for the community that may help with the problem of moral poverty. These services might include parenting classes, adoption services, day-care and preschool programs, and substance abuse programs.

Conclusion In Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs, Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters define their concept of moral poverty. They offer some possibilities of what causes moral poverty and some solutions to the problem. The idea and prediction of the coming of super-predators is also discussed. Bennett and his colleagues discuss two qualities juveniles who grow up in moral poverty possess. Both of the characteristics that the authors suggest can be attributed to moral poverty, lack of impulse control and empathy, are also included in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory of crime as elements of self-control. Even though the predictions made by Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters proved to be incorrect, Body Count was an important addition to criminological literature. Many changes in juvenile justice policy and criminal justice policy in general were motivated by the predictions made by these authors. Whether or not these policy changes were beneficial to the system has yet to be determined. Jennifer Tanner See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The; Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture; Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Window Theory

References and Further Readings Bennett, W. J., DiIulio, J. J., Jr., & Walters, J. P. (1996). Body count: Moral poverty . . . and how to win

Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending America’s war against crime and drugs. New York: Simon & Schuster. DiIulio, J. J., Jr. (1997). Lack of moral guidance causes juvenile crime and violence. In Juvenile crime: Opposing viewpoints. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. (2008). Juvenile arrests 2006. Washington, DC: Author. Wilson, J. Q. (1995). Crime and public policy. In J. Q. Wilson & J. Petersilia (Eds.), Crime (pp. 489–510). Oakland, CA: ICS Press.

Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences White-Collar Offending

of

Historically, individuals prosecuted for conventional “street” crimes have faced relatively simple and straightforward consequences, including incarceration, fines, probation, and loss of certain rights. However, legal responses from the justice system, as well as non-legal reactions toward individuals who engage in white-collar crimes, are often thought to be more varied and less punitive. Indeed, it has been widely assumed that whitecollar offenders receive preferential treatment compared to their conventional criminal counterparts, in large part due to their high social status. But there is debate over both the nature and the severity of legal and non-legal reactions to whitecollar offending. Some assume that white-collar offenders not only avoid severe legal sanctions but also are somehow able to avoid non-legal consequences, such as labeling or stigmatization, frequently associated with a criminal conviction. However, others maintain that because of their occupational positions and elevated social status, white-collar offenders face a barrage of non-legal, collateral consequences more harmful than those brought through traditional justice system processing. Thus, a great deal of controversy lingers regarding how white-collar offenders are actually treated and whether such treatment is contingent on individual social status.

85

With the publication of “The Fall From Grace: Loss of Occupational Status as a Consequence of Conviction for a White Collar Crime” in 1984, Michael L. Benson sought to extend limited research on this issue by examining an important collateral cost often thought to be associated with whitecollar offending. Specifically, his investigation drew upon case histories from a non-random sample of approximately 70 individuals convicted of white-collar offenses to explore how justice system processing and conviction differentially affected the ensuing occupational status of offenders. In 1985, Benson’s complementary publication, “Denying the Guilty Mind: Accounting for Involvement in White-Collar Crime,” explored how offenders account for engaging in these forms of offending. Previously, scholars had given only limited empirical attention to the motivations and subjective realities experienced by white-collar offenders. Through this inquiry, Benson exposes a potential link between subjective reactions to whitecollar criminals and offenders’ post-involvement explanations for offending. His study is based on interviews with 30 convicted white-collar offenders, case files from 80 white-collar offenders, and interviews with federal probation officers, judges, and attorneys. Specifically, he examined the assumption suggested by anecdotal evidence that white-collar offenders provide different accounts for their offending (1) to minimize or excuse the criminality of their behaviors, and (2) as a means of responding to potential or existing negative consequences associated with justice system processing and conviction. Although their behaviors may be technically illegal, these offenders almost without exception fail to label themselves as “criminals,” even after they have been convicted. Through an examination of both subjective reactions to white-collar crime and offender reactions to their post-processing/adjudication realities, Benson calls attention to how non-legal corollaries of conviction may shape changes in non-legal social status, which then go on to mold subsequent offender explanations for engaging in white-collar crime. First, Benson (1984) explores whether loss of occupational status is indirectly influenced by justice system processing and conviction for white-collar offenses. Second, Benson (1985) examines how offenders account for their involvement in white-collar offending so as to

86

Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending

minimize both the legal and non-legal consequences of offending. Through both investigations, Benson notes important implications that both issues have for the study of crime and subsequent treatment of individuals convicted of white-collar offenses.

Fall From Grace: Loss of Occupational Status White-collar offenders are often assumed to receive more lenient treatment across the justice system when compared to common criminals, in large part due to the non-violent nature of their crimes and their elevated social and economic status. Further, it is often assumed that as a result of their lenient treatment in the justice system, they are less likely to suffer the collateral consequences, such as stigmatization and loss of employment, that often accompany criminal convictions. But are they truly more capable of neutralizing or avoiding stigmatization associated with a criminal conviction? While some research argues that a person’s social position has little to do with preferential treatment or the severity of legal sanctions, other studies suggest that the probability of severe sanctions (e.g., incarceration) is tied directly to the occupational status of each defendant. Nevertheless, few studies have explored the impact of justice system processing and conviction on the subsequent non-legal, occupational status of offenders. In response to this empirical shortcoming, Benson examines whether white-collar offenders are differentially affected by non-legal consequences arising out of justice system processing. His research was motivated in part by a desire to explore the empirical assumptions that underlie two theoretical perspectives on how white-collar offenders should be sanctioned. First, there are those who believe that deterrence-oriented sanctions like incarceration are most appropriate to reduce future white-collar offending. In this regard, white-collar offenders are perceived to be more amenable to deterrent strategies because incarceration plays on the imprisonment fears of individuals. Thus, it is assumed that incarceration is the only sanctioning method that truly presents a hardship for wealthy, high social status individuals. Unlike imprisonment, fines or probation may not represent meaningful punishments or be equivalent to potential profits arising from white-collar offenses.

Moreover, because the legitimate social positions of white-collar offenders carry more significant social demands, and their offenses are considered more complex continuations of initial criminal events, “just deserts” arguments exist that white-collar offenders should be punished more severely. Thus, it is asserted that criminal sanctions should be tied directly to social position or rank in that greater sanctions should be positively related to higher social status, given the social responsibilities associated with elevated social position. Similarly, some argue that lenient sentences for white-collar offenders undermine the legitimacy of the American justice system by providing potential street criminals with rationalizations toward offending. As a result, those favoring deterrence-oriented sanctions may either ignore non-legal consequences of justice system processing or argue that they should be discounted when establishing punishments for white-collar offenses. In their view, formal legal sanctions must be harsh, because informal, non-legal sanctions are weak by comparison. In contrast, those in the second camp argue that in addition to a decline in occupational status or earning potential, the stigma associated with a loss of personal and professional associations, the embarrassment of conviction, and the psychological trauma of a trial are sufficient and costly enough to deter future involvement in white-collar crime. Proponents of this view see no need for incarceration, because less severe punishments are more restorative for communities, fairer to defendants, and result in the suffering of severe non-legal consequences. Reflecting the latter position, Benson found evidence that deterioration in individual social position or occupational status often results from justice system processing for some white-collar offenders but not others. Specifically, public officials, professionals, or individuals holding licensure for certain occupations appeared to suffer more severe non-legal consequences, because they may lose or be denied their professional capacity to continue working in their field by agencies external to the justice system. In contrast, those in private business positions appeared less exposed to the same potential consequences. Thus, loss of occupational status may very well be contingent on the type of occupational position offenders hold (public/professional/licensed positions versus

Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending

private sector jobs). Occupational position in turn influences access to criminal opportunities and the nature of the offender’s attempts to subjectively deflect the collateral consequences of conviction.

Denying the Guilty Mind: How White-Collar Offenders Manage the Consequences of Conviction Regardless of one’s specific occupational position, offender behavior subsequent to justice system processing may principally be tied to the identity transformation process that has relabeled the individual from law-abiding citizen to criminal. They may readily admit the illegality of their behavior. However, because they were in legitimate elevated social positions and largely believe in and conform to most social norms, white-collar offenders may deny any notions of their own criminality by failing to label themselves as “criminal.” In this regard, white-collar offenders are likely to use accounts as either justifications or excuses for engaging in certain behaviors (Benson, 1985). Offenders attempt to recast their behaviors in a more favorable light, thereby lessening the possibility of more severe legal and non-legal reactions to their offending. Benson found evidence to suggest that whitecollar offenders almost without exception disavow their own criminality by falling back on various “accounts” as explanations for their involvement in crime. The different methods white-collar offenders use to rationalize, justify, and excuse their behavior is reminiscent of Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s delinquency theory involving techniques of neutralization—with one slight departure. Their theory posits that offenders may seek to minimize the illegitimacy (i.e., criminality) of non-normative behaviors prior to engaging in an offense. Thus, neutralizations, such as denying the existence of a victim or responsibility for an act, may temporarily free an offender from conforming to behavioral norms. However, Benson argues that offender accounts are largely derived in an effort to justify or excuse an offense after the crime and justice system processing have occurred, and in part, as a way of managing the legal and non-legal outcomes that may or may not have materialized. Thus, offender “accounts” contrast with Sykes and Matza’s “techniques” primarily with respect to the timing of the rationalization for

87

engaging in crime, whereby they explain behavior after the offense has occurred, rather than rationalizing behavior prior to its occurrence. Overall, Benson suggests that accounts for involvement in white-collar offending largely remain contingent on the specifics of an offense, the white-collar offenders’ ability to refute the accusation of criminal intent, and the legitimate occupational positions that provide opportunities for offending. The organizational culture and social structure of corporate capitalism, both dedicated to preserving profits over all other legitimate goals, give rise to a large number of opportunities, justifications, and mitigations toward offending through diffusion of responsibility, the pressures toward profitability and economic growth, and the competitive nature of free enterprise. The confluence of free-market organizational and structural circumstances, pressures toward fulfilling monetary achievements, and the potential non-legal, subjective responses to convicted offenders provide white-collar offenders with sufficient ammunition to attempt to define their offenses in terms that are less reprehensible and more socially and morally acceptable.

Conclusion The contributions of Benson to the study of whitecollar offending have highlighted several key issues surrounding the subjective responses of and to white-collar offenders as they progress through the justice system. These contributions have significant implications for future white-collar crime research, as well as for a better understanding of how whitecollar offenders are dealt with in communities. First, it is noteworthy that white-collar offenders appear to be processed and treated differently, both prior to and following adjudication, than conventional street criminals. This is true not only with respect to legal sanctions imposed on whitecollar offenders but, more importantly, regarding the non-legal, subjective consequences resulting from justice system processing. Certain segments (i.e., public officials and licensed professionals) of the white-collar offending population may face greater occupational consequences arising from stigmatization and loss of occupational licensing that follow justice system processing than other segments (i.e., those in the private sector). Prior to

88

Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School

the publishing of Benson’s “The Fall From Grace” in 1984, the non-legal consequences associated with white-collar offender were virtually ignored. Future research must now address this issue to broaden our understanding of white-collar offending and its consequences. Second, it is worth mentioning how white-collar offenders appear to regard themselves as vastly different from conventional street criminals. As a result, their explanations for white-collar offending may differ dramatically from their conventional criminal counterparts. These so-called offender accounts may largely be a response to both perceived and real non-legal consequences associated with engaging in white-collar crime. William A. Stadler See also Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and WhiteCollar Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime; Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization

References and Further Readings Benson, M. L. (1984). The fall from grace: Loss of occupational status among white-collar offenders. Criminology, 22, 573–593. Benson, M. L. (1985). Denying the guilty mind: Accounting for involvement in white-collar crime. Criminology, 23, 583–607. Conklin, J. E. (1977). Illegal but not criminal: Business crime in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Cressey, D. R. (1953). Other people’s money: A study in the social psychology of embezzlement. New York: Free Press. Hagan, J. L., Nagel, I. H., & Albonetti, C. A. (1980). The differential sentencing of white-collar offenders in ten federal district courts. American Sociological Review, 45, 802–820. Nagel, I. H., & Hagan, J. L. (1982). The sentencing of white-collar criminals in federal courts: A socio-legal exploration of disparity. Michigan Law Review, 80, 1427–1465. Nathan, R. S. (1980, January). Coddled criminals. Harper’s Magazine, pp. 30–35. Sutherland, E. H. (1983). White collar crime. New York: Greenwood Press. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664–670.

Wheeler, S., Weisburd, D. L., & Bode, N. (1982). Sentencing the white-collar offender: Rhetoric or reality. American Sociological Review, 47, 641–659.

Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School Jeremy Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London, on February 15, 1748, and died there on June 6, 1832. He entered Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1760, at the age of 13, graduating in 1764, after which he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. Though he qualified to practice law, he never did so, instead spending from 8 to 12 hours each day writing, principally on legal theory. By the 1780s, Bentham had come to know a number of the leading liberal (Whig) politicians and lawyers, but his ideas remained largely unappreciated. He wrote extensively on theoretical matters, though he also authored a number of practical proposals for social and political reform. In 1785, he briefly joined his brother Samuel in Russia, where he devised plans for the Panopticon—a model prison which he had hoped would interest the Czarina Catherine the Great. After his return to England in 1788, Bentham pursued the idea in Britain—at great expense, but fruitlessly. By the late 1790s, Bentham’s work began to have some impact on legal and political reformers, yet his influence was greatest on the continent. Bentham’s writings reflected the major social, political, and economic upheavals of the period— the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the middle class, and the revolutions in France and America. At his death, he left tens of thousands of manuscript pages, intended for publication. Bentham also left a large estate, in part to finance University College, London. In accordance with his instructions, his body was dissected, embalmed, dressed, and placed in a chair at University College, where it still resides.

Method Bentham’s analytical and empirical method emphasized conceptual clarity and deductive argument. It was influenced by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, such as Cesare Beccaria, Claude

Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School

Helvétius, Denis Diderot, and Voltaire, and also by John Locke and David Hume. Bentham followed the example of Locke in emphasizing the importance of reason over custom and tradition, and of precision in the use of terms. Hume provided Bentham with insights into human psychology as well as a secular version of the principle of utility, which had frequently been annexed to theological views. Bentham’s method is evident in his criticisms of the law and the moral and political uses of language. He was influenced by Beccaria not only concerning issues of crime and punishment and the relevance of utility but also on exactness in legal discourse. One of Bentham’s principal targets was the presence of “fictions” in the law. Terms like relation, right, power, and possession were “fictional”—that is, they involved taking a part or aspect of a thing in abstraction from, and as, the thing itself—with the result that people were deceived or confused. In those cases where the terms or “wholes” could be justified by explaining their properties or how they followed from their “parts,” and where nothing was left at an abstract level, Bentham allowed that the terms could continue to be used. Otherwise, they were to be abandoned. One particular fiction that Bentham hoped to eliminate was the legal claim that there was some original contract that explained why there was any law at all.

Human Nature Bentham held that morals and legislation must be based on an accurate account of human nature. Just as nature is explained through reference to the principles of physics, so human behavior can be explained by reference to principles of human nature—ultimately, the two primary motives of pleasure and pain. This is the theory of psychological hedonism. At the beginning of the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation published in 1789, Bentham writes, Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened

89

to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.

Bentham argued that one can make a scientific determination of value on this basis. Pleasure and pain are objective states, and they can be described in terms of seven properties—intensity, duration, certainty, proximity or propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent—and measured. Such characteristics not only provide a basis for calculating the value of a thing but also allow us to compare things. This is called the hedonic or felicific calculus. Bentham’s account of human nature is ultimately individualistic. The community is but “the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it”; it is a fictitious body. Bentham’s view is that the individual is the basic unit of the social sphere. A person’s relations with others, even though important, are not essential and describe nothing that is, strictly speaking, necessary to its being what it is. Bentham also believed that human beings have a natural, rational self-interest. In his “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy,” John Stuart Mill cites Bentham’s The Book of Fallacies that “[i]n every human breast . . . self-regarding interest is predominant over social interest; each person’s own individual interest over the interests of all other persons taken together.” This psychological egoism underlies all human action, and reason—which is a natural capability of persons—is subservient to it.

Moral Philosophy Bentham’s moral philosophy is detailed principally in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He is one of the classical exponents of utilitarianism, but his “greatest happiness principle” or “principle of utility” is derived from Helvétius, Hume, and Beccaria. Utility is not just a matter of the usefulness of things or actions, but is concerned with the extent to which these things or actions promote the general happiness. Specifically, what is morally obligatory is that which produces the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, happiness being determined by reference to the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.

90

Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School

While Bentham’s account of human nature explained why pleasure and pain are the primary motivators, he also explained why another’s happiness—or the general happiness—should count. Bentham’s concern for the interests of others—universal egoism—is based, first, on his observation that, in acting, individuals refer either explicitly or implicitly to the interests of others. Bentham also argues that, if pleasure is the good, then it is good irrespective of whose pleasure it is. Thus, the moral injunction to pursue or maximize pleasure has force independently of those whose specific interests are involved. Bentham notes, as well, that people recognize that others’ interests are inextricably bound up with their own, and so they would reasonably seek the general happiness. There are other reasons. The principle of utility also shows a commitment to human equality. It presupposes that “one man is worth just the same as another man” and so, in calculating the greatest happiness, “everybody [is] to count for one, nobody for more than one” (Mill, 1867, p. 93). Most importantly, pleasure and pain can be described and measured objectively. The principle of utility accordingly allows us to make decisions in situations where there are conflicts among individuals. For Bentham, then, the greatest happiness principle and his psychological hedonism and egoism are not inconsistent. Moral philosophy or ethics can be simply described as “the art of directing men’s actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness, on the part of those whose interest is in view” (Bentham, 1962, vol. 1, p. 142).

Theory of Law In the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham states that the fundamental purpose of the law is to prevent mischiefs. Law, then, is by its nature “negative”—a restriction on liberty and “painful” to those whose freedom is restricted. H. L. A. Hart suggests that this model of law is based on English criminal law. Bentham, however, at least implicitly accepts that the law may have a positive rationale in other contexts. According to Bentham, “A law may be defined as an assemblage of signs declarative of a volition conceived or adopted by the sovereign in a state, concerning the conduct to be observed in a certain

case by a certain person or class of persons, who in the case in question are or are supposed to be subject to his power” (1962, p. 160). Law is, then, the command of the sovereign and an imperative. This view is called legal positivism and is frequently associated with Bentham’s friend and colleague, John Austin. It holds that the validity of a law does not rest on its morality. A law which commands morally questionable or even evil actions is still a law. Although the separation of law and morals is generally a defining characteristic of legal positivism, Bentham held that morality is relevant to law. The principle of utility is the criterion for determining what should properly become a law. Still, Bentham rejects the idea that legal rights and obligations have a moral derivation, and he famously dismisses the idea of natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” This reflects his view that words like obligation and right are confusing abbreviations of moral or legal arguments rather than simple descriptive terms. The practical side of Bentham’s theory of law is particularly significant. Some of his earliest work, included in A Fragment of Government, consisted of a general attack on the common law and William Blackstone’s famous Commentaries on the Law of England. Bentham disputed Blackstone’s defense of tradition in law and rejected the idea that our legal obligations originate in the state of nature and social contract. His antipathy to the common law was also based on the obscurities of legal practice. In the Principles of Morals and Legislation, he describes the written records underlying the common law as “the most inconvenient for reading or consulting” (Bentham, 1970, p. 186). These records “are kept locked up in places where not one in ten thousand of those whose conduct is to be guided by them and whose fate depends on them can know how to find them: much less to make anything of them when found” (Bentham, 1970, p. 186). Bentham also disparaged many of the procedural elements in the common law, which had their origins in feudal times. On a more fundamental level, Bentham complained vigorously that the common law had allowed the judiciary to impose its moral and social views on the rest of society. He also objected to the retrospectivity of the common law, which decides cases on an individual basis, and therefore

Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School

ex post facto. This leaves the law uncertain. Bentham accordingly argued that the law should be codified. This would give legislators the responsibility for making law. It would also provide a clear conceptual plan of the law, and thereby clarify and systematize legislation. Every provision, Bentham believed, should be accompanied by a brief rationale, setting out its purpose and justification, in order to prevent any deviations in its application. This approach has been criticized, however, for its failure to recognize the intricacies that arise in individual cases.

Theory of Punishment Bentham’s theory of punishment follows the general outline of Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments. Bentham’s account is nevertheless more scientific than Beccaria’s and should be seen as part of a larger theory of social control. Both theorists argue that punishment cannot be based on simple emotions like anger or desire for revenge and must be rationally defended. This was a major development in the history of punishment. Bentham’s views on punishment are spread over a number of texts. The Rationale of Reward and The Rationale of Punishment were both based on his Théorie des Peines et des Récompenses, edited and published by his disciple, Etienne Dumont, in 1811—but they contain interpolations that make any account of Bentham’s own views problematic. Still, the essential dynamic on which Bentham’s theory is based is simple enough. Since individuals have the ability to choose, and are rational and self-interested, it is possible to have them change their behavior. This is the purpose of punishment. The logic of Bentham’s theory is based on two moral axioms: (1) punishment consists of the infliction of pain on an offender; and (2) punishment is (accordingly) an evil. It follows that only the minimum punishment should be inflicted. Punishments need only outweigh “the profit of the offense.” Punishment also requires justification. This is true on both a general and a specific level. The general justification is that it increases the security of the public and protects freedom. It accomplishes this end in two ways: (1) it deters other members of the public from acting in the same way as the offender; and (2) it reforms the behavior of the offender. These principles have made their way

91

into the common law under the name of general and specific deterrence, though “reform” seems to indicate something more than deterrence. The emphasis here is on the correction of behavior rather than on punishment per se. Bentham’s work on punishment is notable for its lists and classifications. In the Principles of Morals and Legislation, he sets out 12 rules governing the proportion of punishments to offenses. Some of these may seem surprising, such as Rule 8, which suggests that punishment should be increased in accordance with the length of time that has elapsed since the commission of the crime. This is explained by the increased difficulty in changing the offender’s behavior. The fact that a crime was committed out of habit is another consideration, while Bentham’s attention to the particular sensitivities of the offender seems to permit a wide range of possible sentences for a particular offense. Although these lists show considerable insight, they have an eccentric cast (he includes “violation of sleep” as a significant aggravating factor) and are inevitably incomplete. Bentham’s Collected Works also include a “Specimen of a Penal Code,” which sets out other aggravations that would justify an increase in punishment.

Prison Reform Bentham is best known in contemporary criminology for his design of the Panopticon, or InspectionHouse. The fundamental idea behind the Panopticon is that inmates are housed in cells that permit them to be observed by the “Inspector” at any time. This explains the word Panopticon: observing (opticon) all or everything (pan). Although Bentham designed the Panopticon for any establishment that required observation, such as schools and hospitals, it is best known as a model for prisons. Bentham exhibited a solid grasp of the psychological dynamics of behavior modification in designing the Panotpicon. Since the Inspector remains unseen inside the central inspection tower, at any particular time the inmates can only assume that they are being watched, and behave accordingly. As a result, each begins to watch himself or herself. It is this internalized habit of watching oneself that then becomes the psychological mechanism that controls behavior. In his celebrated

92

Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School

book, Survellir et punir: Naissance de la prison, translated as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault sees the Panopticon as an exemplary, if disturbing, manifestation of a new form of social control. This is not, however, entirely fair. The evidence suggests that while Bentham’s earliest views on punishment were based on a draconian regime of solitude, darkness, hard labor, and a frugal diet, which was designed to break the spirit of the rebellious offender, his design of the Panopticon was part of a more enlightened scheme to serve society, the offender, and the institution simultaneously. The Panopticon, then, provides a utilitarian solution to the problem of punishment, which involves the infliction of pain and therefore shares implicitly in a prima facie immoral action. Moreover, Bentham’s design incorporated a number of reforms, some as simple as the provision of adequate heat to the cells. While Bentham’s plan to build the Panopticon did not succeed in his lifetime, his view had a pronounced effect on the architecture of modern prisons, which have often featured a central tower, surrounded by cells that fall under the constant surveillance of guards. Bentham was nevertheless unrealistic in several respects, and he did not recognize that his plan to run prisons for profit would lead to abuses.

Contributions of Bentham to Popular Understanding Bentham wished his work to be educative, and one of his motivations for codifying the law was that it would be available to every citizen. He also advocated teaching hospitals and championed usury, on the ground that it would stimulate the spirit of invention. Bentham’s positions on many moral issues are close to contemporary views. He believed that sodomy, for example, should be taken out of the criminal law, though he did not publish his comments in his lifetime. Bentham is also important for his position on animals, which have historically been classified as property (and therefore as “things”) in the law. He is frequently cited for his view that, because animals experience pain, they should be brought into the hedonic calculus. Bentham also had progressive views on medicine. The supply of cadavers for medical research

in 19th-century England was limited, since the only bodies that could be legally used for such purposes were those of convicted murderers. This gave rise to a lucrative black market in corpses, and even to the murder of the poor. Bentham believed that legislation was needed to address the problem, and he drafted a bill that would allow medical research to make use of the bodies of people who died in the course of treatment. Bentham also donated his own body to medical research, on the condition that his head and skeleton would be reassembled and kept for posterity. His motivations in wanting his body preserved in this way are unclear, though his desire to flaunt the moral prejudices of the day undoubtedly played a part in it. This may explain why, in his last years, he carried in his pockets the glass eyes that were to be used for this purpose. Bentham played a prominent role in the social movements of early-19th-century Britain. Many of the political reforms introduced during this period (such as the secret ballot, advocated by Bentham’s friend, George Grote) reflect his views. Bentham’s insistence that the legislature is the proper agent of change in society has also been influential. His opinion of the common law has had an enormous impact in England, where the prevailing view—in spite of its inaccuracy—has been that judges only apply and interpret the law made by Parliament. The vocabulary used by legal and political theorists (e.g., international law, maximize, minimize, and codification) is indebted to Bentham’s proclivity for inventing terms. It would be out of the question to summarize the entire range of reforms that Bentham explored and advocated in the course of a long and varied life. It is nonetheless typical that he advocated a public prosecution service, at a time when private prosecution was still a feature of the criminal law. He also saw the need to collect and maintain statistical data regarding crime, primarily because this would provide information that legislators needed to fulfill their responsibilities. All of this can be seen as a natural extension of his general interest in the reform of public institutions, which led him to endorse a systematic and professional civil service. Bentham deserves credit for the movement to codify the criminal law in England. A draft Criminal Code was prepared by James Fitzjames Stephen, a follower of Bentham who is considered

Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School

the foremost authority on the criminal law in England. The proposal came to nothing when the Conservative government went down to defeat in the general election of March 1880. It nevertheless provided much of the impetus for the codification of the criminal law in those countries following the common law. It is also significant that utilitarianism was largely successful in undermining the validity of retribution as a legitimate principle in sentencing, to the point where American courts have held that retribution for its own sake violates the restriction on cruel and unusual punishment.

Criticisms Bentham is important for identifying a number of deficiencies in the common law. He failed to recognize, however, that the origins of the common law lie more in custom and moral consensus than in judicial opinion. This is particularly true in the area of the criminal law. Related concerns are that his legal theory leaves the authority to make law entirely in the hands of the legislature, and that the majority may disregard the rights and needs of minorities. This continues to present difficulties for legal positivists. Bentham also neglected the importance of the social sciences in the study of human behavior. Although he was influenced by Helvétius, who saw the importance of social circumstances in determining behavior, Bentham neglected these considerations. His work fails to recognize the pathological aspects of criminal behavior or differentiate from other kinds of decisions, the decision—if it is a decision—to commit a crime. Bentham was also only incidentally concerned with the etiology of crime, which is one of the central preoccupations of modern criminological theory. This may reflect his liberal stance, since he seemed reluctant to judge criminal acts, except so far as they represented a threat to the general good. Problems in Bentham’s moral theory also surface in his views on the nature of crime and punishment. Bentham took a different position than Beccaria on torture and believed that it would be justified in situations where the pain to the individual defendant was outweighed by the larger benefit to those who would be spared unnecessary pain. Many commentators have also argued that there are many situations where utility and the

93

greatest happiness may be served by prosecuting the innocent. Finally, Bentham’s work sometimes fails to catch the moral and emotional complexities of human circumstances.

Relevance to Criminology Today Bentham’s primary contribution to criminology lies in his theory of punishment. His work is relevant as well in light of the current reappraisal of classical theory, which focuses on the capacity of individuals to choose. This is a more complicated matter than generally acknowledged, since the classical view, which still persists in the courts, also rests on the immoral nature of the decision to commit a crime. Bentham’s work and the hedonic calculus focus instead on the rational aspects of criminal conduct. This resurgence of interest of criminologists in Bentham’s work is also related to the contemporary influence of decision theory. On this view, crime is explained through an analysis of the specific decisions made by those who commit crimes. Although this is in keeping with liberal views in philosophy and political theory, it runs against the sociological and psychological grain of much academic work in criminology. It also presents issues for public policy, which has usually proceeded on the basis that the causes of crime are to be found in larger social, economic, or political conditions in society. There is a certain irony in the fact that Bentham’s work, in spite of its liberal foundations, led him to formulate an institutional approach that has justified increasing the level of social control in modern society. The critical and Marxist schools of criminology have noted that the criminal law has been used, historically, as a means of preserving the economic and social order. Foucault relates this to the birth of prisons, and many sociologists would agree that Bentham’s work sets out the mechanisms of isolation and surveillance that are still used to maintain social order in modern western society. William Sweet and Paul Groarke See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime

94

Bernard, Thomas J., and Jeffrey B. Snipes: Variable-Centered Approach

References and Further Readings Becker, G. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76, 169–217. Bedau, H. A. (2000). “Anarchical fallacies”: Bentham’s attack on human rights. Human Rights Quarterly, 22, 261–279. Bedau, H. A. (2004). Bentham’s theory of punishment: Origin and content. Journal of Bentham Studies, 7. Available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/ journal/Bedau.htm Bentham, J. (1962). The works of Jeremy Bentham (J. Bowring, Ed.). New York: Russell & Russell. (Original work published 1838–1843) Bentham, J. (1970). Of laws in general, Part 2, Volume 2 [Volume 8 of Collected works of Jeremy Bentham (H. L. A. Hart, Ed.). London: Athlone Press]. (Original work published 1782) Calvert, B. (2006). Bentham and the death penalty. Dialogue, 45, 211–231. Foucault, M. (1975). Survellir et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Halévy, E. (1904). La formation du radicalisme philosophique (3 vols.). Paris: Felix Alcan. Harrison, R. (1983). Bentham. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hart, H. L. A. (1973). Bentham on legal rights. In A. W. B. Simpson (Ed.), Oxford essays in jurisprudence (2nd series, pp. 171–201). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Hart, H. L. A. (1982). Essays on Bentham: Studies in jurisprudence and political theory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Mack, M. P. (1962). Jeremy Bentham: An odyssey of ideas 1748–1792. London: Heinemann. Manning, D. J. (1968). The mind of Jeremy Bentham. London: Longmans. Mill, J. S. (1867). Utilitarianism (3rd ed.). London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. Mill, J. S. (1969). Remarks on Bentham’s philosophy (1833). In J. Robson (Ed.), The collected works of John Stuart Mill: Vol. X. Essays on ethics, religion, and society. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto. Plamenatz, J. (1949). The English utilitarians. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Schofield, P. (2009). Bentham: A guide for the perplexed. London: Continuum. Semple, J. (1993). Bentham’s prison: A study of the panopticon penitentiary. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. 

Stephen, L. (1900). The English utilitarians (Vol. 3). London: Duckworth.

Bernard, Thomas J., and Jeffrey B. Snipes: VariableCentered Approach Thomas J. Bernard and Jeffrey B. Snipes’s variablecentered approach describes a strategy for constructing an integrated or general theory of crime. It differs in a fundamental way from most recent attempts at constructing integrated theories. Rather than combining existing theories of crime, such as control and social learning theories, it focuses on identifying the major variables that cause crime and describing the relationships between them. This entry begins by describing why Bernard and Snipes prefer this approach. It then describes the variables that should be considered in such an approach and the relationships between them. Bernard and Snipes (1996, p. 301) believe that “there are too many theories in criminology.” They note that researchers have devoted much effort to testing these theories in an attempt to determine which are true and which are false. But this strategy has not worked, because it is not the case that some theories are true and others are false. Rather, all theories capture part of the truth. Given this fact, it makes sense to combine or integrate these theories. Bernard and Snipes, however, state that efforts to integrate the leading crime theories have not produced satisfactory results. This is because most of the integrations attempt to combine rather abstract theories. Bernard and Snipes state that efforts at integration should instead focus on the concrete variables that cause crime: variables such as economic status and self-control. These variables and the relationships between them can be observed and measured, resulting in a more straightforward and readily testable integration. Bernard and Snipes then describe the types of variables that should be considered in an integrated theory. In doing so, they draw on existing crime theories. They state that some theories seek to explain the rate and distribution of crime in

Bernard, Thomas J., and Jeffrey B. Snipes: Variable-Centered Approach

groups or collectivities (e.g., why some neighborhoods have higher crime rates than others). These structure/process theories focus on the features of the larger social environment that cause crime and the processes by which these features lead to crime. For example, neighborhoods with high rates of poverty have higher levels of crime. This is because people in these neighborhoods are more likely to conclude that crime is the best way to satisfy their needs and desires, since legitimate jobs are scarce and the likelihood of being sanctioned for crime is low. Further, people in these neighborhoods are more likely to justify or approve of crime. It is important to note that structure/process theories state that the people who engage in crime are no different than non-criminals. Rather, they are simply in environments that are conducive to crime. Bernard and Snipes also state that some theories focus not on the larger social environment, but on the differences between individuals—especially the biological and psychological differences. These individual difference theories state that individuals with certain characteristics are more likely than others to engage in crime, regardless of their environment. For example, individuals who are low in self-­ control—or the ability to restrain themselves from acting on their immediate impulses and desires—are more likely to engage in crime. Such theories do sometimes acknowledge that the characteristics of individuals are influenced by their immediate social environment, such as the family environment. These theories, however, usually do not give much consideration to the larger social environment. Bernard and Snipes state that the variables identified by these theories should also be considered in the variable-centered approach they advocate. Finally, Bernard and Snipes discuss the relationship between structure/process and individual difference theories. They argue that such theories can be integrated, even though they appear to be at odds with one another. In particular, features of the larger environment may help explain the origin of those individual characteristics that cause crime. High levels of poverty, for example, may negatively impact the family environment and thereby reduce the likelihood that parents will teach their children to exercise self-control. Also, structure/process theories should acknowledge that individuals may differ in their response to the same environment,

95

with some individuals being more likely to respond to particular environments with crime. In sum, the variable-centered approach of Bernard and Snipes recognizes that both features of the environment and of the individual are important in explaining crime. Bernard and Snipes list many of the specific environmental and individual variables that have been found to impact crime. These variables include a range of biological factors, such as brain dysfunction; personality characteristics, such as impulsivity and insensitivity; weak attachment to parents; association with others who approve of crime; neighborhood characteristics, such as poverty and mobility levels; and cultural characteristics, such as the relative emphasis placed on material success. Bernard and Snipes state that further research will allow us to better determine the relative importance of these and other variables in causing crime. They also provide limited guidance on how these variables are related to one another and why they affect crime. The variable-centered approach, then, represents a major strategy for integrating theories of crime. Robert Agnew See also Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory; Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime; Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency; Thornberry, Terence P.: Interactional Theory

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (2005). Why do criminals offend? A general theory of crime and delinquency. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Bernard, T. J., & Snipes, J. B. (1996). Theoretical integration in criminology. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 20, pp. 301–348). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Messner, S. F., Krohn, M. D., & Liska, A. E. (1989). Theoretical integration in the study of deviance and crime: Problems and prospects. New York: State University of New York Press. Vold, G. B., Bernard, T. J., & Snipes, J. B. (2002). Theoretical criminology. New York: Oxford University Press.

96

Blau, Judith R., and Peter M. Blau: Inequality and Crime

Blau, Judith R., and Peter M. Blau: Inequality and Crime In their seminal article “The Cost of Inequality: Metropolitan Structure and Violent Crime” published in the American Sociological Review in 1982, Judith R. and Peter M. Blau advanced a hypothesis concerning the links between race, socioeconomic inequality, and violent crime in the United States. The essence of their argument was that inequalities in the distribution of valued resources may be viewed as legitimate if the inequities are based on achieved characteristics like education or skill level. However, inequality in the distribution of valued resources on the basis of inborn or ascribed characteristics, when apparent in a cultural context like the United States that supposedly values equality and opportunity for all, will be viewed as illegitimate and unjust. According to their hypothesis, where conditions of socioeconomic inequality based on ascribed characteristics are widespread, rates of violence can be expected to be higher. Thus, the actual focus is on economic inequality between races. John Hipp refers to this as consolidated inequality theory due to the way it links the dual factors of race and economic inequality. The theoretical mechanisms linking ascriptive inequality to violence by the Blaus are varied. They initially argue that criminal violence is an expression of diffuse aggression and hostile impulses caused by ascriptive inequality. They also invoke social disorganization theory by citing “undermined social integration of a community,” Marxist and strain theories by referring to “resentment, frustration, hopelessness, and alienation,” and Durkheimian theory with reference to “anomie” and normative “regulation.” In terms of empirically testing their hypothesis, the Blaus applied correlational and regression analysis techniques to data for 1970 on the 125 largest Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) in the United States. They found that the Gini coefficient of income inequality was a stronger predictor of all violent crime rates than poverty rates, and that the “Southern effect” on violence was rendered null when both the Gini coefficient and their measure of socioeconomic status (SES) inequality in race were included in the model. They

ultimately conclude that both within-race inequalities and between-race inequalities are related to violence—the former mostly to violent crimes involving people who know each other (murder and aggravated assault) and the latter more closely related to the prevalence of violent crimes involving strangers (rape and robbery). The publication of this study prompted a substantial number of additional publications calling into question their findings and generally highlighting the limitations of macrosocial inquiry altogether. In the end, though, many of them did not make all that much of a difference for the Blaus’ core assertion: that racial inequality is linked to higher rates of criminal violence. For example, a comment in American Sociological Review by Robert O’Brien questioned the use of FBI Uniform Crime Reports data by the Blaus. However, because no good alternatives were available at the time, this critique was largely ignored. Similarly, Kirk Williams argued that the Blaus did not detect an association between poverty and violence because they failed to take into account its non-linear relationship with homicide in particular. Still, in his model, the effect of the racial inequality measure detected by the Blaus remained, which was their most important point. In response to this mounting criticism, Peter Blau and Reid Golden published another analysis with the same data, adding a few more control variables. They reconfirmed the racial inequality–violence link while acknowledging that it may not be as strong as they previously reported. A later study by James Balkwell generally supports the Blaus’ conclusions. Alternatively, Golden and Steven Messner report that merely measuring racial inequality in incomes does not lead to a replication of the original findings. They then find that the Blaus’ findings are completely dependent upon model specification. Perhaps the most important limitation of the Blaus’ original study was that they did not use racially disaggregated data. This is a critical issue to take under consideration because the theoretical framework suggests that racial inequality should elevate black rates of violence but not necessarily white rates. In their analytical model, the explanatory measure of racial inequality was reasonable, but global outcome measures made it impossible to further dissect the observed relationships and

Blau, Judith R., and Peter M. Blau: Inequality and Crime

determine if the structural relationships were really race specific. To be sure, the Blaus and most other scholars of the day were constrained by a severe lack of data availability, a log jam that was later broken when Robert Sampson secured racespecific arrest data and began publishing studies with them. Notably, it was through the use of racedisaggregated data that the biggest challenges to the Blaus’ original findings would emerge. Sampson’s race-disaggregated study of homicide in 55 large U.S. cities found no support for the proposition that racial inequality would be associated with black homicide rates. In a similar study of SMSAs using race-disaggregated arrest data, Miles Harer and Darrell Steffensmeier reached the same conclusion. Both of these studies employed inequality in income as the measure of racial disparity, which Golden and Messner reported usually was not associated with rates of violence. This is an important point because it is at this juncture that the entire macrosocial literature concerned with race and crime took a dramatic turn. With the publication of William Julius Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged, and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid 6 years later, macro-criminology took to the realization that racial inequality was not just economic in nature—an emphasis consistent with the Blaus. Perhaps more important, these landmark works emphasized how spatial arrangements within cities could profoundly influence the processes generating black urban violence. Until this time, most analysts took issue with the Blaus’ statistical models and paid very little attention to the theoretical processes that were supposed to be causing racial inequality to generate minority violence to begin with. But the ecologically grounded work of Wilson and of Massey and Denton clearly favored social disorganized-based social-control theoretic interpretations of the racial inequality–black violence link over reductionist accounts emphasizing diffuse aggression and personal hostility. Contemporary scholarship on racial inequality and violence thus owes a debt of gratitude to the Blaus’ important work for emphasizing that racial inequality is more broad based than mere inequality in incomes. Moreover, while their articulation of the conceptual links between ascriptive inequalities and violence were not widely accepted, the

97

Blaus’ arguments forced other scholars to think more closely about the nature of these causal mechanisms. Matthew R. Lee See also Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Inequality and Crime; Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime; Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

References and Further Readings Balkwell, J. W. (1990). Ethnic inequality and the rate of homicide. Social Forces, 69, 53–70. Blau, P. M., & Golden, R. M. (1986). Metropolitan structure and criminal violence. Sociological Quarterly, 27, 15–26. Golden, R. M., & Messner, S. F. (1987). Dimensions of racial inequality and rates of violent crime. Criminology, 25, 525–541. Harer, M. D., & Steffensmeier, D. (1992). The differing effects of economic inequality on black and white rates of violence. Social Forces, 70, 1035–1054. Hipp, J. R. (2007). Income inequality, race, and place: Does the distribution of race and class within neighborhoods affect crime rates? Criminology, 45, 665–697. Massey, D., & Denton, N. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Messner, S. F., & Golden, R. M. (1992). Racial inequality and racially disaggregated homicide rates: An assessment of alternative theoretical explanations. Criminology, 30, 421–447. O’Brien, R. M. (1983). Metropolitan structure and violent crime: Which measure of crime? Comment on Blau and Blau, ASR, February 1982. American Sociological Review, 48, 434–437. Sampson, R. J. (1985). Race and criminal violence: A demographically disaggregated analysis of urban homicide. Crime and Delinquency, 31, 47–82. Shihadeh, E. S., & Flynn, N. (1996). Segregation and crime: The effect of black social isolation on the rates of urban black violence. Social Forces, 74, 1325–1352. Williams, K. R. (1984). Research note: Economic sources of homicide: Reestimating the effects of poverty and inequality. American Sociological Review, 49, 283–289.

98

Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime

Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime In the early 20th century, scholars examining the causes of crime tended to see the roots of criminal behavior as products of people’s free will or of other causes lying within the individual. Willem Bonger, a Dutch sociologist, took a different approach and argued that crime was caused by societal factors, specifically the economy and its effects on people. In creating his argument, he was influenced by theorists such as Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, and he explored the links between crime and economics in his text Criminality and Economic Conditions (original version: 1905; English version: 1916). In this book, Bonger argued that the capitalist economic structure can have a detrimental influence on society and can create criminal behavior and allow it to flourish. Many scholars view Bonger as a founding father of critical criminology.

Origins of Bonger’s Approach In building his argument that the causes of crime have a basis in society in Criminality and Economic Conditions, Bonger first critiqued the more common viewpoint at the time that crime was caused by factors resting within the individual, either because of their free will to choose their own actions, including criminal behaviors, or by their biological makeup. In developing this argument, Bonger explored a number of scholars who had examined the causes of crime from various standpoints, including philosophers, spiritualists, biologists, sociologists, and bio-sociologists, and he compared each school’s discussion of the origins of crime. Bonger refuted each school’s claims and noted that the link between crime and the economic conditions in a country was the most compelling argument. One basis for his reasoning was that many of those authors who have examined this link agree that economy and crime are related, even if other factors, such as morality or imitation

of others’ criminal behavior, are more important. Only a small proportion of the cited authors argued that there is no relationship between crime and economic conditions. Many of the above authors looked at economic conditions solely in terms of the amount of poverty and wealth in a country. In contrast, Bonger believed that to understand how these conditions can influence crime, scholars need to look at distribution of wealth in a country rather than the total amount of wealth. In other words, a country that is wealthy overall may still have a high crime rate if there are people who are impoverished alongside people who are very wealthy. Bonger then described that the economic conditions of a country build the social structure of that country. The economic condition that is a key cause of a society’s crime is modern capitalism. Although Marx and Engels did not have a primary focus on crime and law, they did mention some aspects of crime that Bonger further expanded upon. People will produce goods and services to meet their survival needs, such as food and shelter. In a capitalist society, some individuals will own and control the means of production; they are the people who own the factories and businesses that distribute goods and service and are referred to as the bourgeoisie. Other individuals have only their own labor to trade for other goods and services; these are the workers (the proletariat). Social classes developed as a result of this differential access to goods and services. In a capitalist society, therefore, some individuals will have money and that money can translate into power to distribute resources at will; other individuals will lack money. Those people who have the power want to keep it, mainly through exploiting the labor of those who do not have power, and those who do not have the power will struggle against those who do. One’s status in society is not due to one’s innate capacity but rather is the result of capitalism, which creates differences in money and power. Capitalism is not the sole economic structure that can lead to the gap between rich and poor; under capitalism, however, the distance between rich and poor has increased to a larger extent and continues to increase. As support for his argument, Bonger examined problems such as poverty and illiteracy in various European countries for many years and compared these to the countries’

Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime

crime rates. With a few exceptions, he found that as poverty or illiteracy increase, so does the amount of crime.

The Downside of Capitalism A primary purpose of capitalism is for people to make a profit. Under capitalism, production is for the sake of exchange rather than for personal consumption. In other words, people do not use the goods they produce; they exchange those goods for money or other goods or services. In any exchange, people try to maximize their own profit while minimizing the profits of others. Capitalism has benefits, including the fact that all people have the potential to obtain wealth and that a competitive market makes products better and cheaper. However, there is a societal drawback. The capitalist mode of production creates and fosters egoism in people. Egoism refers to placing one’s own selfinterests above the interests of others; it is the opposite of altruism, which refers to placing the interests of others above those of oneself. According to Bonger, humans are intrinsically altruistic, and he based this assumption from an examination of helping behaviors of other animals and by looking at more “primitive” human societies, mainly Native American tribes, which were described as kind, hospitable, and focused on helping each other. Bonger highlighted that egoism itself does not make people criminal but can make people more capable of crime. Capitalism either creates or reinforces egoism by lessening any altruistic instincts and by weakening the “moral force in man which combats the inclination towards egoistic acts” including criminal ones (p. 532). The change toward capitalism drives people to be more ambitious and greedier and to develop “egoism at the expense of altruism” (p. 401). When people are looking out for themselves above all others, they lose compassion for others and “a great part of morality disappears” (p. 532). Although egoism is the primary cause of crime under capitalism, crime also occurs as a result of the demoralization of people who live in poorer conditions. Bonger described various social institutions, such as marriage and family, and how capitalism can weaken these institutions. For example, women must marry in order to obtain social and financial security; those who are unable to attain

99

financial security in that way may turn to prostitution. Bourgeois children are spoiled by luxury, whereas proletariat children are not taught proper morals that would keep them out of crime. He argued that the children of the proletariat need to work in factories to help earn money for their families, thereby lessening prosocial intellectual and moral education. Instead, their work brings them into contact with older people who may teach them poor moral values and egoism, which in turn leads to the greater likelihood of crime. Many poorer children will be raised in this poor environment in which they have little education other than beatings from their parents, which can habituate them to violence; therefore, a tendency to violence is taught at a young age. By the effects of capitalism destroying the traditional cultural values and informal social controls, and promoting hedonism and selfishness, people are no longer prevented from committing harmful acts. Crime becomes a rational response to capitalist exploitation.

The Breadth of Bonger’s Theory The problems of capitalism can be used to explain a variety of crimes, from minor crimes to more serious offenses. For example, vagrancy and begging are more common under capitalism because there will always be some people who are unable to sell their labor. Furthermore, Bonger noted that as an example of how poorly paid some laborers are, it can even be more profitable to beg than to work. Next, because in a capitalist society having possessions can be viewed as success, people who cannot afford these possessions may turn to crime, especially theft, to attain greater status in the views of others. As an example of violent crime, the economic situation influences the amount of rape by affecting whether people can marry; marriage, in turn, limits these crimes. Members of the proletariat are less likely to be able to afford to marry, and therefore must satisfy their sexual urges illegally. Women’s inferior social position along with alcoholism, a more common affliction among the proletariat, and “sexual demoralization and lack of civilization” can lead members of the proletariat to rape (p. 620). Through applying the above arguments regarding the influence of economy on social structure, Bonger can explain the causes of crime within a

100

Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender

society as well as variation of criminality across different societies, as capitalist societies will have more crime compared to countries with more equal distribution of wealth. Because the problems of capitalism can influence both the wealthy and the poor, Bonger explored not only crimes by the working class but also those of the people in power. Wealthier people could, for example, steal a large amount of other people’s money, partly because of their opportunity to have access to other’s money (e.g., in working in a bank) and partly because egoism stimulates greed for all classes.

The Economic Solution to Crime In order to eliminate most crime, Bonger advocated for a society based on community support and a lack of material poverty. Culture, intellect, and wealth should not be limited to the benefit of some people but rather should be enjoyed by all. If an economic system like capitalism is the cause or reinforcer of people’s self interestedness, then an economic system that supports altruism would lessen people’s egoism. According to Bonger, an economic system such as socialism, or one in which people have more equal footing economically, would support altruism and, in turn, reduce rates of crime. Amy Stichman See also Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime; Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime; Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime; Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology

References and Further Readings Antonaccio, O., & Tittle, C. R. (2007). A cross-national test of Bonger’s theory of criminality and economic conditions. Criminology, 45, 925–958. Bonger, W. (1916) Criminality and economic conditions. Boston: Little, Brown. (Original work published 1905) Chamlin, M. B., & Cochran, J. K. (2006). Economic inequality, legitimacy, and cross-national homicide rates. Homicide Studies, 10, 231–252. Mike, B. (1976). Willem Adriaan Bonger’s “Criminality and Economic Conditions”: A critical analysis. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 4, 211–238.

Neapolitan, J. (1995). Differing theoretical perspectives and cross-national variation in thefts in less developed nations. International Criminal Justice Review, 5, 17–31. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Van Bremmelen, J. M. (1955). Pioneers in criminology. VIII. Willem Adriaan Bonger (1987–1940). The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 46, 293–302. Van Swaaningen, R. (1999). Reclaiming critical criminology: Social justice and European tradition. Theoretical Criminology, 3, 5–28. Wright, R. A. (2000). Left out? The coverage of critical perspectives in introductory criminology textbooks, 1900–1999. Critical Criminology, 9, 101–122.

Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices

of

Gender

During the decade of the 1960s, an increasing amount of attention was paid to the concept of gender. Many began to suggest that roles of men and women were not biologically determined but were instead socially constructed. Through socialization, society encouraged individuals to adopt and develop certain gender roles by encouraging wanted and discouraging unwanted behavior. In 2001, Jean Bottcher published “Social Practices of Gender: How Gender Relates to Delinquency in the Everyday Lives of High-Risk Youth.” The intent of this research was to convey a message that gender needed to be conceptualized as a social practice—something done in everyday life— and that certain social practices of gender are intertwined with delinquent behavior. Bottcher thus explained, “The key is to conceptualize gender as an active process” (p. 894). In her view, conceptualizing gender as an active process meant identifying the activities that high-risk adolescent boys and girls do every day to be “masculine” or “feminine” and examining how delinquent behavior fits into these activities (social practices). Bottcher believed that an examination of high-risk adolescent boys’ and girls’ social practices of gender may reveal social conditions and activities that have an effect on delinquent involvement.

Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender

101

History of the Study of Gender

Gender and Delinquency

Gender was once a term used simply to define biological sex. The first radical alteration to this paradigm came about in the early 1960s through the work of sociologists, psychologists, and feminists. These groups began to propose that roles of men and women were not biologically determined but rather were socially constructed. It was suggested that gender did not refer to biological differences of human beings but to cultural patterns, norms, and values encouraged through socialization. The important distinction between the biological “sex” and the cultural “gender” is the fact that gender is defined by society, not biology. Therefore, gender is not a role or identity. Instead, gender is “an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting males and females as different in socially significant ways and organizing inequality in terms of those differences” (Ridgeway, 2001, p. 637). Gender is something someone “does” rather than “is.” As the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir eloquently stated, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” It is well documented that men and women experience differential socialization that begins at the moment of birth. Society has expectations (i.e., attitudes and beliefs) regarding appropriate male and female behaviors. In most societies, there are differences and inequalities between women and men in responsibilities assigned, activities undertaken, access to and control over resources, and decision-making opportunities. The traditional feminine gender role prescribes that women are dependent, emotional, sexually passive, and responsible for providing the emotional support and nurturing to family members and the sick. Traditional roles for women tend to be relationship-oriented, where a woman’s sense of self becomes very much organized around being able to make and maintain affiliation and relationships. In contrast, the traditional masculine gender role prescribes that men focus on autonomy, self-reliance, and independence and that men should de-emphasize the expression of feelings. Individual men and women internalize these societal expectations and conform to gender-role norms. By age 4 or 5, most children have developed and internalized gender stereotypic attitudes and beliefs. This process has been found to continue throughout an individual’s life, even in the absence of any social or institutional pressures.

A significant body of literature has examined the important role that gender may play in delinquent behavior. Overall, a review of this literature suggests that adolescent males commit a higher proportion of juvenile crime than do adolescent females. However, much of this research has defined gender in narrow terms of traits (e.g., selfcontrol) or beliefs and life experiences (e.g., opportunities to engage in crime) and conditions that are a product of different patterns of socialization. Bottcher described how much of the theoretical work that focuses on the relationship between gender and delinquency has suffered from limitations including, but not limited to, narrow conceptualizations of gender, unjustified theoretical assumptions, and a lack of rich qualitative data. An examination of the available data provides many examples of gender differences in delinquency. Female juveniles and male juveniles are involved in criminal offending in very different ways. However, focusing on differences between females and males without addressing overall context makes the implicit assumption that women and men operate in similar social contexts or that social context is irrelevant. It is well documented that there are different societal expectations and social contexts for men and women in relation to behavior. Certain expectations and roles are assigned to men, while others are assigned to women. Simply comparing males and females as individuals does not lay out the dimensions of gender in a comprehensive manner. According to Bottcher, much of the current research does not take into consideration the fact that gender is a product of individual and interpersonal action.

Social Practices of Gender Social practices are the things that people do in their daily life like going to work, taking care of children, going to college, and spending time with friends and family. Individuals construct themselves as “masculine” or “feminine” by the way they conduct themselves in their daily life. How do individuals decide they need to do certain social practices, plan certain social practices, and actively engage in such practices or activities? Beliefs about gender-appropriate social practices are often passed down through parents, other family members,

102

Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender

other important role models, and society. These formal and informal sources communicate, directly and/or indirectly, beliefs about what is and what is not appropriate for differently sexed persons. To provide an example, in many countries gender still produces a form of a social division of labor whereby women have primary responsibility of child care and reproduction, while men have the primary responsibility for production. If an individual does not display social practices typical to one’s biological sex, it may become a social problem for them in many cultures. Research has suggested that an individual may have difficulty relating to someone if he or she cannot attribute a gender to that person. This difficulty illustrates the pervasiveness of social beliefs about gender-appropriate social practices. Social practices offer a way to conceptualize not only gender but also delinquency. Bottcher suggests that both gender and delinquency can be defined as social practices and may be shown to interact closely with one another. Adolescent boys and girls create “masculine” and “feminine” identities for themselves in their daily activities. Delinquent behavior may become a resource for an adolescent boy or girl to do masculinity or femininity. This may be particularly true for high-risk youths where options in life are limited. “Crime only makes sense when it is an available and desirable resource, given the alternative resources at hand” (p. 926). Therefore, understanding the social practices of gender is important. These practices can help to explain how delinquency is enabled or caused. Bottcher explained that “although social patterns define gender, social action reproduces those patterns in everyday social life” (p. 896). Social patterns can only exist if they are reproduced across time and space. What social practices of gender help explain how delinquency is enabled or caused? In her research, Bottcher discussed how certain maletyped social practices encouraged or enabled delinquent activity for either sex. One male-typed social practice included the gendered pattern of making friends. Adolescent males were more likely to have highly sex-segregated friendship groups than adolescent females. This overlapped with delinquent behavior where delinquent males were more likely to support sex-segregated group activity than their

nondelinquent male peers. Additionally, the gendered pattern of having fun encouraged or enabled delinquent activity. Adolescent males were more likely to have access to privacy and spend more time with unsupervised peers. Therefore, adolescent males had more crime-prone daily activities than adolescent females. Both of these male-typed social practices placed adolescent males at greater risk for delinquent behavior than adolescent females. Bottcher also discussed how some female-typed social practices appeared to discourage delinquent activity for both sexes. These female-typed social practices included teenage child care, parental responsibilities, and limited social support for female delinquency. Adolescent females appeared to assume adult responsibilities like child care and parental duties at a younger age than adolescent males. This gendered pattern of assigning adult responsibilities appeared to discourage delinquent behavior.

Conclusion Bottcher’s “Social Practices of Gender: How Gender Relates to Delinquency in the Everyday Lives of High-Risk Youth” has influenced those studying gender and delinquency to recognize that gender is a social practice, something done in everyday life, and that there are certain social practices of gender that are intertwined with delinquent behavior. Her research suggests that theories of crime and delinquent behavior must include an interactive and contextually sensitive concept of gender. Kathryn A. Branch See also Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender

References and Further Readings Bem, S. (1983). Gender schema theory and its implications for child development: Raising genderaschematic children in a gender-schematic society. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8, 598–616. Bigler, R. (1997). Conceptual and methodological issues in the measurement of children’s sex typing. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 53–69.

Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect Bottcher, J. (2001). Social practices of gender: How gender relates to delinquency in the everyday lives of high-risk youths. Criminology, 39, 893–931. Deaux, K. (1984). From individual differences to social categories: Analysis of a decade’s research on gender. American Psychologist, 39, 105–116. Deaux, K., & Major, B. (1987). Putting gender into context: An interactive model of gender related behavior. Psychological Review, 94, 369–389. Eagly, A. (1987). Sex differences in social behavior: A social role interpretation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Epstein, C. F. (1988). Deceptive distinctions: Sex, gender, and social order. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hagan, J. (1988). Structural criminology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Heimer, K., & De Coster, S. (1999). The gendering of violent delinquency. Criminology, 37, 277–318. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. LaGrange, T., & Silverman, R. (1999). Low self-control and opportunity: Testing the general theory of crime as an explanation for gender differences in delinquency. Criminology, 37, 41–72. Mazerolle, P. (1998). Gender, general strain, and delinquency: An empirical examination. Justice Quarterly, 15, 65–91. Messerschmidt, J. W. (1993). Masculinities and crime. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Messerschmidt, J. W. (2004). Flesh and blood: Adolescent gender diversity and violence. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Renzetti, C., & Curran, D. (1992). Women, men, and society (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Ridgeway, C. (2001). Gender, status, and leadership. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 637–655. Shumaker, S., & Hill, D. (1991). Gender differences in social support and physical health. Health Psychology, 10, 102–111.

Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect Published in 1995, Philippe Bourgois’s pathbreaking book In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio is still timely, given that it focuses on the

103

destructive impact of major economic transitions in North America that are still taking place at the start of this new millennium, including alarmingly high levels of unemployment plaguing metropolitan neighborhoods. In Search of Respect also continues to assist criminologists in their ongoing attempts to develop a rich theoretical understanding of how structural determinants, such as transnational corporations moving operations to developing countries, help create criminal youth subcultures and gangs in disenfranchised innercity communities. In addition to being theoretically important, Bourgois’s book includes in-depth ethnographic data derived from 5 years spent in East Harlem (also referred to as El Barrio) observing, tape recording, and photographing various components of the lives of roughly 24 Puerto Rican crack dealers. In some ways, Bourgois’s work resembles that of Oscar Lewis’s mid-1960s research. For example, both scholars are anthropologists and both have done ethnographic research in El Barrio. However, they offer fundamentally different interpretations of the sources of poverty there and the myriad of social problems related to this highly injurious symptom of structured social inequality. Based on life-history data provided by one extended Puerto Rican family, Lewis offered the culture of poverty theory, which contends that middle-class and lower-class values are distinct. Instead of addressing how broader political, economic, and cultural forces are related to social and economic exclusion, Lewis—as well as more contemporary culture-of-poverty theorists—argue that the poor are poor because, unlike middleclass people, they lack the moral fiber and discipline to earn an education, to get jobs, to defer gratification, and so on. On the other hand, Bourgois’s account asserts that macro-level factors such as the following have fueled the emergence of Puerto Rican drug dealing gangs in El Barrio: the rapid expansion of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector in New York City; the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); transnational corporations moving operations to use cheap labor; the implementation of high technology in the workplaces; and the shift from a manufacturing to a servicebased economy. Bourgois also contends that these

104

Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect

ghetto-based criminal subcultures are not distinct from the wider or mainstream U.S. culture. On the contrary, they are a core element of U.S. culture and actively involved in the pursuit of the American Dream and the respect garnered from it. As Bourgois (1995, p. 326) argues: Like most other people in the United States, drug dealers and street criminals are scrambling to obtain their piece of the pie as fast as possible. In fact, in their pursuit of success they are even following the minute details of the classical Yankee model for upward mobility. They are aggressively pursuing careers as private entrepreneurs; they take risks, work hard, and pray for good luck. They are the ultimate rugged individualists braving an unpredictable frontier where fortune, fame, and destruction are all around the corner, where the enemy is ruthlessly hunted down and shot.

Although he does not specifically identify himself as an anomie, a subcultural, or as a left realist theorist, Bourgois’s perspective seems to be heavily informed by the work of Albert Cohen, Robert K. Merton, Steven Messner, Richard Rosenfeld, and Jock Young. Left realists assert that inner-city people who lack legitimate means of solving the problem of relative deprivation come into contact with other frustrated disenfranchised people and form subcultures, which in turn, encourage and legitimate criminal behaviors. As Bourgois discovered, receiving respect from peers is highly valued among El Barrio males who are denied status in mainstream, middle-class society. Until recently, most empirical and theoretical work on urban gangs paid little, if any, attention to the role of gender. This cannot be said about Bourgois’s contribution. Consistent with male peer support theorists who examined woman abuse in inner-city public housing communities (e.g., Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz), Bourgois draws from a feminist interpretation of gender relations to explain how postindustrial factors influenced brutal patriarchal practices and discourses in his research site. For example, as is the case in El Barrio and other ghettos, poor women are not simply passive victims of patriarchal domination and control. Rather, a growing number of them are creating autonomy for themselves and their “sisters” by participating

in the paid labor force, dealing drugs, and by other means. According to Bourgois, these behaviors, and other examples of what he labels as “inverting patriarchy,” challenge men’s hegemony at home and on the streets, which in turn, motivates them to “lash out against the women . . . they can no longer control” (p. 214). Moreover, they are influenced to do so by their peers. Like the college-based hyper-erotic male subcultures identified by male peer support theorists such as Eugene Kanin, Martin Schwartz, and Walter DeKeseredy, Bourgois’s theory of gang-related woman abuse points to the fact that many innercity all-male subcultures produce high or exaggerated levels of sexual aspiration, with members expecting to frequently have intercourse. However, some women end up being raped, and sexual relations have more do with the gang members’ need to compensate for their lack of money and their need to sustain their status among their peers than a need to satisfy their sexual urges. As noted by male peer support theorists, one problem with the above argument is that it is impossible to believe that men with high sexual expectations who force women to have sex can somehow justify their behavior as a legitimate “conquest.” When they are using physical violence and are participating in gang rapes, they must be aware that this behavior will be defined as deviant or criminal not only by other men but also by the criminal justice system. Still, like college-based male peer support groups, Bourgois found that the drug-dealing gang members who participated in his study provided their peers with a vocabulary that defines victims as legitimate targets of abuse. Consider Primo, a young man who dealt crack in East Harlem. He told Bourgois that some of the women that he and his friends gang-raped enjoyed being targets of sexual violence and were “worthy victims.” In the words of Primo, “You gotta understand Felipe, even when they say no, they’re loving it” (p. 210). Bourgois’s analysis of gender relations and gendered violence in East Harlem responds to calls for moving the experiences of ghetto men to the center of empirical and theoretical work on how all-male social networks perpetuate and legitimate woman abuse. To date, most male peer support theories focus exclusively on undergraduate members of patriarchal subcultures despite evidence

Brain Abnormalities and Crime

such as Bourgois’s showing that there are socially and economically disenfranchised male peer groups outside universities that also use sexist and abusive means of interacting with women in public and private places. Thus, Bourgois’s work fills a major gap in the theoretical literature on violence against women. Again, Bourgois does not identify himself as a left realist, but he has things in common with left realist criminologists. First, although he would like to see a major transformation from a society based on class, race/ethnic, and gender inequality to one that is truly equitable and democratic, he explicitly states that this will not happen soon. This is why he proposes practical progressive initiatives that can be implemented immediately, such as decriminalizing drugs, offering poor people quality entrylevel jobs, and permitting unemployed workers to enroll in educational programs while they receive government unemployment assistance. Second, like all left realists, Bourgois sharply opposes policies that view crime primarily as a property of the individual rather than a consequence of broader social, cultural, economic, and political forces. Unfortunately, as Bourgois observes, still to this day, “The psychological reductionist and cultural-essentialist analyses of social marginalization that pass for common sense in the United States frame solutions to racism and poverty around short-term interventions that target the ‘bad attitude’ of individuals” (p. 323). The theoretical perspectives included in Bourgois’s book are informed by several ways of thinking critically about crime and his analysis moves well beyond highly problematic and dated attempts to pathologize Puerto Rican gang members in East Harlem. Indeed, as Bourgois reminds us, the data he uncovered are not restricted to El Barrio. Certainly, many middle-class people use illicit drugs, beat their intimate female partners, and participate in gang rapes. Nevertheless, because of the structural changes described by Bourgoise (e.g., deindustrialization), many poor Puerto Rican residents of New York City cannot find quality legitimate work and have little reason to refrain from criminal activity. This is one of the key reasons why gang-related crimes are committed with greater frequency in ghettos, barrios, and slums. Walter S. DeKeseredy

105

See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Cohen, Albert K: Delinquent Boys; Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Left Realism Criminology; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

References and Further Readings Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press. DeKeseredy, W. S., Alvi, S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2006). Left realism revisited. In W. S. DeKeseredy & B. Perry (Eds.), Advancing critical criminology: Theory and application (pp. 19–42). Lanham, MD: Lexington. DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2002). Theorizing public housing woman abuse as a function of economic exclusion and male peer support. Women’s Health and Urban Life, 1, 26–45. Lewis, O. (1966). La vida: A Puerto Rican family in the culture of poverty—San Juan and New York. New York: Random House. Schwartz, M. D., & DeKeseredy, W. S. (1997). Sexual assault on the college campus: The role of male peer support. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Waterson, A. (1993). Street addicts in the political economy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Knopf.

Brain Abnormalities

and

Crime

Despite the large body of knowledge accumulated by neuroimaging research in the last few decades associating criminal behavior to various neurobiological risk factors, the most well-known theories of criminology remained focused on the use of social and environmental variables to explain criminal and antisocial tendencies. The lack of inclusion of a neurobiological aspect in these theories prevents an in-depth understanding of the complicated biosocial mechanisms underlying criminal behavior, specifically regarding the role that brain abnormalities play in predisposing individuals to criminal and/or violent behavior. This gap in theories can be viewed as problematic especially since several reports have confirmed high rates of brain abnormalities among death row

106

Brain Abnormalities and Crime

inmates, forensic psychiatric inpatients, and other individuals with a history of violence. The phrase brain abnormalities is often employed, as an umbrella term, to describe congenital or acquired anatomical or functional alterations in the brain. Brain abnormalities have long been associated with psychiatric disorders, such as antisocial personality disorder (APD) and psychopathy, of which criminal behavior is a prominent feature. Several hypotheses and models have been proposed based largely on empirical evidence from brain imaging literature. This entry reviews a key hypothesis, the frontal lobe dysfunction hypothesis, which has received a great deal of attention in the past few decades with regard to the neural bases of antisocial, criminal behavior. Specifically, the theory as well as the supporting empirical evidence from lesion, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging findings of structural and functional brain abnormalities in the frontal lobe of criminal offenders and antisocial individuals is discussed. This is followed by a discussion on other models of brain abnormalities and crime, specifically the somatic marker hypothesis and the violent inhibition mechanism, which focuses on brain deficits underlying poor decision making and moral reasoning aspects of criminal offending. This entry concludes with an assessment of the hypothesized link between brain abnormalities and crime, and with a discussion of implications for future studies.

Frontal Lobe Dysfunction Hypothesis The frontal lobe has long been linked to antisocial criminal behavior due to the critical role of this brain region in executive function. The development of this hypothesis has been prompted by lesion, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging studies to explain the behavioral tendency for rulebreaking in criminal offenders. The frontal lobe dysfunction hypothesis proposes that structural and functional deficits to this brain region impair the higher cognitive functioning such as moral decision making, impulse control and emotion regulation, which contribute to criminal offending. This hypothesis received support from Brown and Price, who reviewed the neuropsychological and neuroimaging findings of incarcerated criminals and concluded a high correlation between frontal

dysfunction and increase in aggression and antisocial behavior. Lesion studies have reported changes in personality, specifically an increase in antisocial criminal behavior, following injuries to the frontal lobe. The increase in risky deviant behavior was particularly noticeable when the damage to the frontal lobe involved the orbitofrontal regions. Several case studies have described patients with damage to the orbitofrontal regions, particularly the medial orbitofrontal cortex, to show marked deficits in real-life tasks demanding moral judgment, impulse control, interpersonal sensitivity, and the evaluation of future consequences, while revealing minimal impairments on standard neuropsychological tests of intelligence and executive functions. These patients were also found to show frequent explosive aggressive outbursts. In addition, it has been demonstrated that when prefrontal lobe damage occurred earlier in life (e.g., before the age of 8), the patient suffered a more severe outcome of behavioral disturbances, including executive dysfunction, poor abstract conceptual thinking, impaired theory of mind, and immature moral reasoning later in life. The hypothesis of frontal lobe dysfunction in predisposing to criminal behavior is also supported by several large systematic studies on cohorts of war veterans with head injuries. For example, the Vietnam Head Injury Study found that individuals with frontal lobe lesions engaged in aggressive behavior (e.g., fights, property damages) at a higher rate (14 percent) than those without frontal lobe damage (4 percent). This study also showed that increased aggressive behavior was significantly associated with localized damage to the medial and orbitofrontal regions identified using computed tomography. Other studies reported similar behavioral symptoms as a result of frontal damage in patients with frontotemporal dementia. These patients showed higher rates of criminal behavior—including stealing, physical assault, and sexual comments or advances—compared to patients with Alzheimer’s disease who exhibited equally impaired cognitive function. In short, these lesion findings suggest that dysfunction as a result of frontal damage may be associated with increased criminal behavior, particularly that of an impulsive nature, due to the inability of the disrupted frontal network to suppress impulse.

Brain Abnormalities and Crime

The frontal lobe dysfunction hypothesis for crime is also supported by studies using anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (aMRI) to examine the frontal lobe structures of antisocial individuals and criminal offenders (for a review, see Yang, Raine, et al., 2009). For example, one aMRI study on individuals with APD and found significant gray matter volume reduction in the prefrontal cortex compared with normal controls, a substance-dependent control group, and also a broader psychiatric control group. Similar findings of reduced gray matter volume in the frontal cortex have been reported in aggressive epileptic patients and criminal psychopaths compared to their non-aggressive, non-criminal counterparts. Consistent with lesion findings, aMRI studies further revealed that the reduced gray matter volume in antisocial individuals is localized in the dorsolateral prefrontal, medial frontal, and orbitofrontal cortex. Supporting the predictions of the frontal lobe dysfunction hypothesis, these studies showed a consistent pattern of structural deficits in the frontal lobe in criminal offenders, which may impair their frontal functioning for effective behavioral control and decision making. More direct evidence has also been accumulated from functional imaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the functional integrity of the frontal lobe in individuals with antisocial criminal behavior. For example, several PET studies on psychiatric patients with a history of repetitive violence found decreased metabolic activity in the frontal cortex compared with normal controls. Similarly, significant correlation between higher severity of aggression and lower metabolism in the bilateral medial prefrontal cortex has also been found in a group of aggressive children with epilepsy. Other studies that examined the metabolic abnormality in antisocial individuals by using a challenge task, most commonly a continuous performance task (CPT), also discovered frontal lobe dysfunction in violent individuals. For example, in 1994, Raine and colleagues found reduced glucose metabolism in the anterior medial prefrontal, orbitofrontal, and superior frontal cortex in murderers compared to normal controls using a CPT task. Findings were replicated by the same research team in a follow-up

107

study of a larger sample of murderers and controls (N = 82) in 1997. Using SPECT, Daniel decreased regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) activity in the frontal cortex was found in aggressive psychiatric patients (Amen et al., 1996) and violent perpetrators (Soderstrom et al., 2000). In another study of 21 individuals convicted of impulsive violent offenses, it was revealed that violent patients showed reduced rCBF in the bilateral dorsofrontal cortex compared to non-violent patients (Hirono et al., 2000). The fMRI represents the latest development in brain imaging techniques employed to examine the association between frontal lobe dysfunction and criminal offending, which quickly became popular due to its non-invasive and low-risk nature. In the last several years, clinical neuroscientists have seized upon this technology to examine brain functioning in criminals and antisocial individuals and found abnormal brain activity in the frontal regions in these individuals during an emotional or a cognitive task. For example, Frank Schneider and colleagues found increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the acquisition phase of fear conditioning in individuals with APD. Another study conducted by Niels Birbaumer and colleagues revealed that criminal psychopaths showed significant reduced activation in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex compared to healthy controls. Using a working memory task, V. Kumari and colleagues found activation deficits in the left frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex in violent offenders compared with normal controls. These functional imaging studies have provided strong evidence supporting the frontal lobe dysfunction hypothesis by demonstrating that several frontal subregions failed to respond properly in antisocial individuals and criminal offenders. Although these brain imaging findings have been highly suggestive of a strong link between criminal offending and brain abnormalities, particularly within the frontal cortex, there has been criticism regarding the under-specificity of this hypothesis, in that it did not specify which subregions of the frontal lobe are more closely connected with criminal behavior. Furthermore, it has been argued that this hypothesis seems applicable for reactive types of criminal offending (e.g., reactive aggression) but not for instrumental aggression.

108

Brain Abnormalities and Crime

Other Theories on Brain Abnormalities and Crime Several other models have been proposed for the neurobiological basis of criminal behavior. Many have targeted the poor decision making and aggressive aspects of crime and have hypothesized more localized brain abnormalities in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to be linked to increased deviant behavior. One of the theories is the somatic marker hypothesis, which predicts deficits in the medial OFC may lead to risky decision making by impairing an individual’s ability to accurately assess the reward/punishment value of his or her actions. Another hypothesis, the violent inhibition mechanism model, proposes that brain abnormalities in the amygdala would result in disrupted moral development and the continuation of using aggressive behavior to achieve goals. The Somatic Marker Hypothesis

The somatic marker hypothesis was developed by Antonio Damasio based on findings of patients with brain lesions. It represents a complementary theory for brain abnormalities and crime by suggesting that the neural system underlying emotional processing and regulation (i.e., the medial orbitofrontal cortex) plays a role in decision making. In real life, decision-making processes involve the formation of the action-outcome associations (somatic markers), which are stored in the orbitofrontal regions to assist future decision making in similar situations. This process allows healthy individuals to categorize and learn from punishments. This hypothesis predicts that deficits in the medial OFC would disrupt this process and prevent the individual from experiencing the negative emotional feedback necessary for forming the somatic markers. Such failure in the somatic marker mechanism likely results in an individual’s inability to learn from punishment, therefore recidivating during conflict situations. This hypothesis received a great deal of support from case reports, which found patients with damage to the medial OFC to show changes in personality and behavior. The changes include disinhibition, social dysfunction, emotional deficiency, risky decision making, and a lack of insight into their behavioral problems which may put patients at

higher risk for criminal offending. Neuroimaging literature also supports the hypothesis by showing that criminal offenders have structural and functional deficits in the orbitofrontal regions (Yang & Raine, 2009). However, the more specific prediction of this hypothesis that criminal offenders would show reduced autonomic response to emotion-inducing reward or punishment behavioral outcome has not yet been tested. The Violent Inhibition Mechanism Model

The importance of empathy for the development of moral socialization was said to be one of the reasons for proposing the violent inhibition mechanism (VIM) model. This model proposed that distress cues (e.g., sad and fearful facial affects of others) activate the VIM and in turn result in the aggressive act that caused the distress cue aversive as well. Blair and colleagues define this as the process of moral socialization. This model suggests a crucial involvement of the amygdala in the VIM system due to its role in emotion regulation, fear conditioning learning, and moral decision making. Through the process of classical conditioning, one associates these representations of moral transgressions as triggers for the VIM. Through moral socialization, the normally developing child finds thoughts of aggressive act aversive, and becomes less likely to engage in physical aggression in the future. Although proposed for psychopathy and moral development in particular, the same principle applies to criminal offenders. Based on this model, it may be hypothesized that criminals, particularly violent ones, have a disrupted VIM, possibly an impaired amygdala, resulting in maldeveloped moral reasoning. This prediction has received empirical support from lesion and imaging studies showing amygdala deficits in violent criminal individuals. Although they did not routinely become aggressive, lesion studies showed that patients with amygdala lesions, often showed symptoms such as the inability to recognize facial emotions and had poor recollection of emotional events that may result in the abnormal preference for antisocial behavior. Relationships between abnormalities in the amygdala and individuals with criminal psychopathic behavior have also

Brain Abnormalities and Crime

been found in several brain imaging studies. For example, volume reduction in the amygdala has been found in criminal psychopaths and violent offenders. Functionally, a 1997 study by Raine and colleagues involving murderers found abnormal asymmetries of functioning, with murderers showing lower left and increased right functioning in both the amygdala and hippocampus compared with controls. More recently, using tasks involving emotional processing, several fMRI studies have found abnormal amygdala activation in criminal psychopaths, adolescents with conduct disorders and in individuals with APD. The VIM model has an advantage over frontal lobe dysfunction and somatic marker hypotheses in that it provides an explanation for the emergence of instrumental aggression. Although supported by some neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies, the VIM model for many criminologists still seems too narrow to fully explain the wide range of criminal acts.

Conclusion With the advancement of brain imaging techniques, abnormalities in several brain regions have been revealed in criminal offenders. One of the major theories in the field, the frontal lobe dysfunction hypothesis, has received great support from neuroimaging studies showing both structural and functional disturbances in the frontal lobe in individuals with antisocial criminal behavior. Several other theories including Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis and violent inhibition mechanism model have provided more specific predictions associating brain abnormalities in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex with criminal offending and violent behavior. Future development of a more complex hypothesis incorporating genetic imaging, neuropsychological, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging findings may prove to be of great help in the understanding of brain abnormalities and crime. Yaling Yang and Adrian Raine See also Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory; Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Neurology and Crime; Psychophysiology and Crime

109

References and Further Readings Bechara, A. (2004). The role of emotion in decisionmaking: Evidence from neurological patients with orbitofrontal damage. Brain and Cognition, 55, 30–40. Birbaumer, N., Veit, R., Lotze, M., Erb, M., Hermann, C., Grodd, W., et al. (2005). Deficient fear conditioning in psychopathy. Archives of General Psychiatry, 62, 799–801. Blair, R. J. (2001). Neurocognitive models of aggression, the antisocial personality disorders, and psychopathy. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 71, 727–731. Blair, R. J. (2006). The emergence of psychopathy: Implications for the neuropsychological approach to developmental disorders. Cognition, 101, 414–442. Blair, R. J., Mitchell, D., & Blair, K. (2005). The psychopath: Emotion and the brain. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Brown, M. C., & Price, B. H. (2001). Neuropsychiatry of frontal lobe dysfunction in violent and criminal behavior: A critical review. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 71, 720–726. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error and the future of human life. Scientific American, 271, 144. Damasio, A. R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 351, 1413–1420. Grafman, J., Schwab, K., Warden, D., Pridgen, A., Brown, H. R., & Salazar, A. M. (1996). Frontal lobe injuries, violent and aggression: a report of the Vietnam Head Injury Study. Neurology, 46, 1231–1238. Hirono, N., Mega, M. S., Dinov, I. D., Mishkin, F., & Cummings, J. L. (2000). Left frontotemporal hypoperfusion is associated with aggression in patients with dementia. Archives of Neurology, 57, 861–866. Hux, K., Bond, V., Skinner, S., Belau, D., & Sanger, D. (1998). Parental report of occurrences and consequences of traumatic brain injury among delinquent and non-delinquent youth. Brain Injury, 12, 667–681. Kumari, V., Das, M., Hodgins, S., Zachariah, E., Barkataki, I., Howlett, M., et al. (2005). Association between violent behavior and impaired prepulse inhibition of the startle response in antisocial personality disorder and schizophrenia. Behavioral Brain Research, 158, 159–166. Raine, A., Buchsbaum, M., Stanley, J., Lottenberg, S., Abel, L., & Stoddard, J. (1994). Selective reductions in prefrontal glucose metabolism in murderers. Biological Psychiatry, 36, 365–373.

110

Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory

Schneider, F., Habel, U., Kessler, C., Posse, S., Grodd, W., & Müller-Gartner, H. (2000). Functional imaging of conditioned aversive emotional responses in antisocial personality disorder. Neuropsychobiology, 42, 192–201. Soderstrom, H., Tullberg, M., Wikkelsoe, C., Ekholm, S., & Forsman, A. (2000). Reduced regional cerebral blood flow in non-psychotic violent offenders. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 98, 29–41. Yang, Y., Glenn, A. L., & Raine, A. (2008). Brain abnormalities in antisocial individuals: Implications for the law. Behavioral Science and the Law, 26, 65–83. Yang, Y., & Raine, A. (2009). Frontal cortex and the antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis. Psychiatric Research, 174, 81–88. Yang, Y., Raine, A., Narr, K. L., Colletti, P., & Toga, A. W. (2009). Localization of deformations within the amygdala in individuals with psychopathy. Archive of General Psychiatry, 66, 986–994.

Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory John Braithwaite’s Crime, Shame and Reintegra­ tion, published in 1989, presented a general theory of crime at a time when criminology was criticized for theoretical stagnation. The theory received considerable attention, both among criminologists who have sought to test its hypotheses, and in the growing field of restorative justice. From a theoretical perspective, the theory is interesting because it shows that competing theoretical traditions could be reconciled within a single framework, but its more significant contribution has been to highlight the potential of reintegrative practices and challenge the emphasis placed on punishment in debates on criminal justice. At its center, the theory concerns the distinction between stigmatization and reintegration. But a deeper reading of the theory shows that it is concerned with the way in which individuals, communities, and societies form normative expectations through shaming and how individuals manage the emotions that accompany social disapproval when they violate these norms. This theoretical perspective has continued to develop over the last two decades during which time Braithwaite has offered a revision of the

theory, buttressed it with a normative theory of justice, and has supplemented it with a theory that proposes a broader framework for regulation.

Stigmatization Versus Reintegration Reintegrative shaming theory takes as its starting point the proposition that communication of social disapproval will have the opposite effect on offending depending on whether it is stigmatizing or reintegrative. This basic argument builds significantly on pre-existing criminological theory but also proposes a unique model to explain the effect of social control on criminality. Stigmatization and Labeling Theory

Drawing directly on labeling perspectives, reintegrative shaming theory argues that stigmatization of offenders leads to greater re-offending. Being charged with a crime, found guilty of it in a court, and then sanctioned is a particularly potent way of imposing a deviant identity on an individual because it ceremonially changes the position of the person within society. Being labeled in this way has important social implications, such as reduced employment opportunities, but it is also understood as having psychological consequences, whereby the person comes to think of himself or herself as defined by this criminal status. Central to this critique of criminal justice is the assertion that once imposed, a deviant identity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and is almost irreversible: marginalization reduces the individual’s access to legitimate opportunities while increasing perceptions of injustice and the attractiveness of supportive subcultures. Braithwaite argues that labeling theory, along with subcultural theory and opportunity theory, explain why it is that stigmatizing of offenders is counterproductive. Reintegrative Shaming

Reintegrative shaming theory, however, diverges from the labeling tradition by rejecting the idea that stigmatization is an inevitable product of social disapproval, and its corollary that the application of social control is a fraught exercise. Braithwaite argues that communication of disapproval can be reintegrative in nature, and furthermore that

Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory

communication of reintegrative shaming is essential to reducing crime. He observes that there are many occasions and social contexts in which disapproval of behavior occurs while preserving the identity of the offender as essentially good. One of the primary contexts in which this can be observed is in family life and the disciplining of children, where research shows that an authoritative, rather than permissive or authoritarian, approach is most effective. Braithwaite also draws on the example of Japan as a society, which is both high in shaming and high in reintegrative traditions, that has a remarkably low crime rate. In each of these contexts, reintegrative shaming involves disapproval, rather than permissiveness, ongoing respect for the individual, and communication of forgiveness following disapproval. Toni Makkai and Braithwaite have offered a systematic definition of reintegration and stigmatization by identifying four dimensions that define the difference between these opposite forms of shaming. According to Makkai and Braithwaite, reintegrative shaming involves the following: disapproval while sustaining a relationship of respect, ceremonies to certify deviance terminated by ceremonies to decertify deviance, disapproval of the evil of the deed without labeling the person as evil, and not allowing deviance to become a master status trait. Stigmatization involves disrespectful disapproval, humiliation; ceremonies to certify deviance not terminated by ceremonies to decertify deviance; labeling the person, not only the deed, as evil; and allowing deviance to become a master status trait. The distinction that reintegrative shaming theory makes between stigmatization and reintegration suggests three hypotheses about the relationship between shaming and crime. These can be summarized as (1) tolerance (an absence of social disapproval) will increase offending, (2) stigmatizing shaming will increase offending, and (3) reintegrative shaming will decrease offending. Since the statement of the theory, numerous studies have empirically tested these hypotheses, as well as the structure of the concepts proposed by Braithwaite.

Moral Norms, Communitarianism, and Social Control While an important element of reintegrative shaming theory concerns the failure of stigmatization,

111

the distinctive contribution the theory makes is to explain why it is that reintegrative shaming works to reduce offending. Here the theory places greatest emphasis on the role shaming plays in the development or engagement of conscience. As Braithwaite (1989, p. 9) puts it, reintegrative shaming is “conceived as a tool to allure and inveigle the citizen to attend to the moral claims of the criminal law, to coax and caress compliance, to reason and remonstrate with him over the harmfulness of his conduct.” Shaming is important because of its educative value in developing or reinforcing beliefs about what is wrong. Although the theory suggests that shaming can have a deterrent effect, as an informal sanction that threatens the loss of respect by valued others, this is considered secondary to its moralizing qualities. Shaming that is reintegrative is seen as having distinct advantages because it allows concerns about behavior to be communicated effectively to offenders in a way that stigmatization does not. Affirmation and inclusion of the individual allows for moralizing and denunciation of the act to occur in a way that invites the offender to acknowledge guilt and express remorse knowing that he or she will not be outcast and that forgiveness, or decertification of their deviant status, will occur. Stigmatization focuses attention on the individual’s status rather than the harm he or she has caused and is more likely to damage the offender’s bonds with law-abiding others. Reintegrative shaming theory places considerable store in the ability of moral persuasion to reform individual offenders. However, this faith in moral persuasion at the individual level stems from a broader social premise, which Braithwaite takes from control theorists, that the reason individuals do not commit crime is because they have commitments to shared moral norms and social institutions. He argues that punishment is irrelevant to most people because committing serious crime is unthinkable to them. Socialization of children in families and schools about moral norms leads to a broad consensus about what acts should be crimes. While subcultures that support alternative cultural values exist, support for the criminal law is much greater. Indeed, Braithwaite states that reintegrative shaming theory is only valid to the degree that there is a consensus that certain acts are, and should be, criminalized.

112

Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory

Reintegrative shaming theory is clearly applicable to the explanation of secondary deviance, where reintegrative or stigmatic responses are predicted to have different outcomes on offending. However, the theory’s emphasis on the importance of moral norms, and community-wide shaming in developing a consensus regarding these norms, suggests that primary deviance is also more likely in communities where social mechanisms to express disapproval of crime are weak. The theory argues that societies in which there are strong commitments to shared norms and lower crime are those that engage in reintegrative shaming more often. Shaming is not just important because of its effect on the individual who is the subject of disapproval, but also because it reinforces commitments to norms among those who witness it. Mechanisms such as gossip are significant because of their role in socializing children and adults about what Braithwaite calls the “curriculum of crimes.” Commitment to social norms will be strongest in societies that are communitarian and have high levels of interdependency between individuals. Interdependencies include social bonds, attachments, and commitments between individuals, as emphasized in control theories. Communitarianism refers to a culture in which group loyalties and personal obligations to others in one’s community are emphasized. Both interdependency and communitarianism are predicted to increase the likelihood that communities will be reintegrative as well as the significance that shaming has for individuals.

Shaming and Shame A distinctive characteristic of reintegrative shaming theory is its emphasis on informal mechanisms of social control and particularly the notion of shaming. As seen above, it is the communication of disapproval that is seen as central, because it invokes remorse and desistance by offenders, and builds social consensus that certain behaviors are wrong. This core concept is captured by Braithwaite’s (1989, p. 100) definition of shaming as “all societal processes of expressing disapproval which have the intention or effect of invoking remorse in the person being shamed and/or condemnation by others who become aware of the shaming.” The appropriateness of shaming within contemporary criminal justice systems has attracted a

significant degree of debate. However, it is important to recognize that Braithwaite’s definition of shaming is distinctively broad, and perhaps broader than the use of this term in common language. Shaming is not conceived of as necessarily public, humiliating, or directed at demeaning the person being shamed. Indeed, the definition does not restrict itself to those forms of disapproval that are intended to cause shame, or even remorse, in the target. It is also apparent that this definition does not suggest that shaming is only expressed through a specific set of behaviors, such as placing individuals in stocks or publishing their names in newspapers. These extremely overt forms of shaming only capture a small subset of behaviors that are used to communicate disapproval, and they concentrate our attention on only the most stigmatizing forms. Instead, the theory argues that a broad range of actions are used in societies to communicate disapproval, many of which are indirect and subtle. A discussion between parents and their child about how his or her actions had impacted negatively on others might be considered a form of shaming, even if the parents had no intention of causing their child to feel shame—as would a fine handed down by a court. This definition of shaming invites us to consider the contribution that informal processes make to social control as well as to evaluate the degree to which formal processes of censure are effective in communicating disapproval, rather than focusing just on their instrumental outcomes. Braithwaite’s use of the term shaming, rather than simply disapproval, is significant because it implies that the response to disapproval, and its effectiveness, lies in its emotional nature. What prevents crime in the first place is an “abhorrence” of crime rather than a rational weighing up of its benefits, and shaming in response to a crime invokes shame-related emotions such as shame, embarrassment, humiliation, and guilt. However, Braithwaite’s initial statement of the theory does not provide much detail about the nature of the emotions involved.

Integrating Shame Management In 2001, Braithwaite published a revision of the theory (Ahmed, Harris, Braithwaite, & Braithwaite, 2001). This revision does not alter the theory’s

Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory

prediction that reintegrative forms of shaming reduce crime while stigmatizing forms of shaming increase crime, and Braithwaite points out that this restatement does not preclude testing of the theory in its original form. However, the restatement of the theory seeks to reexamine the foundational concepts forwarded by the theory and, in particular, the relationship between shaming and shame, which Braithwaite argues was undertheorized in the original statement. Building on theories of shame, particularly those of Helen Block Lewis and Thomas Scheff, and empirical research, this revision of the theory argues that shaming is important because it affects how offenders manage shame. While it might have been expected that the most important emotional outcome for predicting recidivism was the degree to which individuals feel shame, this research suggests that the key distinction is the degree to which individuals experience acknowledged or unacknowledged shame. In acknowledged shame, individuals recognize that they feel shame, accept disapproval of their actions as correct, and feel greater empathy for victims. This emotion allows for greater reconciliation and reintegration of offenders because it involves commitment to a shared ethical identity in which the individual is able to affirm an unspoiled, “true” self. Unacknowledged shame occurs when individuals do not recognize that they feel shame, reject the accusation that they have done something wrong, or externalize anger toward others. Un­­ acknowledged shame blocks opportunities for reconciliation and the repair of a damaged ethical identity. It is hypothesized that reintegrative shaming, especially by highly respected others, increases acknowledged shame (shame-guilt) because it is more likely to persuade individuals to acknowledge wrongdoing and appeals to a shared ethical identity. In contrast, stigmatizing shaming is hypothesized to increase unacknowledged shame because it communicates rejection of a shared ethical identity and undermines attempts to persuade an individual that a shared ethical norm is at issue. The revision of the theory forwards a number of hypotheses that are beyond the scope of this discussion. Among these, it predicted that reintegrative shaming and acknowledged shame will be greater in restorative justice interventions, but that

113

stigmatization and unacknowledged shame will be greater in court processes.

Reintegrative Shaming and Restorative Justice From early on reintegrative shaming theory has been associated with restorative justice. Restorative justice presents an alternative approach to the traditional criminal justice system that is defined by a different philosophy and different practices. It argues that justice is best achieved when an offender repairs the harm caused by an offense, rather than punishing the offender, and advocates practices, such as family group conferences, offender mediation, and healing circles that empower the affected parties to come together to decide how this can be achieved. Reintegrative practices that are evident within restorative conferences are the inclusion of people who will offer the offender support, a focus on the offense and its consequences rather than on the offender (even denunciation of the offense is often eschewed in favor of less confronting discussions about the harms that were caused), and the aim of finding ways in which to restore harm rather than punish the offender. Consequently, restorative justice represents the strongest implementation of reintegrative shaming to date, and is certainly the implementation that has received most attention. Reintegrative shaming theory has become an important justification for the use of restorative justice, as far as its potential to reduce recidivism is concerned, and has been widely used in the development of practices. It is also significant that 1 year after Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Braithwaite coauthored, with Phillip Pettit, an alternative theory of justice to the principles that define traditional criminal justice practices: deterrence, just deserts, and retribution. Like restorative justice, this republican theory of justice argues that there is no moral imperative to punish where shaming and restitution are successful.

Criminal Justice as Regulation While reintegrative shaming theory can be read as a conventional theory of crime, it is important to recognize that the theory has its origins in

114

Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology

Braithwaite’s interest in business regulation and is also complemented by his subsequent work on responsive regulation. As Braithwaite points out on page 54 in Crime, Shame and Reintegration, the conclusion of an earlier work was, If we are serious about controlling corporate crime, the first priority should be to create a culture in which corporate crime is not tolerated. The informal processes of shaming unwanted conduct and praising exemplary behavior need to be emphasized. (Fisse & Braithwaite, 1983, p. 246)

The continuity between criminology and other forms of social regulation is an important theme in Braithwaite’s work, and he has argued that criminology as a discipline may one day be subsumed into the broader study of regulation (Braithwaite, 2000). Indeed, one feature of Braithwaite’s theory of responsive regulation is to place restorative justice and reintegrative shaming theory within a broader regulatory framework. The theory of responsive regulation, very simply put, argues that regulation will be most effective when restorative approaches, strong in reintegrative shaming, are given first priority in attempts to change behavior, but backed up by mechanisms based on deterrence and incapacitation (but not stigmatization). An implication of this broader theoretical perspective is that regulatory ideas have relevance to criminology, but also that restorative justice and reintegrative shaming are relevant across a broad range of contexts such as crime, child protection, business regulation, and peace building. Nathan Harris See also Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: SelfControl Theory; Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance; Reiss, Albert J., Jr: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil; Tyler, Tom R.: Sanctions and Procedural Justice Theory

References and Further Readings Ahmed, E., Harris, N., Braithwaite, J., & Braithwaite, V. (2001). Shame management through reintegration. Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press.

Ayres, I., & Braithwaite, J. (1992). Responsive regulation: Transcending the deregulation debate. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Braithwaite, J. (2000). The new regulatory state and the transformation of criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 40, 222–238. Braithwaite, J. (2002). Restorative justice and responsive regulation. New York: Oxford University Press. Braithwaite, J., & Mugford, S. (1994). Conditions of successful reintegration ceremonies: Dealing with juvenile offenders. British Journal of Criminology, 34, 139–171. Braithwaite, J., & Pettit, P. (1990). Not just deserts: A republican theory of criminal justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Fisse, B., & Braithwaite, J. (1983). The impact of publicity on corporate offenders. Albany: SUNY Press. Harris, N., & Maruna, S. (2006). Shame, shaming and restorative justice: A critical appraisal. In D. Sullivan & L. Tifft (Eds.), Handbook of restorative justice: A global perspective (pp. 452–460). London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Harris, N., Walgrave, L., & Braithwaite, J. (2004). Emotional dynamics in restorative conferences. Theoretical Criminology, 8, 191–210. Lewis, H. B. (1971). Shame and guilt in neurosis. New York: International Universities Press. Makkai, T., & Braithwaite, J. (1994). Reintegrative shaming and compliance with regulatory standards. Criminology, 32, 361–385. Scheff, T. J., & Retzinger, S. M. (1991). Emotions and violence: Shame and rage in destructive conflicts. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Van Ness, D., & Strong, K. (1997). Restoring justice. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology For years, traditional criminology focused almost exclusively on the offender. Other elements of the crime—such as the victim, the law, and the crime itself—were virtually ignored. In environmental criminology, Patricia L. and Paul J. Brantingham

Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology

focus on what they classified the fourth dimension of crime—the crime setting. Specifically, they study where and when crime occurs. Environmental criminology uses “the geographic imagination in concert with the sociological imagination to describe, understand, and control criminal events” (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981, p. 21). This perspective helps to provide the foundation for choice and opportunity theories, and it guides research in the spatial aspects of crime. This entry begins with a brief review of the theoretical roots of environmental criminology. It then describes the two epistemal works written by the Brantinghams: Environmental Criminology and Patterns in Crime. This section details the eight rules that guide pattern theory, and briefly defines key concepts included in the guiding rules. The entry concludes with a synopsis of future work in environmental criminology.

The Evolution of Environmental Criminology The initial roots of environmental criminology are found in the work of early European and British criminologists. André-Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet mapped European crime statistics at a high level of aggregation (country, province, and city level) and found that crime was not evenly distributed. Rather, crime tended to cluster in specific regions and at specific times of the day. They also found that property and violent crime patterns differed substantially from one another and over different areas. Early British researchers analyzed crime at lower levels of aggregation. For instance, Henry Mayhew studied crime patterns in the rookeries of London and found that crime tended to cluster in specific areas, often located on city borders. Taken together, this body of research revealed four important findings: (1) Crime rates differ in space; (2) differences in crime rates occur over micro, meso, and macro levels; (3) spatial patterns continue over time and can be used for prediction; and (4) crime tends to cluster around locations high in targets (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981). Each of these findings is discussed later in this entry. The second wave of research that provides a theoretical foundation for environmental criminology comes from human ecology, specifically the work of Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay and the

115

Chicago School of sociology. Shaw and McKay examined crime patterns in Chicago using methodology borrowed from Ernest Burgess. Burgess compared rates of crime and delinquency using a city’s urban form, hypothesizing that a city develops outward from a central business core in concentric zones. He theorized that crime would concentrate in a city’s core and diminish as distance increased from this area. Shaw and McKay’s results confirmed Burgess’s theory, finding that delinquency and other types of social problems (poverty, disease, rapid population change) concentrated in the center of the city and declined radially outward from the core. These results were shown to be consistent over time. In the 1970s, the work of two criminologists expanded the theoretical foundation of environmental criminology: C. Ray Jeffrey and Oscar Newman. Jeffrey in his book Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and Newman in his book Defensible Space both contended that adapting urban architecture could reduce crime. These two works crystallized the differences between mainstream criminology of the nineteenth and early 20th century and environmental criminology. First, mainstream research saw crime as an attending problem to the much larger disciplines of sociology and psychology, whereas environmental criminology considered the crime as the central research focus. Second, traditional criminology tended to focus on the offender and offender motivations, while environmental criminology is concerned with discrete criminal events and their geography/setting. Using their unique academic backgrounds in law, mathematics, and urban planning, Patricia and Paul Brantingham took the research and theory developed by the individuals described above and constructed the theory of environmental criminology. Paul Brantingham completed a law degree at Columbia University before obtaining a DipCrim at Cambridge University in Britain. Patricia Brantingham met Paul while completing a math degree at Columbia University. She then attained an M.A. in math at Fordham University. Patricia and Paul moved to Florida State University in the early 1970s, where Paul took a tenure-track position in the Department of Criminal Justice and Patricia completed her M.S.P. and Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning. It was there that the pair

116

Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology

met C. Ray Jeffrey and realized that their combined backgrounds in mathematics, urban planning, and the law fit perfectly into the burgeoning field of geography and crime. In the late 1970s, the couple took faculty positions at the relatively young School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, and began publishing the epistemal pieces, Environmental Criminology and Patterns in Crime. In the 1980s, the Brantinghams noticed that there were a few unaffiliated individuals writing about the need to focus on the common situational or environmental aspects of crime as events rather than the motivations and intentions of offenders. After speaking with Ronald Clarke (rational choice theory) and Marcus Felson (routine activity theory) at Rutgers University, it became clear that the simultaneous scholarship could benefit from a professional support network. The Brantinghams then invited a handful of people to a meeting hosted by Simon Fraser University, and thus began the Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis (ECCA) meetings. This ad hoc working group developed into a more cohesive and annual exchange between selected scholars that were actively researching in the general area of opportunity and crime. ECCA continues today.

Environmental Criminology and Pattern Theory In both editions of Environmental Criminology, the Brantinghams edit together a number of works that focus on the criminal event rather than criminal motivations. The book emphasizes four themes that have since been repeatedly tested through empirical research. First, crimes can be understood by researching people’s routine daily activities. People commit crimes in the same areas where they spend most of their time—at home, school, work, and recreation sites. These activity locations and the pathways between them combine to make up the offenders’ “awareness space” (1991, p. 35)—a space where offenders have knowledge about the urban form. The second theme relates to an offender’s target choices and criminal perceptions. The location of crimes is determined through structured search patterns of both victims and offenders that separate good opportunities from bad risks. Research into the search patterns of

several different types of offenders supports this approach, as does the theory of Ron Clarke and collaborators. The third theme in Environmental Criminology concerns ecological labeling and its effect on crime. Ecological labels come from the reputation attached to specific places that affects the level of fear of crime endemic to a neighborhood, and the expectations of police and others servicing the area. These labels affect crime by attracting specific types of people and businesses to the area. Lastly, the book focuses on measurement issues in spatial studies of crime. Analytic debate on how researchers should measure crime, the distances related to crimes, and the spatial patterns of crime continues in environmental criminology through present day. After the release of Environmental Criminology, the Brantinghams further crystallized their spatial theory of crime with the newly titled pattern theory in the book Patterns in Crime. In 2008, they published a piece restating pattern theory for a new generation of environmental criminology researchers. Patterns in Crime developed from the premise that crime is not random. The Brantinghams assert that crime patterns are a factor of the law, offender motivation, and target characteristics—all organized on an environmental backcloth (2008). They define a pattern as the “inter-connectiveness of object, rules and processes” (2008, p. 79). In this sense, crime patterns are complex and multilayered; therefore, research in this area explores crime on macro, meso, and micro levels. The macro level explores crimes between countries, states, provinces, and cities. The work of Guerry and Quetelet described earlier fits into this category. Research at the meso level investigates crime patterns within “subareas of a city or metropolis” (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1991, p. 21). The work of Burgess and Shaw and McKay exemplifies this level of analysis. Microlevel research explores specific places and facilities within cities. This level of analysis may focus on architecture, urban form, or even offender psychology and decision making. The work of Jeffrey and Newman both fit the micro-analytic framework. The majority of the Brantingham and Brantingham’s pattern theory also focuses on micro-level analysis. In 2008, the Brantinghams published a chapter detailing eight guiding rules for crime pattern

Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology

theory based on empirical research and theorizing conducted over the past 30 years, since their original publications. Rule one states that individuals move through a series of daily activities making several decisions. Just as legitimate activities require a series of decisions, criminal activities involve a “crime script” as well. Repeated activities, both criminal and legitimate, can result in a decision process that becomes regularized. This regularization creates an “abstract guiding template”; for criminal decisions this is called a “crime template” (2008, p. 80). The crime template is often based on an assessment of risks versus rewards, and this assessment changes depending on the type of crime in question. For instance, crimes committed for economic benefit will likely involve a different decision-making process than an emotionally motivated crime. Rule two concerns individuals functioning in a social network rather than as independent agents. It states that “most people do not function as individuals, but have a network of family, friends and acquaintances” and “these linkages have varying attributes and influence the decisions of others in the network” (p. 81). While this rule seems simple at first, it becomes complex when the crime templates of medium to large criminal organizations are considered. These collective crime templates can range from criminal gangs supporting collective criminal decisions at one extreme to groups of place guardians and managers supporting lawabiding activities at the other. Rule three states that “when individuals are making their decisions independently, individual decision processes and crime templates can be treated in a summative fashion; that is, average or typical patterns can be determined by combining patterns of individuals” (p. 82). In other words, crime templates of individuals with similar backgrounds and/or demographics can be treated as similar. Qualitative research exploring crime templates of offenders can be aggregated to offenders who commit similar types of crimes. Rule four states that individuals or networks of individuals “commit crimes when there is a triggering event or a process by which an individual can locate a target or a victim that fits within a crime template” (p. 82). The success of these criminal actions alters cognitions of accumulated experience and influences future actions. Initial failure is

117

unlikely to change the behavior, but repeated failure is liable to change future actions. Offenders may adapt their behavior by changing the place or time the crime is committed. Alternatively, they may decide to forego criminal activities and engage in non-criminal activities instead. Rule five states that individuals have routine daily activities that occur in different activity nodes “such as home, work, school, shopping, entertainment, or time with friends, and along the normal pathways between these nodes” (p. 83). Individuals are likely to take the same paths to and from these activity nodes and become familiar with the route and surrounding area. People will deviate when difficulty is encountered on the route, but for the most part, they tend to stick to their spatial routine. The set of activity nodes and the pathways between them is known as an “activity space,” and the area within visual range of the activity space is called the “awareness space” (p. 84). Rule six asserts that individuals who commit crimes have the same spatio-temporal movement patterns as those who engage exclusively in lawabiding activities. The rule also maintains that a crime is most likely to occur near “normal activity and awareness space” (p. 84). Crimes tend to cluster around activity nodes and spread out as distance from the nodes and pathways increases. The activity nodes of one’s friendship network may also influence an individual’s awareness space, much in the same way seen in Rule one and two. People gain knowledge of their friend’s awareness space the more they engage in activity, or hang out, with that individual. Rule seven states that the activity space of potential offenders overlaps with the activity space of prospective targets and victims. Potential targets and victims “become actual targets or victims when the potential offender’s willingness to commit a crime has been triggered and when the potential target or victim fits the offender’s crime template” (p. 87). In other words, victims and offenders need to cross paths for a crime to occur. One’s access to potential crime targets may simply be influenced by opportunity arising where and when their routine activities occur; however, many criminals seek out criminal opportunities. Rule eight states that the prior rules all exist and function within the urban backcloth; roads, land use, economic forces driving a city, and the

118

Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity

socio-economic status of residents comprise the backcloth. This backcloth shapes the urban structure, forms activity nodes, and ultimately determines which places are likely to experience high levels of crime. Crime generators have “high flows of people through and to nodal activity points” (p.88). Examples of crime generators include shopping areas, entertainment areas, and sports stadiums. Crime attractors are “created when targets are located at nodal activity points of individuals who have a greater willingness to commit crimes” (p. 88). Crime attractors are usually places that have a reputation for providing good criminal opportunities. Examples of crime attractors include areas with several bars, prostitution strolls, drug markets, large shopping malls, and large parking lots.

Conclusion Brantingham and Brantingham’s Environmental Criminology and Patterns in Crime are epistemal pieces in studying the geography of crime. Both pieces challenged traditional criminology by focusing on the criminal event rather than on the motivation of individual offenders. They invite future generations of researchers and theorists (1) to consider individual offenders and how their routine activities shape individual awareness spaces; (2) to investigate networks of individuals who co-offend with one another and share crime templates; and (3) to consider the location and characteristics of crime generators and crime attractors. Research based on the tenets of environmental criminology is burgeoning and involves academics from all over the globe.

Brantingham, P. L., & Brantingham, P. J. (1984). Patterns in crime. New York: Macmillan. Brantingham, P. L., & Brantingham, P. J. (1991). Environmental criminology (2nd ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Brantingham, P. L., & Brantingham, P. J. (2008). Crime pattern theory. In R. Wortley & L. Mazerolle (Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (pp. 78–93). Portland, OR: Willan. Burgess, E. W. (1916). Juvenile delinquency in a small city. Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 6, 724–728. Cornish, D. B., & Clarke R. V. (1986). The reasoning criminal. New York: Springer-Verlag. Felson, M. K. (2002). Crime and everyday life (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Guerry, A. M. (1833). Essai sur la statistique morale de la France. Paris: Crochard. Jeffery, C. R. (1971). Crime prevention through environmental design. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Mayhew, H. (1968). London labour and the London poor: Vol. 4. Those that will not work, comprising prostitutes, thieves, swindlers and beggars. New York: Dover. (Original work published 1862) Newman, O. (1972). Defensible space. New York: Macmillan. Quetelet, M. A. (1842). A treatise on man. Edinburgh, UK: William and Robert Chambers. Rossmo, D. K. (1999). Geographic profiling. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Shaw, C. R., & McKay H. D. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wortley, R., & Mazerolle, L. (Eds.). (2008). Environmental criminology and crime analysis. Portland, OR: Willan.

Aili E. Malm See also Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E. and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Cornish, Derek B. and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature; Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design; Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory

References and Further Readings Brantingham, P. L., & Brantingham, P. J. (1981). Environmental criminology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity Prior to the 1950s, positivist theories explaining the causes of crime centered on motivations that led youths into antisocial and delinquent behavior. Particular focus was given to the influence of subcultural, psychoanalytical, and frustrationaggression theories. Central to these premises was

Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity

the question, why do individuals commit crime? In their seminal work, Scott Briar and Irving Piliavin criticized the efficacy of this approach and argued that by focusing solely on motivational factors researchers were missing a key component to explain behavior. They proposed that social control theories, which sought to explain why an individual would not commit an offense, better described both delinquent and non-delinquent involvement. They argued the combination of youths’ commitment to conformity (stakes in conformity) and their environment directly influenced their decision-making process. More specifically the authors postulated that boys with high stakes in conformity were least likely to commit delinquent acts than those youths with the lowest level of commitment to conform. Briar and Piliavin later refined their theory to include a rational calculative approach to decision making referred to as a rewards-cost model of delinquency. Within this model, the authors argued that in any given circumstance, youths weigh the rewards of their activities over the costs and choose the behavior that results in the most positive outcome. For example, even those individuals with the strongest commitments to their families, peers, and social institutions may be tempted to “engage in criminal acts, and they may perform such acts when their commitments do not appear to be threatened (for example, under conditions of low visibility) or when the motives to deviate are very strong” (p. 39). The fear of reprisal or punishments and the deprivations associated with those punishments, along with what they refer to as a “consistent self-image” to sustain their important relationships, is as important in preserving their current and future status as any other relationship. The extension of social control theories to include how both “inner” and “outer” controls (commitment to conformity) combine to influence an individual’s decision-making process summarizes Briar and Piliavin’s special contribution to criminology. Their ideas were subsequently broadened by Travis Hirschi in his social bonding theory and more recently with the evolution of life-course perspectives and theories of desistance. The following discussion is divided into the conceptual framework of the theory, critiques of motivational theories, stakes in conformity defined, and finally a conclusion. This entry provides the

119

reader with an understanding of Briar and Piliavin’s work and of how the combination of commitment to conformity and environment induces even the most law-abiding citizen to commit crime.

Conceptual Framework Conceptually, Briar and Piliavin’s work developed directly from social control theories that stated that delinquency can be explained like any other form of behavior. According to them, “any individual is capable of committing criminal acts and that motives giving rise to these acts are engendered by the individual’s contemporary situation” (Piliavin et al., 1969, p. 166; see also Piliavin et al., 1968, p. 227). Particularly, the authors relied heavily on the work of Ivan Nye, whose internal and indirect controls explained the conscience element of the bond, and of David Matza, whose idea of delinquency as drift described how most individuals drift in and out of delinquent activity rather than simply subscribing full-time to a life of crime. Briar and Piliavin expanded these ideas to include how commitments to conformity preclude youths from committing crime or explain their eventual aging out. This section presents an overview of motivational theories and an expanded definition of stakes in conformity. Motivational Theories Criticized

Prior to the development of control theories, both psychological and sociological theories—also known collectively as motivational theories— focused on the predisposition toward crime. Briar and Piliavin argued that these theories did not sufficiently explain all delinquent activity. More specifically, their critique included the following: First, not all individuals respond to the same circumstances in a similar manner. Second, not all delinquent activity is reported. Third, most individuals, regardless of their offense, cease to commit crimes as they age. Fourth, motivational theories typically do not predict gang-related activities or encounters with the juvenile court. Finally, motivational theories do not explain why most juveniles participate in some form of delinquent activity at one point in their life. As previously mentioned, unlike advocates of motivational theories, control theorists argue that

120

Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity

social institutions (e.g., family) provide a sufficient inducement to not commit crime but they do not explain how the relationship between the internal and external controls works. Thus, explaining why someone commits a crime is a less viable question than understanding why given individuals’ circumstances more people choose law-abiding behavior. Briar and Piliavin argue that the shortcomings in the motivational as well as control theories can be overcome by understanding an individual’s commitment to conformity. Stakes in/Commitment to Conformity Defined

According to Briar and Piliavin, the intensity, level, and duration of the commitments to conformity combine with the environment to explain delinquent involvement. These commitments include the fear of reprisal and deprivations that work to sustain the individual’s current relationships, self-image, and status. The authors further contend that stakes in conformity not only play a role in influencing whether a youth chooses delinquent activity but also impact the individual’s relationship with adult authority figures and choice of friends. For example, those youths with higher stakes in conformity are more likely to consider how the significant adult figures in their lives would view their behavior and their choice of friends. By contrast, those youths with low stakes in conformity are less concerned with the opinions of the adults around them and are more likely to migrate toward youngsters who have few if any stakes in conforming. Although a youth either may not have or may lose his or her commitments to family, schools, or peers, it is not an irreversible act. It is possible for these youths to be exposed to events or individuals that increase their stakes in conformity and therefore increase their views toward conventional behavior and/or activities. These events or individuals can include, but are not limited to, “belief in God, affection for conventionally behaving peers, occupational aspirations, ties to parents, desire to perform well in school, and fear of the material deprivations and punishments associated with arrest” (Briar & Piliavin, 1965, p. 41). Above all, the parent-child relationship is the most important. In child-rearing, parents who

either fail to punish or punish too much followed with no rewards for conformity can undermine their youngsters’ ultimate compliance and ability to minimize participation in delinquent activity. For example, adolescents who seek the approval of authority figures are less likely to participate in delinquent activity for fear of the shame and contriteness they would cause those that they seek to please. The view of the parent to the outside world, which includes social class, also impacts the relationship of the child and his or her authority figure and his or her willingness to conform. A parent who is unemployed, for example, may be viewed by the outside world and ultimately his or her child with less respect. In turn, the children situationally choose not to comply with their parents for fear they will be viewed as weak themselves. Parental expectations influence children in all facets of their lives. Children who fail to satisfy parental compliance typically have difficulty in conforming in other social contexts as well, such as success in school. An involved parent who encourages his or her children to succeed also encourages future normative behavior. Lack of parental involvement and achievement likely fosters similar attitudes and lack of commitment in his or her children. Although parents have the most significant direct effect on children and their desires to conform, a lack of involvement or negative parental influences do not necessarily preclude a youngster from conforming. The role of the teacher, friends, extended family members, and the clergy should not be overlooked. A person with a positive role in a youths’ life can be influential in encouraging and assisting in the development of conforming behaviors in the youth. Moreover, those with high stakes in conformity choose associations and friendships with children who are similar to themselves. Those with low stakes in conformity, likewise, choose associations and friendships with those who also have lower stakes in conformity and are more likely to “get into trouble” (p. 40). According to Briar and Piliavin, research suggests that situationally induced motives can be influenced via both long- and short-term exposure. For example, short-term inducements to commit crime vary by the degree of intensity; by

Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime

the ease by which the activity can be accomplished, the risks involved, and the absence or presence of other more attractive alternatives; and by the degree to which individuals “experience constraints against the behavior” (Briar & Piliavin, 1965, p. 38). They further assert that stakes in conformity, whether high or low, are not achieved overnight and are not irreversible. Given the appropriate motivation and correct circumstances, youths can change their behavioral responses.

Conclusion Although less recognized or cited as other control theorists, Briar and Piliavin were instrumental in advancing our modern-day understanding of commitment to stakes in conformity and its influence on the decision-making process (rewards-cost model). Briar and Piliavin did not offer a direct empirical test of their theory in their original work. Later studies testing this theory reveal a direct connection between stakes in conformity (costs) and lower levels of self-reported and official delinquency, increased school involvement (Piliavin et al., 1969), and lower levels of reported cheating (Piliavin et al., 1968). Findings from these studies reveal that the higher the stakes in conformity, the less likely youths are to offend or cheat and the more likely they are to be involved in afterschool activities. Similarly, the results indicate that “delinquency is more a direct consequence of costs than parental treatment” (Piliavin et al., 1969, pp. 170–171). Based on the theoretical premise and the results of these studies, Briar and Piliavin and Piliavin, Jane Allyn Hardyck, and Arlene Vadum recommend paying youths to conform as a way to increase the commitment to conformity. This option to curbing delinquent activity is a direct example of the rewards of conforming behavior outweighing the costs of youths’ actions. Shannon M. Barton-Bellessa See also Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift; Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Toby, Jackson: Stake in Conformity

121

References and Further Readings Briar, S., & Piliavin, I. (1965). Delinquency, situational inducements, and commitment to conformity. Social Problems, 13, 35–45. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys to age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New York: Wiley. Piliavin, I., & Briar, S. (1964). Police encounters with juveniles. American Journal of Sociology, 7, 206–214. Piliavin, I. M., Hardyck, J. A., & Vadum, A. C. (1968). Constraining effects of personal costs on the transgressions of juveniles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10, 227–231. Piliavin, I. M., Vadum, A. C., & Hardyck, J. A. (1969). Delinquency, personal costs and parental treatment: A test of a reward-cost model of juvenile criminality. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 60, 165–172. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime General strain theory (GST) argues that stressful conditions and events lead to criminal behavior. This is because strain causes negative emotions and negative emotions, in some cases, are efficiently alleviated by crime. For example, children who are being abused by a parent might feel a range of negative emotions such as depression, anger, or fear. To cope with these emotions, they may run away from home, use drugs to self-­medicate, or physically assault the aggressor. Similarly, adults who feel they have been unfairly terminated from their job may feel angry, frustrated, and anxious. To cope with these emotions, they may assault their employer, steal the money they desperately need, or use drugs to alleviate the stress experienced. GST does not assert that every person is likely to respond to strain with crime. Persons with

122

Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime

certain personalities, with deviant peers, with poor social skills, and with little social support, for example, are more likely to do so than others. Lisa M. Broidy and Robert Agnew draw on this theory of crime to explain why males have higher crime rates than females. Three arguments are made: (1) Males are subject to different types of strain than females; (2) males have different emotional responses to strain; and (3) males are more likely to react to strain and negative emotion with crime because they have higher levels of conditioning variables likely to lead to crime—such as aggressive personalities and low social support. Broidy and Agnew also outline the major forms of female strain in this article, arguing that GST not only explains the gender gap in crime but also is well suited to explain female crime in general because it is compatible with central arguments in feminist criminology.

Explaining the Gender Gap in Crime Males Are Subject to Different Types of Strain

Major strains in GST include (1) the inability to achieve one’s goals—such as the inability to achieve money, status, or autonomy, (2) the loss of positive stimuli—such as the loss of property, romantic relationship, or friendship, and (3) the presentation of negative stimuli—such as the presence of physical/emotional abuse or stressful environmental and work conditions. There is no evidence to suggest that males experience more strain than females. In fact, females often report events and conditions as more stressful or undesirable than their male counterparts. There is evidence to suggest, however, that males experience different types of strain and that male strain is more conducive to criminal behavior than female strain. Regarding the inability to achieve one’s goals, males have different goals than females. Males are interested in material success and extrinsic achievement, while females are interested in the maintenance of interpersonal ties and friendships. This is reflected in what women and men find stressful. Females report stress that involves family and friends, while males report stress that involves financial and work problems. Males and females also have different conceptions of fairness. Males are concerned with the fairness of goal outcomes,

whereas females are concerned with whether the process to achieve goal outcomes is fair. Regarding the loss of positive stimuli or the presentation of negative stimuli, males and females report different circumstances as positive or negative. Males report more problems with finances, competition, and jealousy between peers, and report being the target of others’ anger and aggression. Females report problems with gender-based discrimination, low prestige in work and family roles, and excessive demands from family members. These differences can, in part, explain the gender gap in crime. Males have greater property and violent crime rates because they place greater emphasis on finances, are members of more contentious peer networks, and are exposed to more aggression in general. Crime is a particularly adaptive response for these forms of strain. Women, on the other hand, have lower crime rates because strains resulting from family relationships and demanding responsibilities are unlikely to be resolved through crime. Moreover, crime is inhibited with these strains because, when burdened with caretaking responsibilities, women spend much time in the home and are under pressure to avoid behaving in an aggressive or criminal manner. Males Have Different Emotional Responses to Strain

Major negative emotions in GST include anger, frustration, depression, and fear. Anger is especially important because it lowers inhibitions, creates an intention for revenge, and energizes an individual for action. There is no evidence to suggest that males experience more anger than females. In fact, some studies find that women experience more anger in reaction to stressors than men. There is evidence to suggest, however, that males experience a different type of anger in response to strain and that male anger is more conducive to crime than female anger. Male anger is often accompanied by moral outrage or contempt. Female anger is often accompanied by anxiety, depression, shame, and self-hostility. Overall, females are known to be more depressed and anxious when compared to men and, unlike their male counterparts, these feelings blend with their anger when they are provoked. There are a number of reasons why women

Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime

and men experience different types of anger. Women tend to blame themselves when treated poorly or unfairly. Women worry, moreover, that anger may interfere or cause conflict within highly valued interpersonal relationships. Women also view anger as inappropriate with respect to their gender role. On the other hand, men are quick to blame others for mistreatment and to view mistreatment as an insult, are less concerned with disrupting relationships with anger, and feel that anger affirms their gender role. These differences can, in part, explain the gender gap in crime. Males have higher rates of violent and serious property crime due to the moral righteousness and contempt of their anger. Depression, shame, and self-hostility that accompany female anger may serve to control female reactions to such emotion and the strain causing it. Females may instead turn to self-destructive forms of deviance such as drug use and eating disorders rather than property and violent crime, given that these forms of deviance are more compatible with their gender role. Males Are More Likely to React to Strain and Negative Emotion With Crime

Even if males and females experience the same emotional reaction to the same strain, males are more likely to react with crime because they have higher levels of important conditioning variables. Conditioning variables are variables that allow for a behavior under certain conditions. Such variables in GST include coping resources, opportunity for criminal behavior, social control, gender role, and peers. Males are less likely than females to have high levels of emotional social support. Emotional social support is effective in reducing stress, even though close interpersonal relationships can sometimes produce stress. Females are therefore more likely to cope with stress by leaning on their friends for support rather than turning to crime. Males, however, are more likely than females to have a sense of mastery and positive esteem, both of which are important when attempting to cope with strain or negative emotion in a legal manner. Ironically, these variables also provide confidence to respond to strain with crime, as inflated esteem and efficacy can precipitate bold

123

actions. By contrast, females are disadvantaged both when trying to cope with strain in a legal manner and through crime. Women low in mastery and esteem therefore tend to cope with strain in self-destructive ways—such as through alcohol or drug abuse and disordered eating patterns. Gender-role socialization also makes males more likely than females to react to strain with crime. It is more likely that a male will view violent or property crime as a behavior that is congruent with their gender stereotype and their own gender identity. The more masculine a man is, the more this is the case. Females are consequently restricted from engaging in such behavior, because it goes against their female stereotype and against individual gender-role identification. Males are lower in social control and thus have less to lose by behaving in a criminal manner. Males also are more likely to have personalities that are conducive to crime, which makes them more likely than females to respond to strain with crime. Males are also more likely than females to have the opportunity to engage in crime. For example, males are more likely than females to have friends who engage in crime and to be out in public with those friends. Male peers groups are characterized by their large size, hierarchical organization, and competitive interaction. Conflict is overt and physical (e.g., fighting). Male peer groups are also likely to challenge authority and take risks. Structurally, these groups encourage, model, and support aggressive and other deviant behavior. Female peer groups are characterized by their small size, friendship pairs, and cooperative organization. Conflict is indirect and not physical (e.g., talking behind one’s back). Structurally, these groups encourage non-aggressive, cognitive, and emotional coping strategies.

Explaining Female Crime Though GST can be used to understand the gender gap in crime, GST is also useful in explaining why females engage in the relatively small amount of crime documented. One of the central arguments in feminist criminological theory is that female crime is rooted in the oppression of women. GST categorizes the types of oppression suffered by women by categorizing the types of strains women experience: They can fail to achieve goals, experience the loss

124

Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory

of positive stimuli, and experience the presentation of negative stimuli. Within these categories, there are certain goals, stimuli, and strains that are relatively unique to women and therefore useful in explaining female crime. For example, women have often reported their desire to achieve and maintain close interpersonal relationships. High rates of divorce and abuse in intimate relationships demonstrate that this goal is often not reached. A high rate of sexual abuse among adolescent females is a particularly serious threat to achieving this goal for women and, due to the unfairness of this stressor, highly likely to lead to a criminal reaction. Women have also often reported difficulty achieving their goals of financial security or success, even though financial stressors are more often reported by men. Studies confirm that women have unique difficulties achieving this goal. A significant increase in the number of single women who are heads of households, combined with the rise of low-paying pink-collar jobs held by women, have created a social phenomenon known as the feminization of poverty. High rates of female poverty can explain, in part, why the majority of female crime involves minor property offenses. Qualitative research confirms that such crime provides financial independence. Regarding the loss of positive stimuli, such as a family member, friend, or significant other through death, divorce, or separation, females are especially likely to be strained due to the importance they place on interpersonal connections. Moreover, women frequently then assume resulting caretaking responsibilities and burdens, which create more stress than that experienced by their male counterparts. Regarding the presentation of negative stimuli, females continue to have relatively unique stressors. They are more often than men subjected to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse as well as other forms of victimization and discrimination. The role of “housewife” has also been defined as a stressor to women. Many females find the role monotonous, highly demanding, and restrictive. Stressors have followed even for those women in the workforce. Discrimination is a common strain as well as the nature of the job taken. Many pinkcollar jobs often taken by women do not fully utilize their skills and talents, offer little authority, autonomy, and upward mobility. Moreover, the interpersonal connections women make by entering

a new social network at work pose risk for additional female stressors and burdens. Natasha M. Ganem See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; ChesneyLind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Broidy, L. M. (2001). A test of general strain theory. Criminology, 39, 9–33. Broidy, L. M., & Agnew, R. (1997). Gender and crime: A general strain theory perspective. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 34, 275–306. Chesney-Lind, M. (1989). Girls’ crime and woman’s place: Toward a feminist model of female delinquency. Crime and Delinquency, 35, 5–29. Ganem, N. M. (2008). The role of negative emotion in general strain theory. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag.

Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory Robert L. Burgess and Ronald L. Akers collaborated in 1966 to reformulate Edwin H. Sutherland’s differential association theory of criminal behavior in an effort to make the theory more amenable to empirical testing by making its key theoretical concepts open to measurement. They did so by integrating the basic elements of operant conditioning with Sutherland’s nine theoretical propositions. The product of this theoretical integration, differential association-reinforcement theory, attempted to explicitly specify the learning process and mechanisms only implied by Sutherland. This integration converted the nine theoretical propositions from Sutherland’s theory into seven propositions.

Reformulating Differential Association Theory At the time of Burgess and Akers’s reformulation, Sutherland’s differential association theory had

Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory

remained relatively unchanged. In Sutherland’s last reformulation of his theory of differential association in 1947, he rephrased it to explicitly state that criminal behavior is learned, but no theoretical elaboration or specification of the learning process was provided. Thus, Sutherland’s differential association theory, explicitly a learning theory, was postulated on knowledge about the learning process and mechanisms that was outdated by at least a quarter of a century. Because it lacked clear and explicit propositions regarding the learning of criminal conduct, the theory was largely untestable. In fact, Sutherland himself was never able to directly test his own theory or to even find any specific empirical support for it. Subsequent scholars lamented about the difficulty in measuring the key theoretical concepts of differential association theory and strongly encouraged that the theory be modified in such a way as to permit empirical testing. Burgess and Akers took up this challenge. They began by stating that they “accept the basic assumption that criminal behavior is learned by the same process and involves the same mechanisms as conforming behavior” (p. 129); they then set out in their reformulation to “make explicit the nature of the underlying learning process involved in differential association” by “utilizing established learning principles” derived from modern learning theory in social psychology (p. 129). They accomplished this task through a step-by-step reformulation of each of Sutherland’s nine theoretical propositions. Sutherland’s Proposition 1: “Criminal behavior is learned” and Proposition 8: “The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning” become . . . Burgess and Akers’s Proposition 1: “Criminal behavior is learned according to the principles of operant conditioning.” Sutherland’s Proposition 2: “Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in the process of communication” becomes . . . Burgess and Akers’s Proposition 2: “Criminal behavior is learned both in nonsocial situations that are reinforcing or discriminative, and through that social interaction in which the behavior of other persons is reinforcing or discriminative for criminal behavior.”

125

Sutherland’s Proposition 3: “The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups” becomes . . . Burgess and Akers’s Proposition 3: “The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs in those groups which comprise the individual’s major source of reinforcements.” Sutherland’s Proposition 4: “When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple; (b) the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes” becomes . . . Burgess and Akers’s Proposition 4: “The learning of criminal behavior, including specific techniques, attitudes, and avoidance procedures, is a function of the effective and available reinforcers, and the existing reinforcement contingencies.” Sutherland’s Proposition 5: “The specific direction of drives and motives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favorable or unfavorable” becomes . . . Burgess and Akers’s Proposition 5: “The specific class of behaviors which are learned and their frequency of occurrence are a function of the reinforcers which are effective and available, and the rules or norms by which these reinforcers are applied.” Sutherland’s Proposition 6: “A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law” becomes . . . Burgess and Akers’s Proposition 6: “Criminal behavior is a function of norms which are discriminative for criminal behavior, the learning of which takes place when such behavior is more highly reinforced than non-criminal behavior.” Sutherland’s Proposition 7: “Differential associations may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity” becomes . . . Burgess and Akers’s Proposition 7: “The strength of criminal behavior is a direct function of the amount, frequency, and probability of its reinforcement.” Sutherland’s Proposition 9: “While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values

126

Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory

since noncriminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values” is omitted by Burgess and Akers.

Learning to Be Criminal According to Burgess and Akers, the primary learning mechanism in social behavior is operant conditioning through which behavior, including criminal behavior, is shaped by the stimuli that follow it. Social behavior is acquired through both conditioning and modeling (imitation); it is strengthened (more likely to be repeated) both by reward (positive reinforcement) and the avoidance of punishment (negative reinforcement) and it is weakened (less likely to be repeated) by both aversive stimuli (positive punishment) and the loss of reward (negative punishment). Thus, the maintenance or continuation of social behavior depends upon the balance of past and present rewards and punishments for that behavior. If, on balance, the reinforcements of a behavior are greater than the punishments, then the behavior will be strengthened and, most likely, repeated. Conversely, if, on balance, the punishments exceed the rewards, then the behavior will be weakened or extinguished. These reinforcements and punishments for behavior may be social (money, drugs, praise, approval, recognition, acceptance, status, prison, fines, disapproval, shaming, rejection, shunning) or non-social (thrills, excitement, pleasure, pain, anxiety, fear) in nature. Burgess and Akers asserted that the people or groups that comprise the major sources of an individual’s reinforcements and punishments have the greatest influence on his or her behavior. These people and groups are the primary source of rewards and punishments for behavior; they also serve as role models to be imitated and are the primary source of one’s socialization (i.e., the internalization of beliefs, values, and norms). Typically, these are primary groups such as one’s family and friends, but they may also be secondary groups such as acquaintances, distant neighbors, employers or employees, schools, churches, and bureaucratic organizations. However, they also acknowledged that while social learning is important, it is not exhaustive of the full array of learning processes. That is, some

behavior is learned in the absence of social reinforcement. For instance, using violence to avenge a wrong may be reinforcing to some, the psychoactive effects of recreational drug and alcohol use may be inherently reinforcing for some, and the monetary rewards of property crimes is reinforcing in and of itself. Burgess and Akers also acknowledged the important causal role of Sutherland’s concept of differential associations in the etiology of criminal conduct. In short, these are evaluative definitions of behavior as right or wrong, good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate. Like the balance of reinforcements and punishments, the sources of these evaluative definitions of behavior are social in nature. Thus, definitions are also learned and reinforced socially. Moreover, they can become discriminative stimuli or cues defining those situations in which a behavior is considered appropriate and/or likely to be reinforced. Thus, the more significant others in a person’s life define a behavior as good or, at least, justified, the more that person will also define that behavior as good or justified. In turn, the more a person defines a behavior as good or, at least, justified rather than as bad or undesirable, the more likely they are to engage in it.

Conclusion In sum, according to Burgess and Akers, criminal behavior can be expected to the extent that is has been reinforced and defined as desirable or justified. By integrating Sutherland’s differential association theory with the principles of operant conditioning from modern social-psychological learning theory and research, Burgess and Akers have made explicit the learning process and mechanisms only implied by Sutherland and, in so doing, have made the theory more amenable to empirical testing of its validity. Ronald Akers has subsequently elaborated differential association-differential reinforcement even further into what is today referred to as social learning theory. John K. Cochran See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association

Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1973). Deviant behavior: A social learning approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Burgess, R. L., & Akers, R. L. (1966). A differential association-reinforcement theory of criminal behavior. Social Problems, 14, 128–147. Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control Crime is higher in some neighborhoods than others. Robert J. Bursik, Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick have argued that neighborhoods vary in the degree of social control they can apply to the crime problem and that this variation is critical to understanding why there are low-crime and high-crime neighborhoods. Rooted in social disorganization theory, Bursik and Grasmick introduced their systemic theory in their book, Neighborhoods and Crime. Their ideas have since been applied not only to research on neighborhoods and crime, but also fear of crime, gangs, urban disorder and the effectiveness of community policing and restorative justice initiatives. This entry discusses their theory in more detail, along with a description of empirical support, recent refinements and critiques of the theory.

Levels of Control Sociologists and criminologists have long held that social control is a central concept in criminological theory. Sociologists in the early 20th century defined it as any social force developed by a community that sustains the social order of that community. Although it is the modern-day role of the police to provide protection and maintain order, sociologists applied the concept of social control to the interrelated problems of how a

127

community deals with the problem of deviance in its midst and how it is able to maintain a certain level of social organization (or disorganization, as the case may be) that allows for the survival of the community. They and others have since argued that communities practice “informal” social control by, for example, encouraging shared norms of behavior and applying sanctions designed to encourage conformity. Bursik (1988, p. 535) has defined social disorganization as “the inability of a local community to regulate itself in order to attain goals that are agreed to by the residents of that community.” Communities lacking informal social controls are thus considered socially disorganized and are therefore more subject to criminal victimization. Although in today’s multi-ethnic and multi-­ cultural communities shared norms of behavior are less likely to exist than in homogeneous communities, Bursik and Grasmick argue that most community residents at least share the belief that their surroundings should be free of crime and disorder. Bursik and Grasmick borrowed Albert Hunter’s formulation of three levels of social control to describe what neighborhoods do to maintain order. Private control pertains to the networks of family and friends in the neighborhood that look out for each other and provide support in times of distress. Outside of these intimate spheres of influence, a parochial level of control exists that entails all of the informal activities that might go on in a neighborhood to maintain order (e.g., informal surveillance, or “eyes on the street”) or establish social ties (e.g., block parties). The parochial order also refers to the interdependence of community institutions, such as schools, churches and voluntary organizations (e.g., parent-teacher associations). Finally, the public level of control refers to the more formal ties between neighborhoods and public agencies (e.g., the police) that serve to protect the community. Although these levels expand outward in their potential to influence crime, there is a great deal of overlap between them. In other words, many crime prevention activities in neighborhoods rely on an association between at least two levels of control. For example, many community-policing initiatives require the correlation of parochial and public control. The consequent proposition therefore is that

128

Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control

low-crime neighborhoods are able to find the right balance between levels of control.

Social Disorganization, Neighborhoods and Crime Bursik and Grasmick’s systemic social disorganization theory makes two central arguments. First, neighborhoods where private, parochial, and public controls are exercised will be less likely to experience crime than those neighborhoods that are lacking such control. Second, sources of deprivation that have traditionally been linked to neighborhood crime rates within the social disorganization tradition—poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, and residential mobility—will have a reduced impact on crime in neighborhoods where levels of control are in place. One of the advantages of Bursik and Grasmick’s systemic (levels of control) theory over traditional social disorganization theory is a consideration for the political and economic processes critical to the creation and persistence of disorganized neighborhoods. Rather than assuming that disorganized areas are determined naturally, as did Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, their reformulation acknowledges the historical processes that helped to create disorganization in these areas (e.g., housing regulations and a shifting tax base to the suburbs). Another advantage has to do with the concept of social disorganization itself. Although economic deprivation, residential mobility, and crime rates could be tabulated for neighborhoods and correlated with one another, a major limitation in Shaw and McKay’s research was the lack of direct measures of social disorganization. As described above, levels of control are assumed to capture the nature of social disorganization. An alternative conceptualization of systemic social disorganization was first proposed by Robert Sampson and colleagues in a similar attempt to address earlier criticisms of traditional social disorganization theory. Using the definition of social disorganization provided above, Sampson has emphasized the importance of effective social ties and social cohesion in a neighborhood’s ability to regulate itself. The guiding concept later developed by Sampson and various colleagues—collective

efficacy—described both the strength of communal ties and the amount of cohesion, or mutual trust, in a neighborhood. The main hypothesis is that those neighborhoods whose residents share greater attachments to their neighbors will enjoy lower levels of fear, disorder and violence. Akin to Bursik and Grasmick’s systemic theory, membership in community organizations is expected to enhance attachment to the community. What these two systemic models have in common is an emphasis on the importance of informal social control in controlling crime.

Empirical Support Research testing systemic social disorganization theory has found a great deal of support for the idea that informal social control is not only a key determinant of crime in communities but also serves as a protective factor against social and economic forces of deprivation that have the potential to bring neighborhoods down. For the most part, this research is based on quite sophisticated statistical studies that involve collecting and analyzing a large amount of survey data intended to measure concepts such as collective efficacy. Collective efficacy refers both to mutual trust among neighbors and the capacity to exercise control over their surroundings. It is straightforward enough to survey individuals in a community and ask them to what extent they agree with statements such as, “people around here are willing to help their neighbors,” or the likelihood that they would intervene if children were vandalizing school property. Note that these questions imply a measure of parochial control as well. But because the proposition put forth by systemic theories is that conditions in neighborhoods will influence neighborhood crime rates, most studies have tabulated such survey responses to create a group average. Ideally, this group should be consistent with the theory’s description of a neighborhood; however, this can be difficult to do in research because there is often a lack of consensus or consistency regarding the geographic boundaries of neighborhoods. Various studies have tabulated survey responses to the face-block level (i.e., households on both sides of a street segment bounded on each end by another street or at

Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control

one end by a dead end), or some administrative grouping often defined by the government, such as a political ward or a census tract. The “level of analysis” in such studies is therefore treated as the neighborhood, however it is defined. Not all studies testing systemic theory are quantitative studies based on survey data. Patrick Carr examined Bursik and Grasmick’s levels of control in an ethnographic study of the Beltway (pseudonym) neighborhood in Chicago. Carr spent several years interviewing residents, attending neighborhood organization meetings and interviewing police officials and local aldermen. He determined through his research that Beltway, a neighborhood low in crime relative to the rest of the city, achieved order by linking levels of control in strategic ways. In what he concludes to be a “new parochialism,” Carr found that neighborhood organizations (parochial level) worked closely with the police (public control) to produce action intended to solve neighborhood crime and disorder problems.

Refinements of Bursik and Grasmick’s Theory Although rooted in social disorganization theory, several sociologists have recently argued that levels of control and their importance in preventing neighborhood crime tie in quite well with notions of social capital. Social capital could be considered the opposite of social disorganization, in that it refers to the ability of local organizations and neighborhoods to engender mutual trust among participants/residents and encourages civic engagement. Civic engagement is considered to be consistent with Bursik and Grasmick’s theory in that it encourages residents to strengthen parochial ties and to secure help from the police (public control) when needed. Some researchers have suggested that disorganized neighborhoods are policed differently than more advantaged neighborhoods, perhaps because police are viewed as less legitimate by residents in deprived neighborhoods. Other refinements of the theory have involved specifying in more detail the ways that levels of control are inter-connected and interdependent and arguing that the theory should include so-called

129

feedback effects. In other words, although crime is influenced by levels of control, the extent of crime will in turn have an impact on the ability of neighborhoods to exercise informal social control at some levels more than others. For example, at the private level, crime may disrupt familial networks due to the incarceration of family members or the alienation of youths from the rest of the family. Finally, Bursik and Grasmick’s ideas have been aligned with routine activity theory, which argues that crime is the result of a combination of motivated offenders, suitable potential victims (or targets), and a lack of guardianship, or informal surveillance. Criminologists have linked both collective efficacy and levels of control to the level of guardianship in a neighborhood in arguing that the propositions of social disorganization theory and routine activity theory are consistent with each other.

Critiques Like traditional social disorganization theory, Bursik and Grasmick’s systemic theory has been criticized for overemphasizing the importance of structure (e.g., social networks) and underemphasizing culture. Although there is not sufficient space to elaborate on this critique here, it shall suffice to point out that social disorganization theorists tend to ignore or downplay the possibility that high-crime neighborhoods may also be cohesive, and that social ties in some neighborhoods are deviant in nature. This is plain to see if one recalls that most offenders tend to commit crimes and form criminal networks (e.g., gangs) in their own neighborhoods. A second criticism is that, again like traditional social disorganization theory, systemic theory has emphasized so-called street crime as its index of neighborhood crime, when in fact a great deal of domestic violence occurs in households in both cohesive and disorganized neighborhoods. Re­­ searchers have found that the systemic model does not work the same for intimate partner violence as with violence not involving intimate partners and that the systemic model may need to be adjusted somewhat to apply it this form of violence. Michael O. Maume

130

Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control

See also Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime; Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline

References and Further Readings Bursik, R. J., Jr. (1988). Social disorganization and theories of crime and delinquency: Problems and prospects. Criminology, 26, 519–551. Bursik, R. J., Jr., & Grasmick, H. G. (1993). Neighborhoods and crime. New York: Lexington. Carr, P. (2005). Clean streets: Controlling crime, maintaining order, and building community activism. New York: New York University Press.

DeLeon-Granados, W. (1999). Travels through crime and place: Community-building as crime control. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hunter, A. (1985). Private, parochial and public social orders: The problem of crime and incivility in urban communities. In G. D. Suttles & M. N. Zald (Eds.), The challenge of social control: Citizenship and institution building in modern society (pp. 230–242). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Park, R. E., & Burgess, E. W. (Eds.). (1925). The city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, D. R., & Clear, T. R. (1998). Incarceration, social capital, and crime: Implications for social disorganization theory. Criminology, 36, 441–479. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924.

C According to Campbell, although it has always been difficult to accurately count the number of gangs and gang members, criminologists have been writing about gangs for decades. Early researchers—such as Frederick Thrasher and William Foote Whyte and later Albert Cohen and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin in the 1950s— typically wrote about the morality of gang girls and their role as supporting players in men’s gangs. Campbell observes that research of the 1960s made no real attempt to study girls in gangs, but rather depicted female gang members as promiscuous “bad girls” who were responsible for instigating male violence. When Campbell began her study in the late 1970s, she wanted to know if women’s involvement in gangs had evolved over time. Most early studies of gangs found women to be associate or “branch” members of male gangs. A study of Los Angeles gangs in the mid-1970s showed several gangs where women were not just in supporting or “girlfriend” roles but took part in gang activities including fights. However, as late as 1975, a study found that women were “decoys and weapons carriers” for the male gangs (Campbell, 1991). Campbell was interested in discovering if women were “real” gang members or still relegated to second-hand status. In New York City at the time, there were an estimated 400 gangs, including several independent female gangs. With help from the New York Police Department Gang Intelligence Unit and police officers in Brooklyn, Campbell spent 6 months learning about gangs in all five boroughs and then another 6 months each

Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang In 1979, British psychologist Anne Campbell began her study of female gangs in New York City. First published in 1984, Campbell’s Girls in the Gang is the result of more than 2 years of in-depth observation of women in gangs. Campbell’s work is one of the first studies of female gangs conducted by a female social scientist, making her one of the pioneers of female gang research and feminist research methods. Until the last few decades, female offending was not perceived as being particularly important or worth studying (Belknap, 2007). Campbell’s study of girl gangs is a hands-on participant observation of women in a field where traditional studies of delinquency were generally completed on men and boys and done so at an objective distance. Campbell’s writing about women’s lives in their own words became an important forerunner of later feminist criminology.

History of Gangs While the history of gangs in America traces back hundreds of years, the media and the public tended to see gangs as a problem created in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Media interest and movies portrayed out-of-control street gang life in big cities such as Los Angeles and New York (Huff, 2002). 131

132

Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang

with three gangs: the Sandman Ladies, the Sex Girls, and the Five Percent Nation.

Life in Their Own Words Campbell selected three gangs that represented the racial and geographic diversity of current gang life. She then focused her research on one member of each of the three gangs: Connie, Weeza, and SunAfrica. Connie was the leader of the Sandman Ladies, a gang from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Weeza was a member of the Sex Girls, named after Essex Street in Brooklyn. Sun-Africa was a member of the Five Percent Nation, an African American group based in Brooklyn. Connie was 29 and a married mother of four. Her husband, Gino, was the leader of the Sandman, a motorcycle gang made up of mainly Puerto Rican members. Although they had only one working motorcycle, their symbols, boots, and chains were reminiscent of Hell’s Angels. The gang supported themselves mainly by selling drugs. Campbell related Connie’s life story, a difficult one filled with poverty, teen pregnancy, and drug use. The second gang Campbell examined was the Sex Girls, a street gang comprising Hispanic and African Americans. Campbell described the Sex Boys and Sex Girls as a classic New York street gang. At their peak in 1976, there may have been as many as 150 members. When Campbell interviewed Weeza, only a few gang members remained. Like Connie, Weeza was born in Puerto Rico to parents who fought, used drugs, and did not pay much attention to her. Weeza at age 26 had two children and a succession of bad relationships. Her apartment was rodent infested and she could barely read or write because her parents did not make her attend school. During the course of the study, her 18-year-old gang member boyfriend was killed by a rival gang. Sun-Africa’s gang, the Five Percent Nation, purports to be an Islamic education group, although the police consider them a street gang. She was born in New York to Panamanian parents. Her father left the family and, while her mother worked, Sun-Africa was raised mainly by an older sister. Influenced by her sister’s friends, Sun-Africa as a young teen was involved in an all-girl “crew,” skipping school, drinking, and shoplifting. At 16, Sun-Africa joined the Five Percent Nation.

According to their interpretation of Islam, men were “gods” and women were to be the submissive “earth.” Sun-Africa ultimately became pregnant by a “god” and moved in with his first wife and other children. Common themes define the lives of each of the women Campbell followed: abbreviated childhoods, parents with broken marriages, and family violence. Each of the women had immigrant parents who often moved, forcing them to change schools and often resulting in truancy. Each of the women had experienced instability due to their parents. Connie and Sun-Africa had absent fathers, while Weeza’s father was an active gang member and criminal role model. Each of the women at one point had been given up (if only temporarily) to be raised by relatives when their parents separated. Lastly, each of the women was raised in a violent family environment where violence between parents, spouses, and siblings was fairly common. Campbell certainly illustrates what Joanne Belknap refers to as the blurry line between female offenders and female victims.

Women and Criminology Campbell’s interest in female gang members came at a time when criminology was beginning to recognize the importance of gender as an explanatory variable. According to Belknap, women were all but invisible in criminology until the 1970s. Campbell’s work is an important piece in the evolution of criminology’s treatment of gender. Early portrayals of female offenders by theorists such as Cesare Lombroso, W. I. Thomas, and Pollak were unflattering, labeling female offenders as either evil or unfeminine for rebelling against their natural roles, according to Belknap. Campbell argues that male researchers were preoccupied with women’s adjunct status and with their sexuality: “The disproportionate coverage given to female gang members’ sexuality is wearisome” (p. 28). Traditional writings on women in gangs labeled women as either sex objects or tomboys (conventional or independent). Campbell remarked, “Girls appear in the literature as both the cause and the cure for much male gang delinquency” (p. 30). According to Belknap, the legacy of these theorists is that women were often depicted as instigators

Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang

of criminality, while male researchers ignored economic and social circumstances in favor of biological or psychological explanations of women’s offending. By 1975, Freda Adler’s liberation hypothesis began to set the stage for the study of the effect of the women’s movement on female offending.

Are Girl Gangs a Sign of Women’s Liberation? Campbell was concerned with what she saw as female gangs’ contradictory position. Is the existence of all-female street gangs the pinnacle of women’s liberation, or do female gangs exist just to play supportive roles in a man’s world? Interestingly, Campbell found that in some instances, female gang members were transitioning from sex objects and auxiliary members into being independent gang members. Just like boys, girls joined gangs for excitement and camaraderie. Similarly, Campbell determined that in the gangs she observed, the women decided how to structure and run their groups. For many female gang members, their status is a product of interaction with peers, not of their dealings with men or merely of their sexual attractiveness. While gang girls still value male approval, they are more comfortable now being the tomboy type and succeeding using male gang member’s criteria, such as bravery or loyalty. Although Campbell found that girls may join gangs for reasons similar to boys, she points out the importance of social networks to women’s lives. According to Campbell, gang life provides males with independence, but for women gangs are a basis for exchange. Campbell finds that female gangs are not bastions of feminism and equality. Rather, gang girls have fairly conventional conceptions of gender roles, and their membership in a gang is not a feminist act of revolution but instead is a direct consequence of a life full of poverty, drugs, unstable families, and violence. She also reports that, although gang girls value women’s friendships quite a lot, they still tend to value men above all. For instance, nearly all sexual problems, such as infidelity or sexual violence, are blamed on women. For all their gang activities, the girls Campbell followed valued motherhood and domesticity and did not want to be like men. For

133

the most part, Campbell’s gang girls were fairly traditional and not particularly liberated. According to Campbell, the media would like for gang girls to be the new violent predator, and academics want them to be making a grand statement about feminism. But they are neither. Campbell found that most gang girls gave little thought to the future and had little or no hope of improving their circumstances. A primary function of Campbell’s study is describing the hopeless and poverty-stricken lives of black and Hispanic girls in an urban neighborhood in the late 1970s. Their lives are defined by poverty, an indifferent public education system, and high rates of teen pregnancy. Coupled with these disadvantages are high rates of male unemployment and an abbreviated childhood for girls who are expected to help with child-rearing and supporting the family.

Conclusion Campbell’s The Girls in the Gang has become a classic required reading for those interested in female offending and the structure of female gangs. Importantly, Campbell opened the door for future decades of feminist researchers. One of her contributions was that unlike most sociological research on delinquency, Campbell makes a distinct effort to put a face and name to the problems that many Americans might otherwise overlook or judge. Campbell, by giving a biographical insight into each of the gang girls, shows the readers that those without hope, without economic opportunities, and without mainstream middleclass options often make poor choices because their lives are bound by a cycle of gangs, violence, and poverty. For the truly disenfranchised urban second-generation immigrant woman, gangs are a normal part of life rather than a counterculture or a feminist revolution. Campbell examines gangs not as a social enigma but as a distorted mirror of 1980s urban American life. By becoming a close, involved, participant observer, Campbell showed that gang girls are not so different from other girls. They hold fairly traditional values, uphold the virtues of family and motherhood, and are not the communist revolutionaries that radical criminologists had envisioned.

134

Capitalism and White-Collar Crime

Campbell’s work also is to be lauded for advancing theories of female criminality. Campbell’s humanizing observations helped overcome earlier negative stereotypes of female offenders as hypersexual evil women who offend due to biological or psychological forces outside their control. Campbell became one of many female criminologists to point out that women join gangs, as men do, in response to their negative social and economic circumstances. Lastly, while Campbell set the stage for future feminist research, her study did not foreshadow enormous replication. Some later works such as Jody Miller’s One of the Guys received academic accolades, while others such as 8 Ball Chicks were seen by some as sensationalistic and exploitive. Not until 1999 was there an edited compilation of research devoted to research on female gangs. Much of Campbell’s work focuses on gender and aggression. Her recent work on gender differences in one-night stands has garnered widespread attention. She is the author of Men, Women, and Aggression as well as numerous published articles. Beth Sanders See also Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime; Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender; Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work; Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender; Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio; Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender; Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl

References and Further Readings Belknap, J. (2007). The invisible woman: Gender, crime, and justice (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Campbell, A. (1991). The girls in the gang (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Chesney-Lind, M., & Hagedorn, J. (1999). Female gangs in America: Essays on girls, gangs, and gender. Chicago: Lake View Press. Huff, C. R. (2002). Gangs in America III. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. LeBlanc, A. N. (2003). Random family: Love, drugs, trouble and coming of age in the Bronx. New York: Scribner. Miller, J. (2000). One of the guys: Girls, gangs, and gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Sykes, G. (1998). 8 ball chicks: A year in the violent world of girl gangsters. New York: Anchor Books.

Capitalism and White-Collar Crime Capitalism is an extraordinarily complex term that applies to a diversity of phenomena. As Michel Beaud and others have noted, it is both a body of social practices and a way of thinking that has ethical and ideological dimensions. As a body of social practices, capitalism has taken many different forms in different countries. Despite its diversity of form, variants of certain basic features are usually found in capitalist societies. Under capitalism, each individual owns his or her own labor and can sell it for wages to an employer. The means of production, called capital (materials, land, tools and such), are privately owned. Owners of the means of production are capitalists. They can be individuals, private corporations, or other types of organizational entities. Capitalists compete with one another for profits in a market economy by manipulating labor and the means of production using rational calculations. As a way of thinking, capitalism is fundamentally individualistic and forward looking. Capitalist ideology exalts the sanctity of individual rights and of individual pursuit of wealth and progress. It is assumed that the pursuit of wealth and advancement will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number. In reality, however, under capitalism wealth tends to be concentrated in the hands of the richest capitalists. Michael Benson and Sally Simpson argue that the term white-collar crime refers to a broad range of offenses that typically involve the use of deceit, abuse of trust, conspiracy, or concealment as opposed to the use of force as means to carry out illegal activities. The term was originally coined by Edwin H. Sutherland to draw attention to crimes committed by respectable people of high social status in the course of their occupations. He contrasted white-collar criminals with the stereotypical image of the criminal as a disadvantaged individual who suffers from both social and personal pathologies. White-collar crime also encompasses crimes committed by corporate entities or their agents in the pursuit of corporate interests, such as antitrust violations, fraudulent accounting, workplace safety violations, and environmental violations. Most work on the relation between

Capitalism and White-Collar Crime

capitalism and white-collar crime focuses on offenses that occur in corporations, that is, on what Marshall Clinard and Richard Quinney have called corporate crime. Capitalism is related to white-collar crime at both a structural or organizational level and a psychological or motivational level. In regards to structure, under capitalism, the state defines and enforces the basic rules of the market. That is, it creates a legal structure that governs what can and cannot be produced and the manner of production. The state also creates rules governing how products and services can be advertised and sold in the market, the relations between capitalists, and the respective rights and obligations of employers and employees. In doing so, the state regulates the manner and the means by which capitalists can pursue profits. Hence, the legal structure created by the state acts as a constraint on the profitmaking activities of capitalists. Harold Barnett argues that white-collar crime results when capitalists use illegal means to overcome or evade the legal constraints imposed by the state. On the level of motivation, capitalism as a way of thinking elevates materialism and the pursuit of individual wealth to the status of unquestionable ideals. The emphasis on individual material success serves not only as motivation to work hard but also at times as motivation for engaging in illegal means in pursuit of individual goals (Coleman, 1987; Messner & Rosenfeld, 1997). As an ideology, capitalism also provides people with linguistic or cognitive tools that they can use to justify their lawbreaking to themselves and others (Benson & Simpson, 2009; Box, 1983).

Structural Features of Capitalism In regards to white-collar crime, James William Coleman notes that a particularly important feature of capitalist economies is competition. Capitalists must compete ceaselessly with one another for profits, market share, and growth. The incessant need to compete in order to survive and prosper is a structural feature of capitalism that promotes white-collar crime as firms sometimes respond to the pressure of competition by using illegal means to pursue their goals (Gross, 1978; Passas, 1990). In order to increase profits, business firms may engage in illegal activities that reduce or

135

externalize their production costs. For example, it is expensive for manufacturers to comply with environmental regulations regarding the legal disposal of hazardous waste. Manufacturers who avoid these costs by using illegal means to dispose of hazardous waste gain competitive advantages over their law-abiding competitors. By externalizing their costs, violators of environmental regulations increase their profits at the expense of threats to public health and damage to the environment (Barnett, 1992). The extent to which competition causes whitecollar crime, however, may vary among societies and cultures, depending on the degree to which competition is culturally promoted as a value. According to John Braithwaite, in some societies, commitment to competition may be counterbalanced by other values, such as civic-mindedness or respect for the law. Both Karl Marx and Frederick Engels stressed that another important structural feature of capitalism is the inherent tendency toward the concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of the richest capitalists. Over time, the concentration of capital leads to a dyadic economic structure composed of a competitive sector and a monopoly sector (O’Connor, 1973). The competitive sector encompasses the vast majority of corporations. It is composed of small firms that collectively account for a relatively small portion of total corporate assets, even though they make up some 98 percent of all corporations (Barnett, 1981b). In the competitive sector of the economy, competition between firms is fierce and profit margins are low. In contrast, the monopoly sector contains a small number of very large firms that control the vast bulk of corporate assets. Average returns on investment are much greater in the monopoly sector as opposed to the competitive sector. As a result of their size, monopoly sector capitalists are less subject to the forces of competition than competitive sector capitalists. Their size permits them to exert enormous power over the markets in which they operate. According to Barnett (1981b), this market power may be used to generate illegal income in a variety of ways that violate antitrust laws. For example, large firms operating either individually or as an oligopoly can illegally create barriers to entry, segment markets, eliminate competition, and otherwise illegally

136

Capitalism and White-Collar Crime

control costs and prices so as to enhance their profits. Although corporations in the competitive sector can also engage in illegal collusions to control prices and thereby reduce the impact of competition on profits, they are often unable to sustain such agreements over long periods of time.

Capitalism and Criminal Motivation Capitalism is related to criminal motivation in two ways. On one hand, the very structure of capitalism promotes the formation of criminal motives. Early in the 20th century, William Adrian Bonger and Henry Horton argued that because capitalism is based on exchange and the pursuit of profit, it makes people more egoistic—that is, more willing to pursue their own self-interest and pleasure at the expense of others than if their actions were motivated by altruism. Egoism makes people more capable of crime. On the other hand, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism provide individuals with symbolic and linguistic tools that they can use to justify and excuse lawbreaking behavior. Regarding the formation of criminal motives, Bonger and Horton noted that “a society based on exchange isolates individuals by weakening the bond that unites them” (p. 402). Workers exchange their labor for wages from capitalists. In this exchange relationship, it is inherently in the interest of each party to think primarily of their own advantage even if this is to the detriment of the other party. Simply put, it is in the interests of workers to get as much in wages as they can for as little in work as possible. Conversely, it is in the interests of employers to get as much in labor as they can for as little in wages as possible. Merchants and consumers have similarly conflicting interests. Merchants wish to sell their goods for as much as they can to consumers who, obviously, would prefer to pay as little as possible. Finally, the interests of capitalists among themselves are opposed in many ways. The interests of each entrepreneur are opposed to those they buy from and those they sell to, and they are opposed necessarily to other entrepreneurs with whom they compete. Competition inevitably forces participants to be as egoistic as possible or face the prospect of succumbing. It is important to note, however, that egoism does not inevitably lead to crime. People can pursue their self-interests at the expense of

others without necessarily engaging in crime. Whether the egoistic tendency will be expressed criminally depends on other factors. Nevertheless, those who are very egoistic are seen as more capable of crime in particular white-collar crime that promotes self-interest in exchange relationships. Besides promoting a tendency toward egoism, capitalism influences the psychology of crime in other ways. It provides linguistic and symbolic tools or techniques that can be used to justify or excuse criminal behavior. These techniques are similar to the techniques of neutralization identified by Gresham Sykes and David Matza in regards to juvenile delinquency. Two are particularly relevant with respect the relationship between capitalism and white-collar crime: the appeal to higher loyalties and condemning the condemners. In the appeal to higher loyalties, offenders argue that their offenses are justifiable because they serve some higher purpose. Capitalist entrepreneurs, for example, may feel that violating the laws governing their industry is occasionally necessary in order for the firm to make a profit and stay in business. The idea of trying to stay in business and make a profit even at the cost of breaking the law is understandable and perhaps even laudable in societies organized along capitalistic lines. Condemning the condemners involves criticizing either the law or those who enforce it. Business owners wage vigorous campaigns against the law, and they often promote the idea that the law itself, at least in regards to their particular realm of economic activity, is wrong and in violation of more fundamental values (Sutherland, 1949). As discussed below, these kinds of arguments and criticisms have some inherent validity in capitalist societies, because the proper role of the state in controlling corporate behavior is ambiguous, problematic, and disputed.

Capitalism and Corporate Crime Control: The Ambiguous Role of the State In regards to the control of traditional forms of street crime—such as murder, rape, robbery, and burglary—the role of the state is unambiguous. The state has a responsibility to maintain order and secure the peace by passing and enforcing laws. It maintains bureaucracies to apprehend, process, and punish lawbreakers. However, the

Capitalism and White-Collar Crime

state’s role in regards to the control of white-collar and corporate crime is not so clear cut. Rather, the state must balance two competing priorities: legitimacy and wealth accumulation. On one hand, the state must enforce the law against capitalists to maintain its legitimacy as a protector of the public good. On the other hand, the state is dependent on capitalists to generate wealth and employment. In short, unlike its relation to ordinary street offenders, the state often cannot go all out against whitecollar offenders. Enforcement must be tempered by economic priorities. In pure capitalism, the owners of production would be allowed to operate entirely free from outside intervention while competing for profits. But unfettered capitalistic marketplaces can lead to great social harm. They do not ensure the protection of the labor force or fair competition in the pursuit of wealth. Monopoly capitalists can exploit workers and consumers because of their dominant position in the marketplace. Unless prevented by some form of outside intervention, a monopoly capitalist might eventually win control of an entire market or even an entire economy. Thus, to preserve its legitimacy, the state is under pressure to make sure that the marketplace is fair and that workers, consumers, and society in general are not exploited. If the state does not enforce violations and allows corporations to harm society, its legitimacy is undermined. However, the state also has a vested interest in capitalist objectives of increasing wealth, job opportunities, and energy independence. It cannot impose so many restrictions that the ability of capitalists to innovate and accumulate wealth is hindered. Thus, when establishing laws and regulations to govern the marketplace and relations between manufacturers, merchants, workers, and consumers, the state must take into account and be sensitive to the needs and desires of capitalists. The state’s need to promote capital accumulation, combined with the concentration of wealth, ensures that the legal system is subject to influence from elites. Even within democracies, elite capitalists can at times overpower the voice of the public. Capitalists have more resources to influence the law-making process than does the public. Thus, the economic power structure of society is reproduced in its legal structure so that the laws and enforcement mechanisms reflect the

137

views of capitalists. Since the economic structure gives more power to large corporations than to their victims, this is reflected in the laws and enforcement system. In addition, capitalists have the ability to organize as industry groups and to regulate their own activities. Instead of serving the public interest, legislation is passed that allows corporate interests to prevail over the public’s well-being. Capitalism allows the state to prioritize goals of profit over those of social protection. The law and the enforcement system reflect these capitalist priorities. Michael L. Benson and Erin Harbinson See also Anomie and White-Collar Crime; Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of WhiteCollar Offending; Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: WhiteCollar Crime

References and Further Readings Barnett, H. C. (1981a). Corporate capitalism, corporate crime. Crime and Delinquency, 27, 4–23. Barnett, H. C. (1981b). Wealth, crime and capital accumulation. In D. F. Greenberg (Ed.), Crime and capitalism (pp. 182–188). Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield. Barnett, H. C. (1992). Hazardous waste, distributional conflict, and a trilogy of failures. The Journal of Human Justice, 3, 93–110. Beaud, M. (2001). A history of capitalism, 1500–2000. New York: Monthly Review Press. Benson, M. L. (1985). Denying the guilty mind: Accounting for involvement in a white-collar crime. Criminology, 23, 583–608. Benson, M. L., & Simpson, S. S. (2009). White-collar crime: An opportunity perspective. New York: Routledge. Bonger, W. A., & Horton, H. P. (1916). Criminality and economic conditions. Boston: Little, Brown. Box, S. (1983). Power, crime, and mystification. London: New York: Tavistock. Braithwaite, J. (1988). White-collar crime, competition, and capitalism: Comment on Coleman. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 627–632. Clinard, M. B., & Quinney, R. (1973). Criminal behavior systems: A typology. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Coleman, J. W. (1987). Toward an integrated theory of white-collar crime. American Journal of Sociology, 93, 406–439.

138

Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model

Cullen, F. T., Cavender, G., Maakestad, W. J., Benson, M. L. (2006). Corporate crime under attack: The fight to criminalize business violence (2nd ed.). Newark, NJ: LexisNexis. Edelhertz, H. (1970). The nature, impact and prosecution of white-collar crime. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Friedrichs, D. O. (2007). Trusted criminals: White-collar crime in contemporary society (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Gross, E. (1978). Organizational crime: A theoretical perspective. In N. Denzin (Ed.), Studies in symbolic interaction (pp. 55–85). Greenwood, CT: JAI Press. Hooker, R. (1999). Capitalism. Retrieved May 14, 2009, from http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/glossary/capital.htm Marx, K. (1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (F. Engels, Ed.). New York: International Publishers. (Original work published 1867) Messner, S., & Rosenfeld, R. (1997). Crime and the American dream. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. O’Connor, J. (1973). The fiscal crisis of the state. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Passas, N. (1990). Anomie and corporate deviance. Contemporary Crises, 14, 157–178. Shover, N., & Hochstetler, A. (2006). Choosing whitecollar crime. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1940). White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review, 5, 1–12. Sutherland, E. H. (1949). White collar crime. New York: Dryden Press. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664–670.

Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model The social development model, a general theory of antisocial behavior, falls into the category of developmental or life-course criminology. The theory is meant to explain key elements of the “criminal career” such as onset and persistence. Its key tenets take on a holistic, multidomain approach to explaining behavior, drawing on aspects of individuals, their immediate environment (parents, peers), and the broader social structure. Comprising several key general overarching principles, the

model anchors individuals to a progression through social institutions (e.g., elementary school, high school) across multiple developmental stages. All in all, the theory represents an expansive and ambitious framework for explaining the development and continuance of antisocial (and prosocial) behavior. This entry reviews the model’s underlying framework and origins, briefly discusses some potential critiques, and provides a sense of its present empirical support.

Conceptual Framework Key Properties

The social development model contains four elements that coalesce to define it as a theory. First, it synthesizes existing evidence on risk and protective factors. Present knowledge suggests that an array of influences across domains may impact youth development. While a number of such factors have been identified with respect to juvenile delinquency and drug use, Richard F. Catalano and J. David Hawkins suggest that a theory must account for the manner in which they interact to explain behavior. The social development model offers one potential template for understanding the logical patterns among a variety of risk and protective factors. Importantly, this signals a shift from the consideration of correlates of behavior to assessment of potential causal mechanisms. Second, it is a general theory that seeks to explain a wide range of antisocial behavior such as juvenile delinquency and drug use. It also seeks to explain prosocial behavioral trajectories. Third, the social development model is an integrated theory that takes on aspects of control, social learning, and differential association theories of delinquency and utilizes them in explaining paths to antisocial behavior. While the authors explicitly mention these theories, the model also possesses some strands that fall under individual propensity and decision-making theories. For example, the model allows for the potential presence of individual differences that temper the processes contributing to antisocial behavior (Catalano et al., 2005). These “individual constitutional factors,” including difficult temperament, are captured in other theories that focus on between-individual differences in the precursors to antisocial behavior. The tenets of the theory

Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model

suggest that the impact of such factors will be mediated by social processes and the development of key skills, however. For instance, perception of opportunity for prosocial activity may be affected by these individual constitutional factors. The model also allows for some element of choice in terms of individuals’ situated assessments of prosocial and antisocial rewards for their actions (Catalano et al., 2005). Fourth, the social development model draws its foundation from developmental processes embedded in stages of the life course. The relative presence of prosocial and antisocial developmental experiences is what drives behavior (Catalano et al., 2005). This model recognizes the context that frames social development as well as the salience of different institutions at particular stages in the life course. Although the family will maintain some influence as it is the primary socializing agent, it can become a less salient factor in behavior as youths progress through adolescence. The theorists also place great emphasis on life-stage transitions as points where change might occur. Such change is facilitated or tempered by (1) the degree of antisocial/prosocial bonds in the life of the individual, (2) rewards for particular behavior perceived by actions in the previous stage, and (3) the actual degree of antisocial behavior engaged in during that time. For example, the initiation of drug use and delinquent behavior in elementary school predicts the likelihood that problem behavior will be reinforced and continue during the high school period. Because the onset of such behaviors often occurs fairly early in the life course, the theory begins its explanatory process in childhood and continues to adulthood. Theoretical Mechanisms

The purported mechanisms inherent in the social development model draw on the processes identified in the existing theories mentioned above. The theorists use them in an integrated manner to explain behavior across important developmental phases. The theory is “transactional” in its emphasis on the longitudinal process by which the individual is affected by those around them and vice versa. Catalano and Hawkins present a detailed picture of the chain of social processes that influence youth development. It comprises (1) perceived

139

opportunity for participation in certain activities (be they pro- or antisocial) and interpersonal interactions, (2) the degree to which youths pursue these opportunities, (3) possession of the skills necessary for participating in these activities and interactions, and (4) the perception of reinforcement for that participation. This process leads to the development of a social bond, which can be prosocial or antisocial. Social bonds are then considered when individuals weigh different courses of action. Still, in cases where these bonds are prosocial, they can be attenuated by contact with negative social learning situations that orient youths to antisocial behavior and provide negative models, activities, and reinforcements. Similar to differential association theory, the model suggests that antisocial or prosocial development paths will be followed based on the preponderance of those influences. Antisocial behavior is also more likely to occur when youths are not provided with opportunities for prosocial activities or lack the skills to pursue them. Specifically, youths may attend schools that offer few opportunities for positive activities, or they may be provided with those opportunities but lack the cognitive ability to fully pursue them. Consequently, the theory also emphasizes the importance of the development of prosocial skills to ensure positive outcomes.

Origins A particularly important feature of the social development model as a theory of antisocial behavior is that it is partly born of applied work in the developmental prevention field. The primary theorists, Catalano and Hawkins, lead the Seattle Social Development Project, which began in the early 1980s as a school-based early intervention program. One objective of this project is to assess approaches designed to prevent problem behaviors like school failure, drug use, and delinquency. The intervention seeks to enhance the aspects of youths’ lives that protect against delinquency and drug use (e.g., problem solving, social interaction skills) (Hawkins et al., 1992). In this process, the research group has learned a great deal about risk and protective factors for antisocial development. They were also able to view these factors in action as they were altered (or not) during the intervention,

140

Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model

which provides a better grasp on causal effects than studies in which the researcher only observes or asks questions about behavior (Catalano et al., 2005). The theory blends existing theoretical views with propositions derived from the empirical findings of a longitudinal intervention study. Thus, its origins came as a vehicle for logically framing and operationalizing the knowledge that has emerged from the empirical study of behavioral development. In this way, it is a clear example of the blending of theory and practice.

Critiques Elements of the social development model inherently raise questions in two somewhat-related areas. First, a key point of consideration in criminological theories is the degree to which they show parsimony in explaining behavior. Second, some criminologists, such as Travis Hirschi, have criticized integrated theory as a knowledge-building strategy in criminology. The theory is quite expansive and covers several domains of influence. So, while it is thorough in considering various aspects of the individual and his or her environment in explaining behavior, it also takes on a level of complexity that can make it difficult to broadly assess its propositions with data commonly available to criminologists. Although Catalano and Hawkins suggest that the theory’s various components can be tested in parts, its expansive nature perhaps limits the potential that the theory may be falsified (i.e., contradicted by evidence), which is one element of judging the quality of such explanations. On the other hand, according to Allen Liska, Marvin Krohn, and Steven Messner, the level of complexity captured in the theory may be necessary for comprehensively explaining antisocial behavior, which of course can be influenced by a variety of factors and may shift in nature over time. Also, the theorists pay careful attention to the underlying assumptions of the constituent theories and delineate the manner in which each fits into the logical structure of the overall model. Further, the theorists tend to use the theories in a manner that lends itself to elaboration of their individual strengths in a manner designed to enhance the explanation of behavior. Eric Brown and colleagues’ 2005 empirical study of the social development model in relation to its theoretical

components (e.g., social learning, differential association) raises some questions pertaining to whether the parts fit into the whole as suggested by the theory, however.

Empirical Support A number of studies have assessed the viability of the social development model and its components. Despite the critiques just mentioned, in general, these tests have supported the basic pathways outlined in the theory (Catalano et al., 2005). The model tends to fit the data to which it is applied well and the hypothesized relationships usually behave as expected. Some tenets of the model have found less support in empirical tests, including the degree to which social development processes are expected to mediate structural and individual constitutional factors (Catalano et al., 2005); the distinction in measurement among the expected components of the prosocial and antisocial pathways (Catalano et al., 1996); and the role of prosocial/antisocial beliefs (Catalano et al., 1996, 1999). While the theory has garnered a good degree of support to date, most extant tests have drawn on data collected by Catalano and Hawkins’s Social Development Group. Further empirical assessment to reconcile these contradictory findings and expand the scope of data in which it is considered would be beneficial. Christopher J. Sullivan See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Criminal Career Paradigm; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

References and Further Readings Brown, E. C., Catalano, R. F., Fleming, C. B., Haggerty, K. P., Abbott, R. D., Cortes, R. R., et al. (2005). Mediator effects in the Social Development Model: An examination of constituent theories. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 15, 221–235. Catalano, R. F., & Hawkins, J. D. (1996). The Social Development Model: A theory of antisocial behavior. In J. D. Hawkins (Ed.), Delinquency and crime: Current theories (pp. 149–197). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime Catalano, R. F., Kosterman, R., Hawkins, J. D., Newcomb, M. D., & Abbott, R. D. (1996). Modeling the etiology of adolescent substance use: A test of the Social Development Model. Journal of Drug Issues, 26, 429–455. Catalano, R. F., Oxford, M. L., Harachi, T. W., Abbott, R. D., & Haggerty, K. P. (1999). A test of the Social Development Model to predict problem behaviour during the elementary school period. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 9, 39–56. Catalano, R. F., Park, J., Harachi, T. W., Haggerty, K. P., Abbott, R. D., & Hawkins, J. D. (2005). Mediating the effects of poverty, gender, individual characteristics, and external constraints on antisocial behavior: A test of the Social Development Model and implications for developmental life course theory. In D. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental & life-course theories of offending (pp. 93–123). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Hawkins, J. D., Catalano, R. F., Morrison, D. M., O’Donnell, J., Abbott, R. D., & Day, L. E. (1992). The Seattle Social Development Project: Effects of the first four years on protective factors and problem behaviors. In J. McCord & R. Tremblay (Eds.), The prevention of antisocial behavior in children (pp. 139–161). New York: Guilford. Hirschi, T. (1989). Exploring alternatives to integrated theory. In S. F. Messner, M. D. Krohn, & A. E. Liska (Eds.), Theoretical integration in the study of deviance and crime: Problems and prospects (pp. 37–49). Albany: SUNY Press. Liska, A. E., Krohn, M. D., & Messner, S. F. (1989). Strategies and requisites for theoretical integration in the study of crime and deviance. In S. F. Messner, M. D. Krohn, & A. E. Liska (Eds.), Theoretical integration in the study of deviance and crime: Problems and prospects (pp. 1–19). Albany: SUNY Press.

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime A pioneer of conflict theory, William J. Chambliss’s career spans 50 years of research on the problems and patterns of power in society. Through his studies of organized crime figures, opium farmers, gang members, pirates, and corrupt politicians, Chambliss demonstrated that conflict between social classes is the basic social process in a capitalist society—and

141

the key to understanding criminal justice procedures and structures. Chambliss’s primary contribution to conflict theory was to advance knowledge about who makes laws, how and why they are enforced, and the relationship between those who have power and those who do not. In an early work on the role that power plays in determining what people are the targets of law enforcement, Chambliss wrote: “Those people are arrested, tried and sentenced who can offer the fewest rewards for non-enforcement of the laws and who can be processed without creating any undue strain for the organizations which comprise the legal system” (1969, p. 84). Chambliss’s power paradigm laid the groundwork for research on selective enforcement of laws, inspiring numerous studies of drugs, gangs, corporate wrongdoing, and state-organized crime.

Theoretical Foundation Chambliss began his career in 1951 under the direction of Donald Cressey at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In a 1983 interview with criminologist John Laub, Cressey remembered Chambliss as one of his “sociological children—people who drifted into my UCLA undergraduate classes in the 1950s and got turned on to sociology” (Laub, 1983, p. 163). Cressey had been Edwin Sutherland’s graduate student at Indiana University and was an early advocate of differential association theory. As Cressey observed, “Sutherland said basically that, as a consequence of the industrial revolution, modern society is characterized by normative conflict” and individual reactions to that conflict are “shaped by culture” (Laub, 1983, p. 139). According to the differential association perspective, then, criminal behavior is learned through interpersonal contact with criminals—a social learning process that is modulated by the cultural context in which the associations occur. Chambliss graduated from UCLA in 1955 and spent the next year working as a migratory farm laborer, hitchhiking from one labor camp to the next. Along the way, he became familiar with America’s skid rows and the down-and-outers who lived there. In 1957, acting on Cressey’s advice to give up menial labor, Chambliss enrolled as a graduate student in the Sociology Department at Indiana University (IU).

142

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime

In his first year at Indiana, Chambliss took a class on the sociology of deviance taught by Alfred R. Lindesmith. During the post-war years, Lindesmith and Sutherland were symbolic interactionists without peer. Included among their graduate students were three future winners of the Sutherland Award, the American Society of Criminology’s most coveted prize: Cressey (in 1967), Lloyd Ohlin (in 1969), and Albert Cohen (in 1993). (Lindesmith won the award in 1970.) Alfred Lindesmith is best known for his courageous research on opiate addiction. During the mid1940s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics waged a campaign to fire Lindesmith from Indiana University because the sociologist held views that were considered unpatriotic. By the time Chambliss became his student, Lindesmith had spent two decades fighting the government’s drug-control policies. Lindesmith predicted that America’s prohibition against narcotics would ultimately reinforce an illicit drug market, turning cities into war zones, creating overcrowded prisons, destroying millions of lives and costing the American public billions of dollars every year (Keys & Galliher, 2000). “Lindesmith interviewed known opium addicts and searched an extensive literature for biographical and autobiographical accounts of opium addicts,” Chambliss recalled in 1988. “Lindesmith researched questions implied by the conflict perspective, namely, why was the taking of heroin (and other such drugs) criminal? His research led him to conclude that anti-opium laws emerged as a result of political power struggles, bureaucratic machinations, and legislative attempts to raise taxes and supervise imports” (Chambliss, 1988, p. 166). During his second year at Indiana University, Chambliss took the required graduate research methods course, also taught by Lindesmith. Chambliss later described the class as “very provocative, organized as it was around the philosophy of science. It dealt with the philosophy and logic of science and how you can avoid tautology in constructing theory, using George Herbert Mead and social psychology” (quoted in Keys & Galliher, 2000, p. 29). With Lindesmith serving as advisor, Chambliss’s master’s thesis represented a sort of David versus Goliath sociology that questioned the administrative measures used to control automobile parking by faculty members on the IU campus. Why, Chambliss asked, did faculty

members enjoy special parking privileges while students—who paid faculty salaries through tuition—were treated as second-class citizens? This questioning of why institutions are organized as they are, and why law has developed as it has, would become a trademark of Chambliss’s research in the years ahead. Yet Chambliss inherited an equally important research strategy from Lindesmith—namely, the predisposition to value personal contact, interchange, and argument with those he studied. This grounded theory approach is evident in Chambliss’s doctoral dissertation, The Selection of Friends. Although his interests would vary in the coming years, Chambliss would never lose touch with the persons, faces, stories, and lives he came across in the pursuit of theory.

Early Work Chambliss received his Ph.D. in 1962 and took a position in sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. His early research interests concentrated on the dual themes of conflict theory and symbolic interactionism. An article in Social Problems on the history of vagrancy laws in England and the United States would establish the 31-year-old sociologist as a leading voice of conflict theory. In this article, Chambliss showed how vagrancy laws constituted a legislative innovation designed to provide an abundance of cheap labor to England’s ruling class during a period when serfdom was breaking down and the pool of available labor was diminishing. The enforcement of vagrancy statutes was also one of the many ways criminal law was used to force ex-slaves to provide cheap labor for the agricultural, mining and industrial sectors of the U.S. Southern economy following the Civil War. It was also in Seattle that Chambliss undertook a project that would take him far from the cloistered halls of academe. Posing as a truck driver, he began making nightly sojourns to Seattle’s skidrow bars and gambling rooms where he interviewed bookmakers, drug dealers, prostitutes, heroin addicts, corrupt policemen, and well-appointed bankers and city officials. These interviews would ultimately provide the basis for a series of groundbreaking works on vice and political corruption.

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime

Conflict Theory and Social Turbulence By 1967, Cressey had moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he became Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. Chambliss followed him there the same year and became an associate professor of sociology. These were tumultuous times marked by assassinations, urban riots, protests against the Vietnam War, rampant drug use, and cultural rebellion. It was also the heyday of the Black Power movement. In Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party called for militant resistance to racism and police brutality. Heavily influenced by the post-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon, the Black Panthers held that ordinary blacks—“the brothers off the block,” as Panther founder Huey P. Newton called them— were as important to the Panthers as the lumpen proletariat was to Karl Marx. Conflict theory strongly reflected these social syncopations of the 1960s. Back in Indiana, Lindesmith was riding a wave of success brought on by The Addict and the Law, the crowning work of his career, thereby transforming himself into a public intellectual who attracted the attention of such countercultural lions as Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (Keys & Galliher, 2000). In Santa Barbara, Chambliss was doing his thing by moving beyond the traditional conflict explanation of class to take on the issue of race. In his first book, Crime and the Legal Process, Chambliss argued that criminal transgressions of blacks are much more visible than those of white middle-class persons, thereby accounting for disproportionate arrest rates among African Americans. Despite his authorship of what was then considered an anti-­ establishment viewpoint on street crime, during this period Chambliss was appointed to President Richard M. Nixon’s Commission on Violence. This was followed by Chambliss’s seminal text with Robert Seidman, Law, Order, and Power. It begins on this disquieting note: We live on the edge of the abyss. Rarely in recent memory has society seemed to teeter so close to disaster. The economy roars out of control; international affairs threaten to overwhelm us; bureaucracy clasps us in its clammy embrace; politics becomes a theater of the absurd, and politicians, clowns. (Chambliss & Seidman, 1971, p. 1)

143

Impressive not only for its breadth of coverage— the authors covered topics ranging from state and stateless societies, semiotics, criminal and corporate law, to the application of Marxist dialectics to everyday problem solving—but Law, Order, and Power presented a challenge to the domain assumptions of law and social science. In so doing, Chambliss and Seidman advanced the conflict perspective beyond a Marxian discussion of law formation (i.e., laws reflect the interests of those who own and control the means of production) to an examination of the processes by which the interests of the rich and powerful are actually translated into law and administration. Chambliss gave greater articulation to these ideas in four subsequent books published during his Santa Barbara years (Chambliss, 1973a, 1974, 1975; Chambliss & Ryther, 1975). He also brought to print his classic ethnographic study of street gangs: “The Saints and the Roughnecks.” In this often-cited work, Chambliss (1973b) unpacked the connections between social structure, perceptions of deviance, and the effect of labeling as a self-fulfilling prophesy. Chambliss concluded that “the impact on a person’s life of labeling, stigma, and negative self-image is a powerful force in determining who we are and what we become. One lesson is inescapable: The less the intervention in the minor crimes of juveniles the better off they and society will be” (p. 31). The first of his Seattle research came with Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journal, a book cut from the cloth of Sutherland’s path-breaking work, The Professional Thief. Indeed, each edition of Sutherland and Cressey’s Criminology published from 1974 onward would cite The Professional Thief and Boxman as the discipline’s premier studies of professional theft. By this point in his career, Chambliss had become a criminologist of international stature. In 1969 and 1970, he was a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. In 1970 and 1971, he was a visiting professor at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the London School of Economics, and the University of Oslo in Norway. Chambliss also returned to Seattle’s skid row during these years, where he witnessed a fundamental change in the city’s heroin market and the racketeering enterprises that supported it. In search of the story behind this change, in 1974

144

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime

Chambliss visited Thailand where he interrogated the ways in which opium was being produced and trafficked from the Golden Triangle, through Asia, and into the United States.

On the Take In the early 1970s, American popular culture discovered a new obsession: the gangster. This was due primarily to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, based on Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name. Released in 1972 to universal acclaim, the movie was rewarded with several Academy Awards, introduced into the American lexicon such unforgettable catchphrases as “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” and established itself as the de facto gangster film to which all other applications of the genre would be compared. “Certainly there was immorality in the Mafia,” reflected Marlon Brando, the film’s legendary leading character. “But at heart it was a business. . . . It didn’t operate much differently from certain multinational corporations. The Mafia may kill a lot of people, but while we were making the movie, CIA representatives were dealing drugs in the Golden Triangle, torturing people for information and assassinating them with far more efficiency than the Mob” (quoted in Kanfer, 2008, p. 248). Chambliss would arrive at a similar conclusion. In 1975, he retreated to a cabin in the woods near Oslo, Norway, where he synthesized the Seattle research into a manuscript on organized crime. On the Take: From Petty Criminals to Presidents would be his most controversial work. On the Take begins where Cressey’s landmark Theft of the Nation leaves off. Yet Chambliss would distinguish himself from his former mentor in two important ways. First, he employed a different methodological approach. Whereas Cressey based his research on a deductive model of scientific inference, Chambliss approached the organized crime problem from an inductive perspective. “Going to the streets of the city rather than the records [Cressey’s primary data source],” he speculated, “may bring the role of corruption and complicity between political, economic, and criminal interests into sharp relief” (Chambliss, 1978, pp. 5–6). Second, On the Take is distinguished by its theoretical import. Following Cressey, Chambliss wrote that he was “prepared to find

that [organized] crime was understandable in terms of people . . . differentially associated with criminal behavior patterns” (1978, p. 7), yet he concluded that differential association theory was “shallow and unfruitful.” Instead, Chambliss argued that organized crime “is a political phenomenon which takes its character from the economic institutions that exist at a particular point in time” (1978, p. 8). On the Take explores an intricate world of high-stakes poker games, secret meetings with major figures in the organized crime industry, midnight confessions of murder, and stories of bribery, sex for hire, and white slavery. Kilos of heroin pass through On the Take like coins through a slot machine. At one point, Chambliss travels to Florida where he interviews the notorious crime boss Meyer Lansky, who together with Charles “Lucky” Luciano was largely responsible for the Mafia’s development of Las Vegas. At another point, Chambliss witnesses a police killing of a well-known heroin dealer and the disappearance of his cash and drug supply. At another, he fends off threats from wealthy members of the criminal underworld who have grown concerned that a “professor” was inquiring into things that were “none of his damn business.” And at still another point Chambliss is traipsing through the Golden Triangle interviewing CIA agents, Thai officials, poppy growers, and heroin smugglers. Through his analysis of the international heroin distribution network, Chambliss made a major contribution to the organized crime literature. Cressey described organized crime leaders as part of an Italian-American Cosa Nostra who were socially segregated from mainstream society because they “do not have the social background and social graces which would make them eligible to participate [in the mainstream]” (Sutherland & Cressey, 1978, p. 270). Chambliss argued that the “Cosa Nostra” or the “Mafia” was simply a smokescreen for a more complex set of circumstances. He expanded Cressey’s definitional envelope by differentiating between local, national, and international crime syndicates that are composed of people—from various ethnic backgrounds— who are actually resplendent with “social graces” and deeply integrated into legitimate social institutions. These people included financiers, businessmen, politicians, policemen and (in some respects

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime

least importantly) racketeers. In the end, Chambliss concluded that “a symbiotic relationship between politics, law enforcement, legitimate business, and organized crime [is] absolutely necessary for organized crime to survive and flourish as it does in America” (Chambliss, 1978, p. 154).

State-Organized Crime Chambliss returned to the United States in 1976 and became a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware. Recognizing a deficiency in the academy’s outlets for critical scholarship, he became the founder and editor of Contemporary Crises. He also published two influential books on organized crime: Organizing Crime (coauthored with Alan Block) and Whose Law? What Order? (coauthored with Milton Mankoff). In addition to publishing dozens of book chapters and articles in journals throughout North America, Europe, India, and Africa, he also accepted visiting professorships at the University of Stockholm in Sweden, the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies in Austria, and Columbia University in New York. Yet the defining work of Chambliss’s Delaware period was “On Lawmaking,” published by the British Journal of Law and Society in 1979. Here, Chambliss maintained that laws serve as temporary resolutions to conflicts that are rooted in structural contradictions. These contradictions, in turn, lead to visible and concrete disputes between groups, especially social classes. Political elites then face a dilemma in deciding how best to contain and diffuse the conflicts. In search of historical examples of these structural contradictions, Chambliss went to London where he spent months poring over books and unpublished manuscripts at the British Museum, some of which dated back to the 16th century. This exercise led Chambliss to a study of pirating. Among his case studies, Chambliss discovered that in 1572 England’s most famous pirate, Sir Francis Drake, sailed to Spain in a ship outfitted by wealthy businessmen seeking a return on their investment. Over the next 2 years, Drake attacked small ships and villages along the Spanish Main, ransacking supplies of gold and silver. He then joined forces with French pirates and ambushed a train carrying silver. After taking his cut of the bounty, Drake returned to England with enough

145

gold and silver to support the government and all its expenses for a period of 7 years. The Spanish complained to the Queen about Drake’s exploits, yet little was done to punish him. Instead, Drake was rewarded with knighthood, wealth, and power (Chambliss, 1988). Chambliss called this phenomenon state-­ organized crime—defined as “crimes committed by state or government officials in the pursuit of their job as representatives of the government” (1988, p. 327)—and broadened the list of illustrations to include government-sponsored death squads, illegal incarceration, and police brutality. Arguing that these types of crime are as essential to the study of criminology as mugging, robbery and white-collar crime, Chambliss inspired investigations into such state-organized crimes as air piracy by the Israeli government (Georges-Abeyie, 1991), government complicity in the U.S. savings and loan embezzlement scandal (Calavita et al., 1997), torture, human rights violations, and joint efforts between the CIA and organized crime to assassinate a world leader (Hamm, 1993, 1995, 2007).

The Drug War and the Ghetto Poor In 1986, Chambliss took a post as professor and chair of the Sociology Department at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Two years later he became president of the American Society of Criminology. True to his iconoclastic style, Chambliss christened the annual ASC meeting “Crimes By and Against the State.” He opened his presidential address (see Chambliss, 1993) with a moment of silence for the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, an entirely appropriate act given that the date of his address was November 10, 1988—the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Chambliss set forth his theory of state-organized crime through lively discussions of pirates, opium smugglers, assassins, and Lt. Colonel Oliver North—who would soon be indicted on 16 felony counts related to his participation in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1989, Chambliss was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and returned to Africa where he taught in the school of law at the University of Lusaka in Zambia. A city with serious water problems and epidemic rates of HIV/AIDS, Lusaka is home to one of the poorest populations on Earth. According

146

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime

to a 2007 United Nations report, half of Lusaka’s 120,000 residents live on less than $1 a day. Yet Chambliss discovered a special richness living in this afflictive environment. He became an avid collector of wooden carvings made by the indigenous Bantu tribesmen and inspired scores of young impoverished law school students to pursue careers in community betterment. Upon his return to Washington in 1991, Chambliss redirected his research interests toward the ghetto poor. The research moved along two fronts. First he began conducting an ethnographic study of police practices in D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods, participating in ride-alongs with a specialized riot squad called the Rapid Deployment Unit, or RDU. Within the Washington police force the RDU was known as the “Dirty Harrys” or as “very bad-ass individuals” (Chambliss, 1999, p. 64). Second, he began to amass census, crime, and prison population data, eventually gathering dozens of statistical tables. Chambliss introduced this research in his 1993 Presidential Address before the Society for the Study of Social Problems at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, once a favored vacation retreat for Mob figures like Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Sam Giancana. The irony of the location was not lost on the SSSP president. Six years later the study was published in Chambliss’s 15th book, Power, Politics, and Crime, described by Noam Chomsky on the book’s flyleaf as “a wake-up call that is badly needed, offering insight and guidelines for people who care about their society, its serious flaws, and what it could become if citizens were to take the real issues into their own hands.” Drawing on his tables, Chambliss demonstrated to great effect how the panic over crime—especially the teenage “superpredatory” phenomenon—had been manufactured by the media, police officials, and the private prison industry. At the center of this campaign was innercity African Americans who had become grist for the crime control industry. Moving to the human story behind his statistics, Chambliss presented results of the ethnographic study, offering such harrowing accounts of police brutality as this: It is 10:25 at night when an undercover agent purchases $50.00 of crack cocaine from a young black male. . . . We go immediately to the apartment

[where the suspect lived], the police enter without warning with their guns drawn. Small children begin to scream and cry. The adults in the apartment are thrown to the floor, the police are shouting, the three women in the apartment are swearing and shouting, “You can’t just barge in here like this. . . . Where’s your goddamn warrant?” The suspect is caught and brought outside. [He] is sixteen years old. [O]ne policeman says, “I should kick your little black ass for dealing that shit. You are a worthless scumbag, do you realize that?” Another officer asks, “What’s your mother’s name, son? My mistake . . . she’s probably a whore and you are just a ghetto bastard. Am I right?” (1999, pp. 65–66)

Chambliss argued that such heavy-handed practices were caused by the over-policing of ghetto streets brought on by the war on drugs. He wrote that these practices are “the major factors contributing to the ghettoization of the African American community and the creation of an intractable class of abjectly poor.” Any chance for black families to achieve a normal life “is destroyed as the heart of the community is ripped out by the humiliation and degradation that law and law enforcement practices inflict on its young men and women” (1999, p. 76). Leaving no quarter, Chambliss concluded that the war on drugs has been a spectacular failure.

Summary In 2004, Chambliss won the Sutherland Award for his research on conflict theory, making him the fifth Sutherland Award winner to come from IU’s Sociology Department. In 2008, Chambliss was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association—an award that has only been given to one other scholar. When asked if he had any advice for criminologists in a 2004 interview for the ASC’s Oral History Project, Chambliss replied that criminologists should simply “scratch where it itches.” Chambliss has certainly done that over the course of his long and distinguished career. Whether it was his analysis of race and crime, organized crime, state-organized crime, or the war on drugs, Chambliss’s research was forged in the fires of

Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime

prevailing social problems. In Cressey’s words, Chambliss’s work has always been “shaped by culture.” A critical retrospective of that work may reveal a dual legacy, however. On one hand, Chambliss’s research may be considered anachronistic—a throwback, if you will, to the Vietnam/Watergate era when politics was personal. These days, few criminologists study organized crime, heroin smuggling, vice, political corruption, or professional theft. Drug policies are rarely challenged. Institutional Review Boards have made ethnographic research on criminal subcultures almost impossible to conduct. The ethical dilemmas raised by this type of research are typically perceived as too risky or potentially harmful in today’s climate. In particular, ethnographic research that necessitates a researcher concealing one’s true identity (as a researcher) is usually considered overly deceptive. In addition, ethnographers, by design, get “close” to the data, immersing themselves in the lives of their subjects. While this yields incredibly rich information, ethical questions can arise in terms of how deeply the ethnographer should become involved in the activities of the group they are studying. These activities are, after all, sometimes illegal. It has been years since advancements were made in the core principles of conflict theory. For better or worse, conflict theory has been subsumed by feminist, left realist, and cultural criminological perspectives. But on the other hand, there is no doubt that Chambliss was remarkably prescient in his identification of double standards in the application of law and justice in capitalist societies. Today, as drug warriors continue to incarcerate thousands of poor African Americans each year, professional thieves on Wall Street ravage financial institutions with impunity, creating a worldwide economic catastrophe in the process. Meanwhile, opium smuggling in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan has reached record levels; stories of pirates pillaging maritime vessels off the coast of Somalia appear in the news with astonishing regularity; and gangs like Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the Bloods, and the Aryan Brotherhood are now investigated by the FBI as organized crime networks. More than ever, it seems, criminology may benefit from an interest in those people who make laws, how and why their laws are enforced,

147

and the relationship between those who have power and those who do not. Mark S. Hamm See also Chambliss, William J.: The Saints and the Roughnecks; Michalowski, Raymond L., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime; Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief; Turk, Austin: The Criminalization Process

References and Further Readings Calavita, K., Pontell, H. N., & Tillman, R. H. (1997). Big money crime: Fraud and politics in the savings and loan crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chambliss, W. J. (1962). The selection of friends. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University. Chambliss, W. J. (1964, Summer). A sociological analysis of the laws of vagrancy. Social Problems, pp. 67–77. Chambliss, W. J. (1969). Crime and the legal process. New York: McGraw-Hill. Chambliss, W. J. (with King, H.). (1972). Boxman: A professional thief’s journal. New York: Harper & Row. Chambliss, W. J. (Ed.). (1973a). Sociological readings in the conflict perspective. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Chambliss, W. J. (1973b). The saints and the roughnecks. Society, 11(1), 24–31. Chambliss, W. J. (Ed.). (1974). Problems of industrial society. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Chambliss, W. J. (Ed.). (1975). Criminal law in action. New York: Wiley. Chambliss, W. J. (1978). On the take: From petty criminals to presidents. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chambliss, W. J. (1979). On lawmaking. British Journal of Law and Society, 6, 149–171. Chambliss, W. J. (1988). Exploring criminology. New York: Macmillan. Chambliss, W. J. (1993). State-organized crime. In W. J. Chambliss & M. S. Zatz (Eds.), Making law: The state, the law, and structural contradictions (pp. 290–314). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chambliss, W. J. (1999). Power, politics, and crime. Boulder, CO: Westview. Chambliss, W. J., & Block, A. (1981). Organizing crime. New York: Elsevier. Chambliss, W. J., & Mankoff, M. (1981). Whose law, what order? New York: Wiley.

148

Chambliss, William J.: The Saints and the Roughnecks

Chambliss, W. J., & Ryther, T. E. (1975). Sociology: The discipline and its direction. New York: McGraw-Hill. Chambliss, W. J., & Seidman, R. B. (1971). Law, order, and power. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Cressey, D. R. (1969). Theft of the nation: The structure and operations of organized crime in America. New York: Harper & Row. Georges-Abeyie, D. E. (1991). Piracy, air piracy, and the recurrent U.S. and Israeli civilian aircraft interceptions. In G. Barak (Ed.), Crimes by the capitalist state (pp. 129–144). Albany: SUNY Press. Hamm, M. S. (1993). State-organized assassination: A study of seven CIA plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. In W. J. Chambliss & M. S. Zatz (Eds.), Making law: The state, the law, and structural contradictions (pp. 315–346). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hamm, M. S. (1995). The abandoned ones: The imprisonment and uprising of the Mariel Boat People. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hamm, M. S. (2007). High crimes and misdemeanors: George W. Bush and the sins of Abu Ghraib. Crime, Media, Culture, 3, 259–284. Kanfer, S. (2008). Somebody: The reckless life and remarkable career of Marlon Brando. New York: Knopf. Keys, D. P., & Galliher, J. F. (2000). Confronting the drug establishment: Alfred Lindesmith as public intellectual. Albany: SUNY Press. Laub, J. H. (1983). Criminology in the making: An oral history. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Lindesmith, A. R. (1965). The addict and the law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1937). The professional thief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutherland, E. H., & Cressey, D. R. (1978). Criminology (10th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Chambliss, William J.: The Saints and the Roughnecks In William Chambliss’s 1973 groundbreaking study “The Saints and the Roughnecks,” he observed two groups of students from Hanibal High and showed how both social class and societal labeling led to one group being defined as delinquent while the other was defined as normal

teenagers sowing a few wild oats. In the 2 years that Chambliss observed these teenagers, they were involved in activities such as truancy, drinking, wild driving, petty theft, and vandalism. The eight teenagers who were referred to as the Saints engaged in as much or more delinquent behavior than the Roughnecks, but they came from middleclass homes and were able to avoid the deviant label. On the other hand, the six Roughnecks came from lower-class households and were viewed by the community as troublemakers. As a result, the futures of these young men were shaped by the labels they received while still in high school. Although the Saints were active in school affairs and athletics, Chambliss noted that they were some of the most delinquent boys at Hanibal High School. The Saints were successful in school with grade point averages (GPAs) of an A or B but spent most days manipulating teachers to get out of school early. Once they were away from school, they could be found in a pool hall or café in the suburbs. In neither of these places would the Saints likely be recognized by fellow customers. On the weekends, the Saints could most likely be found in “Big Town,” which was a large city of over a million people 25 miles from Hanibal. While in Big Town, the Saints would drink heavily, drive drunkenly through the streets, commit acts of vandalism, and engage in pranks. They often moved construction signs and watched as motorists drove through pot holes or closed streets. The Saints were never seriously injured during their weekend outings and were only stopped twice by the police, but never arrested. This may be the result of the police believing that the Saints were good boys who were always polite and contrite when questioned. Unlike the Saints, the Roughnecks were constantly in trouble with the police and the community, although their rate of delinquency was essentially the same. However, the Roughnecks were different from the Saints in several important ways. First, the Roughnecks were not nearly as successful in school as the Saints. They had an average GPA of a C. They were not viewed as student leaders by their teachers, and they were not involved in school activities, although two were athletes. Second, they engaged in delinquent activities in full view of the community. For example, they could often be seen in front of the local

Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime

drugstore just hanging around and drinking. In addition, they were often in fights that were witnessed by the community. Along with drinking and fighting, they also engaged in the petty theft of such items as paperback books, comics, and gasoline. The Roughnecks disliked the police and felt unfairly singled out. The police believed these were bad kids and attempted to arrest them whenever there was evidence. As a result, each of the Roughnecks was arrested at least once during the 2-year observation. When it came to the total number of illegal acts, the Saints were more delinquent than the Roughnecks. However, the Saints were viewed by the community, teachers, and the police as good kids with bright futures. On the other hand, the Roughnecks were viewed as troublemakers and future criminals. This was the result of several differences between the two groups. The first difference was their respective levels of visibility. While the Saints had access to cars and were able to commit their delinquent activities out of view of their community, the Roughnecks seldom had access to cars and therefore committed the majority of their delinquent activities in full view of their community. Therefore, the delinquent activities of the Roughnecks were well-known to the community, whereas the delinquency of the Saints was not. Another important factor that led to the differential treatment of these two groups was their respective types of demeanor. While the Saints were apologetic and penitent when caught by the police for their crimes, the Roughnecks reacted with hostility and disdain. More often than not, this led to the release of the Saints while the Roughnecks were arrested. Finally, there was the issue of preexisting bias within the community regarding these two groups of boys. Although the Saints were viewed as good kids from middle-class families, the Roughnecks were viewed as bad kids from the wrong side of the tracks. As a result of the differential labeling of the Saints and the Roughnecks, their outcomes were different as well. While seven of the eight Saints went on to college after high school, two of the Roughnecks went to college on athletic scholarships, two never finished high school, and two were sentenced to prison for murder convictions. While all but one of the Saints lived up to the high expectations the community had of them, the Roughnecks

149

lived up to the community’s expectations as well. The common belief was that the Saints would be successful individuals and, except for one, they were. The other belief was that the Roughnecks would wind up as criminals, and except for two, they lived up to that expectation. Chambliss concludes his study by suggesting that selectively finding, processing, and punishing some kinds of criminality and not others leads to the labeling of some as deviant and others as not, even while engaging in identical behaviors. Neil Quisenberry See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime; Schur, Edwin M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency; Turk, Austin T.: The Criminalization Process

References and Further Readings Becker, H. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. London: Free Press. Chambliss, W. J. (1973). The saints and the roughnecks. Society, 11(1), 24–31. Macleod, J. (2008). Ain’t no makin’ it: Aspirations and attainment in a low-income neighborhood (3rd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Reiman, J. (1998). The rich get richer and the poor get prison: Ideology, class and criminal justice (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime Mitchell B. Chamlin and John K. Cochran’s (1997) social altruism theory departs from traditional macro-social theories in its explanation of crime rates in aggregates (e.g., communities, cities, states) in two ways. First, while most macro-social theories of crime focus on the structural aspects of society and their relationship to crime, social altruism theory focuses on the cultural aspect of society and its relationship to crime. The second point of departure occurs by changing the central theoretical question from “What causes communities

150

Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime

to have high crime rates?” to “What causes communities to have low crime rates?” Drawing on the theoretical insights of John Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming theory, Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld’s institutional-anomie theory, and Francis Cullen’s social support theory, social altruism—defined as the willingness of communities to provide sparse resources, distinct from those provided by the state (e.g., welfare), toward the aid and benefit of its members—is predicted to vary inversely with crime.

The Construction of Social Altruism Theory Chamlin and Cochran’s social altruism theory predicts that communities that edify their citizens to appreciate and perform actions for the betterment of fellow citizens’ welfare will cultivate a cultural value system that depresses crime. Social altruism theory separates itself from other macrosocial theories of crime in that it attempts to explain reductions in crime rather than increases in crime. Typically, macro-social explanations of crime have centered on how communities lack characteristics that lead to increased crime rates. For example, anomie theory states that the lack of legitimate avenues to secure desired goals leads to increases in crime, and Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s social disorganization theory states that a lack of informal social control leads to higher crime rates. Other macro-social theories have evaluated how communities have characteristics (e.g., target attractiveness) that promote greater opportunity for crime, thus higher crime rates. Chamlin and Cochran’s social altruism theory takes a different tack and centers its theoretical rationale on how increases of a characteristic— social altruism—reduce crime in a community. The key theoretical concept of social altruism is drawn from the theoretical discussions of the works of Braithwaite, Messner and Rosenfeld, and Cullen. Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming theory posits that the manner in which a community responds to law violations is directly related to their crime rate. Community reactions to law violations that focus on punishing and stigmatizing offenders, what reintegrative shaming theory refers to as disintegrative shaming, do not foster a cultural value system that promotes social altruism. Rather,

these communities foster values that destroy mutual bonds of respect and caring toward crime violators. According to Braithwaite, these communities will have higher crime rates. Alternatively, communities that discourage disintegrative shaming and promote reiterative shaming will experience low rates of crime. Social altruism theory draws its insights from Braithwaite’s work not from the method in which a community responds to law but from the social conditions that foster the different patterns of social control. In this sense, the cultural context in which a community operates is the reason behind differential levels in social control. Accordingly, low crime communities will have social systems that cultivate values in which members are taught that they have a moral obligation, beyond selfmotivated relationships, to help their fellow citizens reduce crime rates in the community. Thus, for social altruism theory, the key insight from reintegrative shaming theory is the role of a community’s cultural climate and its relationship with crime. A social altruism perspective is also supported in the statements of institutional-anomie theory. However, unlike reintegrative shaming theory that was concerned with the role between culture and structure and the distribution of crime, Messner and Rosenfeld focus on how cultural values interact with structurally induced anomic pressures to engage in crime. In brief, institutional-anomie theory argues that crime is a result of the imbalance of structural powers. When the economic institution dominates, it places greater emphasis on individualistic goals as a measuring stick for success, and this leads to higher crime rates. According to Messner and Rosenfeld, crime reductions will occur when noneconomic institutions reaffirm cultural values that stress goals other than the accumulation of goods and services. For the purposes of social altruism theory, the work of Messner and Rosenfeld suggests that communities that inculcate values that are altruistic will be less likely to be dominated by economic goals and thus likely to experience high crime rates. Finally, social altruism theory borrows from the theoretical insights of Cullen’s social support theory. Briefly, social support theory argues that variations in individual involvement in crime, social control, and crime rates can be explained by

Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime

fluctuations in social support. At the macro-social level, Cullen argues that the ability of communities to provide social networks that offer resources to manage the hardships of residents’ lives will be directly related to a community’s crime rates. Thus, Cullen’s social support theory suggests that the more social support a community offers (e.g., through family or other institutions), the lower the crime rates will be. Chamlin and Cochran note that an underlying theme across the works of Braithwaite, Messner and Rosenfeld, and Cullen is that communities who teach their citizens to care for and be concerned for the welfare of others, beyond selfgratifying motives, will experience lower rates of crime. Thus, according to Chamlin and Cochran, communities with high levels of social altruism will experience lower levels of crime.

Policy Implications One of the attractive features of social altruism theory is its policy implications. Findings from other macro-structural theories of crime are often thought of as not readily translatable into effective (or politically acceptable) policy that would lead to a decrease in crime. For instance, a central policy implication of other macro-social theories of crime would require the manipulation of the social structure. On the other hand, the policy implications are straightforward for social altruism theory: Increase a community’s level of social altruism and the level of crime will decrease. Thus, policy developed from social altruism theory should focus on promoting and instilling altruistic values. One policy, suggested by Chamlin and Cochran, would be to increase the tax deductibility of charitable contributions. By providing an incentive to donate money to charitable institutions that would increase altruism in a community, one could theoretically decrease crime rates, according to social altruism theory. Additionally, once individuals engage in altruistic behaviors, regardless of their original intention for doing so, they are more likely to continue engaging in these behaviors.

Empirical Support Social altruism theory is relatively new to the field of criminology, and there have been few tests that

151

have been conducted to establish its validity. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of testing social altruism theory is providing a way to capture (measure) social altruism. That is, how does one empirically measure a community’s willingness to provide and lookout for fellow citizens? In their original article, Chamlin and Cochran measure social altruism as contributions to local charitable institutions—in this case, donations to the United Way. More specifically, they use the ratio of United Way donations to the aggregate city income. The analyses also controlled for other theoretical variables from prominent motivational, opportunity, and compositional theories. The results supported social altruism theory. Thus, cities with high levels of social altruism demonstrated significantly lower property and personal crime rates, while controlling for other theories’ key variables. In a 2001 analysis, Chamlin and Cochran provide a different measure of social altruism—­ donations to public radio. Chamlin and Cochran argue that this measure is less susceptible to social desirability effects (i.e., the measure is less likely to stem from non-altruistic motivations). Similar to Chamlin and Cochran’s original analysis, this analysis controlled for other theories’ key variables. Again, the results supported social altruism theory’s contention of an inverse relationship between social altruism and crime rates. States with higher levels of donations to public radio (i.e., high levels of social altruism) had significantly lower levels of personal and property crime rates, net of other theoretical factors. While discourse and validation regarding the measurement of social altruism have received most of the published attention, the policy implications of social altruism theory have been tested. As noted above, the policy implications of social altruism theory are quite clear. To the extent that a community can teach its members to be aware and provide for the welfare of its citizens (i.e., social altruism), the development of a cultural value system that depresses crime rates can be achieved. One method of promoting altruistic attitudes and behavior, and thus decreasing crime rates, would be to offer tax deductions for donations to charitable institutions. To test this idea, in 1999, Chamlin and colleagues evaluated the relationship between the

152

Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency

ratio of the number of individuals that reported making tax-deductible contributions on their tax returns to the total number of reported tax returns for each state to personal and property crime rates. Consistent with previous research, the analyses controlled for indicators of social, economic, and population structures. The results, however, were not in favor of social altruism theory. There was no evidence that states with a higher proportion of taxpayers making tax-deductible contributions coincided with lower state levels of property or personal crime rates.

Conclusion Drawing on the theoretical discussions of Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming theory, Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional-anomie theory, and Cullen’s social support theory, Chamlin and Cochran’s social altruism theory provides a macro-social explanation of crime rates. Because of the relative newness of the theory, there have been few empirical tests of the theory. While the empirical tests of the inverse relationship between social altruism and crime have found support for the theory, further development of the theory will depend on finding true measures of social altruism—that is, finding ways to capture behaviors that are purely altruistic and not tainted by selfinterest. Moreover, the theory’s policy implications need further examination because they hold relatively attractive qualities compared to those of other perspectives. Thus, if ways can be found to increase altruistic behaviors, these interventions would potentially benefit the welfare of community members and decrease crime. Andrew J. Myer See also Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

References and Further Readings Braitewaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame, and reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brantingham, P. J., & Brantingham, P. L. (1991). Environmental criminology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

Chamlin, M. B., & Cochran, J. K. (1997). Social altruism and crime. Criminology, 35, 203–228. Chamlin, M. B., & Cochran, J. K. (2001). Social altruism and crime revisited: A research note on measurement. Journal of Crime and Justice, 24, 59–72. Chamlin, M. B., Novak, K. J., Lowenkamp, C. T., & Cochran, J. K. (1999). Social altruism, tax policy, and crime: A cautionary tale. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 10, 429–446. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activities approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Cullen, F. T. (1994). Social support as organizing concept for criminology: Presidential address to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Justice Quarterly, 11, 527–559. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American dream. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2001). Crime and the American dream (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency In the 1980s, Meda Chesney-Lind began outlining why criminological theories were inadequate in their explanations of female delinquency. She posited that theories were androcentric, focusing on the experiences of males. However, these theories are applied to both genders as if they were universal propositions. In 1988, with coauthor Kathleen Daly, Chesney-Lind argued that current thinking failed to recognize the unique factors that differentiate females from males and the factors that predispose females to crime differently than males. She contended that an increasing number of girls are entering the criminal justice system and, therefore, require the attention of system officials and researchers as a separate subgroup. Furthermore, according to Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko, females become involved in the system for different crimes and status offenses (offenses that are only illegal for juveniles) than their male counterparts. To address these issues, Chesney-Lind developed a feminist model for female delinquency. She argued that American society is patriarchal,

Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency

meaning that it is dominated by males and that females are relegated to second-class status. This patriarchy subjects females to a powerless situation where they have an increased likelihood of victimization, both sexual and physical. This victimization and powerlessness in the context of a patriarchal society leads girls into delinquency, particularly as their coping mechanisms for their victimizations are criminalized. For example, running away from an abuser is a status offense, which is often punished by periods of incarceration for juvenile females. Moreover, the juvenile justice system treats female offending differentially, and therefore females are punished more harshly for committing similarly non-severe status offenses when compared to their male counterparts. Finally, because of the harsh punishment of girls’ coping strategies, the criminal justice system becomes a tool for the social control of females. Indeed, it is a system that is aimed at subjecting females to further oppression by limiting their reactions to patriarchal authority (ChesneyLind, 1989). This entry provides a brief discussion of the contributions of Chesney-Lind in developing a model of female juvenile delinquency. To cover this material, this entry is divided into three sections. This first presents information on why female delinquency must be studied. The second section provides the feminist critique of mainstream criminology and the response of ChesneyLind to criticism of the feminist perspective. Finally, the third section reviews Chesney-Lind’s model of female delinquency.

The Importance of Studying Females Prior to Chesney-Lind’s research, most criminologists ignored the study of females in the criminal justice system. There are not equal numbers of female and males involved in the juvenile and criminal justice systems, as males commit an overwhelming majority of crime in the United States. However, Chesney-Lind and Pasko presented three pieces of information supporting their contention that criminologists must study female crime separately from male crime. First, female crime is increasing at a rate greater than male crime. Second, female and male juvenile delinquents engage in different crime. Third, punishments meted out for male and female juvenile delinquency are not equitable.

153

Chesney-Lind contends that male and female crime are increasing at unequal rates. In particular, the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of females have increased dramatically since the 1970s. Males’ involvement in the criminal justice system has also risen; however, the rates of females have risen at around twice the rate of males. Chesney-Lind and Pasko argue that this rise suggests that female criminal involvement is affected by factors different than males, making it necessary to study females as well as males. In “Girls in Jail,” Chesney-Lind states that girls commit different crimes than boys. Specifically, females tend to commit less serious crime than males, including a greater number of status offenses. Examples are truancy, running away, and incorrigible behavior. From the data she analyzed, Chesney-Lind contends that female juveniles accounted for 46 percent of status offenses in court records, while they only account for 14 percent of juveniles referred to court. Further, around 2 percent of girls were arrested for serious violent crime, whereas boys were more than 5 times more likely to be arrested for these crimes. Chesney-Lind interprets these data to mean that juvenile females commit less serious crime than juvenile males. Therefore, because males and females commit different crimes, it is necessary to study female crime separately from male crime. In addition to females committing different crimes than males, female juveniles are differentially punished for the crimes that they commit compared to their male counterparts. Females are disproportionately referred to juvenile court by their parents. Girls are jailed for status offenses at rates higher than males. Finally, delinquent females spend comparable time in state custody to males for less serious delinquent behavior. From this evidence, ChesneyLind surmises that females are treated differently than delinquent males for comparable illicit behavior. As such, because punishment is not equitable for boys and girls that come into contact with the criminal justice system, it is necessary for criminology to study female crime distinctly from that of males. Although Chesney-Lind provided arguments for the necessity of studying juvenile females as distinct from their counterparts, the development of feminist criminology and the entrance of feminist thought

154

Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency

into scholarly work in the field were challenged. Therefore, the argument for why feminist thought was needed was paramount to the development of Chesney-Lind’s model of female delinquency.

The Critique of Feminist Thought To appreciate fully the importance of ChesneyLind’s theory, it is vital to understand feminist thought and the inadequacy of mainstream criminological theories. This section briefly discusses the feminist perspective, provides responses to the critique of feminist scholarship in criminology, and provides a discussion of the need for feminist scholars to develop unique theories for women’s crime. Feminist thought presents the idea that gender affects all aspects of social life. Every social relationship and every social construct is affected by gender relationships and the perceptions of males and females. As crime is a social construct, feminist researchers assert that gender necessarily affects crime (Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2004). Specifically, feminists assert that women have been systematically disadvantaged because of their gender. Females are unable to meet all of their goals and potential in their lives because of this discrimination and bias. Further, for equality to exist for women, radical social change must occur, especially regarding those aspects of society that affect women’s lives (Delmar, 1986). Notably, feminist scholars and feminist thought became more accepted in many academic fields by the late 1980s. Before this time, criminology had been largely androcentric. That is, theories were developed by conducting studies of males. However, the theories that resulted were applied to all humans universally. This problematic assumption contributed to females being left out of theories. Specifically, according to feminists, major criminological theories apply to males more accurately and completely than they apply to females. Feminist researchers lobbied for changes in research and theory to explain female crime, but their pleas have not always been fully answered, according to Kathleen Daly and Chesney-Lind. Daly and Chesney-Lind posit that there are misunderstandings of the feminist perspective that lead to theorists in criminology failing to focus on women. First, they argue that feminists are seen as biased and subjective. Critics assert that feminists

are biased in their claim that gender is important and that interpretations of social phenomenon must be gendered. Daly and Chesney-Lind respond that analysis of social phenomenon, history, and social relations has always been written from the male perspective. Moreover, there is the faulty assumption that all that has been written from the male perspective is objective. Daly and ChesneyLind contend that feminists do not seek to supplant men from the examination of crime. Rather, the goal is to reexamine prior theories by taking women into account and to treat women as equal to men in the development of explanations of criminal behavior. Second, feminists are seen as only concerned with women, and thus as ignoring males. This is the antithesis of the criticism that feminists assert depicts mainstream criminology. However, Daly and Chesney-Lind assert that this reaction arises because men are displaced from their traditional status of being the central importance to theories of crime. Nevertheless, they argue that the study of both men and women is necessary to understand criminal behavior. Therefore, feminist theories still seek to explain male criminality, while understanding the effects that gender can have on theory. Third, feminists and their research are seen as unitary and consensual. Critics claim that feminist scholars present only one depiction of women and only seek to change social policy and social theory in narrow ways. But again this assumption is rejected by Daly and Chesney-Lind. They contend that feminist scholarship is as rich and diverse as mainstream criminology. Feminist criminology encompasses multiple perspectives on crime, each with differing assumptions and constructs of interest, much like mainstream criminology. Beyond the critiques of the positions and work of feminists, some scholars persisted in examining females and crime. Daly and Chesney-Lind identified two main camps of scholars that arise when trying to examine the female crime problem. The first camp seeks to examine whether theories developed for males and tested on males apply to females. The second camp examines whether differential crime rates between genders can be attributed to any theoretical factors or constructs. Specifically, these scholars study why there is a gender gap in offending or why men commit a much greater amount of crime than women.

Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency

Daly and Chesney-Lind maintain that researchers should not simply utilize these two strategies separately. Moreover, if scholars truly wish to examine female crime, theories need to be developed specifically for women. Examining if male theories apply to females and why there is a gender difference in crime rates is insufficient to explain women’s crime. Rather, it is necessary to develop theories based on research on women and girls, much like mainstream theories had previously been developed.

A Feminist Model of Female Delinquency In the context of her helping to design the parameters for a feminist criminology, Chesney-Lind endeavored to develop her own theory of female delinquency. Below, the core ideas of her model, as presented in her 1989 article “Girls’ Crime and a Woman’s Place” are described. Chesney-Lind begins by arguing first that current criminological theories are inadequate to explain female crime and, second, that altering these theories to account for women is impossible. These theories cannot be altered because they were never meant to explain status offenses, the bulk of girls’ illicit activity. Further, the sexualization of female crime, in particular, poses problems for all theories that were developed from research on males. The sexualization of female crime refers to the history of the juvenile justice system arresting and incarcerating females for “inappropriate” sexual and “immoral” behavior more prominently than males. Due to the inability to alter mainstream malebased theories to provide an adequate account of female offending, Chesney-Lind presented principles that all theories of female delinquency should follow. Her model is premised on the assumption that female delinquency must be examined in the context of the patriarchal society to which girls are subjected. That is, the position of girls in society is paramount to understanding their offending behavior. Moreover, it is necessary to understand that acknowledging patriarchy does not mean explaining female crime solely based on patriarchy. Specifically, Chesney-Lind mentions that increases in female delinquency are not a result of society becoming less patriarchal. In addition, it is inadequate simply to state that females commit less

155

crime than males because they experience patriarchal control. Rather, it is necessary not only to acknowledge the role of patriarchy in a theory of female crime but also to have separate causal mechanisms explaining female delinquency. Chesney-Lind identifies the starting point in the causal sequence leading to female delinquency. She argues that juvenile females experience a great deal of conflict with parents and guardians. This conflict results from the patriarchal society. Girls are more controlled and more closely watched than their male counterparts, simply due to their being females. Conflict comes in multiple forms. Certain tension exists from parental control causing conflict. Additional conflict results from the physical and sexual abuse of females, which Chesney-Lind observes is pervasive among girls who eventually are involved with the criminal justice system. Sexual and physical abuse is a particular threat for young women because of their subservient role to the adult males in their lives. Physical and sexual abuse leads to trauma in juvenile females. Trauma is characterized by changes in behavior, such as depression, acting out, inappropriate sexual behavior, and running away. These behaviors are coping mechanisms for girls who have experienced trauma. Females involved in the criminal justice system are especially likely to have run away from home in order to deal with trauma in their lives. Specifically, girls leave homes because much abuse occurs there, in large part due to a female’s position as sexualized and subservient to male authority in the household. Additionally, females may be held at home to be subject to more abuse, because of parents’ ability to use the social control of the juvenile justice system to keep them under control. Thus, because of the harsh punishment of girls’ coping strategies, the criminal justice system becomes a tool of social control of females—one that is aimed at subjecting females to further oppression by limiting their reactions to patriarchal authority. For example, a girl may be physically and sexually abused by her father or stepfather. As a result, a girl may become a runaway and engage in illegal behavior to survive on the streets, both financially and emotionally. However, a girl’s parents can turn to the criminal justice system, which then may return the girl home, thus forcing her back

156

Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency

into an abusive home. This is the manner by which a girl’s reaction to patriarchal authority is limited. Finally, Chesney-Lind posits that these girls, having left home, further engage in criminal behavior in order to survive. Once away from home, females will engage in theft, exchange of sexual activities for goods and money, and drug and alcohol use. To summarize, Chesney-Lind proposes that women are subject to a patriarchal society. Young women in their households are subject to physical and sexual victimization from male authority figures. To escape from this abuse, girls run away and engage in criminal behavior to cope with the trauma of abuse and to survive on the streets. This leads females into contact with the juvenile justice system, as girls’ coping mechanisms for trauma are defined as illegal.

contributions of feminist criminology and the gains that have been made through this research. In particular, efforts have been made to reinstate a more patriarchal system of social control, which can be used to formally control the behavior of women and minorities (Chesney-Lind, 2006). Despite the backlash, Chesney-Lind believes that feminist criminology has an opportunity for increased scholarly production and for exerting positive effects on society. Moreover, in “Patriarchy, Crime, and Justice,” she argues that feminist criminologists have an urgent duty to produce more work now than in the past. Specifically, feminist scholars must aim their scholarship at policies and research that are eroding the gains made by the feminist movement. Among other salient topics, they can study the effects of the increasing incarceration of women and the contemporary portrayal of female crime in the media.

Conclusion Chesney-Lind viewed criminology in the 1980s as ignoring females, particularly female delinquency. She contended that girls’ criminal behavior is different from that of males and that the treatment of females by the criminal justice system is also different. For these reasons, Chesney-Lind advocated for the development of feminist criminology and presented her own model of female delinquency. At this time, feminist criminology has been largely accepted by mainstream criminology. Although many may ignore its theories and arguments, feminists have developed their own journals, divisions in professional associations, and research agendas for the field. Moreover, increasing amounts of research has been conducted on topics of importance to feminist criminologists, particularly women’s victimization and interaction with the criminal justice system (Chesney-Lind, 2006). Other researchers in the field, such as Joanne Belknap, credit Chesney-Lind as being instrumental in the development of feminist criminology and for the perspective’s vitality. Notably, Chesney-Lind sees threats and opportunities for feminist criminology in the future. The major threat to feminist criminology is the pervasive social and political backlash to progressive movements, particularly the feminist movement. Crime and gender have become politicized, with certain political groups seeking to undermine the

Brittany L. Groot See also Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime; Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime; Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

References and Further Readings Belknap, J. (2004). Meda Chesney-Lind: The mother of feminist criminology. Women and Criminal Justice, 15, 1–23. Bloom, B., Owen, B., & Covington, S. (2003). Gender responsive strategies: Research, practice, and guiding principles for women offenders. Washington, DC: National Institute of Corrections. Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Girls in jail. Crime and Delinquency, 34, 150–168. Chesney-Lind, M. (1989). Girls’ crime and a woman’s place: Toward a feminist model of female delinquency. Crime and Delinquency, 35, 5–29. Chesney-Lind, M. (2006). Patriarchy, crime, and justice: Feminist criminology in an era of backlash. Feminist Criminology, 1, 6–26. Chesney-Lind, M., & Pasko, L. (2004). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. London: Sage. Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 38, 497–538. Delmar, R. (1986). What is feminism. In J. Mitchell & A. Oakley (Eds.), What is feminism? (pp. 8–33). New York: Pantheon.

Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear

Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat

and

Fear

The concept of racial threat was first introduced by Ted Chiricos in the late 1990s, and he and colleagues have continued to develop a theory of racial threat since then through a series of journal articles examining fear of crime, perceived risk of crime victimization, sentencing decisions, and punitive attitudes. The basic argument is that the more people associate crime with minorities, and African Americans especially, the more at risk and fearful of crime they will be. These sentiments will in turn generate public support for more punitive criminal justice policy and thus contribute to the enactment and continuation of such policies. This entry sketches out the social, political, and economic context that was instrumental in stimulating the development of the racial threat hypothesis before addressing its theoretical background and further developing the argument.

Racial Threat in Context There were a series of developments in crime and criminal justice, the economy, and politics that came together in the mid-1990s that stimulated the initial development of the racial threat hypothesis. In the mid-1990s, the United States was in the midst of an imprisonment “binge” that had begun in the late 1970s or early 1980s and continues today (Irwin & Austin, 2001). According to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, between 1975 and 1995 the incarceration rate increased by approximately 289 percent and was reaching alltime highs every year. Furthermore, this population explosion was seen in other areas of the criminal justice system, with the total population under correctional supervision going from about 1.8 million in 1980 to about 5.3 million in 1995, an increase of 194 percent. This dramatic increase in criminal justice control had a disproportionate effect on African Americans. During this period, the percent of African American adults under correctional supervision more than doubled to reach 9.3 percent by 1995. This means that in 1995, nearly 1 in 10 African American adults was in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole. All of this occurred despite the fact that the trend in rates

157

of serious crime had been generally downward since 1980, although fear of crime among the public remained relatively high. The need to explain this seemingly anomalous situation—dramatically increasing criminal justice control and stable levels of fear at a time of declining crime—combined with contemporary developments in the economy, politics, and the mass media, pointed in the direction of racial threat as a possible explanation. Economically, the mid-1990s was a time of significant economic insecurity. The country was in the process of an economic transformation, which began in the mid-1970s, from an industrial-based economy to a post-industrial economy rooted more in service and information, while at the same time beginning to globalize. This transition had a number of well documented negative consequences for American workers, including unemployment, underemployment, declining or stagnating wages and incomes, and a general sense of insecurity accompanying these developments. In the 1970s and 1980s, these economic problems were limited primarily to the lower and working classes. However, by the 1990s, middle-class and even upper-class workers were being affected by these developments, creating what The New York Times called a “searing climate of insecurity” (1996, p. 224). Similar to the shift in criminal justice policy that was happening at the same time, this economic transformation disproportionately affected African Americans, especially those living in inner-city areas. This population had historically relied heavily on the relatively good industrial jobs in America’s cities for economic support. With deindustrialization, however, these jobs disappeared by the millions. If these jobs were replaced at all, they were with much lower quality positions. In turn, this led to the creation of what sociologist William Julius Wilson has labeled an urban (largely minority) “underclass” that increasingly was concentrated and isolated from the rest of society and was beset by a variety of social problems. The increasing impoverishment and marginalization of large segments of the urban minority population laid the groundwork for this population to be associated with crime and portrayed as potentially threatening to the more “mainstream” society, especially given the insecurities that the middle-class was experiencing. That to some extent happened in both the mass media and political rhetoric of the time.

158

Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear

Around this time, there were two specific instances of intense media coverage of crime-related issues that explicitly linked minorities to crime problems and contributed to what Ted Chiricos, Kelli Welch, and Marc Gertz call the “racial typification” of crime and the perception of racial threat. In both instances, a dramatic increase in media coverage of particular kinds of (minority) crime was accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in public concern about these problems. The first was the crack “epidemic” of the late 1980s, which Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine have argued was much more a product of the spread of cocaine use, in the form of crack, to the “threatening” urban minority population, as opposed to resulting from any significant changes in the amount or patterns of drug use. A similar phenomenon occurred in the early 1990s with violent crime, especially among juveniles. Chiricos (1996) showed that a 400 percent increase in media coverage of crime was accompanied by a greater than 400 percent increase in public concern about it. In addition to the association of crime with minorities, a consistent theme in this media coverage was that crime and drugs were spreading beyond the urban ghettos to affect formerly safe, middle-class communities, enhancing a perception of racial threat. Beyond these two specific instances a number of scholars have demonstrated increasing links between minorities and crime more generally in our mass media and popular culture. Several have concluded that when crime is discussed, it is automatically assumed that we are discussing minorities—and black males in particular. Racial threat found its way into political discourse as well during this time, with politicians playing on (white) middle-class insecurities through a variety of “race coded” issues. According to Martin Gilens, these are issues “that play upon race . . . without explicitly playing the ‘race card’” (1996, p. 593). In other words, some issues, such as crime, but also things like welfare, affirmative action, and immigration, have become so closely associated with minorities that one can talk about race without ever explicitly mentioning race. By attributing the insecurities of the (white) middleclass to various “undeserving” populations and policies such as those mentioned above, politicians were able to play up racial threat and gain political support without having to actually refer to race.

In sum, given an increasingly insecure middle class, increasingly marginalized urban poor, and increasing racial typification of crime in mass media, popular culture, and political discourse, racial threat provided a plausible explanation for fear of crime and punitive sentiments among the public. It is to that explanation that this entry now turns.

The Concept of Racial Threat The concept of racial threat is based heavily on earlier theoretical concepts such as Hubert Blalock’s “power threat” and Allen Liska’s “social threat.” The former posits that the increasing presence of minorities in a community will result in various discriminatory policies and practices due to increased economic competition with, and a political power threat to, the majority group. Liska’s social threat hypothesis more specifically links the presence of minorities with formal social control efforts, which are said to be increasingly mobilized as the proportion of minorities, and especially African Americans, increases. While there is considerable empirical research that links the racial composition of places to a variety of criminal justice interventions, Chiricos’s racial threat concept builds on these earlier perspectives in two important ways. First, it is crime-specific, emphasizing not just the mere presence of minorities in a particular community but also a particular association of minorities with criminal behavior: “Regardless of the racial composition of neighborhoods, an explicit link between race and crime may be the basis for support of more punitive controls” (Chiricos et al., 2004, p. 361). Second and perhaps more importantly, Chiricos’s concept brings the notion of minority group threat to the individual level. In order to drive a policy of increasing criminal justice control at a time of decreasing crime rates, it is necessary to have the support of the public. Both Blalock’s and Liska’s perspectives assume that policy-level decisions are mediated by individual-level sentiments but do not explicitly specify the nature of those relationships. Chiricos, Ranee McEntire, and Marc Gertz suggest that certain “microprocesses” (p. 323) operate that provide a link between relationships at the policy level in the form of general presence of minorities and criminal justice control, and relationships at the individual level that link the association of minorities with crime to perceived risk of victimization

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention

(Chiricos et al., 2001) and punitive attitudes toward crime (Chiricos et al., 2004; Hogan et al., 2005). In short, for race-related circumstances to be “threatening” and the basis for punitive responses, individuals must be threatened and must link that threat to those race-related circumstances. Michael Hogan, Ted Chiricos, and Marc Gertz argue that these individual-level sentiments may then find expression in policy preferences and actions taken at the macro-level (p. 395). This entry, and the concept of racial threat, began with the question of how to explain a historically unprecedented increase in punitive criminal justice control during a time of decreasing rates of crime. Racial threat, and specifically the association of minority populations with criminal behavior, provides a plausible answer to that question and, perhaps more importantly, provides a connection between the individual and criminal justice policy. Michael J. Hogan See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Lewis, Daniel A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear; Racial Threat and Social Control; Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

References and Further Readings Barak, G. (1994). Between the waves: Mass-mediated themes of crime and justice. Social Justice, 21, 133–147. Barlett, D. L., & Steele, J. B. (1992). America: What went wrong? Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel. Barlow, M. H. (1998). Race and the problem of crime in Time and Newsweek cover stories, 1946 to 1995. Social Justice, 25, 149–183. Blalock, H. M. (1967). Toward a theory of minority group relations. New York: Wiley. Chamlin, M. B. (1989). A macro social analysis of change in police force size, 1972–1982: Controlling for static and dynamic influences. Sociological Quarterly, 30, 615–624. Chiricos, T. (1996). Moral panic as ideology: Drugs, violence, race and punishment in America. In M. J. Lynch & E. B. Patterson (Eds.), Race and criminal justice: A further look (pp. 19–48). New York: Harrow and Heston. Chiricos, T., Hogan, M., & Gertz, M. (1997). Racial composition of neighborhood and fear of crime. Criminology, 35, 107–131.

159

Chiricos, T., McEntire, R., & Gertz, M. (2001). Perceived racial and ethnic composition of neighborhood and perceived risk of crime. Social Problems, 48, 322–340. Chiricos, T., Welch, K., & Gertz, M. (2004). Racial typification of crime and support for punitive measures. Criminology, 42, 359–389. Crawford, C., Chiricos, T., & Kleck, G. (1998). Race, racial threat, and sentencing of habitual offenders. Criminology, 36, 481–511. Gilens, M. (1996). “Race coding” and white opposition to welfare. American Political Science Review, 90, 593–604. Harer, M. D., & Steffensmeier, D. (1992). The differing effects of economic inequality on black and white rates of violence. Social Forces, 70, 1035–1054. Hogan, M. J., Chiricos, T., & Gertz, M. (2005). Economic insecurity, blame and punitive ideology. Justice Quarterly, 22, 392–411. Irwin, J., & Austin, J. (2001). It’s about time: America’s imprisonment binge. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Liska, A. E. (1992). Social threat and social control. Albany: SUNY Press. Maguire, K., & Pastore, A. L. (Eds.). (1998). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics 1997. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Myers, M. A., & Talarico, S. M. (1987). The social contexts of criminal sentencing. New York: SpringerVerlag. The New York Times. (1996). The downsizing of America. New York: Times Books. Reinarman, C., & Levine, H. G. (1989, Winter). Crack in context: Politics and media in the making of a drug scare. Contemporary Drug Problems, pp. 535–577. Russell, K. K. (1998). The color of crime. New York: New York University Press. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolman, W., & Colamosca, A. (1997). The Judas economy: The triumph of capital and the betrayal of work. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention In the early half of the 20th century, social scientists abandoned the idea that people make reasonable choices about their actions—at least insofar as

160

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention

crime is concerned. Under the banner of “positivist criminology,” various theories explained crime by pointing to something wrong with the individual’s mind or the social milieu within which the individual lived. These ideas still dominate criminology as evidenced by the column inches in introductory criminology textbooks, numbers of papers delivered at criminological conferences, and the volume of articles published in criminological journals. Not only are criminals not rational, according to this view, but also the explanation for crime—an event—is synonymous with the explanation for criminality—a personal trait. Not surprisingly, academic criminology’s policy suggestions focus on ways of changing the individual directly or indirectly by changing the social conditions within which the individual is raised and lives. Many mainstream criminologists feel that practical policy is beneath them—not worthy of scholarly attention—because their role is to explain crime, not to do anything about it The foremost challenge to conventional academic thinking about crime comes from the work of Ronald V. Clarke and the crime scientists he has inspired. In the early 1980s, Clarke began by reintroducing rationality into the crime discussion. Offenders are no more irrational than non-offenders, according to Clarke, and by that standard can be considered rational. The concept of rational decisions formed the basis of his strategy for reducing crime events by influencing the choices offenders make. Clarke’s explanation for crime is not odd people, but proximal settings that create opportunities for crime that some rational people choose to exploit. Changing the small features of proximal settings alters the opportunity for crime, and this influences the choices offenders make. Implied in this prescription is the notion that reducing crime is a vitally important scholarly function. In short, Clarke challenged four mainstream orthodoxies: that offenders are irrational, that explaining crime requires explaining criminals, that crime cannot be reduced without major social change, and that scholarship in criminology should be divorced from practical action. In doing so, he spurred the development of a new approach to crime research, crime science, and instigated a wide array of effective crime prevention practices throughout the world. This entry outlines the theories of Ronald V. Clarke, particularly situational crime prevention,

briefly describes their origins, and shows how these ideas have furthered a productive research enterprise as well as effective crime prevention practices. This entry shows that Clarke’s ideas began with the failure of mainstream criminology to help address a practical problem and this need to address practical problems animates those researchers who have followed in his path.

Origins In 1974, Clarke completed his master’s degree in clinical psychology at the University of London and took a position as a social science analyst for a public agency in Great Britain that operated residential institutions for serious juvenile delinquents. One of Clarke’s jobs was to determine why some youths ran away from the institutions. The agency had considerable information on the personal characteristics of the boys under its care, and Clarke was able to supplement this information with additional data on the psychological state of runaways and those who did not try to escape. Mainstream thinking suggested that those that ran were somehow different from those that did not, and that knowing these differences would lead to policies that would keep youths within the facilities. Following his training, Clarke looked at the psychological makeup of the youths, their backgrounds, and other personal factors. He found no important differences between escapers and non-escapers. But when he looked at some non-personal factors, he found large differences: kids were more likely to escape when they were new to a facility than when they had been there some time; they were more likely to run away just before holidays than at other times of the year; they were more likely to escape when something went wrong in their lives in the borstals than when things were going smoothly; and some institutions had far more runaways than others even though they had very similar youth populations. All of these factors suggested to Clarke that these juveniles were choosing to run away when it made sense to run away: when the institution was new to them, uncertain, and probably frightening; at times when the rewards for being home were heightened; when the rewards for staying at the institution were very low; and from institutions where it was either easy

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention

to escape or far less desirable to stay. In short, escapees were behaving rationally. After receiving his doctorate in psychology from the University of London, Clarke went to work for the Home Office (the equivalent of the Justice Department in the United States) where he continued to develop his ideas and formulate a new approach to crime reduction policy.

Rational Choice Perspective Clarke’s rational choice perspective, developed with Derek Cornish, walks a middle path between the completely non-rational world of sociologists and psychologists and the hyper rational world of economists. It is an everyday rationality, as is practiced by most people most of the time in most situations. The technical term is bounded rationality. Bounded rational people do not have all the information they need, the time and willingness to explore all alternative options, or even a clear preference ranking among alternative choices (as economists often assume), but their behaviors are not driven by deep-seated drives nor insurmountable circumstances (as psychologists and sociologists sometimes assume). As explained by Cornish and Clarke in 1986, people make quick and dirty decisions, based on limited information, with the rough objective of picking an alternative that is good enough (it might not be the best, but judged in the specific circumstances it is probably not the worst). Clarke and Cornish suggested that there are three classes of decisions that offenders make. The first has to do with whether to become involved in crime. The second is how and when to commit specific crimes. And the third is when to abandon crime. The first type of decision is probably influenced by more general circumstances (e.g., Is the person gainfully employed or emotionally attached to someone who disapproves of criminal activity?) than the second type of decision. These are influenced by the circumstances immediately surrounding the possible crime event (e.g., Is there something worth taking and can I get away with it?). The third set of decisions is probably influenced by the degree of success at committing crimes and the availability of alternative courses of action (for example, after a particularly scary attempt at committing a crime, if presented with a

161

feasible way out, the offender might choose to abandon crime).

Situational Crime Prevention If Clarke had ended his theorizing with a rational choice perspective, he would not have advanced crime theory or practice by much. However, he used a rational choice perspective to develop a theory of crime prevention that focuses on the second set of decisions: when and how to commit a crime. This theory is called situational crime prevention. Clarke described it in 1983 and has revised it over the years. This entry focuses on the latest version, with a few comments on how it progressed. Rational decisions have always been linked to the ideas of pain and reward. So it is not surprising that Clarke first suggested that at the moment a potential offender is considering a crime, he or she will consider the risks the crime will create, the reward that success will bring, and the effort needed to carry out the crime. It is the potential offender’s perceptions of risk, reward, and effort that matter, not some objective standard. If the immediate situation suggests to the offender that the risks are low, the rewards are high, and the effort is slight, he or she is more likely to offend than if risks are perceived to be high, rewards are perceived to be low, and the effort is perceived to be great. Later, Clarke added two other considerations: excuses and provocations. If the potential offender feels he or she has an excuse for committing a crime (as is the case when rules are ambiguous, for example) or that he or she is being provoked (as might be the case, for example, in a hot, crowded, noisy bar and someone makes a pass at the potential offender’s girlfriend), then crime is more likely than in the absence of excuses or provocations. Though provocations seem to imply that the offender is “driven” to act rather than chooses to act, Clarke is consistent in focusing on the immediate situation in which this occurs. It is not some deep-seated psychological twist, but a momentary choice based on information available in a particular set of circumstances (the decision to strike the person making the pass with a beer bottle, for example, is based on a quick appraisal of the immediate circumstances in the bar, including the availability of a weapon and a desire not to look weak

162

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention

to his friends and girlfriend, rather than a longstanding proclivity to hit people). From these five criteria for choice making, Clarke derived 25 interventions (Table 1) that could prevent crime: five classes of interventions for each of the five criteria. Each intervention type alters the opportunity structure of the situation where it is applied. In doing so, it alters the rational choices possible offenders make: Instead of perceiving the situation as suitable for crime, the possible offender sees the situation as unsuitable and chooses to behave. The prescription that situational crime prevention provides to reduce crime has two parts: first, define the crime problem precisely and undertake a careful empirical analysis of the circumstances that give rise to the crime problem; second, select one or more of the 25 techniques that fit the specific conditions of the crime problems and can meaningfully alter how offenders perceive the situation. Although all 25 techniques can work in some circumstance, none will be effective in every crime circumstance, so it is important to know which ones to select.

Displacement and Diffusion A common criticism of Clarke’s situational crime prevention from traditional criminologists is that

offenders will inevitably displace: Because they are driven to commit crimes, they will find crime opportunities at other places and times, or select different targets and use different methods, thus neutralizing the crime reduction effects of situational prevention. Clarke and others have shown that this criticism is without theoretical merit and has no scientific support. Their claim is not that displacement will not occur, but that it is not inevitable. Offenders are not driven to crime, so they have no requirement to displace. Further, the fact that crime is highly concentrated suggests that offenders are choosing good sites for crime and alternative sites are less desirable; if offenders could easily commit crimes anywhere, crime would be evenly spread in time and space. Consequently, if crime sites are made unavailable, it will be difficult for offenders to find new sites, at least in the short run. The scientific research supports the rational choice/situational crime prevention view and contradicts the traditional criminological view. Two separate systematic reviews of research studies conducted in the 1990s by John Eck and Rene Hesseling showed that most evaluations of situational prevention could find little or no evidence of displacement, and when displacement was discovered, it was almost always less than the total volume of crimes prevented. A 2009 study by Rob Guerette

Table 1    Twenty-Five Techniques of Situational Crime Prevention Increase the Risks

Increase the Effort

Reduce the Rewards

Remove Excuses

Reduce Provocations

Extend guardianship

Target harden

Conceal targets

Set rules

Reduce frustrations and stress

Assist natural surveillance

Control access to facilities

Remove targets

Post instructions

Avoid disputes

Reduce anonymity

Screen exits

Identify property

Alert conscience

Reduce arousal and temptation

Use place managers

Deflect offenders

Disrupt markets

Assist compliance

Neutralize peer pressure

Strengthen formal surveillance

Control tools/ weapons

Deny benefits

Control drugs and alcohol

Discourage imitation

Source: Adapted from Clarke, R. V., & Eck, J. E. (2005). Crime analysis for problem solvers: In 60 small steps. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing.

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention

and Kate Bowers that includes studies published since 1994 came to exactly the same conclusion. In a 2006 study, undertaken by David Weisburd and colleagues, where attempts were made to induce displacement, little or no displacement was produced. In short, while displacement can occur, it often does not occur; thus, offenders are not driven by some insatiable need to commit crimes. Further undercutting the traditional notions of criminality is the concept of diffusion of crime prevention benefits. Clarke and David Weisburd, in the 1990s, showed that there is evidence that some situational prevention programs have multiplier effects; they not only reduce crime where they are applied, but also protect nearby targets that were not part of the prevention scheme. The recent review of the displacement literature by Guerette and Bowers mentioned earlier also examined diffusion and found that it is reasonably common. Traditional criminological theories cannot account for this phenomenon, thus suggesting that their depiction of crime is flawed. Finally, Clarke and Pat Mayhew took dead aim at the idea of the driven offender. They examined an offense that many believed is quintessentially irrational: suicide. In the 1970s, Britain switched the type of gas used to heat homes and for cooking from a highly toxic gas to a gas with extremely low toxicity. The switch was for economic reasons, not to prevent suicide. Nevertheless, the switch provided a good opportunity to determine if suicides displaced—switching from gas to pills, drowning, firearms, jumping from heights, and so forth—as many would have predicted. Clarke and Mayhew showed the suicides declined considerably and did not displace. In short, if the opportunity to commit suicide is missing in the situation when it is being considered, then it is unlikely to be chosen. If people considering suicide do not displace, why should we expect less troubled people to do so? The answer is, we shouldn’t.

Applications and Extensions Situational crime prevention provides a pragmatic method for reducing crime, but it does not fit into notions of crime prevention commonly held by the public, press, academics, or elected officials. The popular ideas for preventing crime fall into two rival camps. The first camp has been already

163

introduced. This camp believes that either personal help for offenders, or those at risk of becoming offenders, will reduce crime. Similarly, members of this camp believe that neighborhood and social conditions need to be altered to keep offenders from being produced. At the extreme, proponents suggest nothing less than massive social change is required to reduce crime. Roughly speaking, these views summarize the policies of people on the left of the political spectrum. On the right, there is the second camp. Generally, these individuals believe that offenders make choices to commit crimes and to prevent them from making the wrong choices it is sufficient to increase the chances they are caught and punished. Further, harsher punishment— usually longer sentences—will both increase the deterrent effect of the law and incapacitate those who are most likely to continue to offend despite high risks. Situational prevention advocates agree with the left perspective that circumstances influence offending. But situationalists have three fundamental disagreements. First, those supporting a situational approach believe offenders make choices. Second, the circumstance that matter the most are not circumstances distant in time and space from the crime type (such as child rearing, home circumstances, neighborhood conditions, and school problems), but the conditions immediately surrounding the decision itself. Third, small changes in tiny areas can make big differences in crime—largescale social change is not needed to reduce crime. Situational prevention advocates are in agreement with the right perspective with regard to criminal choices: Offenders are rational enough to respond to risk and reward. But situational advocates again have fundamental disagreements over the utility of risks and punishments that are distant from the crime scene. The offender will be aware of the risk of detection, effort needed, and potential gains for breaking into a house, but might not consider his or her likely sentence length if caught and convicted. Further, a rational offender takes more into consideration than the risk of punishment, and ignoring these other factors unnecessarily limits crime control effectiveness and makes it far more expensive than it should be. Probably because it does not fit into either mainstream crime control ideology, situational crime prevention has not been systematically advocated by government

164

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention

policies in the United States. That does not mean that it has not been widely applied. Within the public sector, the police have applied situational crime prevention the most. This is because it fits well within the police reform movement known as problem-oriented policing, as Michael Scott and colleagues have recently noted. Within this framework, police in North America, Great Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, and in other parts of the world have successfully applied situational techniques to combat crime. Evaluations of these efforts consistently show positive results. The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (http://www .popcenter.org) has produced a series of guides for police on how to prevent crime and other problems (including street corner drug sales, acquaintance rape of college students, assaults in bars, pedestrian-car crashes, and graffiti, to mention a few). These problem-specific guides, available from the Center for Problem-oriented Policing’s website), describe specific problems and examine solutions that have been tried. Most of the solutions are situational. Situational crime prevention has applications outside of policing. Most private sector efforts to prevent crime are situational. Some private sector applications of situational crime prevention are obvious: fences, locks, gates, security guards, and passwords. Some applications in the private sector are less obvious: glass display cases in department stores, audit procedures, and other accounting mechanisms. And some applications are hidden and obscure: restrictions on possession of lobster trap buoys in the State of Maine and registries for diamonds. Graham Newman and Ronald V. Clarke have shown that situational thinking for preventing crime has been applied to crime over the Internet. Richard Wortley and Stephen Small­ bone demonstrated that it can be productively applied to reducing child sexual abuse, and Wortley has also applied situational crime prevention to prison inmate crime. Michael Benson, Tamara Madensen, and John Eck have showed that white-collar crime is best viewed within a situational framework. Similarly, Henk van de Bunt and Cathelijne van der Schoot make the same point for organized crime. Importantly, Clarke and Newman demonstrate that situational crime prevention also has major implications for combating terrorism. Most efforts to combat

terrorism by both the public and the private sectors are situational: setting critical buildings backs from streets to reduce the rewards from car bombing, explosive detectors at airports to increase the risk of detection before the explosives can be placed, parking bans on streets with attractive targets to make it more difficult to plant car bombs, and secrecy around the movement of prominent executives to increase the effort necessary for abductions and assassinations are all examples. Situational crime prevention and the rational choice perspective are important theories within the environmental criminology movement. Environmental criminology—also known as crime science—focuses on explaining and preventing crime events and patterns. In addition to rational choice and situational crime prevention, this field includes routine activity theory, crime pattern theory, and problem-oriented policing. Routine activity theory has been expanded over the years by Marcus Felson based on his original work with Lawrence Cohen. This theory explains how common everyday processes create crime opportunities. Crime pattern theory, developed by Patricia and Paul Brantingham, describes how offenders search for targets and how this gives rise to concentrations of crime. Herman Goldstein’s problemoriented policing focuses police attention on clusters of events with the objective of finding ways of altering the social and physical environment to reduce crime, disorder, traffic accidents, and other harmful events.

Conclusion This entry has described the origins of situational crime prevention and how it differs from traditional criminological perspectives. Like other environmental criminology theories it focuses on explaining and reducing crime events rather than changing the dispositions of individuals. Situational crime prevention rests on the assumption that people in general, and offenders in particular, are reasonably rational—neither driven to crime by forces outside their control nor super-thinkers who know a great deal, plan carefully, and weigh all the pros and cons. This simple insight suggested a battery of 25 forms of prevention that can be applied to any crime problem, once it has

Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention

been carefully defined and analyzed. It is worth repeating that none of these techniques works in all situations, but any crime situation can be addressed by one or more of these techniques. This flexibility makes situational crime prevention highly practical in public and private settings, though it does not fit easily with standard political crime policy agendas. John E. Eck See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective; Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

References and Further Readings Benson, M., Madensen, T., & Eck, J. E. (2008). Whitecollar crime from an opportunity perspective. In S. Simpson & D. Weisburd (Eds.), The criminology of white-collar crime. New York: Springer. Brantingham, P., & Brantingham, P. (2008). Crime pattern theory. In R. Wortley & L. Mazerolle (Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (pp. 78–94). Cullumpton, Devon, UK: Willan. Clarke, R. V. (1983). Situational crime prevention: Its theoretical basis and practical scope. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 4, pp. 225–256). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Clarke, R. V. (1995). Situational crime prevention. In M. Tonry & D. Farrington (Eds.), Crime and justice: Vol. 19. Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention (pp. 91–150). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Clarke, R. V. (2004). Technology, criminology and crime science. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 10, 55–63. Clarke, R. V. (2008). Situational crime prevention. In R. Wortley & L. Mazerolle (Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (pp. 178–194). Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan. Clarke, R. V., & Eck, J. E. (2005). Crime analysis for problem solvers: In 60 small steps. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing. Clarke, R. V., & Martin, D. N. (1975). A study of absconding and its implications for the residential

165

treatment of delinquents. In J. Tizard, I. Sinclair, & R. V. Clarke (Eds.), Varieties of residential experience (pp. 249–279). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Clarke, R. V., & Mayhew, P. (1988). The British gas suicide story and its criminological implications. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 10, pp. 79–116). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clarke, R. V., & Newman, G. R. (2006). Outsmarting the terrorists. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Clarke, R. V., & Weisburd, D. (1994). Diffusion of crime control benefits: Observations on the reverse of displacement. In R. V. Clarke (Ed.), Crime prevention studies (Vol. 3, pp. 165–184). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Cornish, D., & Clarke, R. V. (2008). The rational choice perspective. In R. Wortley & L. Mazerolle (Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (pp. 21–47). Cullumpton, Devon, UK: Willan. Felson, M. (2008). Routine activity theory. In R. Wortley & L. Mazerolle (Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (pp. 70–94). Cullumpton, Devon, UK: Willan. Felson, M., & Clarke, R. V. (1998). Opportunity makes the thief: Practical theory for crime prevention (Police Research Papers No. 98). London: Home Office, Research Development and Statistics Directorate. Guerette, R. T., & K. J. Bowers. (2009). Assessing the extent of crime displacement and diffusion of benefits: A systematic review of situational crime prevention evaluations. Criminology, 47, 1331–1368. Newman, G., & Clarke, R. V. (2003). Superhighway robbery: Preventing e-commerce crime. Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willian. Scott, M., Eck, J. E., Knutson, J., & Goldstein, H. (2008). Problem-oriented policing and environmental criminology. In R. Wortley & L. Mazerolle (Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (pp. 221–246). Cullumpton, Devon, UK: Willan. van de Bunt, H., & van der Schoot, C. (2003). Prevention of organised crime: A situational approach (WODC Report No. 215). The Hague, Netherlands: Dutch Ministry of Justice. Weisburd, D., Wyckoff, L. A., Ready, J., Eck, J. E., Hinkle, J., & Gajewski, F. (2006). Does crime just move around the corner? A Controlled study of displacement and diffusion in two crime hot spots. Criminology, 44, 549–592. Wortley, R. (2002). Situational prison control: Crime prevention in correctional institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

166

Clinard, Marshall B.: The Black Market

Wortley, R., & Smallbone, S. (2006). Crime prevention studies: Vol. 19. Situational prevention of child sexual abuse. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.

Clinard, Marshall B.: The Black Market Periods of war place great strain on a country’s economic resources as it tries to maintain its military and domestic infrastructures. To meet the needs demanded to fight a war, it often becomes necessary to ration important commodities and to impose price controls on certain goods and services, such as petroleum and housing rentals. The United States Office of Price Administration (OPA) was created in 1942 in anticipation of abuses of price controls and rationing that would be required to fight World War II. Marshal B. Clinard served as Chief of the Analysis and Reports Branch of OPA. His 1952 book, The Black Market: A Study in White-Collar Crime, documents the nature of price control and rationing violations and the enforcement actions taken by the OPA in response. The book is widely regarded as one of the early and classic studies of white-collar crime.

The Study The term white-collar crime is now an established part of the general lexicon, yet it remains an amorphous notion even among those who profess to study crime. Edwin Sutherland introduced the problem of white-collar crime in his 1940 presidential address to the American Sociological Association to challenge the predominate criminological theories of the day that focused either on the impoverished conditions in which so-called common crimes occurred or on the biological psychological impoverishment of the offenders who committed them. Sutherland’s view was that crime was prevalent not only in the lower class but among the middle and upper classes as well. He argued that existing criminological theories could not account for crimes committed in the boardrooms of largest corporations in America, nor could they explain the crimes engaged in by businessmen (they were all men) regarded as icons within their communities and professions

(Sutherland, 1940). He urged his colleagues to expand the domain of crime to include any act punishable by law and to formulate criminological theories that could explain the entire domain of crime and not merely some subset of it. Clinard earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford and had the opportunity to study under Sutherland at the University of Chicago. He credits his interest in price control violations and his subsequent book, The Black Market, to his time cutting out articles from newspapers on corporate crimes for Sutherland’s study of white-collar crime (Clinard, 2008). In a similar vein to Sutherland’s 1949 research on crimes committed by large corporations, Clinard carefully and systematically documented the extensive nature of price control and rationing frauds committed during the war as well as the OPA’s enforcement efforts directed toward those violations. He found that during the period from 1942 to 1947, the OPA issued over 600 regulations regarding the prices of over 8 million articles within 20 categories of rationed commodities and rent controls. With a staff of 3000 investigators and 600 attorneys, the OPA conducted more than 1 million investigations and instituted almost 260,000 sanctions against businesses (one out of every five businesses received such a sanction). These figures stand for serious actions taken. When total enforcement actions are considered, the figures swell to 3 times the amount. The amount of dollar loss was in the billions; the prevalence of lawbreaking was pervasive. The study of white-collar crime is particularly difficult since no meaningful statistics have been collected on these forms of crime. Clinard’s findings emerged from a variety of sources, including case records, field reports, administrative records, and newspaper and magazine accounts as well as interviews and public opinion polls. Given his role in the OPA, he had both access to the data as well as a thorough understanding of the enforcement process. The method remains a model for those interested in studying the nature and enforcement of white-collar crime.

Implications Clinard did not seek to develop his own criminological theory to account for black market crimes. He did, however, weigh his findings against

Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means

Sutherland’s theory of differential association, which posits that criminal behavior is learned in interactions with others who share norms favorable to crime. Clinard noted that while differential association theory might account for some violations of price and rationing regulations, it did not satisfactorily consider important personality characteristics that may come into play in shaping how one incorporates or rejects attitudes favorable to law breaking. He noted that many black market violations appeared to be “independently devised,” thus challenging the degree to which intimate associations might be involved in making decisions to engage in crime (1972, p. 309). Clinard also noted that many black market violations appeared to have stemmed from pressures from suppliers and customers and that these factors, as well as restrictions on profits as result of price controls, must be taken into account in addressing why these crimes took place. One of the fundamental criticisms of most past and contemporary research on white-collar crime falls on the data sources used to describe and theorize the problem. Researchers often turn to the enforcement actions of the various regulatory bureaucracies, opening their work to the criticism that the data tell us more about the filtering processes of enforcement than of the behavior itself. The criticism becomes particularly acute when the behaviors are the outgrowth not of some natural order (i.e., mala in se) but of the spoils of the political fights waged around the role of regulation in the capital markets. Clinard’s research is not immune from this challenge. While he did not delve at length into the political wrangling that led to the OPA, Clinard did expand at length on the general boundary questions of crime. He felt strongly that regulatory violations represent harms similar to any crime for gain that may occur on the street and that such offenses merited the same scrutiny given to common crimes. The Black Market: A Study of White-Collar Crime represents one such attempt and stands as a template to guide criminologists in their efforts to better understand crime. Kip Schlegel See also Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social

167

Organization; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Clinard, M. B. (1972). The black market: A study of white-collar crime. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. (Original work published 1952) Clinard, M. B. (1983). Corporate ethics and crime: The role of middle management. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Clinard, M. B. (2008). How I became a criminologist. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 31, 133–142. Clinard, M. B., and Yeager, P. C. (1980). Corporate crime. New York: Free Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1940). White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review, 1, 1–12. Sutherland, E. H. (1949). White collar crime. New York: Dryden Press.

Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means In his classic 1938 essay “Social Structure and Anomie,” Robert K. Merton suggested that deviance, including criminal behavior, occurs when there is a gap between what people are socialized to desire and the legitimate means available to attain this cherished goal. He argued that the United States is marked by a unique form of goalmeans malintegration. On one hand, Americans are taught that everyone should seek the cultural goal of economic or material success. On the other hand, the nation’s social structure is unequal, which creates the harsh reality that many people are denied the means needed to attain this universally prescribed success goal. For society generally, this malintegration strains or undermines the norms that instruct people to use legitimate means (e.g., hard work, education) to pursue success. If many people who try to “do the right things” do not achieve success, the normative standards regulating conduct lose their credibility. This attenuation or absence of norms is called anomie, and it gives rise to deviance. For when anomie prevails, people no longer have to follow the rules. Instead, they are free to use the technically most efficient means, including crime, to secure material success.

168

Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means

For individuals, living in a malintegrated society may present an additional problem. Not only does anomie exist around them, but also they might be among those unfortunate people who do not have access to the legitimate means required to reach the culturally desired goal of success. This personal experience of goal blockage is consequential. Thrown back from what they are taught to cherish, they feel intense pressure or strain (this is why this part of Merton’s work is said to be a “strain theory”). In trying to cope with this strain, Merton noted that different types of individual adaptations are possible. One option is to use crime as an alternative avenue to economic success. In this context, Richard Cloward developed his theory of illegitimate means to explain the choice of adaptations— that is, to explain why those under strain might adapt in one deviant way rather than another.

A Key Insight Cloward was Merton’s graduate student at Columbia University. One day, he was standing in his backyard ruminating about his mentor’s theory. He was suddenly struck by a seeming omission in this paradigm. Merton argued persuasively that not everyone has the legitimate means or opportunity to attain economic success. Aside from a few passages in his writings, however, Merton implicitly assumed that individuals experiencing goal blockage and thus strain could adapt pretty much in any way that they wished—including choosing to employ various types of crime as an avenue to success. At the very least, he did not explain systematically why, when faced with the same feelings of strain, two people might adapt to this problem in very different ways. Cloward sensed that Merton’s neglect of the “choice of adaptations” was not a minor omission. The selection of criminal roles, he reasoned, is similar to the selection of conventional roles. He understood that just as people must have access to legitimate means to become a doctor or business executive, so too must they have access to illegitimate means to become a con artist or an embezzler. Standing in his backyard, Cloward thought that, surely, someone else must have already realized this common-sense point. As it turned out, nobody had. In 1959, Cloward thus sought to fill this theoretical void with what would become a

famous essay, “Illegitimate Means, Anomie, and Deviant Behavior.”

The Origins of the Concept of Illegitimate Means In formulating his theory of illegitimate means, Cloward searched for scholars who might have previously documented how illegitimate means are needed to participate in crime. At this time, the Chicago School of criminology, led most notably by Edwin Sutherland, exerted a major influence on the field. Although this school was often seen by others as the chief rival to anomie theory at Columbia University, Merton (1995) never perceived it in these terms. Rather, he believed that each perspective had important, if different, things to say. In Merton’s view, while he focused on one way of understanding crime, the Chicago School scholars revealed other useful ideas about crime causation. When his student, Richard Cloward, suggested that key insights about access to criminal adaptations resided within the writings of the Chicago School, Merton thus did not jealously defend his own paradigm but encouraged Cloward to probe this possibility further. In the end, Cloward drew on the Chicago School’s works and, in so doing, he consolidated the two major sociological theories of his day. His ability to integrate perspectives that others thought were incompatible allowed his essay to provide a major breakthrough in criminological thinking. Cloward was particularly taken with the lifehistories of criminals authored by members of the Chicago School, such as Clifford Shaw’s The JackRoller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story and Sutherland’s The Professional Thief: By a Professional Thief. These first-person accounts by career offenders richly described how, through exposure to criminal networks, youths first learned to commit crimes and then, as they grew older, possibly gained access to the skills needed to engage in sophisticated criminal ventures. From these revelations, Cloward deduced two crucial conclusions. First, these works showed that to commit any particular type of offense, a person has to acquire certain orientations and opportunities—that is, illegitimate means. In more formal terms, Cloward divided the construct of illegitimate means into two components: “learning structures” and

Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means

“opportunity structures.” As Cloward observed, the term means implies “two things”: “first, that there are appropriate learning environments for the acquisition of the values and skills associated with the performance of a particular role; and second, that the individual has opportunities to discharge the role once he has been prepared” (1959, p. 168). For example, to be a professional thief, a person has to know offenders who can provide training in the skills needed to undertake a con or sophisticated theft. However, even if a person acquired these skills, it is still necessary to have co-offenders who will help to “pull off” a con or a heist. Or, to give another example, to be a successful drug dealer, it is necessary not only to know how to secure and sell illegal substances but also to have a “turf” for one’s drug market that is not going to be shut down by police crack-downs or by lethal violence from rival dealers. Second, whether a person is able to gain access to these illegitimate means depends on his or her location in the social structure. Residence in a lower-class, urban area might create the possibility to become a jack-roller (robber) or a professional thief; by contrast, upper-class status might offer the chance to embezzle or commit some other white-collar crime. Just as there is differential access to legitimate means by class (and by other social characteristics, such as gender), so too is there differential access to illegitimate means. Not everyone in America can become a doctor or corporate CEO, and not everyone can become a bank robber or gang member. Access to such roles, whether legitimate or illegitimate, is limited and differentially available.

Conclusion Cloward’s theory of illegitimate means has three important and largely enduring implications for the study of crime. First, his perspective reveals that explaining a general motivation or predisposition for crime is not the same as explaining the forms of crime in which individuals engage. Most criminological theories explain the former but not the latter (Cullen, 1984). Second, his theory was particularly instructive to more recent strain theorists regarding the importance of explaining responses to strain. In his general strain theory, Robert Agnew thus specifies how a variety of factors “condition” the

169

response to feelings of strain and make crime, rather than some other behavior, more likely to occur. Third, Cloward anticipated the work of contemporary routine activity theorists who suggest that crime rates are a function of not only the number of “motivated offenders” but also the presence of opportunities for crime (Cohen & Felson, 1979). For Cloward, the distribution of criminal behavior is explained by a combination of where in society pressures or strains are most intense and where in society illegitimate means for certain types of crime are most available. Finally, with Lloyd Ohlin in 1960, Cloward proceeded to use his illegitimate means framework to explain the origins, forms, and distribution of delinquent gangs in American society. His book, Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs, became a classic in the field of criminology. Francis T. Cullen See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Cloward, R. A. (1959). Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 24, 164–176. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Cloward, R. A., & Piven, F. F. (1979). Hidden protest: The channeling of female innovation and resistance. Signs, 4, 651–669. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Cullen, F. T. (1984). Rethinking crime and deviance theory: The emergence of a structuring tradition. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Merton, R. K. (1995). Opportunity structure: The emergence, diffusion, and differentiation of a

170

Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity

sociological concept, 1930s–1950s. In F. Adler & W. S. Laufer (Eds.), The legacy of anomie theory (Advances in criminological theory: Vol. 6, pp. 3–78). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Shaw, C. R. (1930). The jack-roller: A delinquent boy’s own story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1937). The professional thief: By a professional thief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity As the United States turned into the decade of the 1960s, an increasing amount of attention was paid to the issue of social and economic inequality. President John F. Kennedy spoke of a “new frontier,” while Lyndon B. Johnson called for a “great society.” The civil rights movement was taking hold and would soon capture the attention of the entire society. The time was ripe for a book that linked delinquency to disadvantaged youths’ denial of opportunity. Such a thesis resonated with the times. Thus, when Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin published Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs in 1960, it met with a receptive audience. They were conveying a message that those inside and outside criminology were prepared to hear. Gang delinquency is not spread evenly across American society. Cloward and Ohlin thus explained that Delinquency and Opportunity “is about delinquent gangs, or subcultures, as they are typically found among adolescent males in lowerclass areas of large urban centers” (p. 1). In their view, accounting for the concentration of gangs in this social location meant that two related, but distinct, issues had to be addressed. First, they wished to know why the motivation for delinquency was high in lower-class urban areas. To answer this question, they relied on the work of Robert K. Merton, whose paradigm is often referred to as strain theory (Hirschi, 1969). Second, they wished to know why delinquency assumed a collective form and manifested certain subcultural content. To answer this question, they relied on the work of theorists in the Chicago

School of criminology such as Edwin Sutherland, Clifford Shaw, and Henry McKay. The consolidation of these two perspectives was important because Merton’s work and the Chicago School were generally seen as rival explanations of criminal behavior. Cloward and Ohlin were offering a fresh integrated theory of gang delinquency, which increased its significance still further. Notably, they dedicated Delinquency and Opportunity to both Merton and Sutherland.

The Dark Side of the American Dream Some explanations of crime, such as control theory, assume that people will naturally commit crimes because it is human nature to seek immediate gratification and pursue self-interest through the easiest means available, which at times would include engaging in a criminal act (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Hirschi, 1969). Strain theories, however, reject this view. For them, crime is an adaptation to a problem of adjustment—a purposeful attempt to cope with a difficulty that is inducing pressure into an individual’s life. These situations create a motivation to do something to relieve the intense feelings of strain. In this sense, criminal motivation is socially created and not hardwired into human nature. In this context, it is perhaps understandable why Cloward and Ohlin would initially ask, “To what problems of adjustment might this pattern be a response? Under what conditions will persons experience strains and tensions that lead to delinquent subcultures?” (p. 32). To address this explanatory problem, they turned to the main theory of their day that illuminated the origins of strain and why it might be higher for those in the lower echelon of American society. This was Merton’s paradigm. Merton argued that the United States is characterized by a unique cultural prescription, which he captured with the construct of the American Dream. This set of cultural beliefs teaches that in the United States, everyone can be economically successful. It instructs all Americans to strive for material success, suggesting that hard work will bring high rewards. The American Dream has positive effects, because it creates strong desires for upward mobility and allows some people who might otherwise have been mired in the bottom of

Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity

society to achieve enormous wealth. But this dream also has a dark side. The difficulty is that the American Dream preaches universal success—that is, that it tells everyone that economic mobility not only is to be cherished but also is within reach. But this dream confronts a harsh reality: the unequal American class structure. Opportunities for success are not universal but differentially available. Not everyone can become a physician, lawyer, or corporate CEO. Only a quarter of the population will earn a college degree. Some people will never rise above low-paying jobs; others will struggle with unemployment. For those starting in the lower class, the American Dream inflicts an especially high cost. With the farthest to rise to reach success, they are the most likely to fall short. Aspiring to success but being denied this goal constitutes a serious problem of adjustment, particularly for those in the lower class. The gap between what individuals are led to desire and what they can realistically achieve ensures that they will fail to reach the goals they are taught to cherish. In Merton’s view, this situation imposes socially induced pressures or strains on individuals. These strains in turn create the motivation to seek an adaptation, which could include pursuing success through criminal or deviant conduct. For Cloward and Ohlin, the failure to reach success goals starts during adolescence. For innercity youths, it is readily apparent that they will not be moving on to college and into a valued highpaying profession. As they peek into the future, they see a life of limited opportunity and impoverishment. Their differential involvement in delinquency thus does not lie in their inherent natures but in the everyday “normal” functioning of American society that preaches a dream that they cannot attain. Faced with an enduring problem of adjustment, they seek to cope with the intense feelings that envelop them. The delinquent gang offers one way of surmounting the pressures they face.

Adapting to Strain: The Collective Response Cloward and Ohlin thus asserted that the denial of legitimate opportunity is the chief source of delinquent motivation in American society and is especially criminogenic among the lower class. Again, this message struck a chord with many Americans

171

in the 1960s who were sensitized by presidents and protesters to the pervasive denial of equal opportunity that existed in the United States. The very title of their book, Delinquency and Opportunity, ensured that it would earn considerable attention. The downside to this acclaim, however, was that many readers focused exclusively on this half of Cloward and Ohlin’s theory—the one that explained why youths are motivated to break the law. In so doing, they neglected Cloward and Ohlin’s admonition that a complete theory must also explain the selection of deviant adaptations— that is, why youngsters respond to socially induced pressures in one way rather than another. As a result, their perspective was reduced to a simple strain theory of delinquency: Youths denied success would experience strain and in turn become delinquent (Cullen, 1988; see also Hirschi, 1969). This has limited theoretical development in criminology (Cullen, 1984). Indeed, in Cloward and Ohlin’s view, “perhaps the largest area of conceptual confusion in the literature on delinquency is the failure to distinguish clearly” between questions “regarding the origin of pressures toward delinquency” and questions regarding “the selection . . . of different solutions” to these pressures (p. 34). They cautioned that to “account for the development of pressures toward deviance does not sufficiently explain why these pressures result in one deviant solution rather than another” (p. 34). Clearly, Merton’s strain theory addressed the origin of pressures, but it did not illuminate systematically why individuals would make any given adaptation to their problem of adjustment. In short, it was not a theory of the selection of deviant adaptations. A separate or second theory was needed for this explanatory problem—one that would “identify certain intervening variables and show how they tend to channel adjustment difficulties into one or another mode of adaptation” (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960, p. 39). In Delinquency and Opportunity, Cloward and Ohlin thus tackled the problem of why lower-class urban male youths turn to a collective solution to their problem of adjustment of being denied legitimate access to success. They tried to set forth the “intervening variables” that channeled these youths into gangs. Two factors seemed particularly important in making gangs possible.

172

Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity

First, youths blocked from success goals potentially experience a “process of alienation” in which they withdraw their allegiance from the norms stating that success must only be pursued through legitimate means such as hard work and education (p. 110). These youths come to see their goal blockage as due not to their own personal failings but to unjust social arrangements that prevent their advancement. This interpretation is more available to those mired in the lower class, especially minority group members, who face structural barriers. In any event, externalizing the blame for failure “cancels out the individual’s obligation to the established system” (p. 118). It also prompts youths to seek out others who share their view of the world of failure they inhabit. A collective response becomes possible because this association provides each youth with “encouragement and reassurance” from those “who have faced similar experiences and who will support one another in common attitudes of alienation from the official system” (p. 126). Concerns about guilt are nullified by this process of alienation and affiliation. The youths develop an “emerging deviant subculture” that “acquires a set of beliefs and values which rationalize the shift in norms as a natural response to a trying situation” (p. 132). By contrast, those who perceive their failure as due to their own deficiencies cannot cut their ties to the conventional normative order. They see themselves “as unworthy and inferior” and must deal with these “psychic consequences” of their situation (p. 125). They may seek solutions to this problem of adjustment, which may in fact be deviant in nature. But if so, they are likely to see their solution as personal and not seek out support from others. They also are at risk of “strong feelings of guilt” as they pursue their solitary deviant acts (p. 126). They will not be candidates to join a delinquent gang. Second and more practical, “collective solutions require a set of conditions in which communication among alienated persons can take place” (p. 139). If there are “barriers to communication,” then sufficient interaction will not occur to allow for the formation of a gang with subcultural values supportive of crime. Lower-class urban status, however, is conducive to such interaction because a large number of youths with the same problem of adjustment are in close proximity and have the

chance to become aware of one another’s disaffection and sense of injustice. Further, once a group starts to form, it is likely to be the recipient of “invidious definitions and punitive responses” from the “law-abiding adult community” (p. 142). Ironically, this negative reaction fosters solidarity among the youths and makes the group “more acutely aware of its isolation from the conventional community” (p. 142).

Explaining Types of Delinquent Subcultures Cloward and Ohlin might have ended their theory at this point. However, they proceeded to make another observation that required further theoretical explanation: Not all gangs are the same. There is subcultural differentiation: Some gangs are focused on criminal enterprises, some on violence, and some on drug use. Cloward and Ohlin labeled these gangs “criminal,” “conflict,” and “retreatist.” They argued that the nature of the gang is largely shaped by neighborhood organization. Cloward and Ohlin placed their analysis of types of gangs or subcultures within Cloward’s (1959) broader theory of illegitimate means. Well-schooled in Merton’s theory, Cloward accepted the idea that access to the legitimate means to attain success goals was differentially available in the class structure of American society. His key contribution, however, was to broaden this insight to include differential access to illegitimate means. From reading the works of the Chicago School (e.g., Shaw, 1930; Sutherland, 1937), he realized that criminal roles had to be learned and then had to have the opportunity to be discharged. To be a professional thief, for example, a person has to be taught the tricks of the trade (e.g., how to pull off a con job or sophisticated heist) and then has to have compatriots who will assist in undertaking the criminal pursuit. Phrased more generally, Cloward thus suggested that illegitimate means involves both a learning structure and a performance structure. Any particular criminal act cannot be completed if a person cannot learn the skills and values required to do the act and then have the opportunity to use these abilities to victimize a person or place. In short, the selection of a criminal adaptation to strain depends on the availability of illegitimate means. In Delinquency and Opportunity, Cloward and Ohlin reiterated these points. They noted that “the

Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity

aspiration to be a physician is hardly enough to explain the fact of becoming a physician; there is much that transpires between the aspiration and the achievement. This is no less true of a person who wants to be a successful criminal” (p. 145). Those criminally motivated thus cannot simply select to deviate whatever way they wish. Just as an individual must have access to the legitimate means (e.g., education) to become a physician, so too does the availability of illegitimate means determine what criminal the person might become. “Having decided that he ‘can’t make it legitimately,’” noted Cloward and Ohlin, a motivated offender “cannot simply choose among an array of illegitimate means, all equally available to him” (p. 145). Not everyone with a problem of adjustment can adapt by becoming a white-collar criminal or by becoming a drug dealer. These options are not equally available. Accordingly, a complete theory must illuminate why some people in the social structure have access to some criminal roles but not others. Otherwise, the selection of an adaptation to strain is left unexplained. Equipped with this perspective, Cloward and Ohlin sought to explain why there are certain types of gangs. They proposed that the subcultural content of gangs is not randomly distributed but determined by neighborhood context. Depending on the neighborhood in which lower-class adolescent males are situated, they can develop a particular type of gang but not another. Cloward and Ohlin observed that some urban slum neighborhoods are organized for crime. There are ongoing illegal networks that control criminal activities. Older offenders know and are socially integrated with younger offenders and, in turn, teach them the skills of the trade. In this context, the delinquent gangs that arise are largely oriented toward criminal enterprises. Any tendencies by gang members to fight or otherwise use violence are controlled by those operating the illegal rackets in the community who do not want to attract police attention. By contrast to these criminal gangs, conflict subcultures arise in disorganized slum neighborhoods that lack integrated criminal networks. These communities do not provide the illegitimate means needed to learn and perform criminal roles. Youths in these areas are thus “cut off from institutionalized channels, criminal as well as

173

legitimate” (p. 175). Denied access to success in both opportunity structures, they “must rely upon their own resources for solving this problem of adjustment” (p. 175). As Cloward and Ohlin noted, “these adolescents seize upon the manipulation of violence as a route to status not only because it provides a way of expressing pent-up angers and frustrations but also because they are not cut off from violence from the vicissitudes of birth” (p. 175). The willingness to use violence does not require connections or elaborate technical expertise but only the “heart” to “risk injury or death in the search for ‘rep’” (p. 175). This violence is often demonstrated—and status achieved—in gang warfare in defense of turf and when the group’s respect is challenged. The violence is not curbed because of the absence of adults, whether in the conventional or criminal sphere, sufficiently organized to exercise informal social control over gang members. Finally, Cloward and Ohlin identified a third type of gang, the retreatist subculture whose main focus is on drug use. The term retreatist was borrowed from Merton, who had previously used it in a typology of adaptations that he had outlined. For Cloward and Ohlin, those who fall into this category are “double failures” (pp. 179–184). They are unable to be successful through either legitimate or illegitimate means. Their social disadvantage limits their access to conventional avenues for upward mobility. But they face the added burden of failing to “find a place for themselves in criminal or conflict subcultures” (p. 182). Even violence is not an option, because they tend to be poor at its exercise and hence earn little prestige. As they retreat from this world of failure, they turn to drugs “as a solution” to their “status dilemma” (p. 183). Some of them also seek out the company of other “double failures” and find comfort in a gang of fellow drug users.

Conclusion Cloward and Ohlin’s Delinquency Opportunity earned the status of a classic book in the history of criminology. It was required reading for a generation and is cited in textbooks today. Even so, its continuing influence on the criminological imagination has been undermined by two considerations. First, there were a variety of tests of the strain portion of their work—the thesis that pressures

174

Cognitive Theories of Crime

brought on by denial of success goals place youngsters at risk for delinquency. These tests yielded mixed results, creating an impression that their strain thesis had been falsified. In reality, most tests inadequately operationalized the theory’s core elements—especially denial of legitimate means—and, as a result, produced misleading conclusions (Burton & Cullen, 1992). Second, subsequent research did not discover the pure subcultures hypothesized by Cloward and Ohlin. Most gangs appeared to be a mixture of criminal activity, violence, and drug use. This erroneous prediction unfortunately led scholars to ignore the broader theoretical point that Cloward and Ohlin were making: the role that access to illegitimate means plays in controlling the selection of criminal roles that motivated offenders may select. The failure to address this issue remains a weakness in contemporary criminological theorizing (Cullen, 1984). Finally, Cloward and Ohlin did not remain as university faculty members detached from the “real world.” Soon after the publication of Delinquency and Opportunity, Ohlin assumed a post formulating delinquency policy in the Kennedy administration. Meanwhile, Cloward, who would spend his career on the faculty of Columbia University, helped to sponsor a delinquency prevention program in New York City called Mobilization for Youth. The program proved controversial because it sought to provide opportunities for youngsters by attacking the political and social inequalities that underlie crime-producing communities (e.g., poor schools, exclusion of minorities from unions, tolerance of slum landlords). Cloward would spend much of the rest of his academic career not as a criminologist but studying how poor people might achieve greater social justice. Francis T. Cullen See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Los Angeles: Roxbury.

Burton, V. S., Jr., & Cullen, F. T. (1992). The empirical status of strain theory. Journal of Crime and Justice, 15(2), 1–30. Cloward, R. A. (1959). Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 24, 164–176. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Cullen, F. T. (1984). Rethinking crime and deviance theory: The emergence of a structuring tradition. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld. Cullen, F. T. (1988). Were Cloward and Ohlin strain theorists? Delinquency and opportunity revisited. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25, 214–241. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. 1990. A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. 1969. Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Shaw, C. R. (1930). The jack-roller: A delinquent boy’s own story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Short, J. F., Jr., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1965). Group process and gang delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1937). The professional thief: By a professional thief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cognitive Theories

of

Crime

In general, cognition refers to what people think and how they think; cognitive processes affect the way in which people make sense of the world around them—that is, the way people interpret the world, interact with others, and react to environmental situations. With respect to crime, cognitive theories explain how cognitive processes affect criminal behavior. Three main types of cognitive theories are found in the field of criminology. The first perspective concentrates on how cognition affects the way in which offenders relate to the world around them. These theories assume that cognitions affect offenders’ interpretation of situations, which influences their subsequent criminal behavior. Popular

Cognitive Theories of Crime

cognitive theories falling under this umbrella are the frustration-aggression hypothesis, the hostile attribution model, and the theory of cognitive scripts. The second main type of cognitive theory in criminology focuses on cognitive processes, or how offenders think. This perspective includes moral development theories, which explain criminality through the reasoning and decision-making abilities of offenders. The last branch of cognitive theories concentrates on what offenders think, or the content of their thoughts. Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow’s theory of antisocial or criminal thinking errors often falls under the rubric of these cognitive theories. Each of these broad types of cognitive theories is discussed in detail below.

Cognitions Influence the Interpretation of and Reaction to Environmental Situations The idea that cognitions influence a person’s appraisal of situations and reaction to them is inherent in many theories which are not typically thought of as cognitive theories. For instance, Albert Bandura’s social learning theory contends that cognition is important in interpreting the value of environmental stimuli, so that cognitions affect how one perceives, interprets, and reacts to stimuli. Likewise, rational choice theory assumes that cognition is important in making a rational decision to engage in crime, and general strain theory assumes that cognitions mediate the effect of strain on resulting criminal behavior. However, while it is true that many criminological theories incorporate elements of cognition into their explanations of crime, only a few theories place adequate emphasis on the role of cognition in order to be considered under the realm of cognitive theory. In this regard, the frustration-aggression hypothesis, hostile attribution bias model, and the theory of cognitive scripts are considered cognitive theories which assume that cognitions influence the way that offenders interpret and react to situations. Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

In an early attempt to explain aggression, John Dollard and his colleagues devised the frustrationaggression hypothesis. According to this hypothesis,

175

aggression was believed to always result from frustration; frustration was assumed to arise due to goal blockage (e.g., not meeting one’s goals) and always occurred before aggression. When used to explain criminality, the frustration-aggression hypothesis holds that criminal behavior results from the frustration an offender feels when his or her goals are not met. Dollard and his colleagues’ original hypothesis seemingly had little to do with the role of cognition; in fact, the small part that cognition played in this theory was that people interpreted goal blockage as frustration (a cognitive function). However, Leonard Berkowitz’s extension and clarification of the original frustration-aggression hypothesis incorporated a more distinct role for cognition. According to his revised cognitive-neoassociation model, cognitive processes mediate the effect of situational factors on behavior. Specifically, cognitive processes are important because they appraise situations as either aversive or pleasant. Based on these appraisals, offenders react accordingly; that is, if an offender perceives a situation as aversive, he or she may react to it with aggression or violence. On the other hand, if an offender does not interpret (through his or her cognition) that a situation is aversive, he or she will not react to it with aggression. According to this revision of the frustration-aggression hypothesis, then, cognitive processes influence the way that offenders perceive and react to situations. Hostile Attribution Model

Similarly, Kenneth Dodge and his associates developed the hostile attribution model, which also assumes that cognitions influence offenders’ interpretations and reactions to situations. This theory holds that violent or aggressive offenders, especially children, are more likely than nonoffenders to interpret ambiguous actions as hostile and threatening. Therefore, offenders are more apt to perceive aggression and violence in situations where there is actually no aggression or violence present. In turn, they react to these situations with aggression. According to the hostile attribution model, cognition plays an important role in the offender’s definition or interpretation of the situation. Research by Dodge and others has demonstrated that violent or aggressive children are more

176

Cognitive Theories of Crime

likely to define social situations in hostile ways, and to react to such situations with aggression or hostility. Cognitive Scripts Model

Rowell Huesmann and Leonard Eron’s cognitive scripts model is a cognitive theory of aggression, which was derived from an information-processing perspective. According to this model, cognitive scripts are strategies for or schemas of behavior that are learned during early childhood. In other words, cognitive scripts are guides for behavior. They are encoded, or learned and remembered, in response to environmental stimuli. These cognitive scripts are then retrieved and rehearsed in response to other environmental stimuli; over time, children evaluate the usefulness of specific cognitive scripts under certain conditions and tend to use the most rewarding scripts repeatedly. In short, children’s reinforcement for behavior that resulted from a particular cognitive script determines the future use of that cognitive script. For example, after learning or encoding a cognitive script, children retrieve and rehearse this script under various situations. If a cognitive script that results in aggressive behavior is rewarded rather than punished, such a script (and the resulting aggressive behavior) is more likely to be used again by the child. Thus, a cycle is developed where children who learn aggressive scripts and engage in aggressive behavior are more likely to rehearse the script and behavior again, especially when such behavior is reinforced.

Cognitive Development Influences Criminal Behavior A second main branch of cognitive theories in criminology focuses on the way in which offenders think and how this affects their subsequent behavior. In this sense, it is important to note that cognitive processes do not refer to the actual content of one’s thoughts. Rather, these theories focus on the development and progression of reasoning skills as well as the capacity to think at high abstract levels. The most influential cognitive theory of crime falling under this umbrella is moral development theory. Although largely heralded by Lawrence

Kohlberg, moral development theory traces its roots to Jean Piaget’s research on child development. Both Kohlberg’s moral development theory and Piaget’s cognitive development theory focus on reasoning and decision-making skills, and both assume that cognitive development occurs over time and coincides with the maturation process among children. Thus, people pass through cognitive stages of development, and lower stages are prerequisites for progression into the next stage. Both Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s theories also assume that younger children are more concrete thinkers than adolescents and adults, and that abstract reasoning skills and capabilities are developed over time as people age. Piaget’s work, however, centered on identifying the stages of cognitive development among children and adolescents, while Kohlberg’s work was more influential in criminology, because it focused on how moral development affected people’s proclivity to obey or break rules and laws. In order to more fully understand moral development theory, however, one must first be introduced to Piaget’s work on the cognitive development of children. Cognitive Development Theory

Over the course of his career, Piaget identified three principle stages of cognitive development. He termed the first stage the pre-operational stage. Most children between the ages of 2 and 7 functioned at this level of cognitive development. During the pre-operational stage, children perceive actions and events in absolute terms, and do not or cannot understand these actions in relative terms. That is, they cannot understand the situations or perspectives of others. Thus, this stage is often considered the ego-centric stage, since children perceive others’ actions to revolve around themselves. The second stage of cognitive development is termed the stage of concrete operations. Children between the ages of 7 and adolescence are said to function at this stage. During the concrete operations stage, children are able to make comparisons between events; therefore, they understand differences and similarities between situations or events. The third stage begins with adolescence, and is called the stage of cognitive operations. Adolescents in this stage are able to think more abstractly about events and situations, such as those which may or

Cognitive Theories of Crime

may not have happened, such as future events. According to Piaget, as children develop into adults, their thinking and reasoning skills also develop from concrete thinking to abstract reasoning. Moral Development Theory

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development follows from Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, but is more complex and relates more specifically to crime-related outcomes such as juvenile and adult offending. Further, Kohlberg allows more flexibility of the ages at which the stages of moral development occur. According to this theory, there are three stages of moral development, and within each stage there are two substages of moral reasoning. The first stage is termed the preconventional stage. This stage characterizes children younger than 9 to 11 years old. Children in the preconventional stage are concrete thinkers; the rules and expectations of society are perceived as external to the child. He or she understands these rules as do’s and don’ts of society, but they fail to internalize them. Children engage in lawful or conventional behavior simply to avoid punishment and obey authority figures, but not necessarily because they believe in the rules’ value to society. Therefore, like the pre-operational stage of Piaget’s cognitive development theory, this stage is characterized by egocentrism among children and concrete thinking. The second stage is known as the conventional stage. According to Kohlberg, this stage characterizes most adolescents and adults in society. In this stage, people take a member-of-society perspective and understand, accept, and attempt to uphold the laws of society. They follow society’s rules and values out of obligation and the desire to meet the expectations of others. Additionally, people in the conventional stage understand that issues have “gray” areas; thus, they progress out of concrete thinking and develop the ability to think in abstract terms. The postconventional stage is the third and final stage of moral development. Kohlberg maintained that a minority of the population reaches this stage, and only does so after the age of 20 years old. Adults in this stage understand that people hold values and beliefs that are relative to the group or society in which they live; however, they

177

believe that some rules such as justice, certain human rights, and respect for humanity are superior to the laws of society. Thus, postconventional adults may follow these universal principles before they follow the rules of society. Kohlberg’s moral development theory has been very influential in criminology. This theory assumes that a moral action (i.e., conventional or lawful behavior) depends on one’s capacity for moral reasoning. That is, progression through the moral stages of development reduces the likelihood of offending. Indeed, evidence shows that most offenders function at the preconventional stage of development, where rules are not internalized but obeyed simply to avoid punishment. The stages of Kohlberg’s moral development theory have also been used to characterize and even classify offenders into typologies. In fact, moral development theory informed the interpersonal-maturity level theory that has been used to identify and classify types of delinquents based on their interpersonal maturity (I-Level) or on how they interact with others and make decisions to engage in criminal behavior. According to this theory, delinquents at various stages of the I-Levels break the law and engage in criminal behavior because they do not sympathize with other people, such as victims, or because they perceive that other people should cater to their needs. Offender treatment programs have also been developed to address these needs, and have attempted to raise offenders’ moral development into the conventional stage. It is most recently believed that higher moral development functions as a protective factor against delinquency and criminal behavior. Moral Development Among Women

Finally, in 1982, Carol Gilligan extended moral development theory to identify the moral development of women. She noted that most research and theorizing on moral development had been conducted on males. Gilligan interviewed adults struggling with one of several moral dilemmas (such as abortion), and concluded that women spoke “in a different voice” than men regarding moral reasoning. Specifically, she found that women spoke more than men about relationships with, empathy for, and obligations to other people. Thus, while men’s approach to morality was

178

Cognitive Theories of Crime

based on respecting the rights of others, women’s approach to morality was based on responsibilities to other people. Gilligan argued that while moral development characterizes both men and women, they may tend to focus on different aspects of morality; specifically, she noted that males adhere to a justice orientation of morality while women follow a responsibility orientation. In her revision of Kohlberg’s moral development theory, Gilligan identified and explained the three stages of moral development among women. The first stage is characterized by selfishness, where young female children are concerned for their own desires and behaviors. The second stage, typically referred to as the conventional mortality stage, is characterized by the belief that women should value the interests of others above their own interests. Finally, during the postconventional stage, women learn the value in balancing their own interests with the interests of others. They no longer equate concern for themselves as selfishness. Thus, Gilligan’s moral development of women outlines a progression from a selfish orientation to a concern for self and others, while focusing on the value of relationships for women.

Criminal Thoughts Influence Criminal Behavior Yochelson and Samenow’s cognitive theory of crime focuses on what offenders think, or the content of their thoughts. This perspective assumes that criminal thinking leads to criminal behavior. Recall that the moral development theories described above focus on how the capacity to think abstractly, not the content of thoughts, influences criminal behavior. The perspective put forth by Yochelson and Samenow examines how thinking errors among offenders influence their criminal behavior. Criminal Thinking Errors

Yochelson and Samenow, both Freudian psychologists, studied and worked with various types of offenders, some of whom were sentenced to a mental hospital for insanity. During the course of their examinations, Yochelson and Samenow observed that offenders were very manipulative, often participating in rehabilitative programs for the purposes of early release instead of eliciting

change in their behavior. Based on this realization, Yochelson and Samenow began to believe that offenders’ poor behavior resulted from faulty thinking instead of sociological factors such as poverty. At the time of Yochelson and Samenow’s writings, sociological explanations for crime were abundant; poor parenting, peer pressure, school failure, and poverty were among the factors thought to lead to crime. However, after countless interviews with offenders, Yochelson and Samenow were convinced that these factors were not the causes of criminal behavior. They argued that while some offenders suffered from difficult social conditions such as poverty, others did not; likewise, while some offenders came from criminal families, displayed poor learning abilities, failed in school, or associated with criminal friends, other offenders did not. Yochelson and Samenow stated that despite these differences, offenders were alike in one way—how they think. This was the basis of their theory. Yochelson and Samenow argued that the roots of criminality lie in what criminals think and how this affects their decision to engage in criminality. In support of their theory, they found that most criminals displayed errors in their thoughts and rationalizations. Yochelson and Samenow eventually identified 52 thinking errors characteristic of criminals. Citing some of the most frequent thinking errors, Yochelson and Samenow note that offenders often justify their criminal behavior, blame others for their behavior, refuse to take responsibility for their offenses, lack empathy for victims, and cannot take other people’s perspective into consideration. For instance, criminals may refuse to take responsibility for their actions, often blaming other people or societal conditions for their behavior. While thinking errors are not unique to offenders (non-offenders also display some of the thinking errors mentioned above), Yochelson and Samenow contend that such thinking errors are found in excess among offenders. Additionally, while criminals do not consider such thoughts to be errors, Yochelson and Samenow note that such thoughts indeed are errors in judgment, and they tend to define criminals’ thoughts. Yochelson and Samenow’s theory has informed rehabilitation programs in correctional settings. It

Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys

is subsumed under the rubric of cognitive-behavioral therapies, which assume that antisocial thinking affects antisocial behavior. Generally, cognitivebehavior therapies teach offenders to recognize their antisocial thinking, to understand the consequences of their actions, and to think of alternate ways of behaving. While cognitive restructuring and cognitive skills programs constitute the main types of cognitive-behavior therapies, cognitive restructuring programs are most informed by Yochelson and Samenow’s theory of thinking errors. These types of correctional programs focus on helping the offender to recognize and identify his or her irrational thoughts or thinking errors. For instance, offenders’ thinking errors such as the justification of their criminal behavior or the minimization of the harm they have caused are identified and linked to the consequences of their actions. The underlying assumption of cognitive restructuring programs is that thinking errors precede and maintain antisocial behavior. Research has shown that cognitive-­behavior programs are among the most effective types of correctional programs in reducing recidivism among offender populations. Emily M. Wright See also Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style; Yochelson, Samuel and Stanton E. Samenow: The Criminal Personality

References and Further Readings Berkowitz, L. (1989). Frustration-aggression hypothesis: Examination and reformulation. Psychological Bulletin, 106(1), 59–73. Dodge, K. A., & Coie, J. D. (1987). Social information processing factors in reactive and proactive aggression in children’s peer groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1146–1158. Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., & Sears, R. R. (1970). Frustration and aggression. In E. Megargee & J. Hokanson (Eds.), The dynamics of aggression. New York: Harper and Row. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huesmann, L. R., & Eron, L. D. (1984). Cognitive processes and the persistence of aggressive behavior. Aggressive Behavior, 10(3), 243–251.

179

Kohlberg, L. (1976). Moral stages and moralization: The cognitive developmental approach. In T. Lickona (Ed.), Moral development and behavior (pp. 31–52). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence. New York: Basic. Samenow, S. E. (2004). Inside the criminal mind. New York: Crown. Yochelson, S., & Samenow, S. E. (1976). The criminal personality: Vol. 1. A profile for change. New York: Jason Aronson.

Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys Albert K. Cohen’s Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang offered a theoretical explanation for delinquency gangs in the United States. Cohen explained the existence of gangs and why boys join them. He argued that working-class boys join gangs because gangs provide a sense of status or self-esteem that would otherwise be unavailable to them in a society dominated by middle-class values. As a delinquent subculture, the gang is a solution to problems of adjustment encountered by working-class boys. Of course, theories exist in a context; they reflect their time. This entry discusses that context and elaborates on the criminological theory that Cohen offered in Delinquent Boys.

Context In the mid-20th century when Cohen was a student, criminologists were interested in theories of crime and delinquency. They tried to explain why people committed crime and how such acts were distributed across various segments of society. There were many explanations, but two of the predominant theories were Edwin Sutherland’s theory of differential association and Robert Merton’s theory of social structure and anomie. Sutherland’s theory reflected the interactionist tradition of the University of Chicago. He argued that criminal behavior, like other behaviors, is learned in intimate group interactions. Learning includes rationalizations as well as techniques for

180

Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys

committing crime. People become delinquent if the definitions favorable to law violation that they learn exceed those that are unfavorable to law violation. In contrast, Merton’s theory was grounded in the anomie tradition of the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim. Durkheim’s anomie theory posits that society exists in a condition of equilibrium so long as people’s goals and the means for attaining those goals are compatible. A condition of anomie or normlessness occurs if the goals and means get out of balance. According to Merton’s modification of anomie theory, people are encouraged to pursue the American Dream, a goal that includes economic success. Although our ideology assumes that the means of attaining this dream are available to all citizens, in fact the means are unequally distributed in society. Members of the lower classes are disadvantaged in terms of the means that are available to them. Those who lack the means to attain the American Dream employ various adaptations to deal with the ensuing stress. Crime is one adaptation: people may commit crime to attain the dream of economic success. Cohen was exposed to the anomie tradition as an undergraduate student at Harvard University. Although initially a political science major, Cohen shifted to sociology after the first meeting of his first sociology class. In a 1993 interview conducted by Gray Cavender, he said that he was captivated by the image of sociology as the study of cultures and civilizations. Upon graduation, Cohen decided to pursue graduate studies. Sociology, especially theory, excited him; it was something he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He transferred to Indiana University to pursue an MA degree in sociology. Sutherland was a professor there. Sutherland made the graduate students in his seminars feel as if they were engaged in an important intellectual enterprise. He presented his ideas and invited the students to critique them. Cohen studied differential association theory in a seminar with Sutherland. Cohen understood that kids learned delinquent ideas in group interactions, but he wanted to know why these ideas were there in the first place. Where do they come from? He asked, but Sutherland (and differential association theory) had no answer to this question. The exchange stuck with Cohen, and after he had graduated from Indiana University and returned to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D., that question became

a focal point of his dissertation. He wanted to develop a theory that explained why boys joined gangs, but also how the gang came to exist in the first place. Once he framed his research questions, Cohen read extensively about the nature and the extent of juvenile delinquency, as well as other work—for example, research about crowd behavior. Cohen’s dissertation was thus a product of the time: It was informed by the literature on delinquency and offered a theory that explained those data. Based upon his reading of the literature, he adopted several assumptions that underlay his theory: He assumed that juvenile delinquency was mainly confined to working-class boys who lived in large cities. The data convinced Cohen that these boys’ delinquent acts were malicious in nature and were not designed to produce an economic profit. Cohen’s dissertation offered a theory of the delinquent gang subculture and why boys joined it. The key concepts in his theory include working-class culture, middle-class culture, subculture, school, strain, adjustment problems, self-esteem, reaction formation, and non-utilitarian delinquency.

Cohen’s Theory of Delinquency and the Delinquent Subculture The values and attitudes that kids learn are transmitted through the culture in which they are raised; the family is an important institution in this process. Kids from middle-class families learn to compete for status in terms of middle-class values, which include a premium on ambition, individual responsibility, rational planning, civility, deferred gratification, a rejection of violence, and a respect for property. In contrast, working-class boys learn to be more easy-going; they lack discipline and are governed by their impulses and desire to have fun, not by long-term goals. Fighting is a more acceptable way to settle disputes in working-class culture. The problem is that middle-class values are the dominant evaluative criteria in society. The situation reaches a crisis in school. U.S. schools are an important site of democracy: Kids are evaluated as individuals and according to the same criteria. This seems fair, but in practice it means that middle-class teachers use middle-class standards to evaluate working-class boys. Those boys are evaluated on dimensions that

Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys

are not a part of their learned repertoire of behavior; indeed, much of their socialization is at odds with what is expected of them in school. As a result, they would be viewed by their teachers as discipline problems and were likely to fail in school. When this happened, the boys experienced the stress or strain that came from a loss of selfesteem: They suffered adjustment problems. They will be in the market for a solution to this dilemma, and the delinquent subculture offered a solution. Cohen also wanted to provide a theory of the delinquent subculture—how it got started and what kept it going. He argued that the delinquent subculture emerged as a response to working-class boys’ problems of adjustment and loss of status that occurred when they failed to meet middleclass standards. Cohen posited that the delinquent subculture was a joint solution to a joint problem: It responded to the problems of adjustment by providing new evaluative criteria that workingclass boys could meet. The gang was the antithesis of middle-class culture; it turned middle-class norms upside-down. If middle-class values privileged rational planning, respect for property, and eschewing aggression, the criteria for status in the gang included aggression, impulsiveness, and a disrespect for the property of others. These inverted criteria explained why gang activities were so malicious and negativistic. Cohen characterized gang activities as non-utilitarian; that is, they were not designed for profit so much as to express the rejection of middle-class values. Cohen noted, however, that the goal of the American Dream was deeply ingrained in all sectors of U.S. society, including the working class. So, although working-class boys had suffered a loss of status by failing to attain the dream and sought out a subculture that offered status according to criteria that they could meet, they still experienced frustration. Cohen employed the notion of a “reaction formation” as a way of understanding how working-class boys handled this frustration. Reaction formation is a psychological concept—a defense mechanism—that relates to the alleviation of anxiety. It is characterized by an exaggerated and inappropriate response to situations that generate anxiety. The irrational, malicious, non-utilitarian behavior of delinquent boys is a case of reaction formation; they reject in an exaggerated fashion any remnants of middle-class values.

181

The gang employed status criteria that the working-class boys could meet; hence, they enjoyed status in the gang. Of course, gang activities further separated them from mainstream society, reinforcing solidarity in the delinquent subculture. Thus, the emergence of the delinquent subculture and working-class boys’ participation in it were a result of the life conditions of the working-class. Cohen noted an irony here: Those values that are at the core of the American way of life and are the major determinants of respectability in our society help to generate juvenile delinquency and the delinquent subculture. Cohen returned to Indiana University as a professor and completed the dissertation in 1951. He reworked his dissertation and published it as Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. It was reviewed in many academic journals and across several disciplines. Several of the reviews commented on the book’s clear writing and its freedom from academic jargon. Cohen credited Sutherland for this writing style. Sutherland directed his master’s thesis at Indiana University. When Cohen submitted his initial thesis chapters to Sutherland, he received one page that Sutherland had re-written several days later. Sutherland had attached a note that asked what, if anything, was in the first several pages of the thesis draft that was not said in a more straightforward manner in his one-page re-write. In a 2008 interview with Gray Cavender and Nancy Jurik, Cohen said that Sutherland taught him to avoid a boring, jargon-filled style of writing that sometimes characterizes academic writing. Cohen’s work was a product of its time. It drew from Sutherland, with whom he studied, the importance of the cultural transmission of values, including those that can produce delinquent behavior. It reflected Merton’s view that the American Dream is not equally available to all sectors and that delinquent behavior may be a response to that situation. Cohen also studied with Merton and understood that one purpose of Merton’s version of anomie theory was to explain the distribution of criminality in society.

Critique Despite its theoretical sophistication and its popularity, there have been criticisms of Cohen’s theory. First, Cohen (and Merton) took as “given” the

182

Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys

law’s definitions of crime. In this, he adopted Durkheim’s view that society was characterized by a consensus of values that were reflected in the criminal law. Cohen’s mentor, Sutherland, actually did question the definitions of law, for example, in his classic work on white-collar crime. Later, critical criminologists addressed where law comes from and whose interests it represents. A second criticism pertains to Cohen’s characterizations of the differences between middle-class and working-class boys—that is, that middle-class boys have ambition and are civil, but that workingclass boys lack discipline, are disrespectful, and fight a lot. At the time, this was a standard view of the working-class and of crime as mainly a working-class phenomenon. The view was reflected in Merton’s theory and in plays and films such as West Side Story. Obviously, not all working-class kids became delinquents. Cohen understood this, but did not explain why some working-class kids did and others did not join gangs. Third, Cohen saw delinquency as a phenomenon of boys. This assumption reflected the delinquency literature and also dominant views about women at the time, including how girls and women seek status. Subsequent criminologists, such as Jody Miller, have added an in-depth understanding of girl delinquents, girl gangs, or women’s criminality more generally. Other criminologists, such as James Messerschmidt, rely on newer theories of gender to explain the relationship between different forms of masculinities and violence. Cohen’s theory appeared in the 1950s, and contemporary research into gang activity reflects dimensions that have changed with the times. Martin Sanchez Jankowski demonstrates that many gang activities (e.g., drug dealing) are designed for profit and that even malicious activities are utilitarian in nature. Others have noted that gang membership is not limited to boys; members may remain in a gang for many years. Others note that contemporary gangs often reflect racial/ ethnic groupings or, in some cases, a form of political purpose (e.g., skinhead gangs).

Cohen’s Theory in Perspective Cohen offered an important theory of juvenile delinquency. His theory addressed two issues: why

boys join a gang, and how there is a gang available to join. His explanation bridged two of the dominant theories of his day: differential association theory and social structure and anomie theory. Viewed more broadly in terms of a history of ideas, Cohen bridged two major sociological traditions: the interactionist tradition of the University of Chicago and the anomie tradition of Merton. Cohen offered an important modification of Merton’s approach. In Merton’s theory, the adaptations to the structural inability to attain the American Dream were somewhat individualistic. Although Cohen used concepts that are associated with psychology (e.g., adjustment problems, selfesteem, and reaction formation), his was a more sociological theory: The delinquent subculture and the boys who joined it both reflected the conditions of life in working-class culture. Moreover, although Cohen and Merton were criticized for their views on class, nonetheless they fostered a discussion of U.S. values, ideology, and the material conditions of social life. There are many ways of categorizing criminological theories. Although Cohen’s theory is often discussed in connection with differential association and social structure and anomie, it also is considered to be an important example of two other theoretical approaches: strain theory and subculture theory. Strain theory focuses on the anxiety produced by the disjuncture between culturally proscribed goals and the structural availability of the means to attain those goals; delinquency was a response to that strain. The response that Cohen explained—the emergence of the gang as a solution to the problem of adjustment that followed that strain—is the essence of subcultural theory. Strain and subcultural approaches were prominent traditions in criminological theory. One critique of Cohen’s theory is that its reliance on official data led to some misspecifications of the nature of delinquency. Although he relied on official data, Cohen understood their limitations. Because he was interested in the distribution of delinquent acts across various sectors of society, Cohen advocated that, in future research, representative samples be drawn of juvenile populations without regard to delinquent histories. Cohen noted that, in terms of crime, criminologists usually try to explain who did it and why. He

Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control

thought that the better question with respect to delinquency was “what made it happen.” He emphasized the need to know more about the frequency and spacing of delinquent acts, about their spirit and emotional tone, about the context of the act—what preceded, accompanied, or followed it—and, perhaps most important, about the collective or individual nature of the act. He thus offered an interactionist agenda for the study of crime, one that subsequent generations of criminologists have pursued: David Luckenbill’s research on homicide as a situated transaction; Jack Katz’s criminal life style; Gray Cavender, Nancy Jurik, and Cohen’s analysis of the accounts offered in the Iran/Contra affair; Lois Presser’s focus on the construction of criminal identities in interviewer/ex-con interactions; Vera Lopez’s analysis of the embeddedness of delinquent events. Cohen has enjoyed a distinguished career as a theoretical criminologist. In addition to his books and articles, he has been honored with awards and offices in numerous academic associations. Gray Cavender See also Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization; Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang

References and Further Readings Cavender, G. (1993). An interview with Albert K. Cohen. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 13, 1–15. Cavender, G. (2008, August 5–6). An interview with Albert K. Cohen conducted by G. Cavender & N. Jurik, Storrs, CT. Cavender, G., Jurik, N., & Cohen, A. (1993). The baffling case of the smoking gun: The social ecology of political accounts in the Iran-Contra affair. Social Problems, 40, 152–166. Chambliss, W., & Zatz, M. (1993). Making law: The state, the law, and structural conditions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cohen, A. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, É. (1964). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press.

183

Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions of doing evil. New York: Basic Books. Lilly, R., Cullen, F. T., & Ball, R. (2007). Criminological theory: Context and consequence (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lopez, V. (2008). Understanding adolescent property crime using a delinquent events perspective. Deviant Behavior, 29, 581–610. Luckenbill, D. (1977). Criminal homicide as a situated transaction. Social Problems, 25, 176–186. Lynch, M., & Michalowski, R. (2005). Crime, power, and identity: The new primer in radical criminology (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Criminal Justice Press. Merton, R. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Messerschmidt, J. (2000). Nine lives: Adolescent masculinities, the body, and violence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Miller, J. (2008). Getting played: African American girls, urban inequality, and gendered violence. New York: Oxford University Press. Presser, L. (2004). Violent offenders, moral selves: Constructing identities and accounts in the research interview. Social Problems, 51, 82–101. Sanchez Jankowski, M. (1991). Islands in the street: Gangs and American urban society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1939). Principles of criminology (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control The work of Albert K. Cohen represents a significant leap in the evolution of criminological theory. Cohen’s work is seen as a foundation of strain theory as well as an early attempt to link masculinity to delinquency. Cohen’s landmark 1955 book, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, integrated theoretical traditions based in the Chicago School, symbolic interaction theory, Durkheim, and conflict theory. It also represented a growing acceptance of cultural theories of delinquency, according to LaMar Empey. Published at a time of moral panic about juvenile delinquency, it remains one of the most important theoretical works on the formation of delinquent groups. This review focuses on Cohen’s later work, particularly his 1966 book, Deviance and Control.

184

Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control

Becoming a Criminologist Cohen was born in a Jewish neighborhood in Boston on June 15, 1918, and attended college in nearby Cambridge, at Harvard University, while living at home with his parents. He was initially a political science major until he took an introduction to sociology course with Pitirim Sorokin. “By the end of the first class meeting, I had been converted,” says Cohen (Cavender, 1994, p. 154). He also had courses with Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, both of whom would have a significant influence on Cohen’s writing. Graduating in 1939 at age 21, Cohen headed to Bloomington, Indiana, to begin his graduate work at Indiana University. He applied to a dozen other graduate programs, complete with a sterling record and letters of recommendation from Parsons and Merton, but received numerous rejections, including overt references to his Jewish background as an obstacle to admittance (Cavender, 1994). Finally, he received a telegram from Edwin H. Sutherland, a leading criminologist at the Chicago School, offering an assistantship at Indiana. Under Sutherland’s tutelage, Cohen became exposed to criminology and theories of differential association. Sutherland also arranged an internship for Cohen at the Indiana Boy’s School at Plainfield, giving him at opportunity to work directly with delinquent youths. In 1942, the 24-year-old Cohen completed his master’s thesis, titled The Differential Implementation of Criminal Law, and took a position at the school as the Director of Orientation. This position allowed him to interview the boys as they came into the facility and explore the applications of differential association theory. However, Cohen’s work was interrupted by World War II. Later that year he was enlisted by the army to serve in Alabama in the Chemical Warfare Service. In 1946, Cohen returned to Harvard to begin his doctoral work with the question “Where does delinquent culture come from?” (Cavender, 1994, p. 161). Working with Parsons and Robert Freed Bales, he began to explore a general theory of subcultures that would explain the distribution of delinquency. As an ABD, Cohen returned to Indiana University as a faculty member and completed his dissertation, Juvenile Delinquency and the Social Structure, for Harvard in 1951. The theoretical basis of his dissertation served as the foundation for his classic text, Delinquent Boys,

in 1955. The book represents a detailed expansion of Merton’s 1938 article, “Social Structure and Anomie.” What would later be known as strain theory began with an observation—perhaps influenced by his work at the Boy’s School—that Merton’s anomie theory does not explain why delinquency is disproportionately a young male phenomenon. Cohen’s sociological background led him to a cultural analysis of working-class boys. Importantly, Cohen broke ground in the book by conceptualizing gender as a variable. Delinquent responses to gender are “characteristically masculine.” Cohen writes, “The delinquent response, however it may be condemned by others on moral grounds, has at least one virtue: it incontestably confirms, in the eyes of all concerned, his essential masculinity” (1955, pp. 139–140). This insight paved the way for later feminist criminologists, like James Messerschmidt, to explore male criminality as a way of “doing gender.” This open approach was well reflected in his later works. Delinquent Boys was well received, and Cohen’s work on criminological theory continued. While at Indiana, he also held visiting positions at Berkeley (1960–1961) and Stanford (1961–1962). In 1965, Cohen returned to New England, taking a position at the University of Connecticut, with visiting positions at University of California at Santa Cruz (1968–1969) and Cambridge University (1972– 1973). He also served as the editor of the American Sociological Review (1967) and as the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1970–1971). In 1987, Cohen was given a Senior Fulbright Award to study in the Philippines.

Deviance and Control While Delinquent Boys remains a key text in the evolution of criminological theory, Cohen kept refining his ideas. In 1965, “The Sociology of the Deviant Act: Anomie Theory and Beyond” clarified how anomie, on a micro-level, leads to decisions to engage in crime. Following in the footsteps of Émile Durkheim, the article also highlights how people, including deviants, benefit from acts of deviance. Cohen uses an example from his days at Indiana University, where a shortage of parking places led to rampant deviance. “The contemptuous parked anywhere and sneered at tickets” (Cohen, 1965, p. 10). The result was the expansion and building

Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control

of parking lots, which benefited everyone on the campus. In 1966, Deviance and Control summarized deviance theories, including strain theories. In Deviance and Control, Cohen hoped to create a readable text that would present a framework that would address not only the context of crime and delinquency but also other forms of deviance, including alcoholism, sports deviance, white-collar offenses, and even fraternity rule-breaking. In his attempt to create something as appealing to undergraduates as criminologists, Cohen created what has been called a “pedagogical gem” (Kobrin, 1970, p. 599). Cohen sets the tone of the discussion in the very first sentence. “The subject of this book is knavery, skullduggery, cheating, unfairness, crime, sneakiness, malingering, cutting corners, immorality, dishonesty, betrayal, graft, corruption, wickedness, and sin—in short, deviance” (p. 1). The breadth of his domain is reflected in the wide variety of deviance covered in his analysis. Everything from bookmaking to incest, what Cohen refers to as the scope of the field, is fair game. Deviance and Control might be best known for weaving ideas from various sociological paradigms, paying service to George Herbert Mead, Sigmund Freud, and Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. Most significantly, the book represents an opportunity for Cohen to reintroduce anomie theory to students of deviance. After highlighting the value of psychological, sociological, and bio-anthropological theories, Cohen charts the evolution of anomie theory, from Durkheim, through Merton, recognizing the limitations of a theory he is often associated with. However, it is still a very incomplete theory. Merton does, to be sure, deal at some length with the determinants of strain and on the possible responses to strain, and he also has some observations on the choice of this mode of adaptation and that. However, he presents no systematic classification of these determinants, much less general rules relating classes of determinants to classes of outcomes. This is a significant limitation. (p. 77)

Cohen’s response to the deficiency might surprise those who associate his strain theory with a power-conflict model. Cohen highlighted the value of symbolic-interactionist explanations of deviance

185

in linking determinants to deviant outcomes. Cohen makes the case that Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s cultural transmission theory, Sutherland’s differential association theory, and Mead’s theory of the self are all compatible with previous deviance theories. The product is role-self theory in which deviants participate in behavior that is “roleexpressive” or “role-supportive.” For example, a boy may steal to prove his masculinity to his peers. Deviance and Control ends with a return to his theory of delinquent subcultures, first published 11 years prior in Delinquent Boys. He admits that without the addition of the concept of subcultures as problem solvers, his strain theory adds little to Merton’s 1938 article, “Social Structure and Anomie.” I went on, however, to stress that an acceptable solution must be one that commands the support of one’s reference objects. To act on premises that nobody else shares is to isolate oneself, to invite punishment, and to consign oneself to doubt and uncertainty. Furthermore, to the degree that the problem is one of status, it is a problem of achieving recognition or acceptance by other people, and on their terms. A successful solution, therefore, requires a collective response. (Cohen, 1966, pp. 107–108)

This discussion paves the way for Cohen to add Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s 1960 opportunity theory to the canon of anomie-strain theory, right next to his own. Deviance and Control is a relatively short book, full of colorful examples. Cohen takes readers to Jewish villages in Poland, makes the case that homosexuality is not a disease (and hardly deviant), and tells a few stories about his days in the army. He also discusses female criminality and the appropriate way to read official crime statistics. The text provided a useful introduction to the fields of deviance and theory development to the students of the late 1960s and 1970s and continues to offer insight into to complexity of Cohen’s thinking. In 1997, in Nikos Passas and Robert Agnew’s The Future of Anomie Theory, Cohen again further elaborates his theory, integrating it with Agnew’s general strain theory and, as he did in 1966, argues for the integration of methodologically sound deviance theories.

186

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory

Conclusion Cohen’s body of work has focused on criminological theory, but has also investigated the social problems of universities, criminal organizations, and Asian delinquency. At the 2006 meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Los Angeles, a panel was held honoring the work of Cohen and was attended by numerous generations of scholars who had been influenced by him. Randy Blazak See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

References and Further Readings Cavender, G. (1994). Doing theory: An interview with Albert K. Cohen. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 18, 153–167. Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Cohen, A. K. (1965). The sociology of the deviant act: Anomie theory and beyond. American Sociological Review, 30, 5–15. Cohen, A. K. (1966). Deviance and control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Cohen, A. K. (1997). An elaboration of anomie theory. In N. Passas & R. Agnew (Eds.), The future of anomie theory (pp. 54–64). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Empey, L. T. (1982). American delinquency: Its meaning and construction. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press. Kobrin, S. (1970). Review of Deviance and Control. American Sociological Review, 35, 598–599. Mutchnick, R. J. (2009). Criminological thought: Pioneers past and present. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory Routine activity theory—also sometimes referred to as lifestyle theory—has proven to be one of the

more useful theories for understanding criminal victimization and offending patterns in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This theoretical explanation, which has primarily focused on providing information regarding who is more or less likely to be a crime victim, was originally formulated by Lawrence E. Cohen and Marcus K. Felson with the 1979 publication of their seminal article “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach.” In this research, Cohen and Felson examined temporal changes in U.S. crime rates from 1947 to 1974. They highlighted the dramatic increase in predatory crime over that time period, especially that during the decade of the 1960s. At the time, most scholars attributed the rise in crime to an increase in the number of those willing to break the law—a group that Cohen and Felson called “motivated offenders.” Taking an alternative approach, they suggested that beyond the supply of motivated offenders, crime could have escalated due to profound changes in the availability of criminal opportunity. For Cohen and Felson, opportunity itself comprises two components: the availability of an attractive target (e.g., something to steal, a person to rob) and the lack of guardianship over the target (e.g., a burglar alarm, a burly companion). Crime rates thus can increase not only if society produces more motivated offenders but also if it produces more attractive targets and less guardianship. In short, Cohen and Felson posited that, between 1960 and 1970, Americans and their households became more suitable and less capably guarded targets. They further suggested that it was the changing routine, daily activities of U.S. residents that created increased opportunity in the form of increased target suitability and diminished guardianship. Particularly opportunistic activities, according to Cohen and Felson (1979), were non-household activities. Major shifts in the labor force participation of women occurring between 1960 and 1970 were thought to underlie much of the increase in levels of non-household activities. Women’s increased participation in the labor force had substantial implications for the public exposure of women and the lack of guardianship provided to households during the daytime. For instance, Cohen and Felson presented data showing that, in 1960, about 30 percent of households were unoccupied by someone 14 years or older between the hours of

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory

8 a.m. and 3 p.m. By 1971, that figure exceeded 40 percent. As a result, more and more households lacked capable guardianship, thus providing increased opportunity for a crime such as burglary. At the same time, women were spending more time outside the house, commuting to and from work, resulting in increased exposure to “street” predatory crime, including robbery. Beyond work-related activities, Cohen and Felson theorized that routine leisure activities were also changing in the United States between 1960 and 1970 among both men and women. With an increasing percentage of U.S. households consisting of two working adults, there was more disposable income to be spent on leisure pursuits outside the home and on the purchase of household durable goods. This proliferation of public leisure activities and household items (especially valuable but lightweight items) also increased opportunities for crime. From the routine activity theoretical perspective provided by Cohen and Felson, these leisure and consumption patterns simply made it more likely that motivated offenders would encounter suitable targets in time/place contexts that lacked adequate guardianship. Cohen and Felson tested their theory by examining whether a “household activity ratio” was related to the changing rates of predatory crime in the United States. They measured the household activity ratio as the proportion of U.S. households that were either “non–husband-wife” households or households that could be classified as “married, husband-present, with a female labor-force participant”(Cohen & Felson, 1979, p. 600). They hypothesized that increases in such households would be associated with increases in U.S. predatory crime rates under the assumption that such household structures served to approximate routine activities that would increase exposure to motivated offenders, increase target suitability, and decrease guardianship. They found strong support for this hypothesis.

Routine Activities and Individual Victimization Following Cohen and Felson’s landmark study, later work extended routine activity theory’s application beyond changing national rates of crime. Subsequent work often applied the theory to variation in individual risk of victimization instead. Today, routine activity theory stands as one of the

187

most influential and policy-relevant theories in the field of criminology. The focus of this theory is on explaining the dynamics of criminal events, patterns in criminal victimization, and predictions of victimization risks/likelihood. Again, at the core of routine activity theory is the contention that there are three necessary locational elements that must be present for crime to occur: presence of potential offenders (individuals seeking/able/willing to commit offenses), presence of suitable targets (individuals or property that is vulnerable or available), and an absence of capable and willing guardians (a lack of protection/supervision or individuals/devices able to ward off an offender). With the assumption that these three elements are present in a situation, the theory is based on two central propositions: First, lifestyles or routine activities create criminal opportunity structures by increasing the frequency and intensity of contacts between potential offenders and suitable targets. Second, potential offenders likely assess the perceived value of a target as well as whether there are any available forms of guardianship (or lack thereof) present when considering when, where, and upon whom to commit their crimes. Routine activity theory differs from most other criminological theories in that it is not primarily interested in identifying or specifying reasons for crime commission but instead shifts focus on the differing risks for victimization that individuals and locations possess. Additionally, routine activity theory not only provides insights regarding when, where, and upon whom criminal events are more likely to be perpetrated but also explains how various aspects of individuals’ lifestyles (e.g., their routine activities) are correlated with these differential patterns of victimization. It is in this respect that the theory derives its name; it is centrally interested in identifying that typical behaviors of persons and that characteristics of situations are associated with increased and decreased likelihood of criminal victimization. The theory has implications for advancing crime prevention efforts. Theoretically, even though persons may be willing to commit crime given sufficient opportunities, if those opportunities never arise, the crimes will not occur. Opportunities may not arise for multiple reasons. It may be that potential offenders cannot find persons sufficiently vulnerable, or possess property

188

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory

sufficiently valuable, to merit interest. And, even if valuable or vulnerable targets are present, it may happen that these persons or items are accompanied by guardians that are capable and willing to stop the impending crime from happening. As such, both structural aspects of specific environmental contexts (where one lives and works, and the conditions and structures that are present in those locations that may increase the number of potential offenders and/or the types of guardianship that is available in the general area) and individual choices (where one goes, what one does, with whom one associates, and any selfprotective measures one takes to increase or decrease one’s vulnerability/suitability as a target) are important for understanding where, when, and to whom criminal events happen (Miethe & Meier, 1990; Mustaine & Tewksbury, 1997). Further, by identifying characteristics of persons, their behaviors and the settings in which these activities take place, routine activity theory research can be used not only to expand our understanding of the interactions and locations of criminal events but also to develop and implement crime prevention programs. Once the actions, places, and types of people who are more likely to be victimized are known, it may be possible (1) to develop concrete strategies to enhance the number and quality of capable guardians in particular types of settings; (2) to reduce the suitability of targets that are present; or (3) to educate people about actions and places that are more dangerous for them and why, so that they may make smarter decisions about their routine activities. Further, routine activity theory can suggest ways in which communities and individuals can prevent crime through the reduction of criminal opportunities, and how they can utilize law enforcement the most efficiently to increase the guardianship present. Additionally, routine activity theory can guide the continued social development of communities in order to provide greater crime prevention.

Lifestyle Factors That Correlate With Victimization There are five important components of lifestyle that have been identified by research as contributing to opportunities for, and likelihood of, criminal victimization. While each of these categories

of factors has important influences on crime, it is the combination of these of factors, as indications of “lifestyle,” that may best explain criminal victimization; only rarely does one type of factor provide a robust explanation for criminal events. The factors that are important in routine activity theory explanations of criminal victimization and events are demographics, social activities, alcohol and drug use, economic status, and structural aspects of communities. Demographics

The earliest focus, and today the best established type of risk factor for criminal victimization, concerns demographic aspects of individuals. Research has consistently shown that victimization rates are highest for men, adolescents and young adults, African Americans, those who have never been married, and persons who live in central cities. Within a routine activity theory approach to explaining crime, demographic factors are not taken on their own but instead are interpreted to be indicators (or proxy measures) of lifestyle activities. For example, research usually finds that married individuals are less likely to be victimized than single people. The explanation for this is that single persons usually live lifestyles that take them out of the home, especially at night, to places that attract potential offenders, such as bars or nightclubs. The links between demographic factors and their presumed lifestyle factors are theorized, not proven, and as such should be viewed with some degree of skepticism. Presuming what people do and where they do these things based on demographic characteristics provides, at best, weak links to policy and practice. While knowing the personal characteristics of criminal victims is useful, it may not be as useful as understanding their actual lifestyle activities, particularly if one considers possible crime prevention efforts. Therefore, demographic variables should be included in research but should not be relied on exclusively. Social Activities

Whereas demographics are used by researchers as indirect/proxy measures of activities, it is also possible to use variables in research that directly measure what social activities people engage in, as well as when, where, with whom, and in what

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory

types of contexts/settings these activities occur. Uses of these types of measures have been shown to be frequently the most salient predictors of criminal victimization, and as such social activities measures are significant influences on victimization risks. Maintaining the focus on the routines of people’s lives, research suggests that some relatively common and mundane social aspects of life (such as going to shopping malls, eating out frequently, participating in school-related clubs and organizations, and going to a gym or playing team sports) are related to some types of criminal victimization. Summarizing some of the early findings in this line of investigations using routine activity theory, Robert Sampson claimed that “an active lifestyle thus appears to influence victimization risk by increasing exposure to potential offenders in a context where guardianship is low” (1987, p. 331). The types of social activities in which an individual engages, and where and with whom they do these actions, are clearly related to victimization risks. Alcohol and Drug Use

One type of social activity that garners special attention in routine activity theory is the use of alcohol and illicit drugs. This should not be surprising in that alcohol and drug use is perhaps the most well-established correlate of both criminal offending and victimization. Regardless of the specifics of place and time, alcohol and other drugs are strongly related to violence. When the alcohol/drug use is placed in the context of young adults, there is an overwhelmingly strong association between alcohol/drug use and (most often violent) criminality. From the perspective of routine activity theory, this relationship can be explained in several ways. First, since alcohol is so closely associated with criminal behavior, engaging in activities, or frequenting places where alcohol is present, would increase one’s exposure to potential offenders; or, said differently, in places where people are imbibing substances that seem to trigger crime, simply being in that setting is risky. Further, drinking alcohol may reduce individuals’ ability to protect themselves and their belongings; in this way, guardianship is reduced and perceived vulnerability of targets is enhanced. Here, it is the effect of alcohol on the nature of the routine of activities

189

that is important, not merely the social act of being around alcohol and drug use. Research has also found that the type of people one is with when in these substance-enriched settings is important (e.g., people who drink alcohol with others who are younger are more likely to be victims of crime than people who drink with older others). Also, the type of setting in which one imbibes is relevant, in that drinking out in public is more dangerous than drinking at a party at a friend’s house. Economic Status

Although crime affects all segments of society, and no persons or parts of society are immune to crime, it remains that crime is disproportionately found among lower socioeconomic segments of communities. While at first this may seem counterintuitive to routine activity theory (how desirable are poor people and their things to a criminal?), it actually fits very well with the theory. In lowerincome neighborhoods and among lower-income persons, there are fewer guardians or instruments of guardianship (burglar alarms, sturdy locks and doors, personal awareness of dangerous situations); this can make potential targets seem more attractive to potential offenders. Also, since potential offenders (for at least some types of offenses) are more prominently found among the lower-income classes, being in the presence of such lessadvantaged persons or places (e.g., in the same physical locations) makes one more exposed and therefore more vulnerable. Further, although employed persons are more likely to be crime victims, this may be due to increased exposure to potential offenders because they must leave the home every weekday. However, unemployed persons are more likely to be victimized than individuals who remain in their homes. Routine activity theory suggests that unemployed persons are more likely to be victimized because they have characteristics (or at least one characteristic) in common with many motivated offenders. Simply stated, both unemployed persons and many motivated offenders lack sufficient activities to occupy their time and also lack a ready pool of financial and materials resources. These facts are likely to lead them to encounter one another throughout the course of each’s daily routines of activities.

190

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory

Community Structural Variables

In general, once someone leaves the home, his or her risks of being a victim of crime increase. Being out and about—moving in and among a variety of (typically unknown) other persons on a daily basis—exposes an individual to more potential offenders. When leaving the home, individuals typically frequent a number of different types of physical settings (domains) and will interact with a wide range of others and social events. For example, the research has shown that community aspects, such as the physical appearance of a neighborhood or the ways that neighbors interact, either civilly or not, have an effect on property crime and some forms of violent crimes. Also, neighborhoods with businesses that attract potential offenders have higher rates of crime and criminal offenders. For example, the presence of bars/taverns in a community has been related to increased rates of crimes—as are high schools, fast food restaurants, public parks, and liquor stores. These are places where potential offenders may be more likely to gather and where guardianship may be low (or absent). Also, alcohol is often present in and around many of these types of settings (at least at some points in time), and the frequent coming and going of people may also increase the chances of crime happening (as a means of reducing consistent observation of those present, or guardianship). In routine activity theory, it is not only the objective presence and quality of various structures in a community that are important, but also individuals’ perceptions of community safety and quality of life. When residents of a particular neighborhood have higher levels of fear of crime and/or perceive that crime rates are high, there is often a corresponding objectively measured high rate of crime. Whether this is a self-fulfilling prophecy has yet to be adequately assessed, however.

Unique Research Challenges With Routine Activity Theory In the pursuit of assessing the validity of the claims of routine activity theory, two specific issues regarding the focus of studies have been identified and serve to guide the structure of many research projects. First, the issue of where crimes occur (their domains) has received very little attention from routine activity theory researchers. This is a

weakness of the theory; a theory that hinges on the idea that actual activity of people are critical for understanding their victimization experience must account for variations in the behavioral expectations associated with types of settings where people engage in their routine activities. Second, the way researchers define and measure activities or routines has been criticized for being less than precise (recall the use of demographics as common proxies for behaviors). Each of these issues is explained in more detail below. Domain-Based Research

One of the clearest problems with routine activity theory is the need to include consideration of where crimes actually occur. This is also one of the great promises of routine activity theory. Rather than simply trying to explain crime in a universally applicable way, routine activity theory argues for a more direct focus on identifying criminal behavior patterns as they exist within specific settings. Routine activity theory can look both at differences in the sources and patterns of victimization across different domains (school, work, home, leisure settings) or between characteristics of individuals within a particular domain. Domain-specific research is a significantly underdeveloped area of routine activity theory. However, starting in the late 1980s, researchers have applied routine activity theory to crimes in specific settings. The result of this focus is the recognition and validation of the fact that certain types of crimes have similar types of offenders, victims, and patterns in all types of settings, while other types of crimes have different participants and relationships that are domain specific. When research highlights one particular domain, it becomes possible to provide more complete and precise definitions and measurements of activities within that domain. In order to effectively accomplish this, however, it is important to account for (1) variations in persons and activities within specific domains, and (2) the movement of offenders and victims between domains. When attention is directed to domain-specific investigations, relationships become more obvious between victimization and daily activities. This means that domain-specific research allows for a much higher level of confidence and specificity in theory.

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory

Definitions and Measures

When researchers critique the work that has been done to evaluate the validity and utility of routine activity theory, there are typically two issues that stand at the center of such critiques: imprecise measurements of core concepts and a reliance on indirect rather than direct measures of routine activities. In regard to the first issue, questions of what constitutes a “potential” offender, a “vulnerable” potential target, or a “capable guardian” have not been satisfactorily resolved by theorists or researchers. This leads to a number of different definitions being used in the research, and consequently a body of research findings that may or may not be fully compatible. This same issue also holds true, although not at such a high level, for many of the specific social activities (how is “going out for leisure at night” defined?), alcohol and drug use (what does “getting drunk regularly” mean?), or other activities variables that are centrally important to the theory. In regard to the second common criticism, despite the centrality of lifestyle to routine activity theory, many of the issues that are presumed to represent lifestyle have not had solid, direct means of measurement identified. For example, most (if not all) routine activity research finds that married (or widowed) people lead safer lifestyles than single people (including divorced or separated). But what exactly is it about being married that decreases one’s risks for criminal victimization? Is it that married people do not go out drinking alcohol at bars for nighttime leisure as often as single people do? Is it that married people tend to have children, and their increased vigilance for the safety of their children rubs off to increase their own safety as well? Is it that married people tend to be older than single people, thus that age is the real characteristic that is associated with increased safety? The answers to these questions are not known. In turn, researchers are forced to speculate regarding the rationale for their association, which is less valid than direct assessment of relationships. Additionally, it is important to include demographics in assessments of the theory because there are real differences in the victimization risks of individuals based on who they are or their social statuses. For example, sex is one of the few consistently strong relationships between criminal

191

behavior as offender or victim. Men simply are involved in criminal behavior and criminal events far more than women. As such, it is important to assess the differences between male and female victimization patterns, particularly those arising entirely to being one sex or the other. In the end, scholars must continue to examine the influence of demographic characteristics as well as continue to specify more precise and direct measures of the lifestyles/routine activities of people in seeking to predict their risks of victimization. Practical Uses of Routine Activity Theory

Routine activity theory has several important practical implications, primarily focused on the development of crime prevention programs. Routine activity theory is most useful, and makes important contributions to social policy, by predicting conditions under which victimization risks are enhanced and identifying patterns of social events associated with criminal incidents. Specifically, the first general implication of the theory is on programming efforts targeting potential victims’ vulnerability (e.g., “attractiveness” as possible victims). This can be determined by understanding when and where particular types of persons may be more likely to fall victim to crime. If we understand that, in a particular domain, persons who engage in behaviors X, Y, and Z are more likely to be victims, it becomes possible (1) to educate persons into being more careful or securing guardianship present when they are engaging in those dangerous behaviors, or (2) to structure settings so as to minimize these persons’ exposure to potential offenders. Prevention efforts may also focus on increasing guardianship efforts. This can take the form of increasing law enforcement presence in certain places at certain times and also of altering the structural aspects of environments. Called “crime prevention through environmental design,” these types of crime prevention programs may include simple measures such as increasing lighting (to make offenses more easily observed), removing hidden blind spots in settings, or simply using more and more effective means of protecting one’s person and property (carrying a weapon for protection or installing new and stronger locks on doors). Regardless of the specific actions that are taken to better separate motivated offenders and

192

Collective Security/Fear and Loathing

vulnerable targets or to diminish the perceived vulnerability of particular persons or places, routine activity theory is behind many efforts to reduce criminal victimization risks. However, where crime prevention efforts spawned by routine activity theory differ significantly from the efforts borne of other criminological theories is that the focus is not on eliminating or removing motivated offenders but instead on reducing such persons’ opportunities and attractions to criminal events. Simply put, routine activity theory gives a theoretical foundation to crime prevention. This can only enhance societal efforts in this area.

Conclusion Routine activity theory is unique among theories in that it seeks to explain varying victimization risks among individuals and the role of criminal location in the incidence of criminal events. At the core of routine activity theory is the idea that crimes can only occur when three elements of a situation are present: potential offenders, suitable targets, and incapable, unwilling, or absent guardians. When these three situational elements come together in place and time, the likelihood of a criminal event occurring is greatly increased. Since its inception, routine activity theory researchers have tested many elements of the criminal incident to fully identify which lifestyles and lifestyle components are associated with higher risks for victimization. Researchers have identified five general categories of factors that increase risk: demographics, social activities, alcohol and drug use, economic status, and community structures. Additionally, by identifying when, where, and under what conditions crime is more likely to transpire, researchers can develop greater understandings of how crime occurs in patterned ways in society. In this respect, routine activity theory allows for more informed efforts to prevent and intervene in crime. Using the concepts, principles, and findings of routine activity theory research, criminologists can begin to identify how individuals in various settings can take steps to protect themselves and their belongings from criminal victimization. Richard A. Tewksbury and Elizabeth Ehrhardt Mustaine

See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature; Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective; Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places; Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

References and Further Readings Cohen, L., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Felson, M. (2002). Crime and everyday life: Insight and implications for society (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kennedy, L. W., & Forde, D. R. (1999). When push comes to shove: A routine conflict approach to violence. Albany: SUNY Press. Meithe, T. D., & Meier, R. F. (1990). Opportunity, choice, and criminal victimization: A test of a theoretical model. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 27, 243–266. Miethe, T. D., & Meier, R. F. (1994). Crime and its social context: Toward an integrated theory of offenders, victims, and situations: State University of New York Press. Mustaine, E. E., & Tewksbury, R. (1997). Obstacles in the assessment of routine activity theory. Social Pathology, 3, 102–120. Sacco, V. F., & Kennedy, L. W. (1996). The criminal event. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Sampson, R. (1987). Personal victimization by strangers: An extension and test of the opportunity model of predatory victimization. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 78, 327–356. Schwartz, M. D., & Pitts, V. L. (1995). Exploring a feminist routine activities approach to explaining sexual assault. Justice Quarterly, 12, 9–31.

Collective Security/ Fear and Loathing Collective security and fear and loathing are two intertwined theses that frequently appeared in the study of protective gun ownership in the United States. David McDowall and Colin Loftin’s 1983 collective security thesis argues that there is an

Collective Security/Fear and Loathing

inverse relationship between protective gun ownership and confidence in the collective institution of justice and security: Protective ownership of guns will increase when confidence in the collective security declines. James Wright, Peter Rossi, and Kathleen Daly’s 1983 fear and loathing thesis proposes that the purchase of guns and carrying of guns for protection are related to fear of crime in general and fear of racially different criminals in particular. Those who are fearful of crime and especial those who have strong prejudice against visible minorities are more likely to arm themselves. These two theses received considerable academic attention since the 1980s. In the political arena, during this time, gun ownership was singled out as one of social problems facing Americans (Zimring & Hawkin, 1987). The National Rifle Association vehemently defends the right of Americans to own and use guns for self-protection. Fear of crime echoes conservative rhetoric for the law and order since the 1970s (Browning & Cao, 1992). This rhetoric focuses the public response to crime on criminals, and especially on black Americans, not on the causes of crime. Taking justice into private hands by arming oneself and the presence of fear and loathing are said to be the driving forces for the increased sale of guns of self-protection.

Collective Security In one of his classic works, Max Weber (1958) argues that a necessary condition for a state is that it retains the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory to provide the residents with collective security. This collective security operated by the state has many advantages over private or informal security: It is efficient, it can be allocated uniformly, it has continuity over time, and it results in a state of peace instead of chaos. The success of the contemporary democracies shows a general expansion of the collective security in the form of police and criminal justice systems and a gradual decline in private revenges of individuals in the form of retaliation. In addition, private security is only allowed when its legitimacy derives from the state. Historically, when a monopoly on the use of violence did not exist, private individuals or groups would inevitably arm themselves and use violence against each other; thus, anarchy or a war of all

193

against all results in more violence than could be found in even the most violent state. With the expansion of the state, such as police and courts, contemporary people have become accustomed to relying on government to provide protection and to maintain order. However, when people doubt the ability of the formal collective security system to provide such protection, they may seek alternative ways to provide personal security (McDowall & Loftin, 1983). Specifically, when collective security fails, individuals tend to take over and provide security and justice for themselves. The passive ways of achieving such protection are to install an alarm system, window bars, or special locks to help prevent break-ins; this approach is also called target hardening. The more aggressive way to achieve security is to arm oneself by purchasing a gun, and organize one’s neighbors in the programs such as community crime watch. The study of collective security is closely related to the study of protective gun ownership because the United States has never been a full-fledged state with a monopoly of legitimate use of physical force. The American government has long tolerated the use of physical force by private individuals and organizations. Quasi-legitimate private use of force—lynching, riots, violent labor disputes, and the like—occur periodically. Many citizens of the United States, especially in the South and West, have a strong mentality of vigilante justice—justice achieved by vigilantes who violate the law in order to protect themselves or others from criminals. For example, a white Houston suburban man in November 2007 called a 911 operator, reporting that he saw two burglars break into his neighbor’s home. Armed with a shotgun and while talking with the 911 operator, he went to confront two Afro-Latin burglars and killed both from the back despite the repeated warning from the 911 operator not to do so. Later he successfully defended his killing and was acquitted by the court (Ellick, 2008). The concept of collective security is complex, especially with regards to its measures. The macrolevel measure of collective security is the ratio of residents per police officer. In their 1988 research, Douglas Smith and Craig Uchida argue that collective security is ultimately a theory of individual choices and it must be examined with individuallevel data.

194

Collective Security/Fear and Loathing

The micro-level measures of collective security include confidence in the police and confidence in one’s neighbors, because collective security contains two aspects: formal collective security and informal collective security (Cao et al., 1997). The measure for informal collective security is greatly intertwined with quite a lot of other constructs in the literature. Sometimes, social disorder is also included as an indirect measure of collective security (Cao et al., 1997).

Fear and Loathing Concern about gun-related violence has grown as such incidents have increased since the 1960s. Fear of crime refers to a series of negative emotional and behavior responses to possible violent crime and physical harm. Because of fear of crime, people “stay off the streets at night, avoid strangers, curtail social activities, keep firearms, buy watch dogs, and many even move to other neighborhoods” (Clemente & Kleiman, 1977, p. 519). One of the more aggressive responses to increased crime is to own guns for self-protection. In the gun literature, fear of crime is a part of Wright et al.’s 1983 fear and loathing thesis, which asserts that gun purchases are motivated by fear and especially by general racial prejudice—perceptions that minorities are a dangerous population. Fear of crime simply argues that it is the fear of violent experiences, perceived or actual, that motivates many individuals to possess firearms as a means of ensuring protection. The fear and loathing thesis suggests that fear of crime alone is not enough to stimulate the need to purchase a gun for protection. Rather, fear of crime with the presence of loathing is more likely to encourage the protective ownership of firearms because many white Americans perceive the crime problem as essentially a racial problem. If the idea of a criminal brings to mind a black male, if blacks are regarded as a threat to the white community’s peace and order, and if people see the crime as a racial conflict, then people are more likely to arm themselves in self-defense. This thesis is based on the assumption that both fear and loathing are needed to motivate a more aggressive response in the form of firearm ownership for self-protection.

Conclusion The theses of collective security and fear and loathing are potentially relevant to the social situation of American inner cities. The reasoning is that crime as well as incivilities or disorder leads to fear of crime among residents, which in turn leads some to withdraw from community activities and others to move away. For the deteriorated neighborhood, only poverty-stricken people remain and only other similarly poor people reoccupy abandoned spaces. When this process of residential succession takes place by a visible minority group, conflicts will have a racial and ethnic orientation. The result is a decline in the neighborhood’s level of informal social control, which is hypothesized to cause crime in the area to increase in frequency and severity and to cause residents in the area to rely on themselves for selfprotection. In the gun literature, collective security and fear and loathing are two hypotheses that describe this situation. The connection of the two hypotheses is perceived personal vulnerability (Wilcox Rountree, 2000). In testing the hypotheses, the results are quite mixed, largely due to measurement issues. In 1985, Robert Young used a Detroit sample of white males and differentiated between low prejudice and high prejudice whites. His analyses support the hypothesis that a perceived high percentage of blacks in the neighborhood increased significantly protective gun ownership among highly prejudiced white males. In 1997, Liqun Cao et al. tested the hypotheses with Cincinnati data, and their data do not support the hypotheses. Another general problem in testing these hypotheses is that almost all of the data are cross-sectional. Longitudinal data are needed to better test the hypotheses. Beyond the gun literature, the construct of informal collective security is overlapping with a series of other prominent constructs such as willingness to intervene, territorial functioning, organizational participation and neighboring, informal social control, local society ties, social capital, community capacity, social integration, and collective efficacy. Liqun Cao

Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory See also Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear; Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime

References and Further Readings Black, D. (1980). The manners and customs of the police. New York: Academic Press. Browning, S. L., & Cao, L. (1992). The impact of race on criminal justice ideology. Justice Quarterly, 9, 685–701. Cao, L., Cullen, F. T., & Link, B. G. (1997). The social determinants of gun ownership: Self-protection in an urban environment. Criminology, 35, 629–657. Clemente, F., & Kleiman, M. B. (1977). Fear of crime in the United States: A multivariate analysis. Social Force, 56, 519–531. Ellick, A. B. (2008, July 1). Grand jury clears Texan in the killing of 2 burglars. The New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2009, from http://www.nytimes .com/2008/07/01/us/01texas.html?ex=1372651200& en=849acdaef3a9ceac&ei=5124&partner=permalink &exprod=permalink McDowall, D., & Loftin, C. (1983). Collective security, firearms, and suicide. American Journal of Sociology, 88, 1146–1161. Smith, D. A., & Uchida, C. D. (1988). The social organization of self-help: A study of defensive weapon ownership. American Sociological Review, 53, 94–102. Waskow, A. I. (1966). From race riot to sit-in, 1919 and the 1960s. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Weber, M. (1958). Politics as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber (pp. 77–128). New York: Oxford University Press. Wilcox Rountree, P. (2000). Weapons at school: Are the predictors generalizable across context? Sociological Spectrum, 20, 291–324. Wright, J. D., Rossi, P. H., & Daly, K. (1983). Under the gun: Weapons, crime, and violence in America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Young, R. (1985). Perceptions of crime, racial attitudes, and firearms ownership. Social Forces, 64, 473–486. Young, R. L., McDowall, D., & Loftin, C. (1987). Collective security and the ownership of firearms for protection. Criminology, 25, 47–62. Zimring, F., & Hawkins, G. (1987). The citizen’s guide to guns control. New York: Macmillan.

195

Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory Differential coercion theory (DCT) was developed by Mark Colvin in 2000 based on his earlier research on the penitentiary crisis in New Mexico Prison. He found coercive measures in prison settings to be highly problematic and conducive to noncompliant behavior. Employing the same logic in DCT, Colvin draws on several theories of criminality in an integrated format around the theme of coercion. Mostly connected with the strain tradition of criminology, DCT takes coercion as a source of negative stimuli experienced during the socialization process that creates adverse social psychological states and, in turn, causes criminality. DCT integrates (1) criminological perspectives considering some social settings and social relations as crime-prone and some social settings as crimeresistant (social causation perspective) (2) with perspectives that see childhood characteristics (i.e., low self-control) as factors affecting the development of social relations as well as criminality (social selection perspective). In this regard, DCT sees chronic criminality as a product of individuals’ exposure to erratic episodes of coercion in interpersonal and impersonal settings. The following sections examine DCT’s conceptual framework and major premises, its empirical status, and its policy implications.

Conceptual Framework Coercion has been examined as a causal factor of crime and delinquency in several theories of criminology. Unfavorable family relations, including different forms of coercion (e.g., physical abuse, psychological pressures), for instance, are indicated to be the reason for delinquency at early ages. Early onset of criminality, in turn, increases the likelihood of engaging in delinquency during adolescence and in criminality during adulthood. In DCT, the term coercion refers to a power creating fear or anxiety that induces or threatens a person to do something. This power can exist in relations between individuals (interpersonal coercion) as well as in larger social contexts that are not directly related to individuals (impersonal

196

Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory

coercion). While the latter version of coercion poses a macro-level effect on criminality, the former one is more of a micro-level factor affecting criminality. Coercion existing within the interpersonal relations can result from active or threatened use of force and several other physical or psychological intimidations between individuals. Coercion existing in the larger social context, within which an individual lives, usually results from socioeconomic pressures (i.e., poverty, unemployment, income inequality, lack of educational opportunities). Coercion at both the interpersonal and impersonal levels can also be in the form of active or threatened removal of social support that an individual receives from several sources.

Types of Coercion DCT examines the relationship between coercion and criminality through a continuum of control ranging from coercive to non-coercive in different durations. According to this approach, control can range between coercive and non-coercive forms, and it can be applied on a consistent or an inconsistent (erratic) basis. When the extent of control and the amount of coercion involved is cross-tabulated, four different types of control emerge. For each type of control, different social-psychological and behavioral outcomes are predicted. Specifically, these different social-psychological states determine whether the individual subject to a respective type of control will display a complying or noncompliant (criminal) behavior. The four types of control are reviewed below. Type 1: Consistent, Non-Coercive

Consistently applied, non-coercive control helps individuals develop strong social bonds through strong elements of social support at both instrumental and expressive forms. Psychologi­ cally, consistently applied non-coercive control leads individuals to develop high self-control, high self-efficacy, and low anger. Through these social-psychological outcomes, individuals subject to Type 1 control develop an internal locus of control, and they are expected to display prosocial behavior with the least probability of criminality.

Type 2: Erratic, Non-Coercive

Inconsistently applied non-coercive control is displayed in this type. Socially, Type 2 control does not develop a coercive control model, but it creates feelings of uncertainty and unreliability of social bonds because social support and supervision are delivered on an inconsistent basis. This inconsistency of control psychologically causes low self-control, and such individuals take the risk of experimenting with antisocial behavior to maximize their pleasure and gain. As the result of these social-psychological outcomes, individuals subject to Type 2 control will be more likely to be involved in non-violent or victimless crimes. Type 3: Consistent, Coercive

People are subject to a consistent coercion in this type of control. This coercive control creates a disciplinary relationship between the sources of that control and the receiver of it. In this disciplinary type of relationship, only a limited amount of expressive and instrumental social support is provided. While individuals are punished for noncompliance, there is not much reward for complying behavior because it is default behavior in this disciplinary type of control. This type of control develops a weak and necessity-based social control found on avoiding disciplinary responses of the controller. People subject to Type 3 control are likely to develop psychopathological problems as a result of inward directed anger, helplessness, fear, and depression. Although those people are not very likely to be involved in chronic criminality, they can perpetrate violent random offenses, such as homicides or assaults, as a result of their psychopathology. Type 4: Erratic, Coercive

Control of behaviors is maintained through an inconsistent and coercive form of disciplining in Type 4. Reactions for noncompliance might be situated at the two edges of the continuum: It is either ignored or harshly punished. Furthermore, while a serious noncompliance can be ignored, a non-serious one can easily be reacted with a harsh punishment. The inconsistent nature of this punitive control does not allow for enough social support to develop a strong social bond. In contrast,

Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory

an individual subject to that type of control develops a coercive social modeling for his or her own behavior. Furthermore, Type 4 control causes serious psychological deficits. This inconsistency of coercive control, first of all, creates a control deficit on individuals; those people subject to that type of control have usually low self-control and low self-efficacy. Second, this inconsistent coercion causes an other-directed anger as a result of feelings of injustice. As a consequence, DCT predicts that people who are subject to this type of control are more likely to be involved persistently or chronically in predatory street crimes.

comprehensive crime prevention program in which a non-coercive society and a non-coercive criminal justice system are essential. In Crime and Coercion, Colvin provides the following policy proposals for a comprehensive crime prevention program:

1. Short-term emergency measures. To decrease the effects of coercion stemming from social context, joblessness should be diminished as much as possible through sustainable job training and job placement programs funded by the government.



2. Nationwide parent effectiveness programs. To develop a strong social bond to legitimate institutions and especially to the family, children should be disciplined in a consistently noncoercive fashion. To achieve this, parents should be trained to apply effective control measures over their children through systematic, publicly funded, professional programs.



3. Universal “Head Start” preschool programs. Preschool programs can provide an efficient non-coercive control over young children that is essential for developing high levels of selfcontrol. In addition, these programs can help for adaptation to school and to reduce noncompliance through the early periods of school.



4. Expanded and enhanced public education. An expanded public education and equal opportunities for all to access free public education are essential for creating a coercion-free society.



5. National service program. DCT suggests a twoyear national service programs that is to be completed after secondary education in exchange for vocational and educational stipends for achieving that program. This program will (1) give people a chance to be involved in their communities in an adult role during a period of time when they are most at risk for criminal and delinquent involvements, (2) enhance their commitment to the society, and (3) benefit society through the services of these young people.



6. Enhanced workplace environment. A vital element of a non-coercive society should include enhancing the environment and quality of workplaces as well as jobs. Youths should be encouraged to pursue higher education with the

Empirical Status DCT has not yet to be tested extensively in different contexts. A 2004 study conducted by James Unnever, Colvin, and Francis Cullen, however, offered support for DCT. They employed both interpersonal (parental, peer) and impersonal (school, neighborhood) sources of coercion to test core assumptions of the theory. Using these sources of coercion, this study examined four types of possible social-psychological deficits that might result from coercion: coercive ideation, anger, parental social bonds, and school social bonds. The findings revealed that both impersonal and interpersonal coercion are positively related to delinquent involvement. More specifically, school coercion and neighborhood coercion were found to be strong predictors of delinquent involvement. This positive relation between delinquent involvement and different types of coercion could be direct or mediated by social-psychological deficits. The study demonstrates that social-psychological deficits mediate a significant portion of coercive forces’ effects on delinquency. Among the four types of deficits—coercive ideation, anger, parental social bonds, and school social bonds—only anger was not significantly related to delinquency. The study, however, showed that anger is a result of coercive ideation and creates an effect on delinquency through coercive ideation.

Policy Implications Since DCT examines coercion at different levels as an important cause of crime, the most important policy outcome of the theory is to develop a

197

198

Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot

promise of non-coercive, high-quality jobs. Coercive work places will alienate workers and lead them into illegal opportunities. In addition, coercion at workplaces will induce coercive relations for workers in their families.





7. Programs for economic growth and expanded productivity. Reducing impersonal coercion requires sustainable economic growth and increased productivity that will subsequently amplify quality of life for people from different layers of the society. 8. A more progressive tax system. The economic system should maintain a balanced and equal distribution of national wealth through a progressive tax system. Such a tax system will enhance the feelings of justice among people and help government develop and implement social programs to create a non-coercive society. 9. Community organizing and criminal opportunity reduction. There needs to be strong ties among the individuals of a community for effective crime reduction programs. Such strong ties will help reduce coercive interpersonal relations.

Osman Dolu and Hasan Büker See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime; Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency; Cullen, Francis, T.: Social Support and Crime; Peacemaking Criminology; Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory

References and Further Readings Alexander, A. D., & Bernard, T. J. (2002). A critique of Mark Colvin’s, Crime and Coercion: An Integrated Theory of Chronic Criminality. Crime, Law and Social Change, 38, 389–398. Colvin, M. (2000). Crime and coercion: An integrated theory of chronic criminality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Colvin, M. (2003). Crime and coercion. In F. T. Cullen & R. Agnew (Eds.), Criminological theory: Past to present—essential readings (pp. 379–386). Los Angeles: Roxbury. Colvin, M. (2007). Applying differential coercion and social support theory to prison organizations: The case

of the penitentiary of New Mexico. Prison Journal, 87, 367–387. Unnever, J. D., Colvin, M., & Cullen, F. T. (2004). Crime and coercion: A test of core theoretical propositions. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 41, 244–268.

Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot In 1980, the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM) experienced one of the most bloody and disastrous riots in the history of the United States. During this brutal uprising, inmates were raped, hacked with meat cleavers, mutilated, and murdered (Colvin, 1992). Mark Colvin, who served as the principle researcher in the state attorney general’s probe into the riot, provides an analysis and description of the incident that emphasizes the social and contextual sources of the uprising. Colvin’s work on the riot is of particular interest because his description not only provides insight into the causes of this riot, but also has implications for understanding how prison administrative control systems and inmate social systems interact to affect inmate adaptation and behavior. In his 1992 book about the riot, Colvin places primary importance on the changing historical context of PNM and the effects this had on the interplay between the inmate social structure and administrative control system. The historical and social context of PNM led to a breakdown of the administrative control structure and also caused the once unified inmate population to become fragmented, disgruntled, and aggressive. As a result, when the lax control structure provided the inmates with the opportunity to take over the prison, the riot that ensued was disorganized, destructive, and extremely violent. The account that follows is drawn from Colvin’s original study in 1992 and from his 2008 analysis of the riot.

Historical Context In The Penitentiary in Crisis, Colvin divides the historical context into four periods: authoritarian, accommodation, confrontation, and fragmentation.

Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot

In his 2008 analysis, Colvin notes that the defining feature of each of these periods is the overriding level of coercion and support that the administration used to control the inmate population. Further, Colvin contends that changes in level of coercion and support led to alterations in the inmate social structure. The Authoritarian Period

The PNM was opened in 1956 in response to problems resulting from crowding in the old penitentiary. Similar to Statesville (Jacobs, 1977) and other “Big House” institutions (Irwin, 1980), the authoritarian period at PNM was marked by autonomous wardens who used rigid discipline to enforce a highly structured day-to-day existence. While discipline was considered by inmates to be harsh, it was also scaled to the seriousness of the violation and applied in a consistent manner. In short, while control of the inmate population was maintained through harsh discipline, the discipline was predictable. Colvin explains that the consistent coercive control applied by the administrative control structure resulted in a high degree of inmate compliance. Still, he stresses that while levels of inmate compliance were high, evidence suggests that there was also a general feeling of docility and hopelessness among the inmates during this era. The Period of Accommodation

The authoritarian era at PNM came to an end as a result of political movements that encouraged inmate rights and discouraged the harsh coercive controls used by prison officials. In 1967, J. E. Baker, a federal correctional administrator, was appointed as warden because of his expertise in promoting inmate self-governance and supporting rehabilitative ideals. In his original study, Colvin discusses prison conditions and policies under Baker’s wardenship: Baker eliminated many of the coercive controls, shutting down the hole and reducing restrictions on inmate movement. While this served to reduce the degree of authority and control that correctional officers had on inmates, Baker sought to use a system of social supports to replace the coercive controls. During this era, rehabilitative programming flourished, allowing inmates opportunities to earn high school and college degrees, attend vocational classes, and organize social

199

clubs. As a result of Baker’s policies, the coercive system of control was replaced by one that was based on incentives and support. This change managed to maintain low levels of inmate deviance as well as increase inmate prosocial behavior and promote solidarity among inmates. While rehabilitative programming and supportive controls grew for about half a decade, in 1972 the original federal grant money that funded these programs began to dry up. Further, a year earlier, Baker was replaced by his deputy warden, and as funding tightened, the new warden failed to maintain the growth of programming. On top of this, the prison began to see increases in the number of offenders who were convicted of drug-related crimes. With heroin from Mexico flooding the illicit drug markets of the Southwest during this period, it was not long before attempts to smuggle this substance into PNM began to increase as well. Another major feature of this period is that front-line correctional officers, who were disenchanted with their removal of coercive power in the years prior, became frustrated and apathetic to the drug trade. As a result, heroin use and trafficking within PNM flourished into a large-scale operation. As the operation grew, an informal control network was also established. Inmates who sold heroin had a vested interest in maintaining order within the institution as inmate violence tended to promote administrative crackdowns. The result is what Colvin, in his 2008 analysis, terms an illegitimate system of support. As long as the heroin dealers kept the inmate population peaceful, the prison administration tolerated the drug sales and use. While legitimate programming was declining and becoming a less consistent supportive control, the illegitimate heroin trade provided an alternative system of supportive controls. Of interest, Colvin notes that this support system maintained the unification of the inmate social system. That is, since the administrative control structure used the drug trade as an incentive to promote order within the institution, the inmate social structure remained unified around the drug trade. The Period of Confrontation

The period of accommodation came to an end when an investigation from the New Mexico’s Attorney General’s office found an alarming level

200

Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot

of drug trafficking at PNM and further suggested that the current administration had done little to address the problem (Colvin, 1992). The current warden and his top administration were promptly replaced by an administration that came from “Big House” (Irwin, 1980) maximum security federal prisons. This administration placed a primary emphasis on coercive controls and quickly took large strides to crack down on drug trafficking. Further, security concerns led the new administration to cut many of the remaining programs that provided college education or involved contact with outside civilians. In the end, the administration removed both legitimate (programming) and illegitimate (drug trafficking) supportive controls and replaced them with a highly coercive control system. In response to the changes, the organized inmate population protested with strikes, small riots, and a federal lawsuit. These confrontations between inmates and the administration resulted in an escalation of both correctional officer coercion and inmate violence. During the period of confrontation, both informal inmate beatings and the formal use of the hole began to be regularly used as a means of punishment. In his original study, Colvin notes that confrontation between administrators at the top levels of the corrections department left mid-level management and correctional officers with little oversight or guiding philosophy. As a result, policies to guide the use of the coercive controls were not established and the use of coercion became arbitrary. Correctional officers would target inmates they believed to be troublemakers and place them in segregation based on hearsay or for no reason at all. Thus, the confrontation between correctional administrators encouraged an inconsistent coercive control structure within PNM. As a result, Colvin points out that inmate violence and escapes rose to levels higher than they had ever been during the years of accommodation. The Period of Fragmentation

The period of fragmentation was the end product of the escalating confrontation between prison officials, correctional officers, and the inmate population. Confrontations between top officials left the administrative control structure in a disorganized state of administrative breakdown. As a result, the

coercive control tactics used by guards became increasingly inconsistent and arbitrarily applied. Mid-level management, concerned with the power that the organized inmate population exerted over the institution, began to use information coerced from snitches to disrupt inmate groups. Colvin notes in The Penitentiary in Crisis that correctional officers also began to target inmate leaders and transfer them to other institutions. This tactic removed influential inmates who informally provided the basis for solidarity in the years prior. The lack of leadership among the inmate groups resulted in a disorganized and disgruntled inmate population that was not only at odds with the administrative control structure, but was also experiencing increases in violence between inmates. Further, the administrative breakdown encouraged lax and inconsistent security policies. For example, as noted by Colvin in The Penitentiary in Crisis, security gates and dormitory doors were routinely left open when policy dictated they remain shut. The lack of administrative direction also had a negative impact on correctional officers as officer turnover approached a staggering 80 percent. The period of fragmentation thus produced a prison environment where the inmate population became increasingly violent, disgruntled, and disorganized, and the security of the institution became increasingly lax.

The Riot On February 2, 1980, around 1:40 a.m. multiple security violations were committed when two shift supervisors and two correctional officers entered Dorm E-2 and left the door cracked open so it would not lock. A small group of inmates who had gotten drunk off of some home brew jumped all four guards on what was more or less a dare. Another series of security violations gave the inmates access to the rest of the wing and the control center. The prison pharmacy was also rampaged at which point inmates began to ingest the sedatives, barbiturates, and narcotics in large amounts. Other inmates broke into a maintenance area that contained paint, paint thinner, and glue. These substances were placed in buckets in the main corridor and inmates began dipping towels in the buckets and inhaling the substances to get high. During this time period, inmates perceived as weak were killed, hacked with meat cleavers,

Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime

beaten with pipes, mutilated, tortured, and raped for no other reason than their defenselessness. Perhaps the most brutal and horrific moment of the riot occurred when inmates gained access to the protective custody unit that housed snitches and other inmates who could not safely live in the general population. While inmates were not able to find keys to unlock the cell block, they did locate acetylene torches in the prison plumbing shop and proceeded to cut open the cell block gate as well as the doors to the cells where the victims were trapped. The inmates inside the cells were left to sit and wait while inmates on the outside described in horrific detail what was going to happen next. These victims were tortured, stabbed, and thrown from the upper-tier catwalks. One inmate was decapitated; his head was placed on a pole and paraded through the main corridor. In the end, over 34 inmates were killed and over 200 were seriously injured. Twelve guards were taken hostage and several were badly beaten, sodomized, and tortured. It is estimated that more than $20 million in physical damage was done to the prison and more than $200 million was accrued in riot related expenses.

201

References and Further Readings Colvin M. (1981). The contradictions of control: Prisons in a class society. The Insurgent Sociologist, 11, 33–45. Colvin, M. (1982). The 1980 New Mexico prison riot. Social Problems, 29, 449–462. Colvin, M. (1992). The penitentiary in crisis: From accommodation to riot in New Mexico. Albany: SUNY Press. Colvin, M. (2008). Applying differential coercion and support theory to prison organizations: The case of the penitentiary of New Mexico. Prison Journal, 87, 367–387. Colvin, M., Cullen, F. T., & Vander Ven, T. (2002). Coercion, social support, and crime: An emerging theoretical consensus. Criminology, 40, 19–42. DiIulio, J. (1987). Governing prisons: A comparative study of correctional management. New York: Free Press. Irwin, J. (1980). Prisons in turmoil. Boston: Little, Brown. Jacobs, J. (1977). Stateville: The penitentiary in mass society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Useem, B., & Kimball P. (1989). States of siege: U.S. prison riots, 1971–1986. New York: Oxford University Press. Useem, B., & Reisig, M. D. (1999). Collective action in prisons: Protests, disturbances, and riots. Criminology, 37, 735–760.

Conclusion Colvin emphasizes how changes in the social control structure at the PNM were the primary cause of this horrific event. Infighting between top officials within the prison administration resulted in an administrative breakdown, encouraging inconsistent enforcement of both security policies and coercive forms of punishment. Further, the move from a supportive control structure to an inconsistent coercive control structure produced an inmate social system that was fragmented, severely disgruntled, and very violent. In hindsight, perhaps it is not so surprising that one of the most violent inmate riots in the history of the United States occurred under these conditions. Matthew D. Makarios See also Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime; Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime; DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order

Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime Mark Colvin, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven developed their differential coercion and social support theory (DCSST) of crime based on two emerging themes in criminology: coercion and social support. According to this perspective, “with some important exceptions, coercion causes crime whereas social support prevents crime” (Colvin et al., 2002, p. 19). DCSST proposes that involvement in criminal behavior is shaped by the sources, types, strengths, and duration of social support and coercion to which individuals are exposed. In the following sections, the conceptual framework, the empirical status, and the policy implications derived from this theory are discussed.

202

Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime

Conceptual Framework Because the premises of the DCSST rely heavily on the relationship between coercion and social support, the theory initially examines what these terms refer to in criminological theory. Coercion

In several theories of criminology, coercion has been examined as a source of criminal behavior. Coercive disciplining and coercive interpersonal relations in family relations, for example, have been found to cause juvenile delinquency. As a term rooted in the strain theory tradition of criminology, coercion refers to a power of creating fear or anxiety that induces or threatens a person to do something. The source of this power can be factors in the larger environment of a person such as adverse economic conditions (macro-level coercion) or individuals around this person (micro-level coercion). Both these types of coercion can affect individuals on a consistent or inconsistent basis and to different degrees. The consistency and extent of this coercion, in turn, determine an individual’s social-­ psychological state (e.g., anger, self-control). Most notably, inconsistent coercion leads a person to a social-psychological condition that is conducive to chronic criminality. At the macro-level and the micro-level, coercion can also undermine social support, the other key term of DCSST. Social Support

Although the idea that strong social networks can help control criminality was promoted earlier in social studies of crime, the term social support has been applied extensively to the studies of criminology only in the recent years. While social support can be in the form of expressing and sharing feelings toward increasing a person’s self-esteem and self-respect (expressive social support), it can also involve financial assistance and constructive guidance for social progress in a legitimate lifestyle (instrumental social support). Social support can be experienced in immediate relations of individuals’ families, and friendships, as well as in larger social networks (schools, neighborhoods, nations). Social support also can be expressed both formally (e.g., government-directed social programs) and informally (e.g., daily conversations of individuals).

As in coercion, consistency is an important factor in determining the social-psychological outcomes of social support. Consistent social support increases the trust between the giver and recipient of social support, thus forming a strong social bond, inducing high levels of self-control, and preventing strain and anger. In turn, this promotes conforming behavior rather than criminality. On the other hand, inconsistent social support undermines social cohesion and trust in the society and creates mistrust toward social institutions. As a result, this situation might prompt people to look for alternative reliable social support networks. As discussed in several other criminological theories, deficiencies in receiving legitimate and consistent social support may lead people to pursue consistent social support from other sources, even from illegitimate ones. Social support from illegitimate sources, contrary to legitimate sources, potentially promotes crime. Thus, the inverse relationship between coercion (promoting crime) and social support (preventing crime) is applicable for social support from legitimate sources. A Differential Coercion and Social Support Theory of Crime

DCSST is an integrated perspective that explores an inverse relationship between coercion and social support. In this inverse relation, greater social support at both the macro-level and micro-level tends to produce less coercion. Societies providing more social support, for example, will be less coercive and ease the delivery of social support at the microlevel (through interpersonal relations). At the micro-level, then, social support decreases the adverse effects of coercion and even prevents it in many circumstances. On the other hand, coercion at the macro-level and micro-level weakens and/or induces the removal of social support. As discussed previously, social support and coercion can be delivered either consistently or inconsistently, and the outcomes of their inverse relation will vary accordingly. Consistent social support effectively decreases the excessive use of coercion, but coercion may be an undirected response along with consistent social support as a final option. Consistent coercion, involving the removal of the means of expressive and instrumental social support, effectively decreases social support. In­­consistency in both

Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime

social support and coercion, on the other hand, might lead people to look for consistent social support from illegitimate sources. In the case of inconsistent social support, feelings of undependability for satisfaction of material and expressive needs develop, which in turn lead people to seek out dependable sources for social support, even in illegitimate forms. Likewise, inconsistent coercion also motivates people to look for illegitimate sources of social support as a means to escape from a cycle of coercion in their environment. This search for social support from illegitimate sources, however, might or might not end up with access to these sources. If access to these illegitimate sources is gained, a person enters a social environment that encourages transforming deviant tendencies to professional, organized criminal activities. If access to illegitimate sources of social support is not gained, a person will be more likely to turn to unprofessional, unorganized deviant behaviors rather than displaying serious criminality. In general, the disparity in exposure to social support and coercion creates different types of social-psychological states in an individual that lead to complying or deviant behaviors. First, consistently receiving legitimate social support will create a cycle of social support in individuals’ lives that will encourage and teach them to provide social support to others when needed. This cycle of social support will expand to the larger society and develop a sense of altruism that require unselfishness and the provision of material and expressive social support to each other through multiple social networks. In such a society, then, people will be less likely to engage in deviance and criminality. Second, consistently being exposed to coercive relations and to lack of social support creates a social-psychological state in an individual that induces insensitivity to the needs, feelings, and dignity of other people. In addition, this social-psychological state encourages coercive relations with others. This cycle of coercion, contrary to the cycle of social support, leads to criminal and deviant behavior.

Empirical Status Because the DCSST is a relatively new theory, tests of the theory are, at best, limited in number and extent. In 2008, however, the theory was applied to a prison environment by Colvin. He argued that differential social support and coercion determine

203

the organizational dynamics of the prison environment and the attitudes of the individuals in the prison. In accordance with the propositions of the theory, this study displayed that social support in a prison environment can develop consensual behavior among the inmates whereas coercion can lead to disorder. Although the studies testing the DCSST per se are limited, there are numerous studies in the criminological literature separately testing the effects of social support and coercion. These works have examined social support in both expressive and material dimensions in relation to mental health and criminal behavior. First, the extant research reveals that both expressive and instrumental social support are negatively related to violent crime rates and property crime rates across different societies. Second, at the individual level, studies indicate that weak social support is a consistent predictor of mental disorders (and violence resulting from mental health problems), substance abuse and criminality, victimization from intimidate partner violence, victimization from community violence, and victimization from white-collar crimes. Investigations of the effects of material social support, however, have yielded varying results in several studies. When it involved informal community support (e.g., contributions to United Way), material social support, was not a significant predictor of violent and property crimes. In contrast, it was a significant predictor when the material social support was state-driven (e.g., welfare programs). In this regard, studies reveal that state-driven social support conditions buffer the adverse effects of socioeconomic conditions on crime rates. Research examining coercion demonstrates strong support for the general proposition that coercion promotes criminality. In these studies, being exposed to coercion in family, school, peer, and community environments has been found to be responsible for the development of several social-psychological deficits, which, in turn, lead individuals toward delinquency and criminality.

Policy Implications The foremost policy implication of DCSST is that societies must develop a strong legitimate network of social support and decrease the level of coercion to control and prevent crime. Social programs and

204

Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency

policies aiming to deal with delinquency and criminality must create crime prevention and offender rehabilitation programs at different levels of society in view of increasing social support and decreasing the effects of coercive forces. In public policy implications, it is important to note that consistently more supportive and less coercive societies will induce necessary conditions for strong interpersonal relationships. Providing consistent social support in both material (e.g., food stamps, WIC coupons) and expressive means (e.g., parent-effectiveness training, access to health care) to families, for instance, will create more supportive and less coercive relations in the society. In turn, children raised in families of such societies will have fewer socialpsychological deficits and be less likely to be involved in delinquency. Similarly, programs providing more support to teachers and students at schools, and creating less coercive environments by eliminating competitive and anti-democratic practices thereof, will affect the relationships between teachers and students positively and diminish delinquency at school environments. DCSST also has implications for the operation of the criminal justice system. The theory argues that the erratic coercive reactions of the criminal justice system create anger and feelings of injustice, which, in turn, induce further criminal behavior rather than discouraging it. Although consistently applied coercion will not create the same effect, such tight crime control policies will cause other socialpsychological problems on individuals that may be as problematic as criminality. In addition, maintaining such tight crime control policies will impose a heavy burden for society. Thus, to create effective criminal justice policies that control and prevent crime, these policies must be considered as part of larger social policies that are designed to promote a more supportive and less coercive society. In this regard, criminal justice policies must (1) display a consistent disapproval for criminal behavior (in a non-coercive fashion, but coercion should be kept as a last resort for negative behaviors), (2) strongly support legitimate social behavior, and (3) interrupt connections with illegitimate sources of social support. Receiving increasing legitimate social support will also induce higher levels of self-control on individuals and move them away from coercive forces that led them toward criminality. Legitimate social support networks

increase social capital whereas illegitimate sources of social support increase criminal capital. Hasan Büker and Osman Dolu See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency; Cullen, Francis, T.: Social Support and Crime; Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquncy; Peacemaking Criminology; Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory

References and Further Readings Colvin, M. (2000). Crime and coercion: An integrated theory of chronic criminality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Colvin, M. (2007). Applying differential coercion and social support theory to prison organizations: The case of the penitentiary of New Mexico. Prison Journal, 87, 367–387. Colvin, M., Cullen, F. T., & Vander Ven, T. (2002). Coercion, social support, and crime: An emerging theoretical consensus. Criminology, 40, 19–42. Cullen, F. T. (1994). Social support as an organizing concept for criminology: Presidential address to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Justice Quarterly, 11, 527–559.

Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency In their integrated structural-Marxist theory of delinquency, Mark Colvin and John Pauly offer an explanation of the process that leads to repeated involvement in serious property and violent delinquency. Colvin and Pauly believed that no single theory of crime adequately explained this process; therefore, they proposed an integrated theory that incorporates elements of Marxist and traditional theories of crime. They offer a class-based theory that assumes that position within the social class structure predicts participation in frequent, serious delinquent behavior.

Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency

Structural-Marxist perspectives address the organization of the social class structure under capitalism and define class in relation to the means of production. However, structural Marxists do not believe that social classes represent monolithic groups, composed of members who pursue the same goals in concert with one another. Rather, structural Marxists contend that there is competition, both between and within classes, over resources. Therefore, social classes can be subdivided. The primary class of interest for Colvin and Pauly is the working class. They adopt Richard Edwards’s model of the working class, which includes three class fractions and incorporates Amitai Etzioni’s compliance theory that addresses the nature of bonds to authority developed in reaction to workplace compliance structures. Specifically, Colvin and Pauly argue that the experiences of workers vary qualitatively across fractions of the working class, due to the nature of the compliance structure present in the working environment and to the subsequent view of authority developed by workers. Compliance structures are the mechanisms through which employers control the behavior of their workers. Location within various fractions of the working class is relevant to the production of delinquency because parents reproduce these compliance structures within their family. Furthermore, juveniles are subject to the same compliance structures within the educational environment and among peer groups. As socialization proceeds through these environments, ideological bonds to authority are developed and strengthened or weakened in reaction to the nature of compliance structures. The type of ideological bond possessed by juveniles as a result of the socialization process may lead to delinquent behavior.

Pathways to Serious, Patterned Juvenile Delinquency The working class can be divided into three fractions, each of which is subject to qualitatively different compliance structures in the workplace (Edwards, 1979). According to Etzioini, the nature of ideological bonds to authority formed by workers varies according to the nature of the compliance structure. Fraction I of the working class comprises low wage, low-skill jobs located in competitive

205

industries. These include lower-level clerical and sales positions, jobs in the service industries, and nonunion positions in manufacturing and textile industries, as noted by Colvin and Pauly. Workers are controlled through coercive techniques, in which the primary means of controlling worker behavior is the threat of job loss. The presence of a surplus labor market, consisting of chronically unemployed or underemployed workers, means that workers can be easily replaced. In response to the coercive nature of the compliance structure, fraction I workers develop an intensely negative, alienated orientation toward authority. Membership in fraction II represents a greater level of stability in the workplace. Fraction II consists of unionized workers, such as those in the oil and automotive industries, who have greater levels of job protection, higher salaries, and benefits. In order to gain compliance from workers in fraction II, employers rely on utilitarian control. This includes the manipulation of extrinsic rewards, including pay raises and job security. In response to this type of control, workers develop calculative or remunerative bonds to authority. These bonds are of intermediate intensity and are dependent on the provision of extrinsic rewards. The greatest level of workplace autonomy is found in fraction III. Fraction III comprises salaried professionals, state workers, mid-level supervisors, secretaries, and craft workers (e.g., electricians or plumbers). These employees are self-directed and creative in their jobs. Normative methods of control are excised over workers, and symbols and statuses are manipulated. Members of fraction III define themselves through occupational status, and the primary motivation for workers is increased status. Status is defined primarily by the amount of control workers have over decision making. In response to normative forms of control, fraction III workers develop strong, positive bonds to authority. The next stage of the process leading to delinquency occurs when parents reproduce the compliance structures they are exposed to at work within their families through child-raising techniques. Therefore, children develop initial bonds to authority that mirror the orientation of their parents. Parents employed in fraction I utilize coercive compliance structures at home, in which

206

Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency

discipline over children is erratic. For instance, parents may respond to the same behavior differently across time. At one point, parents may ignore problematic behavior but respond with punitive physical discipline at another. As a result, children do not know what to expect from parents. Control structures that rely on gaining compliance through coercive techniques produces an intensely negative orientation to authority among children, as it does among parents in the workplace. Parents in fraction II are exposed to utilitarian compliance structures at work; therefore, they gain compliance from their children at home through the manipulation of external rewards. Children form calculative bonds of intermediate intensity to their parents. Their behavior is guided by the prediction of external rewards and punishments. Children born to parents located in fraction III tend to develop strong, positive bonds to authority as a result of the normative compliance structures within these families. The manipulation of symbolic rewards by parents leads to internalized mechanisms of control in children. Socialization in the educational environment is the next stage in the process. Similar to the workplace and family, the educational system utilizes multiple compliance structures, which strengthen or attenuate initial bonds to authority formed within the family. Colvin and Pauly adopt a Marx­ist approach to the examination of the educational environment in that they argue that schools are responsible for training children for placement in a capitalist economy. Therefore, children are trained to accept certain types of discipline and control, which produce the necessary orientation toward authority that will be needed in their future jobs. Children are, for various reasons, subject to the same type of control structure at school that is present within their home. Thus, at school, children with negative bonds to authority are subject to coercive control, those with calculative bonds are subject to utilitarian control, and positively bonded children are controlled through normative mechanisms. Decisions about the academic environment into which students are placed reflect performance on IQ and aptitude tests, responses by teachers and administrators to children’s behavioral patterns, the availability of spots in academic tracks, and financial resources available to schools. For instance,

Colvin and Pauly argue that IQ and aptitude tests measure the nature of bonds to authority rather than levels of innate intelligence. Negatively bonded children perform poorly on achievement tests because of the lack of physical consequences for low scores. Students with strong, positive bonds to authority perform well, because they are internally motivated to achieve. Scores on IQ tests are used to place students into educational tracks, thereby exposing them to different types of control. The interaction process between students and teachers also influences compliance methods. Teachers and students are continually reacting to the other’s behavior. Negatively bonded children may engage in disruptive behaviors; therefore, they are labeled as troublesome by teachers, who then exert even greater levels of coercive control over students. Educational tracking also influences children’s views of authority. Students who are placed in tracks lower than their initial bonds suggest experience strain. Intermediate or strong positive bonds to authority may be weakened if children are placed in lower educational tracks and exposed to coercive compliance structures. The final mechanism for placing children into different types of control structures relies on differences between, rather than among, schools. The financial resources available to teachers and administrators vary by school location, with fewer resources available to schools in low-income areas. In these schools, teachers may resort to coercive control techniques because they lack access to other methods of rewards and punishments. The last stage in the process that produces class-based differences in patterns of criminality occurs as students are socialized into peer groups. Children form friendships with peers who have similar experiences and backgrounds, including exposure to the same compliance structures, and similar views of authority. Children in higher academic tracks become friends with students who are internally motivated, are highly achieving, and have positive bonds to authority. The compliance structure within the peer group is normative, and prosocial behavior and strong positive bonds to authority are reinforced. The characteristics of this peer group inhibit delinquent involvement. Juveniles that follow this pathway are most apt to come from fraction III of the working class.

Convict Criminology

Children with alienated bonds, and those with calculative bonds, are socialized into conflict and criminal subcultures respectively. Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argue that criminal subcultures are oriented toward instrumental delinquency, while socialization into a conflict subculture leads to involvement in violent crime. Juveniles who follow the pathway to the criminal subculture are most likely to come from fraction II. Due to exposure to utilitarian control techniques in the home, at school, and among peer groups, juveniles with intermediate bonds to authority are motivated by extrinsic rewards. Therefore, along with their friends, they engage in frequent and serious property crimes for the financial benefits. Juveniles from fraction I are most likely to be socialized into the conflict subculture. Exposure to coercive control techniques within the family, the educational environment, and the peer group have produced strong negative bonds to authority figures. The primary mechanism for achieving control, since they are blocked from both legitimate and illegitimate means to achieve financial wealth, is violence. Peer groups comprising juveniles with alienated bonds to authority are most often found in urban communities with a large surplus population (Colvin & Pauly, 1983, p. 541).

Conclusion Marxist theorists generally focus on critiquing the process through which laws are written, and certain behaviors are defined as illegal. In general, these theorists argue that law protects the interests of the powerful while controlling the behaviors of the least powerful groups in society. Rather than focusing on the formation of law, Colvin and Pauly focused on explaining the causal relationship between social class and crime. However, in order to explain the process through which delinquency is produced, Colvin and Pauly developed an integrated theory that incorporates concepts from Marxist and from more traditional theories of crime. Lori Elis See also Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Colvin, Mark:

207

Coercion Theory; Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime

References and Further Readings Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Colvin, M., Cullen, F. T., & Vander Ven, T. (2002). Coercion, social support and crime: An emerging theoretical consensus. Criminology, 40, 19–42. Colvin, M., & Pauly, J. (1983). A critique of criminology: Toward an integrated Structural-Marxist theory of delinquency production. American Journal of Sociology, 89, 513–551. Edwards, R. (1979). Contested terrain: The transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. New York: Basic Books. Etzioni, A. (1970). Compliance theory. In O. Grunsky & A. Miller (Eds.), The sociology of organizations (pp. 103–126). New York: Free Press. Simpson, S., & Elis, L. (1994). Is gender subordinate to class? An empirical assessment of Colvin and Pauly’s Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 85, 453–480.

Convict Criminology Having developed in the late 1990s from meetings of ex-convict academics at the conferences of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), convict criminology (CC) is a relatively new area in the discipline of criminology and criminal justice. Since that time, the group has grown in membership, as former prison inmates, non-convict corrections scholars, and a number of prisoners have joined and contributed to its literature. Although somewhat diverse in terms of its membership and theoretical orientation, this group is unified in its general objective of using heuristic observation and first-person accounts to give depth and context to the social scientific study of prison and criminal justice.

History and Development The participation of ex-convicts in the study of criminology is not new, but until recent times has been relatively rare. Moreover, perhaps due to fear of victimization, or because they felt their

208

Convict Criminology

previous careers were now irrelevant, many former prisoners who became professors of criminology chose to keep their personal histories undisclosed. One of the earliest criminologists who did not hesitate to identify himself as an exconvict was Frank Tannenbaum, a former labor organizer, journalist, and later professor at Columbia University, who in his 1938 book, Crime and Community, coined the term dramatization of evil (a precursor of labelling theory) to describe society’s reaction to lawbreaking. A more recent ex-convict contributor is Richard McCleary. McCleary, who served time in both federal and state prisons, published his first book, Dangerous Men, in 1978 while on parole in Minnesota. McCleary has gone on to develop a well-respected career at the University of California, Irvine. The origins of CC as it has emerged in the past decade, however, lie with John Irwin. Irwin, who died in January 2010, was an ex-heroin addict who, during the 1950s, served a 5-year term for armed robbery in California. Irwin commenced academic study while in prison and continued after he was released under the influence of Herbert Blumer, Irving Goffman, and David Matza at the University of California, Berkeley and of Donald Cressey at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Beginning in 1967, Irwin was a professor at San Francisco State University until his retirement 27 years later. His first book, The Felon, was released in 1970, and since then four more books as well as a large number of important papers have appeared under his name. The influence of Irwin in generating the idea of CC and in shaping its intellectual contour cannot be underestimated. As a graduate student at UCLA, Irwin used his own experience of incarceration to challenge orthodox thinking relating to prison culture. In particular, he disputed the functionalist view that prison culture was primarily a collective reaction to the “pains of imprisonment.” He argued instead that prisoners “imported” their social values into the prison, and that in large measure prisoner behavior and cultural principles were extensions of a broader criminal ethos that existed beyond the walls. In 1962, with Cressey, Irwin developed this view in the seminal article “Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture” in the journal Social Problems.

Throughout his life, apart from the academy, Irwin also operated as a hands-on campaigner for prisoners’ rights and prison reform. In the late 1960s, with the assistance of lawyers, prison reform activists, and ex-inmates and their families, he helped to found the United Prisoners’ Union in California and then Project Rebound at San Francisco State University. He has worked on a number of prison reform committees that have been established to further the welfare of inmates and has taken an active and influential interest in the building and direction of the CC group. It is from Irwin that the idea of the CC group originates. Up to the 1980s, there were too few exconvict professors to support scholars like Irwin and McCleary in American universities, so for the most part they worked alone. But during the 1980s, when the U.S. prison and jail population increased by about 140 percent, Irwin became aware of a growing number of convicts who were gaining higher degrees in prison or after they got out. In 1989 at the ASC meetings in Reno, Nevada, Irwin spoke to Greg Newbold, a newly appointed professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Newbold had served a 7.5-year sentence for heroin dealing in New Zealand in the 1970s and, like Irwin, had studied in prison and read for his Ph.D. after release. At Reno, Irwin mentioned the growing number of exconvict academics and noted the need for a group of educated convicts to produce research that was informed by their prison experiences. He spoke about the idea regularly from that point forth. Meanwhile, in Canada, a group of scholar/ activists—Robert Gaucher, Howard Davidson, and Liz Elliot—were having similar thoughts. Disappointed with presentations, especially the lack of participation of former prisoners, at the International Conference on Penal Abolition III held in Montreal in 1987, they started The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, a periodical dedicated to publishing scholarly work written by convicts and ex-convicts. The journal has generated more than 20 issues since that time, and some of the CC group currently serve on its editorial board. The CC concept itself eventually came to fruition in 1997. That year, Chuck Terry, who had served prison time in California and Oregon and was then studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine, remarked to his professor, Joan Petersilia, about the failure of criminologists to

Convict Criminology

understand the true nature of incarceration in America and its effects. Petersilia suggested that Terry put together a session for the 1997 ASC conference in San Diego. Armed with this advice, Terry contacted ex-convict professors John Irwin, Stephen Richards, Edward Tromanhauser, and Ph.D. student Alan Mobley to participate in a session titled “Convicts Critique Criminology: The Last Seminar.” This was the first time a collection of ex-convicts had appeared openly together on a panel at a national academic conference. That evening, over dinner, Irwin, Richards, Terry, and Jim Austin discussed the important potential of ex-inmate professors working together on studies of prisons and other matters. From this point things moved fairly quickly. In the spring of 1998, Richards spoke with Jeffrey Ian Ross (a scholar then working for the National Institute of Justice) about the possibility of editing a book of chapters written by ex-convict academics. Having agreed on the concept, formal invitations were sent out to a number of ex-convict academics, as well as to some critical criminologists that were known for their research on prisons, to submit chapters for consideration in the new book. As a result, Ross and Richards published Convict Criminology in 2003. It was Richards and Ross who coined the term convict criminology, and since 1998 they have been its most energetic promoters and organizers. At the ASC’s 50th annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in 1998, Richards, Terry, and ex-convict professor Rick Jones appeared on a panel honoring the famous critical criminologist Richard Quinney. Meanwhile, the group used the conference as an opportunity to find and recruit additional ex-convict professors and graduate students. Jones and another ex-convict professor, Dan Murphy, joined the informal discussion. The following year at the ASC meetings in Toronto, Richards organized the first official sessions titled “Convict Criminology.” The two sessions involved most of the original CC academics plus Newbold. In addition, there werea numerous ex-convict graduate students and non-convict contributors. A number of the papers from these sessions later appeared in Convict Criminology. From here, the activities of the group continued to expand, with nearly 30 sessions having been recorded at major criminology and sociology conferences as of 2008.

209

In 2001, the establishment of CC was formally announced in an article titled “The New School of Convict Criminology,” written by Richards and Ross for the journal Social Justice. But it was the release of the edited book, Convict Criminology, 2 years later that marked the coming of age of the emerging group. The book’s foreword was written by Todd Clear and the preface by John Irwin. The volume itself included eight chapters by ex-convict criminologists, including all the founding members, as well as contributions from non-convict associates writing about jail and prison issues. This was the first time ex-convict academics had appeared in a book together which included a discussion of their own experiences as criminals, as convicts, and as university graduates and professors.

Convict Criminologists Today CC is informally organized as a voluntary writing and activist collective. It has no formal membership and no assigned leadership roles. Different members inspire or assume responsibility for various functions and take their own initiatives on personal collaborative projects. The group has grown with the addition of professors Tracy Andrus, Rudolph Alexander, James Burnett, David Curry, Robert Gaucher, Richard Hogan, Michael Lenza, Vonn Nebbit, Matt Sheridan, Bernadette Olson, and many more. The group also includes numerous convicts and ex-convicts with graduate degrees who do not work for universities. Today, the CC group includes associates from Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The United States, with the largest prison population in the western world, continues to contribute the most members. Convict criminologists can roughly be divided into five categories. The first consists of more senior members, all associate or full professors, some of whom have distinguished research records. The second group comprises newly graduated Ph.D. candidates who have recently entered the academic profession or are still looking for jobs. Within the third group are graduate student exconvicts, some still in prison but nonetheless anticipating academic careers. A fourth group consists of a small collection of men and women currently behind bars who already hold advanced

210

Convict Criminology

degrees and publish academic work about crime and corrections. A number of them have authored or coauthored books and refereed articles. Finally, although convicted felons provide CC with its core membership, there is significant input from the non-convict community. The majority of these contributors have worked inside prisons or with ex-prisoners and/or have conducted extensive research on imprisonment and its consequences. The inclusion of non-convicts provides important balance to the perspectives of the group and broadens its potential for scholarly development.

Activities and Orientation Since its emergence almost a decade ago, CC has developed four major areas of orientation, each of which is described below. Research, Writing, Teaching, and Conference Presentations

The first and most important area in which the group operates is in research and the dissemination of information arising from its work. CC has no binding “perspective” as such; in fact, members are encouraged to produce original ideas based on their own investigations and knowledge. What makes the work unique is the backgrounds of its writers, most of whom have had years of hands-on contact with crime, corrections, and criminal justice, either as clients or as workers within the system. Having first-hand experience does not make one an expert in criminology, but when combined with tertiary education, it allows informed interpretation of data and responses that may be out of reach to the purely universitytrained scholar. Moreover, people with knowledge of native prison culture and language patterns may have a better idea of what questions need to be asked in prison surveys, how to ask them, and how to interpret them. Access to convicts, and response percentages and patterns, are often affected by subtle differences in the way a researcher operates while in the field. The outcome of research thus conducted is then released to the wider community by way of conference presentations, articles, chapters in books, and books. It is also passed on to students in lecture halls. The inclusion of personal accounts

to illustrate general points enriches the learning experience and brings the study of prison more to life in the classroom setting. Moreover, a fledgling number of scholarly papers and books written by members of the CC group can be found in university libraries. Some of these publications contain significant amounts of ethnographic material. Irwin, for example, drew upon his prison experience in writing The Felon, Prisons in Turmoil, The Jail, It’s About Time (with James Austin), and The Warehouse Prison (with Barbara Owen). McCleary wrote his classic Dangerous Men based on his experiences with parole officers. Terry, using correspondence and interviews, wrote in The Fellas about drug addiction and incarceration. Newbold wrote the New Zealand bestseller The Big Huey about his 5 years inside, followed by Punishment and Politics, Crime and Deviance, Quest for Equity, Crime in New Zealand, The Girls in the Gang, (with Glennis Dennehy), and The Problem of Prisons. Jones wrote Doing Time (with Thomas Schmid). Richards and Ross used inside knowledge of the problems convicts face as coauthors of Behind Bars and coeditors of Convict Criminology. All of the above titles have relied at least in part on analysis influenced by first-hand experience of crime and prison. Informing Public Opinion and Public Policy

A second important activity of the CC group involves using its research and expertise to inform and influence developments in the public sector. The more senior convict criminologists are frequently consulted on criminal justice issues by the news media and are called to testify as expert witnesses in criminal trials. Members of the group are involved in activities related to criminal law and criminal justice reform and frequently advise research organizations and state agencies. For example, Newbold has served on a total of 13 government agencies either as a consultant or as a bona fide member. Ross, Richards, Curry, and Murphy, among others, have been frequent contributors to national media debates on crime and corrections. In the United States and elsewhere, convict criminologists serve as consultants and as invited speakers at universities and in various community forums interested in prison issues.

Convict Criminology

Supporting Student Prisoners

The concerns of CC extend beyond the realm of research, writing, and speaking to academic and public audiences. There is a mentoring role as well. In the United States, where 2.4 million people are now incarcerated and more than 500,000 people are released from lockup every year, there is a growing population of prisoners wishing to attend universities. CC members are involved in assisting with the education and life adjustment of people who are currently serving time or are newly released. This work demands more than delivering education. It requires services such as writing letters of reference and making personal representations to parole authorities, assisting newly released prisoners to find accommodation and jobs and, if they contemplate university study, advising them on application to appropriate programs and mentoring them through graduation. The CC group now advises and mentors a number of people all the way from prison through to their Ph.D. Group members also work to help ex-convict students overcome the many obstacles they encounter at universities. For example, many universities ask criminal history questions on student admission forms, and those with convictions may be denied financial aid, campus housing placements, and employment. In some states, ex-convicts can legally be denied admission to graduate programs, or be admitted and then not be allowed to accept graduate assistantship stipends. Ex-convicts may also be denied admission to many academic programs in medicine, law, social work, and counseling. Such restrictions may be waived, however, when university faculty understand supporting equal access for ex-convicts as an ongoing component of their professional work. As a consequence of this orientation, CC is now being taught at universities as well as in prisons. In Wisconsin, a program called “Inviting Convicts to College” has been in place since 2004, where pairs of undergraduate intern instructors, supervised by ex-convict professors, have been trained to teach free college programs inside local prisons. The courses use Convict Criminology, donated by the publisher, as a key text, with the objective of inspiring prisoners to adopt similar paths to those taken by some of its contributors. Prisoners exiting prison use their classes as a

211

bridge to entering college, with the final weeks of the program devoted to instruction in completing admission and financial aid applications. Inviting Convicts to College has already helped a number of prisoners to enter universities, where they receive advice and mentoring from members of the CC group. It should be noted that by no means are these efforts always successful. In many cases, in spite of the support they are given, protégés reoffend or violate conditions of community supervision and return to prison. But sometimes it is the existence of support that makes the difference between success and failure, and such cases provide incentive for members to continue with their efforts. Supporting Ex-Convict Colleagues

A final important role of the group is providing support for former convicts who have obtained advanced degrees and are commencing careers as academics. Former inmates entering the scholarly profession often suffer stresses and hurdles that are different from those facing the non-convicted graduate. Academia can be a hostile and foreign environment for an ex-convict, and he or she may feel adjustment to be difficult. Faculty appointments, for example, can be subject to criminal background checks causing candidates with criminal records to be disadvantaged in employment searches. If appointed, because of possible embarrassment to their institutions, some ex-convict junior professors have reported faculty advising them to hide their pasts and keep a low profile—for example, by refusing media interviews or publishing without revealing their criminal histories. This provides something of a dilemma to an individual committed to ending a life of deception and living in an open, transparent, and honest way. Senior members of the CC group ruminate over such problems and provide advice to junior colleagues on how to deal with them. Matters relating to promotion, tenure, relationships with staff and students, and the difficulties people with criminal records have with international travel, are all considered within the group, and knowledge about how to deal with such issues is shared. However, just as some members have felt negatively discriminated against, others have acknowledged the generous assistance they have

212

Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities

received from university authorities and colleagues sensitive to the pressures they face.

Conclusion To a large extent, the emergence of the distinctive discipline known as convict criminology is a result of America’s harsh criminal sentencing and parole laws, which have seen the nation’s prison and jail population more than quadruple since 1980. The result is that, out of the millions of men and women that have served prison time, there are a few more each year interested in completing Ph.D.s in criminology or related disciplines. Some of these will join or affiliate with the group, as they see fit. As each person adds intimate knowledge of particular correctional facilities or prison systems, the group’s expertise grows, building a more detailed picture of life behind bars. The broad objectives of the convict criminologists are to use these experiences of incarceration to assist the understanding of what actually happens in prison, to influence the formulation of intelligent public policy, and to help existing and former prisoners in their efforts to build productive careers within the free community. Greg Newbold, Jeffrey Ian Ross, and Stephen C. Richards See also Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory; Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

References and Further Readings Irwin, J. (2005). The warehouse prison: Disposal of the new dangerous class. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Irwin, J., & Austin, J. (1994). It’s about time: America’s imprisonment binge. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Newbold, G. (2007). The problem of prisons: Corrections reform in New Zealand since 1840. Wellington, New Zealand: Dunmore. Ross, J. I., & Richards, S. C. (2002). Behind bars: Surviving prison. Indianapolis, IN: Alpha/Penguin. Ross, J. I., & Richards, S. C. (Eds.). (2003). Convict criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Terry, C. M. (2003). The fellas: Overcoming prison and addiction. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Cook, Philip J.: Supply Demand of Criminal Opportunities

and

It has been suggested by Philip J. Cook and others that the creation and elimination of criminal opportunities may operate in a fashion similar to the supply and demand of goods in an economic market. According to the economic model, supply and demand determines the price and quantity of goods in the market by finding a balance or equilibrium between the two. In a similar relationship, criminal opportunities may find a comparable equilibrium by balancing the forces of crime prevention with perceived target vulnerability. That is, potential victims take more precautions to protect themselves or their property when they perceive their risk of victimization to be high, and fewer when their perceived risk is lower. On the other hand, potential offenders are more likely to prey on more vulnerable targets, and less likely to target those which have more protections in place. This perspective on criminal opportunities has implications for crime prevention and policy.

Criminal Opportunities Many leading theories of crime and victimization are in agreement that there cannot be a crime without an opportunity for one to occur. Rational choice theories contend that potential offenders weigh the costs and benefits of committing a crime. This includes an assessment of risks of apprehension and detection, possible rewards if successful, and the effort involved (Clarke & Cornish, 1985). Offenders may not always make purely rational decisions but, rather, may make “good enough” decisions based on the information immediately available; this has been termed bounded rationality. Similar processes are at work in the initial decision to engage in crime, the decision to continue that behavior, and the decision to desist. Theoretically, a rational offender would seek opportunities yielding the largest gains, with the lowest risks, for the least effort. According to routine activity theory, opportunities for predatory victimization occur when suitable targets converge in time and space with motivated offenders in an environment lacking

Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities

capable guardianship (Cohen & Felson, 1979). Each of these characteristics is necessary for the creation of criminal opportunities, and any is sufficient to prevent their creation. Routine activities are those everyday activities which individuals engage in, such as work, leisure, school, and socialization; and it is the routine activities of both potential victims and offenders that ultimately contribute to the formation of criminal opportunities (Cohen & Felson, 1979). Similarly, lifestyle-exposure theory asserts that certain lifestyles place individuals at greater risk of victimization through exposure to risky situations (Hindelang, Gott­fredson, & Garofalo, 1978). Routine activities and risky lifestyles, such as frequently staying out late at night, expose individuals to added risks of victimization by making their likelihood of being targeted by offenders higher. Compatible with these approaches are the principles of environmental criminology, which posits that opportunities, like crimes, cluster at certain times and places—at nodes, paths, and edges (Brantingham & Brant­ingham, 1993).

Supply and Demand Like supply and demand of products in an economic market, opportunities for crime depend upon external forces to bring about a balance or equilibrium. This balance is struck between individuals’ routine activities, some of which may facilitate victimization, and those potential offenders either seeking vulnerable targets or discovering opportunities in the course of their daily routine activities. The term potential offenders is appropriate because of the idea that anyone can become criminally motivated if the right opportunity for the right crime presents itself. The supply and demand hypothesis is compatible with each of these opportunity theories, particularly the stipulation of a rational offender. A rational offender can theoretically be deterred by crime prevention efforts, such as target hardening and increased surveillance. In a like manner, the rational offender will take advantage of serendipitous opportunities, even if he or she was not initially seeking crime targets. Clearly, this perspective is compatible with routine activity theory since it is individuals’ routine activities that partly act as a balancing agent in the supply/demand relationship.

213

Cook contends that in areas and times of high crime rates, many respond by taking added precautions to protect themselves or their property from crime, resulting in fewer opportunities for victimization. These added precautions may involve target hardening, such as putting bars over windows, extra locks on doors, or increased lighting, or something as simple and routine as spending less time away from home (the assumption being that less time away from home exposes one to fewer risks). These precautions are focused on eliminating opportunities for the offender and take three forms: increasing the effort involved, decreasing the rewards, or increasing the risk of detection or apprehension. Potential offenders, in turn, respond to the reduced opportunities by either working harder to find suitable opportunities or by abstaining from crime. Either way, if this situation persists over time, the crime rate will begin to decline, which will give the populace a greater sense of security and perceived lower vulnerability. Believing their risks to be lower, individuals will gradually relax their routine cautionary behaviors and prevention efforts, especially if they are costly or cumbersome. The effect of this will be the creation of more criminal opportunities and a “demand for offenses,” which potential offenders will once again seize. In this scenario, there is an ebb and flow of criminal opportunities behaving much like a teeter-totter, with routine activities, particularly those involving prevention, tilting the balance one way or the other.

The Replacement Effect In the larger scheme in which the criminal justice system incarcerates and rehabilitates offenders, the supply and demand hypothesis would demand that otherwise “inactive” offenders be replaced, or the crime rate would automatically decline. Those who are incarcerated, rehabilitated, “retired” due to a lack of opportunities, or are otherwise inactive leave a gap in the crime market when the pendulum swings toward the prevalence of greater criminal opportunities. The economic model would dictate that either new offenders or once inactive offenders fill the “demand for offenses” gap. Of course, this replacement effect would depend in large part on the crime under consideration. Crimes such as burglary, software piracy, vandalism, and drug dealing

214

Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities

would likely find immediate replacements, while the effect for crimes such as murder, rape, child abuse, or kidnapping would be substantially lower or even nonexistent, according to Cook. If this replacement effect operates in the manner described, then the implications for the criminal justice system are significant—it essentially means that incarcerating and rehabilitating offenders will not have the intended effect of lower crime rates. Other potential criminals will step in to fill the demand for offenses. An Example

An example of this process may prove helpful at this point. Imagine that a parking facility located in a highly trafficked part of the city is experiencing a string of auto break-ins with expensive car stereos and other valuables being stolen from the cars. In response, the facility’s security personnel increase patrol of the area, and patrons are advised to take their valuables with them, lock their doors, and take other appropriate measures. The additional preventive efforts become part of the routine activities of the patrons of the garage to the point where fewer criminal opportunities are available. If these efforts prove to be successful deterrents, fewer potential offenders will seek opportunities in this particular parking facility. Over time, if the problem dissipates, it may be determined that the added patrolling is no longer necessary, and motorists may backslide, becoming more careless with their car’s security and changing their routines. As more opportunities for theft occur, stealing valuables from cars will be more profitable, because the ratio of opportunities to offenders will be at its peak. As a result, old thieves will become active again, and any that “retired” from this garage will gradually be replaced by new thieves. This simple example illustrates the basic concepts underlying the supply and demand of criminal opportunities perspective. A Comparison

The relationship between opportunities and routine activities is similar to that described by Mark Warr in relation to objective and perceived risks of victimization. In the case of the latter, the issue was

that a balance between objective and perceived risks of victimization is ideal, because it means that a given individual is taking appropriate safety measures against victimization—no more, no less. However, if individuals’ perceived risks outweigh their actual or objective risks, then these individuals may be unnecessarily constraining their behavior. On the other hand, if their objective risks are higher than their perceived risks, they will not be taking adequate precautions, making them more susceptible to victimization. Warr notes that this balance is rarely ever struck because people either under- or overestimate their personal risks. The comparison between this process and Cook’s supply and demand hypothesis is clear: in each case, there exists a back-and-forth between competing forces, these forces involve individuals’ routine activities, and rarely is equilibrium between the forces achieved.

Criticisms This perspective on criminal opportunities is not without its criticisms, and three are readily apparent. First, this perspective assumes that victims respond to the higher crime rates with higher perceived personal risk. This may make sense theoretically, but is not necessarily the case. In turn, it is assumed that higher perceived risks equate with altering one’s routine activities and taking more precautions against victimization, which also may not be the case. Second, the issues of displacement, diffusion of benefits, and adaptation are not addressed in the theory. If precautions are taken by potential victims, and offenders are indeed deterred, they either stop seeking criminal opportunities or they are displaced. If they are displaced, it is unclear what the effect of that displacement is on the supply and demand relationship. Similarly, if those individuals who perceive themselves to be vulnerable, constrain their behavior and/or engage in crime prevention efforts, there may be a diffusion of benefits of those efforts to nearby targets. In addition, criminals often adapt to circumvent prevention efforts, and this issue has not been addressed. It is unclear how these issues might affect the supply and demand dynamic. Third and finally, the theory is difficult to test empirically. Although it may make good theoretical sense that there is a reciprocal relationship between these

Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory

crime opportunity forces, it is difficult to measure how the preventive activities of individuals correspond to a decrease in the net payoff to crime (Cook, 1986).

Conclusion The supply and demand of criminal opportunities perspective is based on the premise that the quality of criminal opportunities influences the crime rate. The quality of opportunities is based on both the availability and the payoff per offender. As more criminal opportunities are tapped, the crime rate is expected to rise. Perceiving their risks of victimization to be higher as a result of rising crime rates, individuals will respond by changing their routine activities, possibly taking added crime prevention measures or altering their exposure to risky situations. As a result of these added crime prevention efforts, fewer criminal opportunities will be available, resulting in a decrease in crime. Lower crime rates translate into the perception of safety on the part of potential victims, leading them to take fewer preventive efforts. From this point, the cycle repeats until a balance is struck between routine activities creating criminal opportunities and those preventing them. Bradford W. Reyns See also Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Economic Theory and Crime; Wilcox, Pamela, Kenneth C. Land, and Scott A. Hunt: Multicontextual Opportunity Theory

References and Further Readings Brantingham, P., & Brantingham, P. (1993). Nodes, paths, and edges: Considerations on the complexity of crime and the physical environment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 13, 3–28. Clarke, R. V. (1980). Situational crime prevention: Theory and practice. British Journal of Criminology, 20, 136–147. Clarke, R. V., & Cornish, D. (1985). Modeling offender’s decisions: A framework for research and policy. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 4, pp. 147–185). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

215

Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Cook, P. J. (1986). The demand and supply of criminal opportunities. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 7, pp. 1–28). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ehlich, I. (1981). The market for offenses and the public enforcement of laws: An equilibrium analysis. British Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 107–120. Felson, M., & Clarke, R. V. (1998). Opportunity makes the thief: Practical theory for crime prevention (Police Research Series No. 98). London: Home Office. Hindelang, M. J., Gottfredson, M. R., & Garofalo, J. (1978). Victims of personal crime: An empirical foundation for a theory of personal victimization. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. Warr, M. (2000). Fear of crime in the United States: Avenues for research and policy. In D. Duffee (Ed.), Measurement and analysis of crime: Criminal justice 2000 (Vol. 4). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. Wilcox, P., Land, K. C., & Hunt, S. A. (2003). Criminal circumstance: A dynamic, multicontextual criminal opportunity theory. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke’s rational choice theory is the byproduct of a symposium devoted to understanding the rational components of offending (Cornish & Clarke, 1986; Clarke & Cornish, 1985). In the years leading up to this symposium, Cornish and Clarke became interested in examining the strategic thinking of offenders and creating a decision-making approach to studying crime. Their frustration with dispositional theories of crime coupled with their earlier work on situational crime prevention led them to believe that crime is the outcome of choice (Clarke, 1980). However, Cornish and Clarke were also concerned with the development of more effective crime-control strategies. In fact, their pursuit for policy-relevant research to prevent and control crime was the primary reason for the creation of their rational choice theory.

216

Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory

The Development of Rational Choice Theory Cornish and Clarke’s initial interest in offenders’ decision making can be traced to their prior research for the Home Office Research and Planning Unit. In the 1960s and 1970s, their evaluative research illustrated how environmental variables could affect the behavior of institutionalized delinquents. More specifically, they recognized that both situational incentives and opportunities for delinquency affected the rates of absconding and misconduct in these institutions. These findings sparked Cornish and Clarke’s interest in situational crime prevention and deterrence and, later, their curiosity in the decision-making process of offenders. They realized that before any useful policies could be created, it would be necessary to become familiar with the cognitive information processing abilities of offenders. In particular, Cornish and Clarke were interested in how offenders perceive environmental opportunities, legal sanctions, and the potential costs and benefits of their actions. However, the notion of a reasoning offender did not fuse well with the positivist sentiment of conventional criminological theories. According to Clarke (1980), criminology had become too preoccupied with dispositional theories of crime. These theories argue that some people are born with or develop biological, psychological, or sociological dispositions to commit crime. Dispositional theories tend to “overpathologize” criminal offending, which merely exaggerates the differences between offenders and non-offenders and suggests that there are fundamental distinctions between them (Cornish & Clarke, 1986, p. v). Instead of focusing on the distinctions between offenders and non-offenders, Cornish and Clarke were interested in the similarities between these two groups. They believed that the decision-making process and cognitive strategies used by offenders paralleled those of non-offenders. Thus, when contemplating the decision to commit crime and the decisions involved with crime, offenders would use the same “conscious thought processes” and “underlying cognitive mechanisms by which information about the world is selected, attended to, and processed” that are used to reach any mundane decision (Clarke & Cornish, 1985, p. 147). In order to develop a perspective that was focused on the strategic thinking of offenders,

Clarke and Cornish (1995) had to delve into other academic disciplines. In July 1985, a multidisciplinary conference at Christ’s College in Cambridge, England, provided the platform for social scientists to discuss the rational nature of criminal offending. Sponsored by the Home Office Research and Planning Unit, this symposium provided the opportunity for Cornish and Clarke to synthesize the existing research on offender decision making in order to create a rational choice framework for studying crime. Cornish and Clarke found that many social scientists were rejecting theories that focused exclusively on the pathological or deterministic elements of criminal offending. The sociology of deviance, for example, was suggesting that crime was a function of routine decision making and was guided by offenders’ particular circumstances. Examining the offenders’ perspective allowed sociologists to gain a more thorough understanding of the rationalizations used to justify offenders’ behavior, as well as the episodic nature of offending. Although many criminologists were becoming disenchanted with the failure of rehabilitation, ecological criminologists were focusing on the non-random patterning and distribution of crime. The non-randomness of crime patterns was suggesting that offenders make rational decisions when selecting suitable targets. Not only do offenders choose targets that will provide the least risk while yielding an acceptable payoff, but successful crime prevention experiments suggested that offenders adjust their decisions in response to changes in opportunity, risk, and environmental design. Similarly, economists argued that because individuals will behave in ways that maximize pleasure and minimize pain, their decisions can be influenced by incentives and deterrents. While economic models were used to routinize criminal activity and focus on the concept of choice, cognitive psychologists expanded the field of rational decision making through studies of professional judgments, risky decision making, and group decision making. Clarke and Cornish found that one branch of psychology, radical behaviorism, proposed that instead of focusing on particular personality traits and predispositions, it would be beneficial to look at how outside influences affect criminal behavior. Specifically, cognitive psychologists were interested

Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory

in how reinforcements and punishments, as well as situational cues and opportunities, affect behavior. Collectively, literature from these academic fields provided Cornish and Clarke with the framework for their rational choice theory.

Bounded Rationality The crux of Cornish and Clarke’s rational choice theory is that every crime is chosen and committed for specific reasons. However, the notion that criminals are rational actors is not new. Early classical criminological theorists advocated a version of rational choice theory that was based on absolute free will. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, theorists such as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham argued that individuals are rational actors who choose to commit crime for personal gain or to pursue their self-interest. According to the classical perspective, when deciding whether or not to commit crime, individuals would calculate the rewards and costs of their actions in terms of pleasure and pain. Crime would occur when individuals believe that the potential reward or pleasure of the crime is greater than the potential punishment or pain associated with that crime. While these classical theorists maintained that the decision-making process is unconstrained by external factors, Clarke and Cornish recognize that even though individuals make their own decisions, their decision-making ability is constrained by personal and situational factors. According to Cornish and Clarke’s rational choice theory, individuals do make rational choices, but their decisions are influenced by various foreground, background, and sociological factors. Because consideration is given to external factors, Clarke and Cornish suggest that individuals engage in “bounded” or limited rational decision making. Rather than strictly weighing the costs and benefits of committing crime, individuals weigh these factors within the context of their current situations and prior experiences. Cornish and Clarke acknowledge that the actual degree of reasoning involved in the decisionmaking process will vary depending on the particular offender and the specific crime. They contend that time constraints and the availability of relevant information will also limit the decision-making process. Because the decision-making process is bounded or limited by all of these factors,

217

Cornish and Clarke (1989) suggest that not all decisions will be sophisticated nor will they be based entirely on correct information. Rather, many decisions will be limited by the misinformation at hand and may appear irrational and foolish until examined from the offender’s point of view.

Decision-Making Models Unlike positivist theories, Cornish and Clarke’s rational choice theory advocates a crime-specific focus. They argue that positivist theories tend to minimize the differences between different offenders’ motives and crimes. These theories not only portray offenders as one in the same but, in making generalizations about the offenders, also imply that offenders all face the same types of decisions when deciding whether to engage in crime. Clarke and Cornish insist that crime is not a unitary phenomenon, and that in reality, different crimes will involve different decisions, not to mention a different number of decisions. For example, robbery will require different decisions than burglary. Unlike robbers, burglars must consider how to gain entry into the building and how to avoid encountering people and turning their burglary into a robbery. And unlike burglars, robbers must consider how to conceal their weapon and how to select a target that will not resist their demands. In addition to making inter-crime distinctions, Clarke and Cornish argue that it is important to make intra-crime distinctions. For example, residential burglary and commercial burglary will involve different types of decisions. Both the methods of entry and time of day will vary depending on the type of burglary selected. Additionally, because Clarke and Cornish believe that crime specificity is essential, they contend that there are still differences between residential burglary in a middleclass suburb and residential burglary in a lower-class or upper-class neighborhood. Furthermore, Clarke and Cornish suggest that multiple models may be necessary to explain participation in crime because there are multiple stages of criminal involvement. Offenders will face different decisions the first time they decide to commit a crime (i.e., initial involvement) than they will after committing several crimes (i.e., continuing involvement) or when deciding to stop committing crime (i.e., desistance). Clarke and Cornish

218

Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory

recognize the importance of utilizing multiple models and contend that having just one “theory of crime” would make as little sense as having just one “theory of disease” (Clarke, 1980, p. 137). They assert that criminological theorists are also too preoccupied with explaining the involvement of particular individuals in crime. Because of this, explanations focused on the occurrence of criminal events have been ignored. In addition to focusing on the motivated individual, Clarke and Cornish argue that attention must be given to the situational factors surrounding the occurrence of a criminal event. Moreover, decisions related to the actual criminal event (i.e., event model) must be kept separate from decisions related to the stages of involvement (i.e., initial involvement, continuing involvement, and desistance models) (Cornish & Clarke, 1987). According to Clarke and Cornish, individuals use the bounded decision-making process during all stages of criminal involvement. To illustrate this point, they use residential burglary in a middle-class suburb to explain the importance of different rational decision-making models at various stages of criminal involvement and for different criminal events.

Involvement Models In terms of the initial involvement model, an offender must first recognize his or her readiness to engage in burglary as a means of fulfilling specific needs or desires. Such a decision will be influenced by psychological, social, and demographic factors, as well as a person’s upbringing and prior experiences. A potential offender will also evaluate legitimate solutions, as well as other illegitimate solutions. Once criminal readiness has been established, a potential offender will still need an opportunity to offend. Just because the individual has made the decision to offend does not mean that all crime is planned out in advance. A potential offender requires a criminal opportunity before he or she becomes an actual offender. Clarke and Cornish acknowledge that although positivist theories use many of the same factors to describe an individual’s disposition to crime, using them in a decision-making context is different. They contend that for their purposes, previous and current background factors are “less directly

criminogenic” and serve more of an “orienting function—exposing people to particular problems and particular opportunities and leading them to perceive and evaluate these in particular (criminal) ways” (Clarke & Cornish, 1985, p. 167). However, Clarke and Cornish add that in many instances an offender’s background will be less important and relevant than his or her immediate situation. Cornish and Clarke’s continuing involvement model focuses on factors—such as increased professionalism, as well as changes in lifestyle, values, and peer groups—that keep the offender ready, willing, and able to continue committing this particular type of offense (i.e., residential burglary in a middle-class suburb). According to Clarke and Cornish, these conditions and circumstances coupled with positive reinforcement will keep the offender involved and offending until an optimum level is reached. The offender will experience an increase in professionalism as he or she continues to commit crime. For example, experience will increase the offender’s knowledge and refine the skills needed to continue committing this type of crime. Not only will the offender learn how to reduce the risk of getting caught, but he or she will also learn how to improve the target selection, increase the quality and/or quantity of the loot, and acquire reliable fencing contacts. In addition to increased professionalism, the offender will also experience changes in lifestyle and values that help to maintain his or her involvement in crime. For instance, the offender could begin to enjoy the criminal lifestyle or simply learn how to justify the criminal behavior. Similarly, the offender may become heavily dependent upon the proceeds of the crime or may begin to devalue legitimate employment. Furthermore, because of prolonged involvement in this particular crime, the offender may also experience changes in the peer group. The offender may develop friendships with other offenders and/or become labeled as a criminal. Besides having less time to spend with non-criminal family members and friends, the offender may also strain or weaken any prosocial ties to the non-criminal world. The desistence model revolves around the offender’s reevaluation of his or her readiness to commit crime and reappraisal of alternatives to crime. According to Cornish and Clarke, certain events can cause the offender to rethink a particular

Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory

offense. For instance, any sort of aversive experience that occurs during the commission of a burglary—such as being surprised by the home owner, failing to sell the stolen goods, or being apprehended by the police—can cause the offender to reconsider committing any future burglaries. Similarly, external events or changes in the offender’s personal life, such as getting married, having children, or finding legitimate work, can lead the offender to reassess his or her involvement in crime. Events or changes in the environment in which the offender operates, such as the formation of a neighborhood watch group or the exhaustion of potential targets, can also influence the offender’s decision to stop offending. Regardless of what triggers the offender’s decision to abstain from a particular kind of crime (e.g., burglary), once the offender is ready to desist, he or she must decide whether to replace this crime with lawful activities, such as legitimate employment, or with different illegitimate activities. The latter option could involve, for example, a residential burglar switching to a different type of burglary, such as commercial, or to burglaries in lower-class or upper-class neighborhoods instead of middle-class suburbs. The offender could also choose to substitute residential burglary in a middle-class suburb with an entirely different crime like robbery.

Event Model While the involvement decisions are multistaged and continue over a long period time, the event model has fewer variables that influence the decision-making process, which means that this decision sequence will take less time (Clarke, 1995). According to Clarke and Cornish, a willing offender uses bounded rational decision making to determine when, where, and how to commit the crime. However, these decisions will be guided by opportunity. The time, place, and process of committing crime will vary depending upon the opportunities presented to offender. In addition to opportunity, event decisions focus on situational factors that are associated with effort and proximal risks. The offender will likely select an area that is easily accessible, has low security, and has few police patrols in lieu of one that is unfamiliar, distant, and heavily patrolled. When selecting a particular house, the

219

offender will likely choose one that appears to be relatively affluent, with no one home, and with some sort of natural coverage (e.g., bushes). The offender will reject a house that has nosy neighbors, locked windows or doors, a security alarm, or a dog, because it will require more effort and greater risks. Furthermore, it is important to remember that not only will individuals make decisions within the context of their current situation and unique prior experiences, but they will also make decisions based on their perceptions of the consequences, risks, and benefits of crime. Because decisions are made based purely on perceptions, the information used in the decision-making process can be inaccurate. Clarke and Cornish add that the external situation may change during the actual decision sequence, which can lead to spontaneous and unwise changes of mind.

Situational Crime Prevention Cornish and Clarke’s pursuit for policy-relevant research helped fuel the development of their rational choice theory. According to Clarke (1980), the dispositional bias of positivist theories produced unproductive crime prevention measures. By not distinguishing between different types of crimes and by concentrating exclusively on factors like temperament, biological and psychological variables, and social and economic conditions, dispositional theories have had little success in preventing and reducing crime. To overcome this dispositional bias in mainstream criminology, Corn­ish and Clarke look to situational crime prevention. The assumptions of situational crime prevention hinge on the notion that individuals engage in bounded rational decision making. To prevent crime, the perceived costs or risks associated with a crime must outweigh the potential benefits. For rational choice theory, this can be accomplished by changing or reducing the opportunities for crime by increasing the effort or difficulty associated with committing crime, increasing the risks of offenders being apprehended, and reducing or eliminating the rewards of crime (Clarke, 1995). By trying to reduce the opportunities for crime and increase the perceived risks, situational crime prevention presupposes that individuals weigh the costs and benefits before deciding whether to

220

Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime

engage in crime. If offenders were unable or unwilling to make choices in a rational manner, then efforts to reduce criminal opportunity through situational crime prevention would be futile. Overall, the development of rational choice theory has had an enormous impact on criminology. According to Clarke (1980, p. 136), “an alternative theoretical emphasis on choices and decisions made by the offender leads to a broader and perhaps more realistic approach to crime prevention.” By acknowledging that offenders engage in bounded rationality, it is possible to manipulate situational factors in order to affect the information they consider during their decision-making process. Reducing the benefits and pleasure of crime while increasing the costs and pain can force reasonable criminals to reevaluate their decisions to commit crime. Brooke Miller Gialopsos See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities; Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime; Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders; Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

References and Further Readings Clarke, R. V. (1995). Situational crime prevention. In M. Tonry & D. Farrington (Eds.), Crime and justice: Vol. 19: Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention (pp. 91–150). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clarke, R. V. G. (1980). “Situational” crime prevention: Theory and practice. British journal of criminology, 20, 136–147. Clarke, R. V., & Cornish, D. (Eds.). (1983). Crime control in Britain: A review of policy research. Albany: SUNY Press. Clarke, R. V., & Cornish, D. (1985). Modeling offender’s decisions: A framework for research and policy. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 6, pp. 147–185). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cornish, D., & Clarke, R. V. (Eds.). (1986). The reasoning criminal: Rational choice perspectives on offending. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Cornish, D., & Clarke, R. V. (1987). Understanding crime displacement: An application of rational choice theory. Criminology, 25, 933–947.

Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime Barbara J. Costello and Helen J. Mederer develop a multilevel control theory that incorporates feminist critiques of existing control theories yet encompasses traditional notions of control and bonding. Their aim is to explain, in true control theory fashion, why girls do not commit more crime. Instead of taking quantitative differences by gender in offending as indicative of the need for different etiologies of offending, Costello and Mederer suggest that traditional theories of crime, when extended appropriately, explain both male and female offending and explain gender differences in offending. They do this with their multilevel control theory of gender that suggests that boys and girls are differentially controlled on three levels: the individual, the interactional, and the structural levels (Risman, 1998). They create this theory by tackling three key theoretical issues: the gender gap in crime and delinquency, feminist critiques of control theories, and the issue of differential control of boys and girls exerted on different levels. Costello and Mederer begin with gender differences in crime and delinquency to frame their theory. Grounded in control theory assumptions of the nature of offending, they write, “our question is not ‘Why do men commit so much crime?’ . . . but rather, ‘Why don’t women commit as much crime as men?’ (p. 88). Their answer to this question is that women and girls are controlled more than boys at all levels—within the family, within peer groups, and within the social structure. This leads them to their multilevel control theory. In essence, they argue that girls are supervised and ideologically controlled more than boys at the family level first. Parents and structural edicts regarding women’s roles and gender identities keep girls closer to home and involved in activities of the home. In contrast, boys are allowed more physical freedom that helps them develop their burgeoning

Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime

masculinity. Girls are also exposed to greater normative and social control through interactions with peers—the interactional level. The authors’ contention is that the field of criminology has, to its detriment, paid scant attention to the conventional pressures that peers exert on adolescent behavior. Girls, being sensitive to other’s expectations of behavior, are more ready recipients of pressures toward conformity. Finally, from discussions of patriarchy to the division of household labor, Costello and Mederer contend that social structure is a source of unequal control of girls and women. All of these sources of control work independently and in concert to reduce female offending. However, Costello and Mederer do not see the greater control of girls as being problematic— rather, much to the contrary. If theorists and policy makers want to close the gender gap in crime while at the same time reduce overall levels of offending, then boys should be controlled in the same manner in which girls are controlled. This would take place, again, on multiple levels in which boys would be supervised as closely as girls, boys would experience greater levels of normative controls from their friends, and men’s and boys’ roles at the structural level would change to incorporate more care taking of adults and children. Costello and Mederer’s control theory of gender was developed, in part, as a response to feminist critiques of traditional theories of delinquency and crime. Feminist criminologists assert that because many criminological theories were written by men and about men (and boys), women and female offending were excluded. Feminist criminologists assert that although boys and girls differ only slightly in the amounts of many of the non-violent crimes they commit, small quantitative differences may point to greater qualitative differences. Qualitative differences in offending by girls are thought to be the result of gender inequality which makes girls more likely to commit “gendered” acts of deviance such as prostitution or running away. Costello and Mederer question such qualitative differences in self-reported offending and suggest that “we avoid constructing theories that explain differences in behavior that do not actually exist” (p. 82). Whereas feminist criminologists tend to see important divergences in male and female offending even when, quantitatively, the differences are small, Costello and Mederer choose to

221

focus on the considerable overlap between male and female offending. Costello and Mederer base their contention on prior work that shows a great deal of commonality in offending for males and females and similar motives for offending. As such, general theories of crime and delinquency are favored and a genderneutral etiological process is proposed. “For this reason, we believe it is more useful to focus on quantitative differences in independent variables affecting male and female crime, and less useful to posit qualitative differences in the types of variables or causal mechanisms linking them to crime” (p. 83). To paraphrase the authors, inequality in social position does not necessarily translate into differences in the types of crimes committed. Women and girls can be and are subjected to sexism and discrimination and yet they still commit the same types of crimes as boys and men, albeit at lower rates much of the time. Finally, Costello and Mederer comment on the feminist critique of traditional methodology as lacking important contextual information on criminal offending by girls and women. While this may indeed be true, as much of the field of mainstream criminology heavily privileges quantitative methodology, a qualitative method may likely silence important points regarding context and female offending from the larger, and admittedly male, criminological audience. Taken together, Costello and Mederer use prior research and theory on controls and the concept of gender as social structure (Risman, 1998) to construct their multilevel control theory of gender and crime. Akin to Janet Saltzman Chafetz’s argument that many gender theories rely on one level of inequality to the exclusion of other levels (e.g., focusing solely on individual-level practices such as sexist attitudes or solely on power inequality at the structural level), Costello and Mederer propose a gendered control theory that encompasses all levels of analysis. In addition, Costello and Mederer borrow from Barbara Risman’s idea of “gendered selves” that reflects gendered expectations for behavior via preferences, attitudes, and behavior. Much like Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s concept of “doing gender,” Costello and Mederer contend that gender is accomplished through interaction and that these interactions are loaded with structural edicts regarding appropriate and inappropriate gendered behavior.

222

Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime

First they turn to the individual-level of analysis in their theory. According to Costello and Mederer, girls are socialized better than boys. Not only are girls supervised more than boys, but girls are taught to be more empathic (Chodorow, 1978; Gilligan, 1982) and are punished more readily for expressions of anger (Harter, 1999). This differential socialization results in less delinquency for girls, because girls are more likely to anticipate the consequences of their actions for themselves and for others. The second level of the theory is the interactional level. It is at the interactional level that Costello and Mederer feel that girls are uniquely pressured toward conformity by peers (p. 96). Or, seen in a different light, girls may be excluded from deviant activities by boys who see deviance as incongruous with a feminine identity (Bottcher, 1997). Regardless of the source of interactional pressure against deviation for girls, it appears that girls may be insulated from deviance by interactional processes. Either girls are subjected to greater peer pressure against deviance and toward conformity or else girls are exposed to fewer criminal opportunities while embedded in normative interactions. Finally, Costello and Mederer explain the structural level of their theory. Citing early work by Rita Simon and Frieda Adler, they highlight the idea that gender differences in offending can be the result of structural changes in society. While the predictions of liberation theory have not been upheld, liberation theory places theoretical attention on how social structure translates into individual behavior. Better suited for Costello and Mederer’s gender theory is their discussion of social expectation for gender roles and the division of labor. Costello and Mederer make a case for the idea that women’s and girls’ greater involvement in child-rearing and domestic duties keep them tied to the home and away from most criminal opportunities. Whereas other gender-based theories of crime suggest that structural inequality leads to delinquency via parenting and gender role acquisition (Hagan et al., 1987), Costello and Mederer see structural inequality primarily operating through exposure to criminal opportunities. Again, to reiterate an earlier point, if child-rearing and domestic duties keep women occupied and away from criminal influences, then they should operate

similarly for boys and men as well. In this vein, decreasing the crime committed by boys and men is as easy and making the household and family division of labor more egalitarian. The strength of Costello and Mederer’s control theory of gender differences lies in their examination of the multiple levels of controls that both boys and girls face. It is particularly instructive in this era of declining crime rates to examine the classic question “Why don’t people commit more crime?” and to use girls’ experiences as a guidepost for preventing crime in the future. Constance L. Chapple See also Adler, Frieda: Sisters in Crime; Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: SelfControl Theory; Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology

References and Further Readings Adler, F. (1975). Sisters in crime. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bottcher, J. (1995). Gender as social control: A qualitative study of incarcerated youths and their siblings in greater Sacramento. Justice Quarterly, 12, 33–57. Campbell, A. (1981). Girl delinquents. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Chafetz, J. S. (1990). Gender equity: An integrated theory of stability and change. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Chapple, C. L., McQuillian, J., & Berdahl, T. A. (2005). Gender, social bonds and delinquency: A comparison of boys’ and girls’ models. Social Science Research, 34, 357–383. Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. Costello, B. J., & Mederer, H. J. (2003). A control theory of gender differences in crime and delinquency. In C. L. Britt & M. R. Gottfredson (Eds.), Control theories of crime and delinquency (pp. 77–107). Edison, NJ: Transaction. Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 5, 497–535. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hagan, J., Simpson J., & Gillis, A. R. (1987). Class in the household: A power-control theory of gender and delinquency. American Journal of Sociology. 92, 788–816. Harter, S. (1999). The construction of the self: A developmental perspective. New York: Guilford Press. Hindelang, M. J. (1973). Causes of delinquency: A partial replication and extension. Social Problems, 20, 471–487. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leonard, E. (1982). Women, crime and society: A critique of criminology theory. New York. Longman. Mazzerole, P., Brame, R., Paternoster, R., Piquero, A., & Dean, C. (2000). Onset, age, persistence and offending versatility: Comparisons across gender. Criminology, 38, 1143–1172. Miller, J., & Mullins, C. M. (2006). The status of feminist theories in criminology. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 217–249). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Naffine, N. (1987). Female crime. Boston: Allen & Unwin. Risman, B. J. (1998). Gender vertigo: American families in transition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simon, R. J. (1975). Women and crime. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Smart, C. (1976). Women, crime, and criminology. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. (1987). Doing gender. Gender and Society, 1, 125–151.

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime Particularly notable among Donald R. Cressey’s major contributions to many aspects of the criminological realm was his role in revising Edwin H. Sutherland’s landmark textbook Criminology published in 1924 through the 5th to the 10th edition following Sutherland’s death. Cressey served as an intellectual acolyte to Sutherland, seeking to defend and shore up his mentor’s

223

theory of differential association as it increasingly fell into desuetude. But Cressey was by no means a scholarly sycophant, and, as we shall see, he had some strong critical words for what he regarded as Sutherland’s failure to appreciate that corporations could not by an anthropomorphic slight-of-hand be regarded as actors in the same way that human white-collar criminals could to form the basis for satisfactory criminological theory. Like so many scholars who made impressive contributions early in their careers to the study of white-collar crime—among others Marshall Clinard and Richard Quinney years ago and Susan Shapiro and David Weisburd in more recent times—Cressey turned to other subject matter throughout most of his working life. In particular, he dedicated much time to the study of the sociology of organizations. However, he revisited whitecollar crime when, in his last published contribution, he took exception to aspects of Sutherland’s classic White Collar Crime published in 1940. Cressey saw himself almost exclusively as a sociologist—or, more precisely, as a social psychologist who studied criminal acts from a behavioral perspective with little attention to their legal ramifications, although in his days as a graduate student he had taken a course from Jerome Hall, a preeminent legal scholar. Cressey only once attended a meeting of the American Society of Criminology (when he received the Sutherland Award for outstanding contributions to the field), despite the fact that the group had come of age while Cressey was still an active scholar. All of his academic affiliations, both at the University of California in Los Angeles beginning in 1950 and at the UC campus at Santa Barbara after 1961, were in sociology departments. His only significant association with a mainstream criminological educational enterprise was the year he spent in England at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology. Cressey did play a major role in the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Admini­ stration of Justice when Lloyd Ohlin, a onetime classmate of Cressey’s at Indiana, selected him to prepare the Commission’s report on organized crime (Cressey, 1969). Cressey’s agreement to deal with this hot-button subject, which at the time was of great political importance because of the prosecutorial zeal of Attorney General Robert Kennedy,

224

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime

indicates his concern with public policy issues that he believed also could be mined for theoretical and substantive sociological insights. That view would be manifest in the research that Cressey did with a colleague on Synanon, a drug rehabilitation facility located not far from the UCLA campus (Janzen, 2001; Volkman & Cressey, 1963).

Becoming a Criminologist Cressey was born on April 27, 1919, in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, then a city of about 15,000 persons. Fergus Falls is the seat of Otter Tails County in west central Minnesota and lies some 180 miles northwest of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Fergus Falls was populated largely by immigrants from Norway. Cressey’s forebears had been farm laborers in England and undertook the same kind of work when they came to Vermont and ultimately moved westward. It required a considerable degree of bodily insulation to grow up in Fergus Falls: On February 5, 1992, the city registered a cold weather record of minus 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Cressey’s parents, by his account, were “real poor” (Laub, 1983, p. 131). His father, an alcoholic, operated the circuit panel switches at the town’s electric plant and left the family after being arrested for a hit-and-run drunk driving accident when Cressey was 13 years old. He moved to Duluth where Cressey saw him but once ever after. His mother, who Cressey admired greatly, worked various jobs as a maid, dishwasher, waitress, and cook (Colomy, 1988). Cressey would be the first person in his extended family to complete high school. Both in high school and during his early years at college, Cressey worked at bakery jobs, anticipating that he would come to learn a trade that would keep him employed throughout his life. He was at best an indifferent high school student. Spurred on by Elaine Smythe, the woman he would marry before the military sent him overseas, Cressey did undergraduate work at Iowa State University in Ames, switching to sociology from a major in chemistry that focused on bakery products. After graduating in 1943, Cressey enlisted in the Army Air Force during World War II, seeing service in India and on Tinian, one of the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean that was captured from the Japanese in 1944 and was the site from

which the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, took off. Following his military discharge, Cressey wrote to Sutherland, the doyen of white-collar crime scholarship, requesting admission to Indiana’s Ph.D. program. After he received his doctorate in 1950, Cressey worked as an analyst in a prison system, as did several other sociologists, including Ohlin and Daniel Glaser, who would later carve out prominent academic careers. Cressey had a very keen mind that often instructed his tongue to express acerbic observations reflecting his impatience with what he viewed as academic posturing and obscurantism. His favorite term of scorn for work that he believed to be below par was what family newspapers these days are wont to call a “barnyard epithet.” His sometimes gruff exterior, however, camouflaged a sentimental soul, perhaps best illustrated by the poetry he wrote to commemorate the retirement of an administrative colleague at Santa Barbara and published in 1977 as Turkey in the Peach Garden. He also was an extraordinarily hard and diligent worker, stressing the utmost importance of developing writing skills if a person expected to launch a successful academic career. “I get up at five a.m. or earlier,” Cressey told an interviewer. “I usually work twelve hours a day, including some Saturdays and Sundays. I do it because I like it. It’s fun. Being a sociology professor beats the hell out of working in a bakery” (Laub, 1983, p. 163).

Other People’s Money Cressey made an immediate splash on the sociological scene with the publication of Other People’s Money. The book is based on his Ph.D. dissertation at Indiana (Cressey, 1950). It must be appreciated that, unlike today, in the 1950s it was unusual and highly prestigious to publish an academic book on a criminological topic. There was not yet a critical mass of potential purchasers to attract publishers. The Free Press, based in Glencoe, Illinois, which issued Other People’s Money, was a small elite organization that attended only to the very most important works in the social sciences. That Cressey selected embezzlement as his subject is a bit puzzling. Perhaps he did so primarily because he had been able to obtain access to a

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime

sizeable coterie of imprisoned offenders. The puzzlement arises from the fact that Sutherland had explicitly excluded embezzlement from his roster of white-collar crime, apparently because its target was likely to be a business and not the government or the public. The subtitle of Cressey’s book, The Social Psychology of Embezzlement, is something of a misnomer that can be traced to a provocative debate in the early years of American criminology. Thorsten Sellin, a close friend of Sutherland, had maintained that criminologists ought not to restrict their subject matter to how the law defines and treats particular behaviors but rather should construct categories that gather together reasonably homogeneous acts, however they might be designated by the legal system. For Cressey, embezzlement became not the charged offense but all behaviors that he declared to characterize not only embezzlement but also similar kinds of fraudulent acts (Green, 1993)—persons who had committed what he called a “criminal violation of trust” (Cressey, 1973, p. 20). Trust violators had to meet two conditions: They had accepted an occupational position in good faith, and they had violated the expectation of trust inherent in the obligations associated with that position. The first condition was verified by statements from the men such as “I had no idea I was going to do this until the day it happened” (Cressey, 1950, p. 740). Study subjects were 133 male inmates from three prisons (Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, California Institution for Men at Chino, and the United State Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana). The men were interviewed for an average of 15 hours each over a stretch of 5 months to determine the roots of their violations. Analytic Induction

For data collection and interpretation, Cressey relied upon an approach known as “analytic induction” that first was highlighted in the 1934 work of sociologist Florian Znaniecki, a Polish immigrant to the United States. Cressey was turned on to analytic induction by Alfred Lindesmith, a faculty member in the Indiana sociology department who had earlier studied under Sutherland at the University of Chicago. Lindesmith had concluded by use of the analytic induction approach

225

that the key element in narcotic addiction was the user’s association of the drug with pleasure and its absence with pain. He finessed the issue of enduring later abstinence by insisting that once an addict always an addict, if only subconsciously (Lindesmith, 1986). Analytic induction involves a researcher beginning with a set of postulates and then continually readjusting them so that they encompass all evidence that the data produce. Thus, if a negative case is found, the hypothesis is reformulated until all cases support the generalization. Cressey sought to learn if there was a “definable sequence” that was always present when a trust violation took place (Cressey, 1973, p. 12). However, the approach contains a major shortcoming from a scientific viewpoint in that it is not possible to use it for predictive purposes. As Sheldon Goldenberg (1993, p. 161) would conclude, “analytical induction is incapable of suggesting causal associations and equally incapable of generating the universals that are its goal.” The death rite for analytic induction was pronounced by John Laub and Robert Sampson in 1991: “No empirical research today is guided by the theory” (p. 1419). Cressey revised his working hypothesis four times, until settling on a fifth iteration. This final reformulated hypothesis was claimed to be confirmed by all 133 cases without a single exception. Similarly, in a review of roughly 200 unpublished episodes that had been collected by Sutherland, Cressey found no reason to reject his final hypothesis. He argued that: Trusted persons become trust violators when they conceive of themselves as having a financial problem which is non-shareable, are aware this problem can be secretly resolved by violation of the position of financial trust, and are able to apply to their own conduct in that situation verbalizations which enable them to adjust their conceptions of themselves as trusted persons with their conceptions of themselves as users of the entrusted funds or property. (Cressey, 1973, p. 30)

This three-step process, which has become known as the “Fraud Triangle,” was presented to explain a trust violation. Cressey adamantly argued that whenever all three characteristics were present, a trust violation would occur, while the absence of

226

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime

any one of the elements would result in the absence of such a violation. A Non-Shareable Problem

A non-shareable problem comes to exist when individuals conceive of themselves as having a financial problem that cannot be resolved by seeking the help of another person due to their fear that they will lose status and/or forfeit the respect of others (Clinard, 1954). The condition can be shorthanded as a form of psychological isolation and it is noteworthy that not one of the married men in the sample was able to share his dilemma with his wife. The men had, as one of them put it, “too much false pride to get help from others” (Cressey, 1950, p. 742). Cressey maintained that whether the problem is shareable or non-shareable is based on the individual’s perception, a perception that may or may not be in accord with objective fact. While two individuals may be in the same circumstances, one might perceive the situation as shareable, while the other defines it as non-­ shareable. Non-shareable problems were said to arise often from violations of ascribed obligations associated with the role of the trusted individual, personal failure, business reversals, physical isolation from others who could help the individual, status demands such as a seeming need for membership in a country club, and problematic employer-employee relations (Clinard, 1954; Cressey, 1953/1973). In Other People’s Money, Cressey concentrated on those non-shareable problems that could be solved by a violation of trust, noting that all such problems described by the 133 inmates concerned status-seeking or status-maintaining activities. Interestingly, in an interview with John Laub 30 years after the publication of Other People’s Money, Cressey concluded that having a non-shareable problem was important but not “critical” for the explanation of trust violations (Laub, 1983). General Knowledge/Technical Skills

The second essential element needed for a trust violation to eventuate was the knowledge that the non-shareable problem could be resolved secretly by a violation of the person’s position of financial responsibility. The person must also possess the

necessary technical knowledge to carry out the crime (Cressey, 1950, 1953/1973; Clinard, 1954). Cressey noted that this component is often demonstrated by offenders when they utter phrases such as “It dawned on me” or “I realized I could” with regard to their emergent awareness that they could use their employment position to solve their problem by means of workplace theft. Cressey pointed out that most people had acquired the skills needed to perpetrate a fraud in the course of their training or by means of on-the-job routine experiences. What was critical was that the individual had to come to understand that the non-shareable problem could be solved by “the application of rather general information to a specific problem” (Cressey, 1973, p. 91). Verbalizations/Rationalizations

The final and most important component necessary for a trust violation to occur lies in the ability of the individual to rationalize the behavior as acceptable in regard to his image of himself (Cressey, 1953/1973; Laub, 1983). The process is necessary to avoid having to confront and deal with the reality that what the person is doing constitutes theft and deprives others. To commit a violation, individuals have to justify their conduct by the use of rationalizations that enable them to maintain their conception of themselves as a decent person despite the fact that they are making illegal personal use of entrusted funds. For independent businesspeople and long-term violators, these rationalizations usually take the form of a belief that they are only “borrowing” the money and that they will, in due time, return it. Another justification might be that the appropriated funds legally “belong” to them, perhaps with a claim that they have long been underpaid for the tasks performed. Cressey further found that a number of the trust violators he interviewed sought to justify their acts by observing that some of the most respected business leaders got their start by temporarily using other people’s money. Then there were absconders, who took off with the purloined funds, some of whom shrugged off their behavior as a consequence of personal defects or who exhibited a “don’t care” attitude. Cressey felt compelled to examine his results in regard to how they lined up with Sutherland’s

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime

theory of differential association, a formulation that insisted that all crime, including the white-collar variety, was explicable as a product of learned attitudes and behaviors. Cressey’s conclusion was equivocal at best. Sutherland’s differential association theory, he noted, did not fully explain violations of financial trust. For one thing, perpetrators by and large could figure out for themselves what they needed to do and how to do it to alleviate their discomforting financial condition. At the same time, Cressey recognized that in order to develop and internalize a rationalization, offenders had to have been exposed to a cultural ideology conveying and supporting those verbalizations. People rarely invent new rationalizations. Almost invariably, perpetrators have been exposed to the definitions they settled upon through contacts with co-workers, the media, or other social experiences. Consequently, Cressey argued that he had found at least some indirect support for differential association theory. Cressey’s claim that his triad of explanatory items satisfactorily and invariably applied to violators of trust has not been supported by replication during the more than half a century since it first was promulgated, and two prominent research probes have claimed that their evidence shows him to have been in the wrong. Cressey’s position was first rejected in 1974 by Gwynn Nettler, who concluded that the folk wisdom explanation of embezzlement was correct, that offenders are much more likely to have been prodded by overspending on reckless activities—the “wine, women, and song” theme—than by the conditions Cressey postulated. Nettler found the idea of a non-shareable problem far from satisfactory. “The concept is sufficiently vague that any condition may, after the criminal fact, be denominated as a non-shareable problem that triggered the breach of trust,” Nettler insisted, adding: “Such looseness is unsatisfying” (p. 74). Later, in her 1981 study of female embezzlers, Dorothy Zeitz concluded that, unlike the men, women who embezzled were prompted by the financial difficulties of persons close to them—most often husbands, children, other family members or lovers—and that they felt a need to come to their aid. Nonetheless, Other People’s Money remains a pioneering quintessential study of white-collar crime. It served to place the subject on the agenda of criminologists, it dealt with actual offenders (although there are likely distinctions, perhaps

227

important ones, between the universe of violators and those who have been found out and sentenced), and it put forth a provocative explanatory schema.

Analyzing White Collar and Corporate Crime Cressey viewed Other People’s Money more as a study of the social psychology of criminal behavior and less as a study of white-collar crime (Akers & Matsueda, 1989; Laub, 1983). He appreciated that the inmates he interviewed did not fit Sutherland’s (1940) definitional criteria of respectability or high social prestige for classification as a white-collar criminal (Green, 1993). However, as Ronald Akers and Ross Matsueda (1989) observe, the criminological community embraced this piece as one of the defining works of white-collar crime and sought to formulate policies based on its findings. Corporate Codes of Conduct

The main policy implication from Other People’s Money was that “embezzlement could best be reduced by changing the normative climate of the organization which supported verbalizations conducive to violation of financial trust” (Akers & Matsueda, 1989, p. 434). Years later, by means of interviews with retired corporate middle managers now living in the southwest, Clinard (1983) came to the same conclusion: The moral climate of the corporation set by its top executives was crucial to its performance in regard to criminal violations. Today, with the banking industry in disrepair and the real estate realm riddled with mortgage scandals, recommendations have abounded that the corporate world must be turned away from an emphasis on greed and self-enhancement toward concern with public welfare. Later, in what Cressey would call his first real empirical work on white-collar crime (Laub, 1983), he and Charles Moore (1980, 1983) examined 119 corporate codes of conduct—60 percent of them involving Fortune 500 companies—that had been adopted in response to the explosion of scandals in the 1970s. The goal of this movement was to change the normative climate of the corporation in order to lower the amount of illegal and unethical behavior within the organization and to increase the public’s approval of big business. Cressey and

228

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime

Moore concluded that the aim was not achieved. Instead, the codes were said to serve the interests of the corporation at the expense of social responsibility. Specifically, the majority of codes gave the least amount of attention to illegal behavior that harms the public or their own employees (i.e., environmental pollution, unsafe working conditions, selling unsafe products), and paid the most attention to behaviors likely to harm the corporation by reducing its profits (i.e., embezzlement, issues of conflict of interest). These findings echoed what Cressey alluded to in his 1979 interview with John Laub when he discussed how white-collar crime was coming to be defined, most notably by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as “crime against business, rather than crime by business” (p. 154).

to violating the law than otherwise would themselves be more likely to engage in illegal activities (Cressey, 1980, p. 139). After examining numerous studies of corporate crime, Cressey concluded that “young managers often ‘go along’ with the questionable practices of their superiors,” thus lending support to the notion that people develop a learned set of attitudes and behaviors from those they associate with. Through these interactions, people come to form views on what is and what is not “really” a crime (Cressey, 1980, p. 141). Therefore, Cressey argued that deterrence and control-oriented approaches to corporate crime would not be effective; rather, the normative climate of the workplace would have to be altered and replaced with one that was opposed to the violation of the law.

Considering White-Collar Crime

Corporate Crime

Cressey also undertook to apply various criminological theories to white-collar crime, reflecting Sutherland’s groundbreaking attacks on formulations, such as mental disorders and broken homes, that had floundered when examined in terms of advertising fraud and antitrust violations (Cressey, 1952, 1953/1973, 1972, 1980, 1986). Cressey indicated that variations in trade code violations by businesses paralleled neighborhood rates of delinquency (Akers & Matsueda, 1989; Cressey, 1972). He observed that “the corporate world contains patterns of criminalistic interaction that are remarkably similar to the patterns of criminalistic interaction noted years ago by Shaw and McKay in the world of the slum” (Cressey, 1972, p. 209; Shaw & McKay, 1942). Cressey indicated that when corporations enter a particular industry, they will likely take on the crime rate of that industry, just as children who move into a neighborhood often take on the delinquency rate of that neighborhood. He relentlessly proclaimed that Sutherland’s differential association theory offered the very best explanation of white-collar crimes. Cressey especially applied Sutherland’s differential association theory to the analysis and control of management fraud (Akers & Matsueda, 1989; Cressey, 1980, 1986). He argued that management fraud could be explained through an understanding that people are exposed to definitions both favorable and unfavorable to the violation of law. Those who associate with others who hold attitudes hospitable

Cressey’s most influential contribution to the analysis of corporate crime was his critique that Sutherland had treated corporations in White Collar Crime as if they were individuals whose actions could best be interpreted by differential association (Cressey, 1989). For Cressey, this was a fruitless endeavor: Only humans could think and act; organizations were mindless entities with “no soul to damn, no body to kick” (Coffee, 1981). Corporations had no psychological or biological characteristics and thus could not be explained by the same principles used to interpret the actions of real people (Cressey, 1989, p. 37). He argued that although Sutherland (1940) defined white-collar crime as illegal acts committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the context of their occupation, he failed to study these individuals. Rather, he concentrated on the crime rates of corporations, applying human characteristics and capabilities (i.e., intention) to organizations (Friedrichs, 1992). In 1989 in “The Poverty of Theory in Corporate Crime Research,” Cressey insisted that there is no possibility of formulating a satisfactory social psychological theory to explain corporate or other nonhuman behavior because it is only through the will and intention of human agents that corporations are able to act.

Conclusion Cressey represented what NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw would come to glorify in 1998 as the

Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime

“greatest generation,” kids raised during the severe economic depression of the 1930s, who fought in World War II and returned home to translate their seasoning and experiences into productive careers. Academia before Cressey’s time was a reserve for the elite, professors who often subsisted not on their meager salaries but on their family fortune. Cressey’s background was working-class; his movement into university teaching and administration by the grace of the G.I. Bill of Rights was something that in previous times, had it happened all, would have been a striking novelty. He traded on an unquestionably high level of intelligence, a sizeable dosage of belligerence, and a compelling dedication to justice, particularly for those who, like himself, were or had started off in straitened circumstances. He was not a romantic, but he was a strong advocate for reform. Like that of virtually every scholar who makes something of a strong but not compellingly powerful impact on his study subject, a contributor who is not a Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, or Max Weber, Cressey’s substantive work inevitably has had only a limited shelf life. Similar to his qualitative-minded criminological colleagues such as Ohlin (who would marry Elaine Cressey after her husband’s death at age 68 on July 21, 1987), Gresham Sykes, and Albert Cohen, Cressey’s reputation would have to give way to the wave of quantitative research that in time took center stage—a development that, in the sarcastic words of the intellectual guru Edward Shils in 1956, followed in the wake of a time “when intellectuals still wrote in English” (p. 123). In the theoretical realm, Cressey’s work might have enjoyed a longer run had he upgraded and refined differential association, which he came to regard as a “principle” rather than a fullfledged “theory”—a rather uncertain distinction. In forewords to edition after edition of the Sutherland textbook, Cressey claimed that he would in time undertake such a task, but that he was moved to leave the theory in its original form because it constituted such a strong pedagogic tool; that is, it alerted students to a social process rather than to personality flaws or structural conditions that had been claimed to lie at the root of lawbreaking. Cheryl Lero Jonson and Gilbert Geis

229

See also Anomie and White-Collar Crime; Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of WhiteCollar Offending; Capitalism and White-Collar Crime; Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals; Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of WhiteCollar Crime; Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime; Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime; Rational Choice and White-Collar Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L., & Matsueda, R. L. (1989). Donald R. Cressey: An intellectual portrait of a criminologist. Sociological Inquiry, 59, 423–438. Brokaw, T. (1998). The greatest generation. New York: Random House. Clinard, M. B. (1954). Reviewed work: Other people’s money: A study in the social psychology of embezzlement. American Sociological Review, 19, 362–363. Clinard, M. B. (1983). Corporate ethics and crime: The role of middle management. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Coffee, J. C., Jr. (1981). “No soul to damn, no body to kick”: An unscandalized inquiry into the problem of corporate punishment. Michigan Law Review, 79, 386–459. Colomy, P. (1988). Donald R. Cressey: A personal and intellectual remembrance. Crime and Delinquency, 34, 242–262. Cressey, D. R. (1950). The criminal violation of financial trust. American Sociological Review, 15, 738–743. Cressey, D. R. (1952). Application and verification of the differential association theory. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 43, 43–52. Cressey, D. R. (1969). Theft of the nation: The structure and operations of organized crime in America. New York: Harper & Row. Cressey, D. R. (1972). Restraint of trade, recidivism, and delinquent neighborhoods. In J. F. Short, Jr. (Ed.), Delinquency, crime, and society (pp. 209–238). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cressey, D. R. (1973). Other people’s money: A study in the social psychology of embezzlement. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. (Original work published 1953) Cressey, D. R. (1977). Turkeys in the peach garden. Santa Barbara, CA: Water Table Press. Cressey, D. R. (1980). Management fraud, accounting controls, and criminological theory. In R. K. Elliot & J. J. Willingham (Eds.), Management fraud: Detection and deterrence (pp. 117–147). New York: Petrocelli Books.

230

Crime Hot Spots

Cressey, D. R. (1986). Why managers commit fraud? Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 19, 195–209. Cressey, D. R. (1989). The poverty of theory in corporate crime research. In W. S. Laufer & F. Alder (Eds.), Advances in criminological theory (Vol. 1, pp. 31–56). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Cressey, D. R. (1990). Learning and living. In B. Berger (Ed.), Authors of their own lives: Intellectual autobiographies by twenty American sociologists (pp. 235–259). Berkeley: University of California Press. Cressey, D. R., & Moore, C. A. (1980). Corporation codes of ethical conduct. New York: Peat, Marwick and Mitchell Foundation. Cressey, D. R., & Moore, C. A. (1983). Managerial values and corporate codes of ethics. California Management Review, 25(4), 53–77. Friedrichs, D. O. (1992). White collar crime and the definitional quagmire: A provisional solution. Journal of Human Justice, 3(2), 5–21. Goldenberg, S. (1993). Analytic induction revisited. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 18, 161–176. Green, G. S. (1993). While-collar crime and the study of embezzlement. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 525, 95–106. Janzen, R. R. (2001). The rise and fall of Synanon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laub, J. H. (1983). Interview with Donald R. Cressey: March 29, 1979. In J. H. Laub (Ed.), Criminology in the making (pp. 131–165). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. T. (1991). The SutherlandGlueck debate: On the sociology of criminological knowledge. American Journal of Sociology, 96, 1402–1446. Lindesmith, A. R (1986). Addiction and opiates. Chicago: Aldine. Nettler, G. (1974). Embezzlement without problems. British Journal of Criminology, 14, 70–77. Ohlin, L. (1988). In memoriam: Donald R. Cressey (1919–1987). Crime and Delinquency, 34, 238–241. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas: A study of the rates of delinquents in relation to differential characteristics of local communities in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. A. (1956). The torrent of secrecy: The background and consequences of American security policies. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1924). Criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Sutherland, E. H. (1940). White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review, 5, 1–12. Volkman, R., & Cressey, D. R. (1963). The rehabilitation of drug addicts. American Journal of Sociology, 69, 129–142. Zietz, D. (1981). Women who embezzle or defraud: A study of convicted felons. New York: Praeger. Znaniecki, F. (1934). The method of sociology. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.

Crime Hot Spots Academic interest in crime hot spots developed from research suggesting that micro-level variation in crime existed within communities. The observation that the distribution of crime varied within neighborhoods has existed for some time. However, due to limited analytical capacities, little empirical research examined this variance beyond the community level of analysis. With the advent of powerful computer systems and software packages in the late 1980s, two well-known studies—one by Glenn Pierce, Susan Spaar, and LeBaron Briggs in 1988 and the other by Lawrence Sherman, Patrick Gartin, and Michael Buerger in 1989—found that more than 60 percent of crimes were committed at a few small places within communities in Boston and Minneapolis, respectively. Even within the worst neighborhoods, Sherman et al. found that crime clusters at a few discrete “hot spot” locations, leaving blocks of areas relatively crime-free. Further, research by Ralph Taylor and Stephen Gottfredson revealed conclusive evidence that links this spatial variation to the physical and social characteristics of particular blocks and multiple dwellings within a neighborhood. Crime clustering at specific locations within specific neighborhoods has been reported in studies of a variety of crimes, including burglary, convenience store robberies, gun crimes, and drug selling. The study of crime hot spots as a means to explain the variation of crime within communities, also known as the “criminology of place,” has developed from an interest in improving crime control policies. In their quest to develop more effective prevention strategies, police departments have increasingly focused their resources

Crime Hot Spots

on controlling crime hot spots. When dealing with crime hot spots, the attributes of a place are viewed as key factors in explaining clusters of criminal events. For example, a poorly lit street corner with an abandoned building, located near a major thoroughfare, provides an ideal location for a drug market. The lack of proper lighting, an abundance of “stash” locations around the derelict property, a steady flow of potential customers on the thoroughfare, and a lack of defensive ownership (informal social control) at the place all generate an attractive opportunity for drug sellers. In many such cases, the police spend considerable time and effort arresting sellers without noticeably affecting the drug trade. The compelling criminal opportunities at the place attract sellers and buyers, and thus sustain the market. If the police want to disrupt the market, they should focus on the features of the place that causes the drug dealing to cluster at that particular location. This approach to focusing on the characteristics of crime hot spots is considered to be a radical departure from traditional criminological theories, which centered prevention efforts on the individual and ignored the importance of place (Sherman et al., 1989).

What Is a Crime Hot Spot? Before discussing applications of hot spots policing, it is important to define what is meant by a crime hot spot. Hot spots policing is not simply the application of police strategies to units of geography. Traditional policing in this sense can be seen as place-based, since police have routinely defined their units of operation in terms of large areas, such as police precincts and beats (Weisburd, 2008). In hot spots policing, place refers to a very different level of geographic aggregation than has traditionally interested police executives and planners. Place in this context are very small micro units of analysis. These would include buildings or addresses; block faces or street segments; and clusters of addresses, block faces, or street segments. When crime is concentrated at such places, they are commonly called hot spots. Two illustrations of crime hot spots are useful since they point to the different ways that place may be important in understanding crime and in police interventions (Weisburd, 2008). In the

231

Minneapolis Hot Spots Experiment, Sherman and Weisburd identified street segments or street blocks for increased patrol presence. They used street blocks in part because they represented a unit of analysis that was easily identified by police and could provide a natural setting for police interventions. But they also recognized, as have other scholars, that specific factors—such as the visual closeness of residents of a block; interrelated role obligations; acceptance of certain common norms and behavior; common, regularly recurring rhythms of activity; the physical boundaries of the street; and the historical evolution of the street segment— make the street block a particularly useful unit for analysis for policing places. In the Jersey City (New Jersey) Displacement and Diffusion Project (Weisburd et al., 2006), the researchers also sought to identify a discrete place for police attention. However, they specifically sought to examine particular types of criminal markets. Such markets often spread across street segments in a larger area of criminal activity. For instance, included in the boundaries of a prostitution hot spot in the Jersey City study was a group of city blocks. While larger than a street segment, the prostitution market area was much smaller than the neighborhoods or police precincts that have often been the focus of police interventions and scientific study of crime. The Jersey City displacement project and the Minneapolis experiment illustrate more generally the ways in which units of place might differ depending on the interests of the police and the underlying structure of crime problems. This issue of defining units of analysis for focused crime prevention is one that certainly will demand more attention if police adopt this approach on a large scale.

Police Efforts to Control Crime Hot Spots A number of researchers have argued that many crime problems can be reduced more efficiently if police officers strategically focused their attention to hot spot locations. The appeal of focusing limited resources on a small number of high-activity crime places is straightforward. If crime at these hot spots can be prevented, then total crime might be reduced. Indeed, police officers have long recognized the importance of place in crime problems. Police

232

Crime Hot Spots

officers know the locations within their beats that tend to be trouble spots and are often very sensitive to signs of potential crimes across the places that comprise their beats. As Egon Bittner suggests in his classic study of police work, some officers know “the shops, stores, warehouses, restaurants, hotels, schools, playgrounds, and other public places in such a way that they can recognize at a glance whether what is going on within them is within the range of normalcy” (p. 90). The traditional response to such trouble spots typically included heightened levels of patrol and increased opportunistic arrests and investigations. Until recently, police crime prevention strategies did not focus systematically on crime hot spots and did not seek to address the underlying conditions that give rise to high-activity crime places. Many police departments now report having the capability to manage and analyze crime data in sophisticated ways and, through management innovations such as Compstat, hold officers accountable for implementing problem-solving strategies to control hot spot locations. At the core of hot spots policing is a concern with focusing on places where crimes are concentrated, and it begins with an assumption that there is something about a place that leads to crimes occurring there. In this sense, hot spots policing has a strong theoretical basis. For instance, many insights on the concentration of crime at specific hot spot locations arise from Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson’s routine activity theory, which identifies crime as a matter of the convergence of suitable targets (e.g., victims), an absence of capable guardians (e.g., police), and the presence of motivated or potential offenders. Of course, this all must occur in the context of a place or situation, and accordingly hot spots policing recognizes that there is something about specific places that leads to the convergence of these elements. Hot spots policing has become a popular way for police departments to prevent crime. A recent Police Foundation report found that 7 in 10 departments with more than 100 sworn officers reported using crime mapping to identify crime hot spots (Weisburd et al., 2003). The strategies of hot spots policing can be as simple as directed patrol in crime hot spots, as was the case in the Minneapolis Hot Spots Policing Experiment, where the police intervention involved placing more patrol resources at places where crime is concentrated. But hot spots policing can also take

a much more complex approach to the amelioration of crime problems at places. In the Jersey City Drug Market Analysis Project (Weisburd & Green, 1995), for example, a three-step program (including identifying and analyzing problems, developing tailored responses, and maintaining crime control gains) was used to reduce problems at drug hot spots. In the Jersey City Problem-Oriented Policing Project (Braga et al., 1999), a problem-oriented policing approach was taken in developing a specific strategy for each of the small areas defined as violent crime hot spots. In hot spots policing, “place managers” can be central figures in trying to do something about crime and crime-related problems. For example, Ross Homel and Jeff Clark found that the way in which bartenders and bouncers regulate behavior strongly relates to violence in drinking establishments. Place managers, such as business owners or managers, bartenders, doormen, or simply people who live and work at places, can be an important resource for policing hot spots. A related approach to hot spots policing involves the use of civil remedies to “persuade or coerce non-offending third parties to take responsibility and action to prevent or end criminal or nuisance behavior” (Mazerolle & Roehl, 1998, p. 1). In such cases, the police might use nuisance and abatement statutes to induce landlords and property owners to aid the police in controlling crime at hot spots.

The Effectiveness of Policing Crime Hot Spots A growing body of research evidence suggests that focused police interventions, such as directed patrols, proactive arrests, and problem-oriented policing, can produce significant crime prevention gains at high-crime hot spots. Anthony Braga and Brenda Bond’s 2008 randomized controlled experiment in Lowell, Massachusetts, revealed that the strongest crime prevention benefits were driven by situational changes in the physical environment at the crime and disorder hot spots. Misdemeanor arrests for disorderly behavior generated much smaller crime prevention gains in the treatment places in the Lowell experiment. Critics of place-based interventions charge that such policing strategies result in displacement— that is, criminals move to places not protected by police intervention. Recent studies suggest that

Crime Hot Spots

spatial displacement is not a serious threat to place-based crime prevention, and indeed that there is more likely to be a “diffusion of crime prevention benefits” (Clarke & Weisburd, 1994) than displacement in areas near targeted sites. In his 2001 review of hot spots policing evaluations, Braga reported that none of the studies examining spatial displacement found evidence of significant displacement to other places. Nonetheless, the threat of displacement remains an important barrier to hot spots policing in public and scholarly debate of the approach. There are also concerns that concentrating police resources in small places can result in overly aggressive, abusive, and inappropriate policing that further distance the police from the communities they serve. The U.S. National Academies’ Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practice reports that “there is strong research evidence that the more focused and specific the strategies of police, and the more tailored they are to the problems they seek to address, the more effective the police will be in controlling crime and disorder” (Skogan & Frydl, 2004, p. 17). Policing crime hot spots represents an important advance in focusing police crime prevention practice. However, it is important to recognize that unfocused and indiscriminate police enforcement efforts at specific locations may result in unfair policing and also have unintended negative consequences for policecommunity relationships. As such, police departments should engage a community problem-oriented approach to develop highly localized responses to specific recurring problems that give rise to crime hot spots. Anthony A. Braga See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective; Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places; Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory; Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

References and Further Readings Bittner, E. (1970). The functions of the police in modern society. New York: Aronson.

233

Braga, A. (2001). The effects of hot spots policing on crime. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 455, 104–125. Braga, A., & Bond, B. (2008). Policing crime and disorder hot spots: A randomized controlled trial. Criminology, 46, 577–608. Braga, A., Weisburd, D., Waring, E., Green Mazerolle, L., Spelman, W., & Gajewski, F. (1999). Problem-oriented policing in violent crime places: A randomized controlled experiment. Criminology, 37, 541–580. Clarke, R., & Weisburd, D. (1994). Diffusion of crime control benefits: Observations on the reverse of displacement. Crime Prevention Studies, 2, 165–184. Cohen, L., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–605. Homel, R., &. Clark, J. (1994). The prevention of violence in pubs and clubs. Crime Prevention Studies, 3, 1–46. Mazerolle, L., &. Roehl, J. (1998). Civil remedies and crime prevention: An introduction. In L. Mazerolle & J. Roehl (Eds.), Civil remedies and crime prevention (pp. 1–20). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Pierce, G. L., Spaar, S., & Briggs, L. (1988). The character of police work: Strategic and tactical implications. Boston: Northeastern University, Center for Applied Social Research. Sherman, L., Gartin, P., & Buerger, M. (1989). Hot spots of predatory crime: Routine activities and the criminology of place. Criminology, 27, 27–56. Sherman, L., & Weisburd, D., (1995). General deterrent effects of police patrol in crime hot spots: A randomized controlled trial. Justice Quarterly, 12, 625–648. Skogan, W., &. Frydl, K. (Eds.). (2004). Fairness and effectiveness in policing: The evidence. Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices. Committee on Law and Justice, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Taylor, R., & Gottfredson, S. (1986). Environment design, crime, and prevention: An examination of community dynamics. In A. Reiss & M. Tonry (Eds.), Communities and crime (pp. 387–416). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weisburd, D. (2008). Place-based policing (Ideas in American policing No. 9). Washington, DC: Police Foundation. Weisburd, D., & Braga, A. (2006). Hot spots policing as a model of police innovation. In D. Weisburd & A. Braga (Eds.), Police innovation: Contrasting perspectives (pp. 225–244). New York: Cambridge University Press.

234

Criminal Career Paradigm

Weisburd, D., Bushway, S., Lum, C., & Yang, S. (2004). Trajectories of crime at places: A longitudinal study of street segments in the city of Seattle. Criminology, 42, 283–321. Weisburd, D., & Green, L. (1995). Policing drug hot spots: The Jersey City DMA experiment. Justice Quarterly, 12, 711–736. Weisburd, D., Mastrofski, S., McNally, A. M., Greenspan, R., & Willis, J. (2003). Reforming to preserve: Compstat and strategic problem solving in American policing. Criminology & Public Policy, 2, 421–457. Weisburd, D., Wyckoff, L., Ready, J., Eck, J., Hinkle, J., & Gajewski, F. (2006). Does crime just move around the corner? A controlled study of spatial displacement and diffusion of crime control benefits. Criminology, 44, 549–592.

Criminal Career Paradigm The criminal career can be construed as the “characterization of the longitudinal sequence of crimes committed by an individual offender” (Blumstein et al., 1986, p. 12). An important assumption underlying the criminal career paradigm is that individuals start their criminal activity at some age (onset), engage in crime at some individual crime rate, commit a mixture of crimes, and eventually stop (desistance) (Piquero et al., 2003, 2007). To be sure, the paradigm does not imply that offenders necessarily derive their livelihood exclusively or even predominantly from crime; instead, the career concept is intended only as a means of structuring the longitudinal sequence of criminal events associated with an individual in a systematic way (Blumstein et al., 1982, p. 5). This entry provides readers with a brief overview of the criminal career paradigm in criminology. Since the longitudinal patterning of criminal activity is one that is heavily associated with age, this overview begins with the backbone of the criminal career framework: that is, the relationship between age and crime.

The Age-Crime Curve There is no stronger empirical regularity than that between age and crime. Everywhere and at all times, age and crime are inextricably linked. So

strong is this association that it has been referred to as one of the main facts of crime—facts that a theory must fit (Braithwaite, 1989). The progression of what has been referred to in the literature as the age-crime curve is that the crime rate typically increases from early adolescence, peaks in the mid to late teenage years, and then declines in early adulthood (Farrington, 1986). Although this general statement accurately characterizes the agecrime curve, facts—and interpretation of those facts—are never as simple as they initially appear. Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson (1983, p. 54)—in response to what they considered to be the misapplication of the age-crime distribution by scholars in criticizing social theories of crime and supporting longitudinal methods over crosssectional designs—assert that the effect of age is invariant across time, place, social and cultural conditions, and crime type. They indicated that rates of delinquency have been comparable over the last 150 years and that the age distribution of delinquency in England and Wales in the 1940s, Argentina in the 1960s, and the United States in the 1980s were virtually indistinguishable. They further argued that although non-white offenders may start their delinquency earlier and offend at a higher rate than whites and boys offend at higher rates than girls for particular offenses, the agecrime curve is still invariant across race and sex (p. 556). In addition, they provided evidence against the differences in the age-distributions of property and person offenses. They illustrated that while official data may reveal different agecrime curves for person and property offenses, this difference is not observed in self-report data, and thus the effects of age are invariant across crime type. Hirschi and Gottfredson’s early claims about the invariance of the effects of age across historical and cultural conditions and crime type were met with strong criticism. For example, Farrington (1986) argued that the inherent characteristic of the age-crime curve that receives the least amount of attention is that it reflects variations in the prevalence (how many individuals are involved in crime) rather than the incidence (how many crimes are committed among active offenders) of offending. While age-crime curves for individuals are typically unimodal (with only one peak in the teenage years), Farrington argued that these curves did

Criminal Career Paradigm

not mirror the aggregate curve that was referred to by Hirschi and Gottfredson. Additionally, some evidence had suggested that individual crime rates appeared to be constant during a criminal career, thus providing evidence that crime does not always decrease with age for all offenders (Blumstein & Cohen, 1979). Farrington also showed that aggregate agecrime curves can be comparable, but it is their measures of distribution and central tendency that vary across time, place, sex, and offense type. Nevertheless, despite the conflicting arguments discussed above particularly between Hirschi and Gottfredson and Farrington, there is virtually no definitive evidence refuting the strong aggregate relationship between age and crime. Given the robustness of this relationship, recent attention has drawn researchers to focus on how individual criminal behavior changes throughout the various stages of life (Sampson & Laub, 1990, 1992) and this approach has become characterized as the criminal career paradigm (Blumstein et al., 1986). The criminal career framework and ensuing research presents a framework to think about an offender’s career beginning with its onset, continuation and eventual cessation. It further attempts to address questions of if, how, and why different factors influence the onset of criminal activity, the continued participation and frequency of offending, and factors related to desistance or termination of criminal activity. Additionally, dimensions of the criminal career that are examined include specialization (or the tendency to constrain offending to certain offense types or certain offense categories), co-offending, (or the tendency to offend with other offenders), and escalation, (or the tendency to increase in the severity of offenses over the career). The next section provides a brief review of some of the classic criminal career studies, and then provides an overview of the research on each of the criminal career dimensions.

Early Criminal Career Research Following on the heels of Adolphe Quetelet’s classic Research on the Propensity for Crime at Different Ages, Clifford Shaw can be credited with providing one of the first criminal career studies in his qualitative depiction of the early life course of a delinquent named Stanley in The Jack Roller.

235

Soon thereafter, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck propelled empirically based criminal career research by offering one of the most detailed studies of its time identifying the correlates of crime and demonstrating the nature of crime over the life course. Their work was considered the definitive source of criminal career crime data for quite some time until Marvin Wolfgang and his colleagues completed their well known Philadelphia birth cohort study, Delinquency in a Birth Cohort. In a birth cohort of all 9,945 male births in the City of Philadelphia in 1945 and followed up in official police records through age 17, Wolfgang et al. identified a group of delinquents that represented only 6 percent of the cohort and 18 percent of the cohort’s delinquents but were responsible for committing roughly half of all the offenses and about two-thirds of all of the violent offenses. In a 10-year follow-up study of 10 percent of the original Philadelphia birth cohort, Wolfgang, Terence Thornberry, and Robert Figlio found that these chronic offenders, originally defined as having had five or more police contacts as juveniles, had increased the seriousness of their offending into adulthood. Designed as a replication of the original study, Paul Tracy, Wolfgang, and Figlio captured all 27,160 births in the City of Philadelphia and obtained their criminal records through age 17 and then in a subsequent follow-up through age 26 (Tracy & Kempf-Leonard, 1996). Known as the Second Philadelphia Birth Cohort, Tracy et al. (1990) found even higher rates of chronic offending. Specifically, chronic offenders represented 7 percent of the cohort and 23 percent of the offenders yet were responsible for committing 61 percent of all the offenses, including 60 percent of homicides, 75 percent of forcible rapes, 73 percent of robberies, and 65 percent of the aggravated assaults. Since Wolfgang et al.’s seminal work, a number of other studies have replicated the “chronic offender” finding (ranging from 2 percent to 14 percent of the offending population), and these offenders are responsible for at least half of all the offenses committed (Jennings, 2006). In addition, a series of other well recognized longitudinal studies have made notable contributions to the criminal career literature and have built upon the Philadelphia Birth Cohort study in important ways, such as the addition of self-reported offending

236

Criminal Career Paradigm

information and the inclusion of a large set of survey and attitudinal information. Some of the study sites and affiliated authors include Racine, Wisconsin (Lyle Shannon); London (Donald West and David Farrington); Montreal (Richard Tremblay); Dunedin (Terrie Moffitt) and Christchurch (David Fergusson), New Zealand; and three inter-related studies funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Denver, Rochester, and Pittsburgh (Rolf Loeber, Thornberry, David Huizinga). The next section reviews some of the empirical evidence on each criminal career dimension.

Empirical Findings From Criminal Career Research This section briefly reviews the empirical literature on criminal careers, focusing on the prevalence and frequency of offending, age of onset and desistance, career length, and specialization. Prevalence/Participation

As conceptualized in the criminal career framework, the notion of prevalence differentiates between those individuals who participate in criminal activity and those who do not and is generally measured as the number of individuals who reported committing a crime (or were convicted of an offense) during a given time period. Because of the variability in measurement and definitions of criminal activity, prevalence rates vary between studies. For example, Farrington (2002) found that 96 percent of males in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development self-reported criminal activity up to age 32, and 40 percent were convicted of a crime by age 30. Other studies report similarly high rates of criminal activity among young populations. Moffitt et al. found that by age 18, almost all juveniles sampled in the Dunedin Health and Human Development Study, a birth cohort of more than 1,000 males and females from Dunedin, New Zealand, reported engaging in some illegal activity (only 9 percent of males and 14 percent of females failed to report criminal behavior). However, not all studies report high prevalence rates. For instance, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data,

Charles Puzzanchera found that only 2 percent of juveniles reported ever being arrested, and less than 25 percent reported destroying property, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, or assault. Frequency

Frequency of offending is generally described as the number of criminal acts committed by active offenders in a given time period and is often denoted by the Greek letter λ. This is usually expressed as a rate, such as the number of illegal acts per active offender annually. Like prevalence, λ may be measured via self-report or official records. Although research and findings on offending frequency varies across studies, a number of consistencies emerge. Overall, the frequency of criminal activity peaks in mid- to late-adolescence and declines in the late twenties. In their comprehensive review of criminal career research, Piquero et al. (2003) found that offense frequency tended to peak at age 16 after which it began a slow decline throughout late adolescence and into early adulthood. Similarly, the total number of convictions appears to peak between ages 17 and 20. This is not surprising since the extant research shows that offending information gleaned from self-reports, followed by both arrest and then conviction records, tends to peak earlier with the former and later with the latter officially based measures (Moffitt et al., 2001). Other studies suggest higher annual rates of offending, but this finding appears to be due to sample composition. For example, using data from the Rand Inmate Survey, William Spelman reports that the average offender commits approximately eight crimes each year while actively offending, and offenders who were ever incarcerated reported committing between 30 and 50 crimes annually. Given the high recidivism rate among convicted offenders, this high level of offending is not unreasonable. As a further illustration, David Farrington, Sandra Lambert, and Donald West estimated that the probability of recidivism among Cambridge males was between 0.79 and 0.91 from the third to the tenth offense, thereby indicating a relatively strong level of continuity and continuation after a certain level of offending has been attained.

Criminal Career Paradigm

Onset

Recognized as one of the most important of all criminal career dimensions because of its signaling of an individual’s criminal propensity (Farrington et al., 1990; Moffitt, 1993), the onset of criminal activity is the age of the offender upon commission of the first criminal act. Most studies report that the age of offending onset generally ranges from 13 to 19 depending upon the type of crime (Elliott et al., 1987; Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999) and data source (earlier in self-reports, later in official records). For example, in the Cambridge study, shoplifting onset peaked between ages 13 and 14, while more serious offenses (such as assault) peaked at ages 17 to 19 (Farrington et al., 1990). Additionally, an earlier onset age predicts a longer criminal career, with a greater number of offenses (Farrington et al., 1998). These results have been replicated consistently across studies and samples. Duration and Desistence

Recognizing the inherent difficulties in identifying the true cessation of an individual’s criminal career, the duration of a criminal career has typically been conceptualized as the time period from one’s initial offense to their last offense (Blumstein et al., 1982). Empirical research shows that there is a great deal of continuity in criminal activity over time (Piquero et al., 2007), and a small number of offenders are responsible for the largest proportion of offenses (Farrington & West, 1993). These chronic offenders usually begin criminal activity early, with those initiating between the ages of 10 and 13 evidencing the longest criminal career duration, with an average of 8.8 offenses (Farrington et al., 1998). In the Cambridge study, 66.7 percent of offenders who were active at ages 10 to 15 were still active at ages 16 to 20 (Piquero et al., 2003, 2007). In contrast, offenders with a later onset age (21–30 years) averaged a lower number of offenses and duration of offending (1.8 offenses and 2.3 years of offending). Another study reported that the duration of criminal careers from first to last conviction was 10.4 years when one-time offenders were excluded from analyses (when these one-time offenders were included, the duration was 7.1 years) (Farrington, 1992). From first police contact to last arrest, Piquero, Brame, and Lynam

237

(2004) found that the average length of the criminal career in their sample of California Youth Authority parolees was 17.3 years. Using data from six different birth cohorts between 1953 and 1978 totaling over 58,000 males and females from England and Wales, Brian Francis et al. found that while age at first conviction was the strongest predictor of career length, the risk of desistance remained constant over a period of 20 to 25 years if the offender did not desist after the first conviction. Using the world’s longest longitudinal study on crime, John Laub and Robert Sampson (2003, p. 90) estimated that the average career length among the Glueck delinquents followed through age 70 was 25.6 years for all crimes, lower for violence (9.2 years) and higher for property (13.6 years). Exploring the notion of residual career length (i.e., the length of time remaining in a criminal career) with data from the Cambridge study, Lila Kazemian and Farrington found that residual career length declined with age and with each successive conviction, and that age of onset was strongly related to residual career length. Turning to the study of desistance (i.e., the actual termination of a criminal career), research has developed much more slowly, largely because of the difficulties in measurement and operationalization associated with the term desistance and knowing the true end point of an offender’s career (Laub & Sampson, 2001). A likely consequence of this has been that criminologists have turned their attention to developing theoretical accounts (Laub & Sampson, 2003) and methodological approaches (Bushway et al., 2001) for desistance-related efforts. A 2003 study by Shawn Bushway and colleagues in particular is noteworthy. Using self-reported offending data from ages 13.5 to 22 from the Rochester Youth Development Study, they examined whether conclusions regarding desistance varied across both a “static” definition and a trajectory-based “developmental” definition. Settling on a particular trajectory that fit their developmental definition of having “experienced real change,” Bushway et al. found agreement in only 4.8 percent of the cases using the more common static definition and the trajectory-based developmental definition. This study notwithstanding, most types of crimes decrease with age; the average age of desistance ranges from 20 to 29 (Farrington, 1992), and most offenders desist by middle adulthood (Laub & Sampson, 2003).

238

Criminal Career Paradigm

Specialization/Versatility

Specialization may be described as the repeated involvement of an offender in one type of criminal activity. Studies tend to suggest some more specialization in property as opposed to violent crime (Petersilia et al., 1978; Piquero, 2000; Piquero & Buka, 2002; Spelman, 1994), and that there is general tendency for male offenders to not be highly specialized but a slight trend for female specialization (Piquero, 2000; Soothill et al., 2002). However, their differences are ever so slight as both males and females are relatively diverse in their offending (Mazerolle et al., 2000; Piquero & Buka, 2002). There is some evidence that specialization increases with age (Soothill et al., 2002). Specifically, Piquero (1999) reported that after age 20, offenders typically begin to diversify and specialize. Finally, there seems to be some evidence of short-term specialization among high-rate offenders, only to be followed by more long-term versatility (Sullivan et al., 2006). These efforts not withstanding, the general conclusion in many specialization studies is that their specialization is the exception—and versatility the norm—throughout offender careers.

Theories in Criminal Career Research Changes that naturally occur across the life course provide impetus for a theoretical orientation that moves beyond the static theories traditionally employed in criminology. These frameworks adopt a life-course lens and assume that, while continuity is relevant, change is as well (Paternoster et al., 1997). Continuity and change are intimately related concepts, and both are crucial to understanding the initiation, maintenance, and desistance from a criminal career. Trajectories may be defined as the sequence of development over the life course, such as social or professional development, or criminal activity, while transitions are single events embedded within a trajectory that may alter an individual’s trajectory or development. These would include events such as a marriage, a job, and geographical relocation (Piquero et al., 2003). Trajectories and transitions play an essential role in the development, maintenance, and cessation of criminal activity. Broadly speaking, this life-course perspective fits under the umbrella of developmental/lifecourse criminology (Jennings & Piquero, 2009),

which asserts that criminal behavior and age are interrelated (Farrington, 2003). Using much of this empirical criminal career based knowledge as a foundation, the theories highlighted in the next section attempt to explain why some offenders continue committing crimes while others desist over time. Moffitt’s Developmental Taxonomy

Moffitt’s taxonomy focuses on two mutually exclusive classifications of offenders, known as “adolescence-limited” versus “life-course persistent” offenders. These groups are differentiated by individual characteristics, including neuropsychological deficits, parental socialization, and environmental context. The very small group of life-course persistent offenders is hypothesized to suffer from neuropsychological deficits and from exposure to deficient environmental circumstances. These offenders initiate antisocial behavior early in the life course and are rejected by conventional peers. Facing few prospects for change, life-coursepersisters evidence antisocial, criminal, and negative behavior across all life domains and throughout much of the life course. Adolescence-limited offenders, on the other hand, offend for shorter periods of time and desist from criminal activity early. According to Moffitt, these offenders commit crime because of internal conflict resulting from the maturity gap (i.e., adolescents feel like adults and seek to be treated as such but are not permitted to do so) and peer social context. This type of offender generally commits crimes that symbolize their transition to adulthood, such as property and drug crimes rather than violent acts. Relying on their socialization and prosocial attitudes, virtually all adolescence-limited offenders desist from crime with entrance into adulthood. Sampson and Laub’s Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

Unlike the group-based model articulated by Moffitt, this next perspective contends that a general model operates for most all offenders. Sampson and Laub (1993) proposed that people commit crime due to weak relationships with family, peers, schools, and other adult institutions (e.g., jobs,

Criminal Career Paradigm

marriage). Background characteristics (such as ethnicity, parental criminality, family functioning, and socioeconomic position) as well as individual differences (e.g., intelligence and behavioral disorders) indirectly affect attachment and socialization (informal social control) and this effect varies by age group. Therefore, adolescents are presumed to commit the majority of criminal acts because they are attached to a large number of delinquent acquaintances during this developmental period. According to the theory, some individuals continue to offend because of reduced social control, and the type and quality (rather than the mere presence) of risk or protective factors affect changes in criminal behavior. Importantly, Sampson and Laub argue that major life transitions can substantially alter an offender’s criminal trajectory and open opportunities for desistance from crime. For example, the quality of marriage has been shown to be significantly related to desistance from crime (Laub et al., 1998). Sampson and Laub (1997) have extended their theory to include the notion of “cumulative disadvantage” from labeling theory. This construct links prior criminal behavior to future criminal behavior through deteriorating links to prosocial society. For example, one criminal offense may result in an arrest and incarceration, and this negative event may make it more difficult for the offender to obtain a job upon release; as a result, fewer outlets to conventional society will be available for the individual to return to a law-abiding state. As such, future criminal activity may result from the labeling-related consequences of the first criminal offense. Laub and Sampson (2003) have continued developing their theory and have begun to consider the notion of “human agency,” or the notion of projective or transformative action within structural constraints (Laub et al., 2006), into their lifecourse explanation of criminal activity. Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

Farrington’s (2003) developmental theory integrates components of rational choice, control, social learning, strain, and labeling theories. The key construct is “antisocial potential,” or an individual’s potential for engaging in antisocial behavior. Antisocial potential (AP) varies with age and has a highly skewed distribution, as most people

239

have very low AP and low levels of criminal behavior as a result. AP may be differentiated into two typologies: long-term versus short-term. Long-term AP is determined by individual characteristics, such as prosocial rearing, impulsivity, life events, and stress. There appears to be an interaction effect between these risk factors for higher long-term AP, as the presence of two or more risk factors results in exceptionally high levels of long-term AP. Comparatively, short-term AP is determined by motivational factors and situational characteristics that influence context-specific offending at the time the decision to offend (or not) is made. These short-term factors are dynamic and change depending upon the situation. Persons with low long-term AP will not offend even when it appears rational to do so, as persons with low short-term AP will commit offenses even when it is irrational for them to do so (e.g., when bored or intoxicated). Each of these theories reviewed above help shed light on why offending differs largely by age group. Using these theories and the prior criminal career empirical research as a backdrop, policy issues for the application of this knowledge are discussed in the following section.

Policy Issues in Criminal Career Research Within the criminal career paradigm and its related theoretical framework, there are three avenues for crime control: prevention, trajectory modification, and incapacitation. Prevention activities seek to reduce the number of non-offenders who engage in crime, often using a general deterrence philosophy. Trajectory modification consists of rehabilitation of offenders and specific (or individual) deterrence, and these programs seek to reduce the frequency or severity of offending. Trajectory modification typically includes attendance at treatment, educational, or job training programs (Piquero et al., 2003). Incapacitation seeks to remove offenders from society so they are physically incapable of committing additional crimes. Prevention

Deterrence assumes that individuals are rational beings, and the threat of immediate, certain,

240

Criminal Career Paradigm

and severe punishment will prevent criminal activity. Although embodying the cornerstone of criminal justice, there has been little empirical research on the effect of deterrence policies on individual criminal career trajectories. Those studies evaluating punishment-oriented efforts have not been met with much success (Greenwood, 2005). Much more common and effective have been programs aimed at preventing individuals from initial criminal activity and subsequent programs aimed at intervening in offender’s lives once a criminal career has been initiated (Greenwood, 2005). For example, early family-parenting training programs (Piquero et al., 2009), self-control modification efforts, and cognitive-based therapies (Landenberger & Lipsey, 2005) have all been found to improve cognitive abilities and decision making among exposed youths, which in turn have resulted in lower delinquency and antisocial behavior. Trajectory Modification

Empirical evidence from developmental criminology indicates that many offenders will desist on their own, as a result of significant life events, or via decreased association with delinquent acquaintances. Yet, for the small number of offenders who do not desist on their own, rehabilitation, education, job training, or other correctional programs are often seen as beneficial and required as a condition of sentencing and subsequent transition into the community. Punitive correctional programs do not appear to reduce recidivism (Currie, 1998; MacKenzie, 1997; Nagin, 1998), although a recent meta-analysis has demonstrated the effectiveness of other types of interventions with juveniles who may be initiating their criminal careers. Mark Lipsey found that the most effective correctional interventions may reduce recidivism by as much as 40 to 50 percent. In a discussion of trajectory modification among offenders, the principles of effective correctional intervention should be adhered to (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007). For example, programs for new arrestees should target criminogenic risk factors, or those known predictors of recidivism early in the criminal career. Multiple meta-analyses have demonstrated that the best predictors of crime and recidivism are dynamic in nature, and trajectories

may be modified with the proper tailored interventions targeting antisocial attitudes, beliefs, and values; antisocial peer-influences; self-control; impulsivity; and risky behaviors (Andrews & Bonta, 1998; Gendreau et al., 1996). These treatments and programs should meet the needs of offenders (known as the responsivity principle) and meet the needs of the population at risk (Andrews, 1995). In other words, trajectories of crime may be altered by targeting the root of the individual’s problems, such as a broken home, money problems, or social conflict. Incapacitation

Strategies of incapacitation involve physically removing the offender from society to reduce criminal activity. There are two types of incapacitation that may be implemented to reduce crime committed by offenders. Collective (or general) incapacitation philosophies increase the volume of prison populations (regardless of the offender or type of offense), while selective incapacitation seeks to institutionalize the most persistent offenders who pose the greatest risk for future offending (Piquero et al., 2003). A number of laws have been passed that seek to identify and lengthen the incarceration period of the most habitual offenders. Truth-in-sentencing laws, for example, extend the incapacitation period of convicted offenders by increasing the minimum sentence that must be served prior to parole eligibility. Similarly, mandatory minimum sentencing also increases the length of incarceration for certain crimes (e.g., aggravated violent offenses). Threestrikes laws specify an extended incarceration period for the third offense, generally ranging from 25 years to a life sentence. Finally, habitual offender statutes allow for increased punishment for repeat recidivists. Each of these laws allows for increased incapacitation of career criminals in an attempt to remove the small number of chronic offenders from society. Laws that target selective incapacitation seek to identify chronic, career offenders soon after the onset of a criminal career in order to maximize the effect of incapacitation under the assumption that a long sentence will prevent a large number of crimes. Identification of these career criminals at an early point in time, however, is difficult. Most

Criminal Career Paradigm

offenders who are released recidivate within 2 years after incarceration, making selective incapacitation difficult with such a high number of active recidivists (Greenwood & Turner, 1987). The misclassification rate for identifying high-rate, serious offenders is also relatively high (as much as 60 percent) (Auerhahn, 1999). Additionally, Franklin Zimring, Sam Kamin, and Gordon Hawkins did not find three-strikes laws effective in decreasing the rates of serious criminal behavior in California. Specifically, these authors found that the thirdstrike arrest was made at the average age of 34.6, which is an age at which the duration of offenders’ criminal careers is winding down. Therefore, the longer sentences were being imposed when offenders were closer to the age of desistance from criminal activity (after their third strike), rather than earlier (after the first strike) where there is still some considerable length remaining in the offender’s criminal career. Thus, it is important for policies to identify and target high-rate, chronic offenders early in their criminal career trajectories in order to have the greatest effect. Even fewer studies have examined how incapacitation alters (upward or downward) subsequent criminal careers (Piquero & Blumstein, 2007). In one recent study, Avinash Singh Bhati and Piquero used arrest history data from a large sample of prisoners released from state prisons in 1994 and followed for 3 years after release. They found that most releasees were either deterred from future offending or merely incapacitated by their incarceration. In fact, only about 4 percent had a criminogenic effect (i.e., increased their subsequent offending).

Conclusion The knowledge base on criminal career research is strong and has served as an important foundation for criminological—especially developmental/lifecourse—theories. Going forward, and with the aid of longitudinal data and recently developed methodological and statistical techniques that have yielded evidence about group-based offending trajectories (Piquero, 2008), there is great hope in what can be learned about life-course offending patterns. It will also be important that this material be brought to bear in an effective and understandable way so as to ensure that criminal justice

241

policies are based on the most sound scientific evidence about true—and not assumed—patterns and causes of criminal activity over the life course. Alex R. Piquero, Wesley G. Jennings, and Jennifer Reingle See also Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory; Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending; Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

References and Further Readings Andrews, D. A. (1995). The psychology of criminal conduct and effective treatment. In J. McGuire (Ed.), What works: Reducing reoffending (pp. 35–62). West Sussex, UK: Wiley. Andrews, D. A., & Bonta, J. (1998). Psychology of criminal conduct (2nd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Auerhahn, K. (1999). Selective incapacitation and the problem or prediction. Criminology, 37, 703–734. Bhati, A., & Piquero, A. R. (2008). Estimating the impact of incarceration on subsequent offending trajectories: Deterrent, criminogenic, or null effect? Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 98, 207–253. Blumstein, A., & Cohen, J. (1987). Characterizing criminal careers. Science, 237, 985–991. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Farrington, D. P. (1988). Criminal career research: Its value for criminology. Criminology, 26, 1–35. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Hsieh, P. (1982). The duration of adult criminal careers (Final report submitted to National Institute of Justice, August 1982). Pittsburgh, PA: School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie Mellon University. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., Roth, J. A., & Visher, C. A. (Eds.). (1986). Criminal careers and “career criminals” (Vol. 1, Report of the Panel on Criminal Careers, National Research Council). Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. Bushway, S. D., Piquero, A. R., Broidy, L. M., Cauffman, E., & Mazerolle, P. (2001). An empirical framework for studying desistance as a process. Criminology, 39, 491–515. Bushway, S. D., Thornberry, T. P., & Krohn, M. D. (2003). Desistance as a developmental process:

242

Criminal Career Paradigm

A comparison of static and dynamic approaches. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 19, 129–153. Currie, E. (1998). Crime and punishment in America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Elliott, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Morse, B. (1987). Selfreported violent offending: A descriptive analysis of juvenile violent offenders and their offending careers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 1, 472–514. Farrington, D. P. (1986). Age and crime. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 7, pp. 189–250). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farrington, D. P. (1990). Age, period, cohort, and offending. In D. M. Gottfredson & R. V. Clarke (Eds.), Policy and theory in criminal justice: Contributions in honor of Leslie T. Wilkins (pp. 51–75). Aldershot, UK: Avebury. Farrington, D. P. (1992). Criminal career research in the United Kingdom. British Journal of Criminology, 32, 521–536. Farrington, D. P. (2002). Understanding and preventing youth crime. In Youth justice: Critical readings (pp. 238–253). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Farrington, D. P. (2003). Developmental and life-course criminology: Key theoretical and empirical issues—the 2002 Sutherland award address. Criminology, 41, 221–255. Farrington, D. P., Lambert, S., & West, D. J. (1998). Criminal careers of two generations of family members in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. Studies on Crime and Crime Prevention, 7, 85–106. Farrington, D. P, & West, D. J. (1993). Criminal, penal, and life histories of chronic offenders: Risk and protective factors and early identification. Criminal Behavior and Mental Health, 3, 492–523. Francis, B., Soothill, K., & Piquero, A. R. (2007). Estimation issues and generational changes in modeling criminal career length. Crime and Delinquency, 53, 84–105. Gendreau, P., Little, T., & Goggin, C. (1996). A metaanalysis of the predictors of adult offender recidivism: What works! Criminology, 34, 575–607. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1950). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1968). Delinquents and nondelinquents in perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenwood, P. W. (2006). Changing lives: Delinquency prevention as crime control policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Greenwood, P. W., & Turner, S. (1987). Selective incapacitation revisited: Why the high-rate offenders are hard to predict (Rand Report No. R-3397-NIJ). Santa Monica, CA: Rand. Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. G. (1983). Age and the explanation of crime. American Journal of Sociology, 89, 552–584. Jennings, W. G. (2006). Revisiting prediction models in policing: Identifying high-risk offenders. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 31, 35–50. Jennings, W. G., & Piquero, A. R. (2009). Life course criminology. In J. M. Miller (Ed.), 21st century criminology: A reference handbook (Vol. 1, pp. 262–270). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kazemian, L., & Farrington, D. P. (2006). Exploring residual career length and residual number of offenses for two generations of repeat offenders. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 43, 89–113. Landenberger, N. A., & Lipsey, M. W. (2005). The positive effects of cognitive-behavioral programs for offenders: A meta-analysis of factors associated with effective treatment. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 1, 451–476. Laub, J. H., Nagin, D. S., & Sampson, R. J. (1998). Good marriages and trajectories of change in criminal offending. American Sociological Review, 63, 225–238. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2001). Understanding desistance from crime. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 28, pp. 1–69). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys to age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laub, J. H., Sampson, R. J., & Sweeten, G. A. (2006). Assessing Sampson and Laub’s Life-Course Theory of Crime. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & C. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (advances in criminological theory: Vol. 15, pp. 313–332). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Lipsey, M. W. (1999). Can rehabilitative programs reduce the recidivism of juvenile offenders? An inquiry in to the effectiveness of practical programs. Virginia Journal of Social Policy and Law, 6, 611–641. Lipsey, M. W., & Cullen, F. T. (2007). The effectiveness of correctional rehabilitation: A review of systematic reviews. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 3, 297–320. MacKenzie, D. L. (1997). Criminal justice and crime prevention. In L. W. Sherman, D. Gottfredson, D. MacKenzie, J. Eck, P. Reuter, & S. Bushway (Eds.), Preventing crime: What works, what doesn’t, what’s

Criminal Career Paradigm promising (Research Report, NCJ 165366) (Chap. 9, pp. 1–76). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. Mazerolle, P., Brame, R., Paternoster, R., Piquero, A., & Dean, C. (2000). Onset age, persistence, and offending versatility: Comparisons across gender. Criminology, 38, 1143–1172. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). “Life-course persistent” and “adolescence-limited” antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., Rutter, M., & Silva, P. A. (2001). Sex differences in antisocial behavior: Conduct disorder, delinquency, and violence in the Dunedin Longitudinal Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nagin, D. S. (1998). Criminal deterrence research at the outset of the twenty-first century. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 23, pp. 1–42). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paternoster, R., Dean, C. W., Piquero, A., Mazerolle, P., & Brame, R. (1997). Generality, continuity, and change in offending. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 13, 231–266. Petersilia, J., Greenwood, P. W., & Lavin, M. (1978). Criminal careers of habitual felons (National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration). Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Piquero, A. R. (2000). Assessing the relationships between gender, chronicity, seriousness, and offense skewness in criminal offending. Journal of Criminal Justice, 28, 103–116. Piquero, A. R. (2008). Taking stock of developmental trajectories of criminal activity over the life course. In A. Liberman (Ed.), Longitudinal research on crime and delinquency (pp. 23–78). New York: Springer. Piquero, A. R., & Blumstein, A. (2007). Does incapacitation reduce crime? Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 23, 267–286. Piquero, A. R., Brame, R., & Lynam, D. (2004). Studying career length through early adulthood among serious offenders. Crime and Delinquency, 50, 412–435. Piquero, A. R., & Buka, S. L. (2002). Linking juvenile and adults patterns of criminal activity in the providence cohort of the national collaborative perinatal project. Journal of Criminal Justice, 30, 1–14. Piquero, A. R., Farrington, D. P., & Blumstein, A. (2003). The criminal career paradigm. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 30, pp. 359–506). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

243

Piquero, A. R., Farrington, D. P., & Blumstein, A. (2007). Key issues in criminal career research: New analyses of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Piquero, A. R., Farrington, D. P., Welsh, B. C., Tremblay, R. E., & Jennings, W. G. (2009). Effects of early family/parent training programs on antisocial behavior and delinquency. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 5, 83–120. Puzzanchera, C. M. (2000). Self-reported delinquency by 12-year-olds, 1997 (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Fact Sheet No. 03). Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice. Quetelet, A. (1984). Research on the propensity for crime at different ages. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. (Original work published 1831) Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1990). Crime and deviance over the life course: The salience of adult social bonds. American Sociological Review, 55, 609–627. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1992). Crime and deviance in the life course. Annual Review of Sociology, 18, 63–84. Shaw, C. (1930). The Jack Roller: A delinquent boy’s own story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soothill, K., Francis, B., & Fligelstone, R. (2002). Patterns of offending behaviour: A new approach. Final report presented to the British Home Office. London: Research Development and Statistics Directorate, Home Office. Spelman, W. (1994). Criminal incapacitation. New York: Plenum. Sullivan, C. McGloin, J., Pratt, T. C., & Piquero, A. R. (2006). Rethinking the “norm” of offender generality: An examination of short-term offending specialization at the individual level. Criminology, 44, 199–233. Tibbetts, S. G., & Piquero, A. R. (1999). The influence of gender, low birth weight, and disadvantaged environment in predicting early onset of offending: A test of Moffitt’s interactional hypothesis. Criminology, 37, 843–878. Tolan, P. H., & Gorman-Smith, D. (1998). Development of serious and violent offending careers. In R. Loeber & D. P. Farrington (Eds.), Serious and violent juvenile offenders: Risk factors and successful interventions (pp. 68–85). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tracy, P. E., & Kempf-Leonard, K. (1996). Continuity and discontinuity in criminal careers. New York: Plenum. Tracy, P. E., Wolfgang, M. E., & Figlio, R. M. (1990). Delinquency in two birth cohorts. New York: Plenum.

244

Croall, Hazel: Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

Wolfgang, M. E., Figlio, R. M., & Sellin, T. (1972). Delinquency in a birth cohort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolfgang, M., Thornberry, T. P., & Figlio, R. M. (1987). From boy to man, from delinquency to crime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zimring, F. E., Kamin, S., & Hawkins, G. (1999). Crime and punishment in California: The impact of three strikes and you’re out. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California.

Croall, Hazel: Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime White-collar crime is viewed most often as unlawful conduct that elites and the powerful commit without fear of coming into contact of the criminal justice system. Hazel Croall questions the elitist stereotype of white-collar crime by examining the differences in offenders and offenses that exist for individual and corporate offending. She also questions the second assumption of differential enforcement of respectable white-collar offenders. When Edwin Sutherland first introduced the term, he argued that elites were able to influence the administration of law and avoid the criminal justice system. Croall argues that this understanding of white-collar crime is too simple. Individuals of high social status may not be brought to the attention of the criminal justice system partly because of their ability to influence the administration of law, but it may also be attributed to other structural and market factors. While the scholarly community and society have embraced a typecast of the elite white-collar offender who possesses a high-level position within his or her occupation, it oversimplifies explanations and theories of crime. Croall argues that this emphasis on the elite, corporate offender hides the other types of offenders and offenses of white-collar crime. Croall questions the assumption that there is a homogenous group of white-collar offenders composed of respectable persons of the business community. Croall draws this conclusion from a study conducted in 1987 in which she examined crimes against the consumer, which were violations of consumer protection legislation in the United

Kingdom. These violations included food adulteration, food sold at unhygienic locations, misleading descriptions of goods and prices, and the sale of goods with short weight or measure. Croall considered these violations to be white-collar crimes because they “are committed by persons ‘in the course of trade and business,’ and consumers are diffuse victims, poorly organized and often ignorant of their victimization” (Croall, 1989, p. 158). What is absent from her criteria of white-collar crime is that offenders are characterized by a high social status or respectability. This study of violations of the consumer protection legislation is characteristic of typical whitecollar offenses, yet the typical corporate offender was not always the perpetrator of these crimes. From official records and court observations, Croall found that the typical offender was not the large corporation but rather the small business. Furthermore, she discovered that there was also a small representation of criminal businesses, which are entities that are organized for the purposes of illegitimate activities. Croall’s data challenge the typical depiction of the large corporation as the white-collar offender. Croall’s investigation provides insight into the varieties of offenses and offenders that are involved in violations of the consumer protection legislation. Even though these cases appear to be trivial offenses by smaller businesses, they are important to consider because they still affect a number of victims. The usual portrayal of the wealthy, corporate criminal obfuscates the other types of white-collar offenders. Larger, more powerful corporations are blamed for receiving differential enforcement by the criminal justice system. Yet Croall argues that there is more than a simple explanation for the lack of appearance of large perpetrators in the criminal justice system. Instead, other structural factors may be at play as well. It is a complex interaction between individuals, the market, and the criminal justice system that shapes the visibility of whitecollar crimes. Furthermore, even though larger corporations may be able to avoid the criminal justice system, it does not mean that smaller businesses do not engage in white-collar crimes. This simplified explanation affects the way in which white-collar offenders are typically characterized and hides the different varieties of offenses that are committed.

Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime

Croall seeks to address the main assumptions of white-collar crime, including the misconception that white-collar crime is committed exclusively by elites and that they are responsible for influencing the criminal justice system’s response to violations. Too much emphasis on the typical white-collar lawbreaker as a corporate, upper-class offender overshadows the other varieties of white-collar crimes. In addition, it is impossible to create distinct groups of white-collar crimes because each group contains many types. A general category of the corporate offender is not as distinct as one might think since the varieties of offenses and offenders intersect with similar offenses and offenders of other categories. Croall argues that in order to explain white-collar crime, theories must examine how the market and structural factors impact the different groups of the offenders: employees, corporations, small businesses, and criminal businesses. Erin Harbinson See also Capitalism and White-Collar Crime; Clinard, Marshall B.: The Black Market; Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals; Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime; Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Clinard, M. B., & Quinney, R. (1973). Occupational criminal behavior. In Criminal behavior systems: A typology (2nd ed., pp. 187–205). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Croall, H. (1989). Who is the white-collar criminal? British Journal of Criminology, 29, 157–174. Daly, K. (1989). Gender and varieties of white-collar crime. Criminology, 27, 769–794. Sutherland, E. H. (1940). White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review, 5, 1–12.

Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime Most criminological theories generally fall into one of two broad categories. First, there are a number of motivational theories that emphasize

245

the importance of social conditions and cultural dynamics that may be criminogenic (e.g., anomie/ strain, economic deprivation theories). Then there are opportunity theories that focus on how the breakdown of social institutions may weaken the ability of social collectives to exert control over citizens’ behavior (e.g., routine activity, rational choice, and social disorganization theories). Francis T. Cullen’s social support theory, however, represents a bit of a departure from this dichotomous way of thinking about crime. At its most basic level, instead of looking at the ways in which individuals or communities may or may not be exposed to certain criminogenic conditions, social support theory is more oriented toward explaining how certain social-contextual conditions may insulate people from crime and victimization. This is not to say that social support theory denies the importance of either formal or informal mechanisms of social control in explaining the problem of crime. Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that conceptions of crime that emphasize the notion of “control” can be enormously useful, from informing certain types of policing strategies (Mazerolle et al., 1998) to evaluating the efficacy of more traditional sociological models of informal community control and supervision (Lowenkamp et al., 2003; Sampson et al., 1997). Nevertheless, the problem, according to the primary architects of social support theory, is that criminological theories premised on the notion of control often err in their assumption that the only effective approach to crime prevention “requires doing something to a person rather than for a person” (Cullen et al., 1999, p. 189, emphasis in the original). Accordingly, the purpose of this entry is to present an overview of Cullen’s theory of social support and crime. In doing so, a discussion of the central tenets of the theory and a review of its empirical status in the field of criminology is provided.

Social Support Theory Elements of social support theory can be seen throughout the work of many criminologists in recent decades. To be sure, theoretical perspectives as diverse as John Braithewaite’s reintegrative

246

Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime

shaming, James Coleman’s theory of social capital, Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s social disorganization, and Robert Merton’s strain/ anomie all point toward the importance of social support—even if only indirectly. While the theoretical statements outlined in such works are conceptually distinct, they each contain a basic proposition that is largely consistent—that crime is influenced by variation in degree to which individuals or communities experience levels of support, shared values, cohesiveness, and a willingness to come to the aid of those in need. Throughout the criminological literature, social support has frequently been defined as “the perceived or actual instrumental and/or expressive provisions supplied by the community, social networks, and confiding partners” (Lin, 1986, p. 18). As such, this definition alludes to three important dimensions of support. First, it implies a distinction between the actual delivery and the perception of support. This distinction essentially suggests that even if individuals do not actively receive support, they can certainly anticipate and interpret it in the context of social situations, and that such perceptions are important in their own right (Cullen, 1994). Second, the distinction between instrumental and expressive dimensions of support is also important to consider. Instrumental provisions of support refer to using a relationship as a means to achieve some desired goal (e.g., obtaining a loan or seeking employment). Expressive provisions of support, on the other hand, involve using a relationship as an end in and of itself. In other words, the expressive dimension of support refers to the exchange of frustrations and sentiments between individuals, working through problems together, and affirming each other’s self-worth. Third, the definition of social support suggests that support can occur on multiple social levels. For example, micro-level support is generated through individual relationships, while macrolevel social support is generated through large social networks or ecological units in which an individual participates. The most distinguishable characteristic of social support is that it involves the transfer of resources from one person to another. These resources may include money, information, guidance, feedback, emotional support, and companionship.

As stated above, while abstract elements of social support can be found in a number of criminological works, the theory is primarily rooted in Cullen’s development of social support as an organizing concept for criminology. While conceptualizing social support theory, Cullen outlined a number of theoretical propositions that can be used to explain why the United States experiences higher rates of serious and violent crime than other Western industrialized nations. In terms of the ecology of crime, social support theory posits that the United States experiences higher crime rates because it is, by comparison, a less supportive society. In other words, American society is organized in such a way that it cannot generate structural or cultural social support. This is largely due to the United States’ highly heterogeneous, mobile, urban population, as well as its excessive emphasis on individualism and self-interest. Additionally, even within the United States (as well as other nations), it can be expected that communities with lower levels of social support will experience higher crime rates. In other words, communities with a high incidence of family disruption, weak social networks, and low participation in local community activities will frequently experience higher crime rates. Additional propositions linking social support and crime assert that the perception of social support lessens the likelihood that an individual will engage in criminal activity. For example, individuals receiving more support from their family are less likely to engage in crime. Accordingly, if an individual’s social network contains a high amount of social support, the effects of criminogenic strains will be lessened, thus reducing the likelihood that the individual will engage in crime. Taken together, then, at the individual level, social support theory suggests that the provision of social support (1) reduces the effect of criminogenic strains, (2) increases the ability of key societal institutions (e.g., family) to generate informal social control, and (3) increases the likelihood that an individual will turn away from a criminal pathway. Social support theory also has important implications for the criminal justice system. For instance, Cullen argues that social support leads to more effective policing and a generally more supportive correctional system. An example of supportive policing can be seen in the community-policing

Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime

movement, where officers and citizens work together to reduce crime and to address community needs in a mutually supportive manner. Social support also increases effective social control while simultaneously decreasing crime through processes such as reintegrative shaming. Furthermore, social support has an impact on victimization, as it not only lessens its incidence, but also lessens any associated pains, should such victimization occur.

The Empirical Status of Social Support Theory By and large, the body of studies testing social support theory is still in its infancy. With that in mind, available tests of social support theory have generated considerable empirical support. At the individual unit of analysis, John Paul Wright, Francis T. Cullen, and Jeremy T. Miller have shown that social support within families can be a particularly strong predictor of delinquent involvement in children. Furthermore, Wright and Cullen have shown that supportive forms of parenting can serve as a necessary precondition for other parenting dynamics— such as control—that are more likely to lead to prosocial behavior in children. At the macro-level, tests of social support theory have revealed even more consistent support for the theory. For example, city-level and state-level analyses have yielded strong support for the notion that crime rates are inversely related to the amount and nature of social support afforded to citizens (Pratt & Cullen, 2005). This strong, inverse relationship between social support and crime is virtually identical across studies that have considered the distinction between formal (e.g., support provided by schools or the criminal justice system) and informal social support (e.g., support received from friends, families, or colleagues). When applied at the cross-national level, additional research suggests that the extent to which nations are structurally and culturally organized to be supportive has a significant effect on crime rates, including violent crime rates like homicide. For example, in a study of 46 nations, Pratt and Timothy Godsey found that nations that devote a higher proportion of their gross national product (GNP) to education and health care (their indicator of social support) have lower rates of homicide. Even further, they found that social support significantly interacted with a measure of economic

247

inequality in such a way that showed that the effect of inequality on homicide was actually worse when levels of social support were low. Perhaps the most impressive evidence in support of the theory comes from Pratt and Cullen’s 2005 meta-analysis of more than 200 macro-level studies in the criminological literature. They assessed the relative strength of more than 30 different predictors of crime rates, from variables related to the criminal justice system (e.g., policing, incapacitation, and get-tough policies) to social-structural conditions (e.g., unemployment, economic deprivation, inequality). Across 40 years of research, Pratt and Cullen found that indicators of social support—such as state-based transfer payments such as welfare, health care, and education—were among the strongest and most consistent predictors of crime rates across various units of analysis (e.g., cities, counties, states, nations) and across various methodological approaches (e.g., crosssectional versus longitudinal studies). The results of these analyses have allowed researchers to place social support theory on the top tier of predictive strength, thus leading some researchers to conclude that social support should be considered as one of the field’s most promising theories.

Conclusion Criminological theories either do or do not catch on with the public and policy makers for a variety of reasons (e.g., they may be too complex, too difficult to implement for crime control purposes, too politically incorrect should they be taken seriously, and so on). Most salient among these reasons is whether the idea being offered by the theory fits with the prevailing social context of the time. To that end, the primary proposition made by social support theory—that, all else being equal, levels of crime will vary according to levels of social support—has been at odds with the conservative political movement in the United States over the last few decades. Nevertheless, as crime rates have continued to rise in the face of get-tough policies— not to mention their concurrent costs to public budgets—a window has opened for new ways of thinking about crime and crime control. It is in this context that Cullen set forth his theory of social support and crime. At its most fundamental level, Cullen contends that “whether

248

Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime

social support is delivered through governmental social programs, communities, social networks, families, interpersonal relations, or agents of the criminal justice system, it reduces criminal involvement” (p. 527). This is an ambitious statement, yet it is also one that has garnered considerable empirical support since it was introduced. As a result of this level of empirical legitimacy, two conclusions are important to consider. First, social support theory provides an intellectual alternative to the rational choice model’s emphasis on getting tough on crime. This political orientation has been extremely costly, yet it has produced little in the way of a crime control benefit. Accordingly, from an academic standpoint, scholars need to provide viable alternative ways of thinking and doing things. Social support theory can do just that. Second, and perhaps more importantly, social support theory does not necessarily render existing theoretical frameworks as either wrong or useless. It instead just means that there is another lens through which researchers can examine these existing theories; or, put differently, there is an important element that might be missing that these theories need to consider. Perhaps the most fundamental implication of Cullen’s social support paradigm has to do with the recognition that effective crime control policies must extend beyond the walls (literally and figuratively) of the criminal justice system. It is easy for both the public and policy makers to assume that each policy arena— from welfare to education, and from health care to economics—is an island unto itself that does not affect, and is not affected by, the others. The results of the research related to social support theory indicate otherwise. Indeed, reasonable and effective crime control policies are more likely to be articulated once policy makers embrace the notion that the decisions they make in one policy domain have repercussions for the others. Accordingly, adopting a more progressive crime control policy agenda—one that more explicitly takes the importance of social support into account—is more likely to result in a substantial reduction in crime relative to the policies flowing from the get-tough agenda that has dominated criminal justice policy over the last few decades. Travis C. Pratt and Tasha Kunzi

See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime; Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

References and Further Readings Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chamlin, M. B., & Cochran, J. K. (1997). Social altruism and crime. Criminology, 35, 203–227. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cullen, F. T. (1994). Social support as an organizing concept for criminology. Justice Quarterly, 11, 527–559. Cullen, F. T., Wright, J. P., & Chamlin, M. B. (1999). Social support and social reform: A progressive crime control agenda. Crime and Delinquency, 45, 188–207. Currie, E. (1997). Market, crime and community: Toward a mid-range theory of post-industrial violence. Theoretical Criminology, 1, 147–172. Drennon-Gala, D. (1994). The effects of social support and inner containment on the propensity toward delinquent behavior and disengagement in education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester. Drennon-Gala, D. (1995). Delinquency and high school dropouts: Reconsidering social correlates. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Lin, N. (1986). Conceptualizing social support. In N. Lin, A. Dean, & W. Edsel (Eds.), Social support, life events, and depression (pp. 17–30). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Lowenkamp, C. T., Cullen, F. T., & Pratt, T. C. (2003). Replicating Sampson and Groves’s test of social disorganization theory: Revisiting a criminological classic. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40, 351–373. Mazerolle, L. G., Kadleck, C., & Roehl, J. (1998). Controlling drug and disorder problems: The role of place managers. Criminology, 36, 371–404. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2006). Crime and the American dream (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Pratt, T. C. (2009). Addicted to incarceration: Corrections policy and the politics of misinformation in the United States. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pratt, T. C., & Cullen, F. T. (2005). Assessing the macrolevel predictors and theories of crime: A meta analysis.

Cultural Criminology In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 32, pp. 373–450). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pratt, T. C., & Godsey, T. W. (2002). Social support and homicide: A cross-national test of an emerging criminological theory. Journal of Criminal Justice, 30, 589–601. Pratt, T. C., & Godsey, T. (2003). Social support, inequality, and homicide: A cross-national test of an integrated theoretical model. Criminology, 41, 611–644. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924. Savolainen, J. (2000). Inequality, welfare state, and homicide: Further support for the institutional anomie theory. Criminology, 38, 1021–1042. Wright, J. P., & Cullen, F. T. (2001). Parental efficacy and delinquent behavior: Do control and support matter? Criminology, 39, 677–706. Wright, J. P., Cullen, F. T., & Miller, J. T. (2001). Family social capital and delinquent involvement. Journal of Criminal Justice, 29, 1–9.

Cultural Criminology Cultural criminology is a theoretical orientation founded on the claim that crime and crime control cannot be understood apart from the domain of culture—that is, the domain of shared symbolism, collective meaning, and mediated communication. Cultural criminologists contend that the basic issues on which criminology has traditionally focused—issues like everyday crime, individual and corporate violence, patterns of victimization, and the practice of crime control—are in fact cultural in nature. They are constructed out of symbolic interactions among people and groups, and they are shaped by ongoing conflicts over their meaning and perception. Because of this, cultural criminology advocates widening the theoretical lens of criminology, such that the analysis of crime and crime control includes a critical conceptualization of subcultural rituals, shared emotional exchanges, mass media images, and other cultural phenomena. Noting the failure of conventional criminological theories and methods to

249

engage with such phenomena, cultural criminologists in turn work to develop alternative theories and methods more attuned to the dynamics of culture and crime.

Overview Cultural criminology developed from a synthesis of two theoretical traditions in criminology, one largely British and the other primarily American. The British tradition dates roughly to the 1970s, when scholars associated with British cultural studies and the “new criminology” began investigating and theorizing the cultural dimensions of crime and crime control. These scholars explored the links between social class, leisure worlds, illicit subcultures, and the politics of social control; they likewise documented the ideological messages promoted by mediated anti-crime campaigns that targeted youth subcultures and other marginalized groups. In this way, they developed a critical analysis of the cultural environments in which both crime and crime control emerge. Around the same time, criminologists in the United States began to theorize and investigate the symbolic practices that shape crime and to ground this investigation in attentive field research in and around criminal subcultures. As encoded most distinctly in labeling theory, this approach conceptualized crime and crime control as ongoing cultural processes out of which the meaning of crime is constructed and contested. From this theoretical view, the social reality of crime—subcultural practices and rituals, public fears of victimization, social harms spawned by violent crime, criminal justice strategies for containing crime—remains always under construction. The meaning and consequences of a criminal assault, a street arrest, or a court decision are not inherent in the acts themselves; they are negotiated in the ongoing interplay between perpetrators, victims, law makers, criminal justice agencies, the mass media, and the public. Both the British and American traditions, then, came to conceptualize crime and crime control as inherently intertwined with cultural dynamics and to see that this sort of cultural understanding could aid in the critical analysis of key crime and justice issues. In the mid-1990s, the two traditions were synthesized for the first time into a distinct “cultural criminology” that also integrated newer

250

Cultural Criminology

work in postmodern theory, subcultural theory, cultural geography, and critical theory (Ferrell & Sanders, 1995). This emergent cultural criminology conceptualized in particular the ways in which criminal subcultures and criminal enterprises are shaped by shared styles, linguistic practices, codes of honor, and other cultural dynamics; it also focused on the media campaigns by which legal and political authorities criminalize alternative artists and musicians, political activists, and other cultural outsiders. Today, cultural criminologists continue to expand the purview of this approach, examining phenomena ranging from video games and Internet fight videos to crime news and terrorist subcultures. Cultural criminology in this way seeks not only to expand the substantive focus of criminology but also to reconstitute its theoretical frameworks. From the perspective of cultural criminology, the subject matter of criminology cannot simply be crime and criminals. Instead, criminology must account (1) for the ways in which crime is perceived by others—that is, for the particular meanings that crime comes to have for criminals, victims, crime control agents, and everyday citizens—and (2) for the effects of these meanings and perceptions on criminal activities, crime-control policies, and the exercise of power in contemporary society. But if this is so, cultural criminologists contend, new theoretical tools are needed, since many current criminological theories exclude a thoroughgoing analysis of contemporary culture, communication, emotion, and meaning.

Theoretical and Conceptual Developments A variety of concepts and theoretical models in cultural criminology are designed to analyze particular constellations of culture and crime and to situate this analysis within larger social and historical frameworks. Many of these likewise attempt to theorize the connections between the immediate, emotional experience of crime and the broader economic and political structures within which crime and crime control emerge. Mike Presdee’s carnival of crime concept, for example, presents a model for making sense of criminal and deviant acts such as arson, “joyriding” in stolen cars, drug taking, sadomasochistic sex, and gang rituals. In many human societies,

“carnival” has historically denoted a significant event of collective excess, temporary vulgarity, and riotous celebration—and yet an event carefully confined to certain times, places, and cultural rituals. In contemporary Western societies, though, the indulgent practices of carnival are less likely to be contained within these cultural traditions. Instead, they are in some cases sold and consumed, in the form of pornography, degrading “reality” television programs, hard-core fight videos, and other carnivalesque titillations. In other cases, the remnants of carnival are enacted as crime, in the form of vandalism, arson, joyriding, or stylized assault—and, in many cases, the boundaries between carnival as commodity and carnival as crime overlap. Cultural criminologists argue, then, that many highly visible and aggressively sensual crimes in contemporary society reflect both long-standing cultural practices and recent social changes. The concept of edgework, as developed by Jeff Ferrell, Dragan Milovanovic, and Stephen Lyng, likewise locates the emotional drama of crime within contemporary cultural and social situations. Here, the focus is on acts of extreme and often illegal risk-taking—street racing, BASE jumping, writing graffiti atop billboards and freeway signs—and on the ways in which these acts incorporate both high risk and high levels of skill. For participants, this exhilarating mix of risk and skill not only shapes their growing commitment to the addictive “adrenaline rush” of illegal edgework; it also allows them to craft a sense of personal accomplishment and an independent self, generally missing from the everyday, law-abiding worlds of deskilled work or prepackaged entertainment. Cultural criminologists argue that this understanding of edgework in turn helps explain an ironic connection between illegal edgework and criminal justice attempts to stop it. Thus, aggressive enforcement programs designed to stop illegal edgework often serve to heighten the risk associated with it, and so to promote the development of further edgework skills among participants, thereby enriching the very experience that edgeworkers seek and criminal justice agents seek to eliminate. Both the carnival of crime and edgework concepts also highlight an essential theoretical orientation within cultural criminology—an orientation toward what Jack Katz calls the “foreground” of

Cultural Criminology

crime and seductions of crime that emerge in the midst of the criminal event. From the view of cultural criminology, much existing criminological theory is constituted in an oddly back-to-front manner; that is, it conceptualizes the sorts of background economic, social, or ethnic structures that spawn crime, but fails to address the experiential foreground of the actual criminal event. In contrast, concepts like the carnival of crime and edgework are designed to begin with a close examination of the emotional dynamics, experiential meanings, and performative drama of crime for perpetrators and victims alike, and then to discover in this criminal foreground larger historical and social forces. Two other theoretical developments attempt especially to conceptualize crime and criminal justice in the context of contemporary culture. Jock Young’s theory of exclusion/inclusion, or the exclusive society, explores the tension between social exclusion and cultural inclusion, and the ways in which this tension can generate criminality. On one hand, contemporary society increasingly excludes many groups from full social and economic participation, by way of job loss, lowwage work, underfunded public education, and mass incarceration. On the other hand, the power of mass marketing and mass consumerism is such that these groups remain culturally included, socialized into desiring the same consumer goods and lifestyle products as others. Recalling the Mertonian model of adaptations to social strain, the concept of exclusion/inclusion suggests that this tension will produce increasing levels of resentment, insecurity, and humiliation, and with them crimes of retaliation, frustration, and illicit acquisition as well. A final theoretical approach focuses in particular on another distinctive aspect of contemporary society: the constant interplay of the media, crime, and criminal justice. Ferrell, Hayward, and Young’s model of media loops and spirals suggests that traditional, linear models examining the effects of media images on subsequent crime, or the accuracy of the media in reporting on previous criminality, are now largely outmoded. Instead, a model is needed that can account for a world so saturated with media technology and media images that distinctions between an event and its mediated image are often lost. In this world, crime and

251

media are linked by a looping effect in which crime and the image of crime circle back on one another, together constructing the reality of crime for participants and the public. When squad car cameras affect everyday policing, when police officers watch “reality” television policing programs for tips and pointers, when juries demand evidence like that presented in CSI-style television shows, when gang members stage violent assaults so as to record them and post them on the web, cultural criminologists argue, crime, criminal justice, and media are operating as part of an ongoing feedback loop. Moreover, these loops reproduce themselves over time—as images are reused or contextualized, as crimes are copied and reproduced—and so spawn longer spirals of crime, criminal justice, and media. Because of this, cultural criminologists contend, the analysis of media dynamics and representation is essential to a full understanding of crime, policing, courts, or any other of criminology’s concerns.

Methodological Orientations and Methodological Critique To perhaps a greater degree than many theoretical approaches, cultural criminology advocates and employs distinctive methods designed to complement its conceptual orientations. Further, a significant amount of work in cultural criminology addresses the alleged inadequacies of conventional criminological methods; in this sense, cultural criminology offers not only a theory of crime and crime control but also a theoretical critique of criminology and its everyday operations. Cultural criminologists argue, for example, that the most commonly used methods in criminology— survey research and the statistical analysis of survey results—are by their own design unable to achieve an adequate understanding of cultural dynamics involving meaning, representation, and emotion. By reducing research subjects to pre-set categories and cross-tabulation, cultural criminologists maintain, such methods extract crime and crime control from the cultural contexts in which they take shape and exclude essential human dynamics of surprise, ambiguity, and anger from the process of criminological research (Kane, 2004). Likewise, the widespread use of quantitative content analysis—the measurement of discrete textual categories—to

252

Cultural Criminology

study media coverage of crime issues precludes an understanding of the looping interplay of media and crime, and it misses the larger aesthetic and structural frames which shape the text’s meaning. In order to conduct research that is conversant with their theoretical orientations toward meaning and representation, cultural criminologists instead turn to a variety of methods that are informed by an ethnographic sensibility. Traditionally, ethnography denotes the sort of long-term, in-depth field research that allows the researcher to become part of the process by which people utilize symbolic codes and shared language to make sense of their experiences. This approach likewise allows the researcher to partake in the emotions that course through people’s experiences of crime, victimization, and criminal justice, and so to understand shared fear, excitement, and anger. Indeed, this approach has produced some of the best-known studies in cultural criminology—in-depth ethnographic accounts of illicit groups ranging from neo-Nazi skinheads, right-wing domestic terrorists, and urban street gangs to hip-hop graffiti writers, urban environmental activists, and homeless trash scroungers. In addition to this traditional practice of ethnography, cultural criminologists are developing alternative ethnographic methodologies designed to incorporate the conceptual orientations outlined above and to resonate with the particular cultural dynamics of contemporary society. Concepts like edgework and the seductions of crime, for example, focus analytic attention on the immediate dynamics that shape criminal experiences and emotions. Consequently, cultural criminologists, such as Ferrell, Hayward, and Young, have developed the notion of instant ethnography—the researcher’s deep immersion in fleeting moments of criminality or transgression—and have begun to use the method in studying BASE jumpers and other groups. Likewise, the concept and practice of liquid ethnography has developed from the understanding that many subcultures and situations today embody a swirl of global identities, mediated images, and ambiguous affiliations. Liquid ethnography denotes a researcher sensibility attuned to these dynamics—a style of in-depth research sensitive to images as well as people, to identities more shifting than stable, and to groups that remain in transition. Finally, cultural criminologists employ David Altheide’s ethnographic

content analysis in their analysis of the media and its interconnections with crime and crime control. In place of the discrete textual categories and quantification of conventional content analysis, this approach conceptualizes media texts as emergent, contested cultural processes. It is also designed to assist the researcher in producing a deep, textured account of the text and its many meanings. All of these methods are connected to cultural criminology’s theoretical orientations by the Weberian notion of verstehen, or, as it is often presented within cultural criminology, criminological verstehen (Ferrell, 1997). This concept denotes the subjective or appreciative understanding of others’ actions, emotions, and meanings; it suggests that full knowledge of a situation is gained only when the researcher is able to grasp the emotional climate and cultural logic that defines that situation. The concept of verstehen is of importance, then, not only because it encapsulates cultural criminology’s focus on the meaning of crime and victimization, but also because it further highlights the contrast between cultural criminology and more conventional criminological approaches. Rather than objectivity guaranteeing the validity of criminological knowledge, here it is emotional subjectivity and cultural attentiveness that ensure an accurate understanding of the situation under study.

Applications and Implications Cultural criminologists apply these theories and methods to a variety of substantive issues. Media research in cultural criminology often investigates the dynamic by which the mass media’s construction of particular crime issues intertwines with public perceptions and criminal justice policy. Research has also been undertaken on popular media forms such as heavy metal and goth music, cartoons and comic books, and prison films, as well as on public shrines, do-it-yourself subcultural promotion, and other forms of communication outside the mass media. Urban culture and urban criminality constitute another ongoing focus, with researchers such as Keith Hayward examining the links between urban consumerism, crime, and social control, or researchers such as Louis Kontos, David Brotherton, and Luis Barrios reconceptualizing the cultural and political practices of street gangs and graffiti crews. In addition, cultural criminologists increasingly explore the gendered

Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime

meanings of crime; research has, for example, examined women’s practices of edgework, the intersections of ethnicity and gendered expectations in domestic violence, and the lived experiences of street prostitutes and other sex workers. In all of this, cultural criminologists emphasize that the subject matter of criminology is not the objective, measurable reality of crime and criminal justice, but rather the complex cultural process by which this reality is constructed and made meaningful. Finally, in reflexive fashion, they argue that criminology itself must be attentive to its own styles of representation if it is to make a useful contribution to public discourse and the common good. Because of this, cultural criminologists increasingly experiment with new forms of scholarship and alternative modes of communication— “true fiction,” manifestos, vignettes, visual analysis, websites, and films—with the hope of making criminology more engaging for students, policymakers, and the public. Jeff Ferrell See also Postmodern Theory; Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems; Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology

References and Further Readings Altheide, D. (1987). Ethnographic content analysis. Qualitative Sociology, 10, 65–77. Ferrell, J. (1997). Criminological verstehen. Justice Quarterly, 14, 3–23. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., Morrison, W., & Presdee, M. (Eds.). (2004). Cultural criminology unleashed. London: Glasshouse/Routledge. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., & Young, J. (2008). Cultural criminology: An invitation. London: Sage. Ferrell, J., Milovanovic, D., & Lyng, S. (2001). Edgework, media practices, and the elongation of meaning. Theoretical Criminology, 5, 177–202. Ferrell, J., & Sanders, C. (Eds.). (1995). Cultural criminology. Boston: Northeastern University Press/ University Press of New England. Hayward, K. (2004). City limits: Crime, consumer culture and the urban experience. London: GlassHouse/ Routledge. Kane, S. (1998). Aids alibis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kane, S. (2004). The unconventional methods of cultural criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 8, 303–321.

253

Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime. New York: Basic Books. Kontos, L., Brotherton, D., & Barrios, L. (Eds.). (2003). Gangs and society. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyng, S. (Ed.). (2005). Edgework. New York: Routledge. Presdee, M. (2000). Cultural criminology and the carnival of crime. London: Routledge. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society. London: Sage.

Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime Elliott Currie’s work spans three decades of empirical analysis on why crime, particularly violent crime, plagues the United States. His argument focuses on the labor market and its influence on crime, noting that private economic gain has become central to all aspects of life. This goal of making money takes precedence over all other social institutions, creating structural mechanisms that eventually block people from successful employment. Thus, the market economy promotes an individualistic society that denies responsibility for the conditions it creates, placing those most at-risk in an environment that breeds crime and violence.

Defining a Market Economy/Society The United States is a society that has been built around financial success, with the primary emphasis on personal economic gain. Currie refers to this as a market economy. When all aspects of a society center on economic gain, Currie labels it a market society. A market society is one where individual economic competition is encouraged without many limitations. To Currie, The pursuit of personal economic gain becomes increasingly the dominant organizing principle of social life; a social formation in which the market principles, instead of being confined to some parts of the economy, and appropriately buffered and restrained by other social institutions and norms, come to suffuse the whole social fabric— and to undercut and overwhelm other principles that have historically sustained individuals, families, and communities. (1997, pp. 151–152)

254

Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime

In a market society individualism is pushed where people are expected to succeed by themselves without much intervention from others. Those who falter or fail are left on their own to survive as this profound egocentricity makes it difficult for society to think about what is best for the whole. As the economy becomes increasingly polarized, the wealthy dominate over the less wealthy, giving those with economic power the ability to influence the direction of most social institutions. This unfettered economic gain for some has led to devastating consequences for others. The rapidly changing market has resulted in mass poverty, high levels of violence, and myriad other social problems (Currie, 1997). This has not been limited to just the United States, but also occurs in those countries that have followed in the same economic footsteps. The reality is that while the focus is on private economic gain, a market society offers very few safety nets for those who cannot compete. It is further perpetuated by the relative absence of institutions that counter the market principles. This ultimately leads to the erosion of individuals, families, and communities, which become increasingly dependent on the market to meet their needs, including material, cultural, symbolic, and psychic ones (Currie, 1998, p. 134). What is left is a “breeding ground for serious and violent crime.”

Crime and Violence in a Market Society The market economy does not operate in a vacuum. It has an overwhelming effect on all aspects of society. Differences may emerge based on the specific society affected, but there are at least seven mechanisms that are embedded in a market society that generate serious and violent crime. According to Currie, they are the progression and destruction of livelihood; the growth in extreme inequality and material deprivation; the withdrawal of public services and support, especially for families and children; the erosion of informal networks and mutual support, supervision, and care; the spread of a materialistic, neglectful, and hard culture; the unregulated marketing of the technology of violence; and the weakening of social and political alternatives (1997, p. 154). These mechanisms overlap and are intertwined, creating destructive forces that foster the conditions that breed crime and violence.

The Destruction of Livelihood

Work, in general, provides individuals with a sense of belonging and pride, both in terms of selfesteem and respect from family and the community. In order to maintain bonds with the community, people need to have satisfying, stable jobs that provide economic viability (Currie, 1985). Yet, the market society undercuts this by constantly pushing to cheapen labor or limiting, if not eliminating, opportunities for sustainable jobs (Currie, 1997). Instead of inclusive work, which provides a decent living that can support families, the market economy strives for marginal jobs, creating almost a secondary labor market. These “underemployment” jobs are becoming increasingly familiar: low-paying, often demeaning jobs that may or may not be full-time. Characteristically service-related, these jobs provide low wages that cannot support a family, coupled with poor or nonexistent medical/health benefits and the lack of retirement plans. Thus, in order to provide stability for the family, workers must either find extra jobs or work long hours, ultimately affecting childrearing and the ability to maintain strong ties with their community. As jobs are eliminated, unemployment becomes an enduring problem, which trickles down to the lower class. Lower-class, particularly minority men, have no prospects for good jobs and no community networks or positive role models connected to legitimate jobs—all of which makes opportunities for illicit activities very attractive. Long-term trends of unemployment and underemployment create larger social conditions that dramatically increase the risk for violence. According to Currie, the lack of work takes away the important prosocial bond to society. This social exclusion results in resentment, alienation, and a broad culture of failure, while at the same time, it increases the risk to become either a victim or a perpetrator of violence. Growth of Extreme Inequality and Material Deprivation

The market society continuously widens the gap between the rich and the poor by constantly pushing for the elimination of sustainable employment and, at the same time, discouraging any governmental intervention to buffer the effects of

Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime

unemployment or underemployment. This results in absolute poverty, where there is no money to provide the basics needed for survival such as food, shelter or clothing. It also creates relative poverty, where the monetary resources do not provide a standard of living that compares to what others enjoy (Currie, 2009). Extreme economic inequality has devastating effects on children. It is linked to higher rates of child abuse and neglect, the stifling of intellectual and social development, higher rates of school failure, and eventual economic marginality as an adult. Extreme income inequality is consistently linked with higher rates of homicide. Social deprivation over time affects culture where violent aggression becomes chronic, and crime and violence become tolerable (Currie, 1997). Simply stated, being at the bottom of the economic ladder is connected with crime, violence, and higher rates of homicide and victimization worldwide. The Withdrawal of Public Services and Support

The mechanisms that could be put in place to alleviate the devastating effects of extreme poverty are not a priority for a market society. A market society pushes for minimal public intervention, which forces individuals and families to rely on themselves to meet basic needs. Public programs can create safety nets to counter the effects of the market but are highly discouraged. Instead of assisting individuals and families with publicly sponsored programs such as child care, afterschool programs, and health care, everyone is left to fend for themselves. For those that are marginalized, the absence of public programs has devastating effects, creating long-term strains that lead to serious and violent crime. There is a direct correlation between societies that provide the least public support to those economically marginalized and higher rates of violence. This reluctance is reflected in the United States’ lack of resources to lessen the impact of joblessness, either through job creation or supplements to ease the economic burden.

255

both in hours worked and mobility. As workers meet the demands of their jobs, they are forced to sacrifice ties with their families and the community. Currie refers to this as the “thinning of networks” that provide friendship and support (1997, p. 161). The importance of the family is paramount in the development of human beings. The family teaches values, how to respond to others, and how to view the world. Extended families also help shape this development. But, as the market flourishes, it increasingly undermines traditional institutions of support and mutual obligation. Strong ties to family and community can buffer the effects of the market society, particularly joblessness and poverty. But when they are weakened, it undercuts the ability to nurture and supervise children and to bond with the community, isolating those most at risk. This deepens the cycle of impoverishment resulting in alienation, antagonism, and resentment (Currie, 2009). The lack of support extends to other institutions that shape the community including recreation programs, health clinics, churches, and the availability of retail businesses. The Spread of a Materialistic, Neglectful, and Hard Culture

A market society promotes both individualism and materialism, making competition and consumption more important than community welfare. Individuals strive to get ahead no matter what the cost, rewarding their success through hyper-materialism. Focus on the individual creates a cultural attitude of non-responsibility for the conditions that breed poverty, joblessness, crime, and violence. It also allows society to blame, exploit, and ignore the care and support of others less fortunate. At the same time, the market promotes the displacement of long-term employees to save money, resists improvements that remove unsafe work conditions, and continuously shrinks health care and retirement benefits. In time, it destroys the cohesiveness of a society.

The Erosion of Social Networks and Mutual Support, Supervision, and Care

The Unregulated Marketing of the Technology of Violence

To be competitive, the economic market increasingly demands flexibility of its workers,

A market society focuses on individualism and free enterprise, while resisting any attempt

256

Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime

at regulation. This is reflected in the lack of regulation on sales and possession of firearms, which contributes to the lethality of American violence. The United States leads all other advanced nations in the amount of gun involvement in crime, especially homicide. Although legislation has provided waiting periods and some restrictions on military-style assault weapons, Currie notes that there is a large informal market of gun shows and private sales that remain unregulated. Ultimately, gun violence is affected by social conditions, and where people are marginalized, guns become part of a culture of masculinity, power, and retaliation.

mimic the seven mechanisms reflect higher rates of serious crime and violence. Currie challenges the idea that it is beyond the government’s ability to change the current direction of crime and violence. Prevention and social action focused on support for families, sustainable/ decent paying jobs, job training, and nationalization of childcare and health care are just a few ways that the government can enhance and strengthen other institutions. The end result would be a more inclusive society, which at the same time would challenge the adverse effects of the market society.

Weakening of Social and Political Alternatives

See also Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory; Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology

Finally, a market society weakens the ability to rally around social change, particularly for those at the lower economic end of society. The market continually strives to weaken labor movements. This allows for worker exploitation, for lower wages with fewer benefits, and for political lobbying attempting to eviscerate standards that provide community and worker protection. At the same time, our embedded individualistic approach makes it difficult to even look beyond our own personal interests. Thus, as the market advances, it removes the ability of people to actively promote their collective well-being.

Conclusion By critiquing the economy and its adverse effect on society’s institutions, Currie uncovers the mechanisms that generate serious crime and violence. Over the years, his work has been expanded to account for global similarities and differences in crime and violence. Worldwide, societies that

Nancy Lynne Hogan

References and Further Readings Currie, E. (1985). Confronting crime: An American challenge. New York: Pantheon Books. Currie, E. (1997). Market, crime and community. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2), 147–172. Currie, E. (1998). Crime and punishment in America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Currie, E. (2009). The roots of danger: Violent crime in global perspective. Columbus, OH: Prentice Hall. Reiner, R. (2007). Law and order: An honest citizen’s guide to crime and control. London: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, I. (1999). Crime in context: A critical criminology of market societies. Boulder, CO: Westview. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society: Social exclusion, crime and difference in late modernity. London: Sage.

D sociology from the University of Massachusetts. During the time Daly was an associate professor at Yale, she, along with Dorie Klein and MarieAndree Bertrand, organized the International Feminist Conference on Women, Law, and Social Control. The conference took place in Mont Gabriel, Quebec, and was considered to be the first international conference ever on women’s crime and victimization. To its credit, the event had about 50 attendees and earned support from the National Science Foundation. Kathleen Daly made a presentation at this conference, and the comments and dialogue that occurred there were the impetus to her article publication 1 year later in the Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies. The article was titled “Women’s Pathways to Felony Court: Feminist Theories of Lawbreaking and Problems of Representation.” Daly’s article was a significant part of the second wave of feminist criminology that began in the 1980s and continues to the present time.

Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court Theories that account for why women commit crime have existed for well over a century. The earliest explanations suggested a biological origin between the sexes and assumed the inferiority of women. Later works insisted that the crimes women committed were hidden or underreported because of men’s chivalrous behavior and the manipulative, deceitful nature of women. As educated women were increasingly drawn to the study of crime in the 1960s, these earlier ideas were challenged as scientifically flawed and stereotypical of sexist notions about women that lacked empirical basis. Over the next two decades, researchers such as Marie-Andree Bertrand, Frances Heidensohn, Pat Carlen, Dorie Klein, Carol Smart, and others dismantled many longstanding ideas in their attempt to depict women differently. Women’s connections to the criminal justice system were viewed largely as victimization experiences of male violence and to the system’s tendency to criminalize women’s survival strategies to abuse and neglect. Part of this first wave of feminist criminology also critiqued mainstream explanations or theories of crime for their failure to account for gender differences. The influence of earlier feminist researchers that helped define why women came to the attention of the justice system were pivotal to Kathleen Daly, who had graduated in 1983 with her doctorate in

Female Pathways Feminist criminologists in the second wave recognized the limitations of traditional criminological theories to explain women’s law-breaking behavior. No one was more aware of this than Daly who believed that “perhaps the most undeveloped area—is the place of women and gender in feminist theories of lawbreaking or in feminist theories of justice and punishment for those accused and convicted of crime” (p. 12). In her article, Daly sought

257

258

Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court

to examine situations and scenarios that criminalized women or were precursors of women’s lawbreaking behavior. To achieve that end, Daly inspected presentence investigation reports and documented the stories of 40 women who were convicted of felony crimes between 1981 and 1986 in New Haven, Connecticut. The presentence investigation is a confidential report prepared by a probation officer that aids a judge in sentencing the defendant. The probation officer interviews the defendant and prepares a written history of the defendant’s family of origin, education, mental health, physical health, knowledge, skills, abilities and deficits, problems with drugs or alcohol, and prior criminal record. Although many of the women’s problems overlapped, Daly identified five different pathways that brought women to felony court on their most current charge. These are discussed below. Daly called the first pathway harmed and harming women. Women in this group had experienced tragic life events as a child, whether it was parents who died, were incarcerated, or were substance abusers that led to neglect or physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. The women had either psychological problems or they used alcohol or illegal drugs as a coping mechanism. Daly found that the presentence investigation reports remarked that the women acted “out of control” or in some way had problems with managing their anger. With harmed and harming women, their response to childhood neglect, poverty and abuse by means of adult violence was criminalized. Second, street women certainly “had their share of physical and psychological damage while growing up or in their current relationships” (p. 37) in that many ran away from home to escape abusive family members. While living on the street, they became addicted to drugs, and many had prior arrests. Daly differentiated street women from the other pathways as people who “support their drug addiction by prostitution, theft or selling drugs” (p. 37). Third, battered women were identified as those who were arrested in conjunction with hurting or killing their abusive boyfriends or husbands. For Daly, “although thirty percent of the women had been in relationships in which their boyfriends or husbands beat them, the five women I call ‘battered women’ would not have appeared before the court

had they not been in relationships with violent men” (p. 35). Fourth, drug-connected women used or sold illegal drugs through a boyfriend, husband, or brother, or at the very least, she allowed drug dealing to occur in her house. She did not live on the street nor did she display the same level of addiction or arrest record as the street woman. She did not have the psychological problems or the anger of the harmed and harming woman. The final group fell into the economic circumstances or greed category. A small number of women committed their offenses because of the desire for money or economic security. They did not seemingly have troubled childhoods, problems with drugs, or live on the street. They frequently came from working-class or middle-class backgrounds and possessed education and abilities above that of women in the other four paths. The motive for the economic or greed pathway was perhaps the most similar to the drug-connected women except for the type of crime each woman used to make money. In identifying the five pathways to felony court, gender was not the only comparison point. Daly asserted the importance of observing the differences among women, such as the social, cultural, and socioeconomic differences. She would find it important to ask how gender, race/ethnicity, and class structure our assumptions and interpretations. Daly sought to explain how women’s experiences as victims and offenders intersected, and were in turn influenced by social constructions of law. Daly viewed women not just as victims. Rather, their experiences may blur the boundaries between women being seen as victims and as victimizers, giving rise to criminal behavior for different reasons than for men who commit crimes. In the end, Daly asks a very important, but unanswered question: “But where does victimization end and responsibility for acts that harm others begin?” (p. 48).

Further Theoretical Developments Two years following her “Pathways to Felony Court” article, Daly finished a book titled Gender, Crime, and Punishment, which further broadened the pathways approach to men. Using 397 felony cases disposed by conviction (208 male and 189

Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court

female), Daly examined gender differences in pathways to felony court, along with the role that defendants played in their crimes and any sentencing disparities. From this “wide sample,” Daly hand-selected 40 pairs of men and women who had been accused and convicted of legally similar crimes. She called this the “deep sample.” Compared to the men, early experiences for the women (or at least more openly reported by women) were more often tied to victimization. Men’s felony crimes, although legally the same as women’s, were generally found to be more serious and harmful. This was linked to men having a more serious criminal past than women, and to their playing a somewhat more active role in the crime than women, which rendered their acts more blameworthy than women’s. Women were also more likely to be primary caretakers for dependents than were men in the sample. Daly concluded that for the jurisdiction and time period studied, men and women were not sentenced differently for similar crimes. The sentencing disparity that occurred could be legitimately explained. In 1995, Daly’s book won the American Society of Criminology Michael Hindelang Award for most outstanding contribution to criminological research. This is one of the highest honors bestowed on a published work in the field. Daly’s ideas remained influential in understanding the differing sources of women’s law-breaking behavior within a patriarchal society that still tends to socialize girls different from boys and affects early childhood identities and experiences. Daly’s theoretical contribution is an important one—termed the pathway or blurred boundaries approach— that has formed the basis of understanding the link between victimized women and criminalized women. Research that has expanded the pathways approach to better understand the conditions that precede criminality include Beth Richie’s study of battered women, Barbara Owen’s ethnography of women prisoners in California, and Sally Simpson, Jennifer Yahner, and Laura Dugan’s quantitative analysis of women brought to a Maryland detention facility. Leanne Fiftal Alarid See also Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending; Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Klein, Dorie:

259

The Etiology of Female Crime; Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work; Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology

References and Further Readings Alarid, L. F., & Cromwell, P. (2006). In her own words: Women offenders’ views on crime and victimization. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Bertrand, M. (1969). Self image and delinquency: A contribution to the study of female criminality and women’s image. Acta Criminologica, 2, 71–144. Chesney-Lind, M. (1989). Girls’ crime and woman’s place: Toward a feminist model of female delinquency. Crime and Delinquency, 35, 5–29. Daly, K. (1992). Women’s pathways to felony court: Feminist theories of lawbreaking and problems of representation. Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies, 2, 11–52. Daly, K. (1994). Gender, crime and punishment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 5, 497–538. Daly, K., & Maher, L. (1998). Criminology at the crossroads: Feminist readings in crime and justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Klein, D. (1973). The etiology of female crime: A review of the literature. Issues in Criminology, 8(2), 3–30. Kornhauser, R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leonard, E. B. (1982). Women, crime and society: A critique of theoretical criminology. New York: Longman. Lombroso, C., & Ferrero, G. (2004). Criminal woman, the prostitute, and the normal woman (N. H. Rafter & M. Gibson, Trans.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Original work published 1895) Owen, B. (1998). In the mix: Struggle and survival in a women’s prison. Albany: SUNY Press. Pollak, O. (1950). The criminality of women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Richie, B. E. (1996). Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of battered black women. New York: Routledge. Simpson, S., Yahner, J., & Dugan, L. (2008). Understanding women’s pathways to jail: Analyzing the lives of incarcerated women. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 41(1), 84–108. Smart, C. (1976). Women, crime, and criminology: A feminist critique. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

260

Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders

Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders Drawing on interviews with active street criminals, Richard T. Wright and Scott H. Decker identify common elements of decisions made by offenders who committed residential burglary or armed robbery. Most criminological theory overlooks the decision-making process of criminals in favor of focusing on the background characteristics (e.g., family upbringing) of lawbreakers. Wright and Decker, however, ground their research in a theoretical framework that places a greater focus on more immediate lifestyle (e.g., drug use) and situational (e.g., multiple offenders) factors that shape the dynamics of urban street crime. This entry addresses the theoretical framework employed by Wright and Decker, describes how they conducted their research, summarizes why and how their subjects committed crime, and concludes by discussing the policy implications of their work.

Theoretical Framework Wright and Decker’s work with active street criminals was influenced by two theoretical perspectives: rational choice theory and phenomenological interactionism. Both conceptual approaches focus on the decision-making process of criminals and the potential weight given to situational circumstances by offenders when considering whether or not to complete a crime. Where these analytical viewpoints differ is that the rational choice paradigm views offender decision making as an emotionally neutral process where criminals carefully weigh the costs (e.g., imprisonment) and benefits (e.g., money) of perpetrating a crime, while phenomenological interactionism regards offender decision making as a less deliberate process where criminals often make choices that are emotionally driven and devoid of any serious forethought. In combining these two perspectives, Wright and Decker (1994, p. 31) “examine not only the hard, verifiable contingencies (e.g., risks, rewards, physical obstacles) that influenced the way in which offenders carried out their [crimes],” but also the impact of larger lifestyles in shaping criminals’

perceptions of the risks, rewards, and physical obstacles associated with crime.

Methodological Strategy Wright and Decker conducted semi-structured interviews with active residential burglars and armed robbers in St. Louis, Missouri. This study design is noteworthy in at least two respects. First, criminologists seldom directly ask offenders to describe or speak to the situational circumstances (e.g., the who, what, when, and where) surrounding the crimes they commit. But when such efforts have been made by criminologists, they generally have done so with incarcerated offenders who are far removed from their natural environments. What is more, some have argued that apprehended criminals may be merely unintelligent offenders whose experiences with crime are distinct from those of undetected criminals. And along this line, when asked to recall the importance of legal sanctions (e.g., arrest) in choosing whether or not to commit past crimes, offenders under correctional supervision may be more inclined to overstate the initial weight given to legal penalties. Wright and Decker overcame such concerns by interviewing active, non-incarcerated criminals. More specifically, they employed a “snowball” sampling strategy where they relied on an ex-offender to initially locate criminals who had recently committed residential burglary or armed robbery. These active offenders were then asked if they knew of other burglars or robbers on the street who might be willing to participate in the study. This process resulted in the recruitment of mainly black males from high-crime and economically distressed innercity neighborhoods.

The Motivation to Commit Crime The vast majority of these offenders decided to commit residential burglary and armed robbery because of a desperate need for money. The proceeds from these illicit activities generally were not exhausted on basic necessities such as housing. Instead, many of the criminals used their illicit gains to finance a lifestyle often characterized by routine drug use, alcohol consumption, and promiscuous sexual activity. In particular, Wright and Decker noted that offenders often spent money for

Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders

the purpose of “keeping the party going” or “to keep appearances up.” The former involved instances (among others) where offenders were using drugs heavily and needed additional funds to continue. Offenders also routinely used income from crime to purchase “status” items such as clothing. Much like their spending habits in general, criminals seldom acquired such items with the intent of meeting some basic need (e.g., protection from the weather), but rather to personify an image that commanded attention and respect among others on the street. The Role of Street Culture

The intense need for money to acquire such nonessentials (e.g., drugs, designer clothing) is consistent with the conduct norms of a street culture. Persons situated within this culture often have a strong “here and now” approach to life where experiencing immediate gratification is highly valued, and each day is lived as though it is one big party. As such, no one wants to be emptyhanded (i.e., without cash or drugs) or looking ragged. And often absent from this environment are persons who bear a feeling of responsibility (e.g., commitments to family) or who think beyond the moment. Wright and Decker indicate that their subjects ultimately made daily decisions while embedded within this volatile environment. When viewed through this contextual lens, offender decision making appears more transparent. For example, it helps illuminate why participants in Wright and Decker’s sample relied on illicit activities to acquire money rather than, say, legitimate employment. This legal option was not perceived as viable by offenders because it was largely incompatible with certain aspects of street life. Everyday employment requires workers (especially in entry-level positions) to sacrifice much time and to answer to authority figures in exchange for little pay. Such employment requirements are perceived by offenders as self-imposed restraints that prevent the pursuit of more gratifying activities (e.g., drug use) that can be financed by easier and more immediate sources of money. In contrast, Wright and Decker’s subjects perceived residential burglary and armed robbery as imposing few restraints in that they can be completed with little time and skill, grant much autonomy (i.e.,

261

can be perpetrated at the discretion of an offender), and always represent a potential source of cash. It is particularly this latter benefit (source of cash), combined with an intense need for money and few realistic alternatives for acquiring it, that made burglary and robbery “subjectively available” to offenders interviewed by Wright and Decker. Stated somewhat differently, these factors coalesce to create an immediate environment where offenders “enter a state of ‘encapsulation’ in which all that matters is dealing with the present crisis” (i.e., desperate need for money) using the only option they view as available to them (i.e., crime) (Wright & Decker, 1997, p. 129).

Sequential Decision Making Wright and Decker also shed light on “sequential” decisions made by offenders prior to, during, and following the completion of residential burglary and armed robbery. With income-generating crime, offenders often are forced to make a number of successive decisions such as whom or what to target. Wright and Decker questioned offenders about a number of these decisions, and the criminals’ general tendencies are summarized here. Residential Burglars

Wright and Decker found that residential burglars were disinclined to choose targets at random. Instead, they preferred residences where they knew something about its occupants and the materials it contained. In some instances, such information was acquired by briefly conversing with street associates or while partying. Once a target was selected, offenders generally approached the residence while trying to maintain a “conventional appearance” or while it was dark. Prior to entering the dwelling, the burglars tended to gain some reassurance that the residence was unoccupied by ringing the door bell or knocking. Once reassured, the offenders often gained entry through a door or window that was not visible from the street or neighboring residences. In most cases, entry could be gained by simply using a household tool (e.g., crowbar) or other items readily available (e.g., rock), but some burglars did express an unwillingness to proceed if the residence had an alarm or a dog, which increased the perceived likelihood that their presence would

262

Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders

become known to others. Once inside, offenders were inclined to undertake a brief search where they first inspected the master bedroom for loose valuables and cash, then proceeded judiciously throughout the remainder of the house, while finally ending their search in the living room where larger electronic devices are often located. When such noncash items were stolen, burglars were inclined to dispose of them in return for money. The burglars often attempted to unload stolen merchandise on a number of possible buyers, such as pawnbrokers, drug dealers (who generally had cash on hand), and family. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, few burglars used the services of a “professional fence,” that is, someone who knowingly purchases stolen items for resale. Armed Robbers

The armed robbers interviewed by Wright and Decker encountered similar decisions such as choosing a target. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the majority of offenders disclosed that they normally targeted other criminals, while a sizeable minority preyed on noncriminal victims (commercial robbery was rare in the sample). Victimizing other criminals offered some advantages: They were prone to carry money (especially drug dealers and men soliciting the services of a prostitute), they were unlikely to involve the law, and they were readily accessible given the lifestyles of many of the interviewed robbers. In contrast, offenders who preferred to target noncriminals often had to be more judicious in where to find such victims. For example, some favored areas around ATMs and check-cashing establishments, while others opted for supermarket and shopping mall parking lots. After settling on an area, offenders still had to choose a specific victim who, ideally, was carrying cash and unwilling to resist. Identifying such victims was an imperfect science where offenders generally relied on physical cues (e.g., jewelry worn) and demographic features (e.g., older women). Once a victim was selected, offenders generally tried to approach their targets inconspicuously by quickly sneaking up on them or by “managing a normal appearance.” Offenders then usually gained victim compliance by verbalizing that they were committing a robbery and that any resistance would be grounds for lethal action.

Depending on their general assessment of the situation, the robbers would physically confiscate cash and valued merchandise themselves or ask the victim to hand over such items. Once these goods were secured, the offenders were inclined to flee the scene as quickly as possible.

Policy Implications An important policy implication that Wright and Decker draw from their research is that increasing the punishment (i.e., time in prison) for burglary and robbery would likely have little effect on active street criminals largely because such an initiative does not alleviate the need for money, nor does it objectively reduce opportunities for crime. Legitimate employment certainly is one way that street criminals could address their need for money. As discussed, however, even if the subjects interviewed by Wright and Decker could land good-paying jobs with little education, the formal demands of everyday work would likely be perceived as unacceptable for offenders committed to a street life. Therefore, given the difficulty of changing active offenders mindset toward crime, Wright and Decker (1997, p. 134) contend that in the short term it may be more worthwhile “to concentrate our efforts on reducing the vulnerability of potential victims.” With burglary, for example, homeowners would be well advised to increase the visibility of windows and doors from the street or neighboring residences, as well as hide valuables and cash somewhere other than the master bedroom. In regard to robbery, persons should be cautious about wearing expensive jewelry and flashing large amounts of cash. In addition, Wright and Decker advise that individuals should cooperate when confronted by a robber as a way of de-­ escalating the situation. More broadly, though, Wright and Decker clearly underscore the influence of the immediate street culture in shaping the decision-making process of urban criminals, which is often overlooked by rational choice theory. Adam M. Watkins See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Felson,

De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime; Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders

References and Further Readings Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. New York: Basic Books. Lofland, J. (1969). Deviance and identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Wright, R. T., & Decker, S. H. (1994). Burglars on the job: Streetlife and residential break-ins. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Wright, R. T., & Decker, S. H. (1997). Armed robbers in action: Stickups and street culture. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory Edwin H. Sutherland’s theory of differential association remains a prominent theory in criminology. When initially formulated, this fundamentally sociological approach to the analysis of deviance contrasted greatly with psychological and biological explanations by firmly locating the causes of deviant behavior in processes of socialization within deviant subcultures. Despite being highly influential, differential association theory has been, and continues to be, subject to a range of critiques and modifications. An important extension of differential association theory was made by Melvin L. De Fleur and Richard Quinney in 1966. In “A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory and a Strategy for Empirical Verification,” they sought to address what they perceived as several major problems with Sutherland’s original theory and, specifically, with the nine logically deductive propositions that formed the heart of differential association theory. First, De Fleur and Quinney were concerned with examining the internal logical consistency of the theory. They argued that there was a lack of specificity regarding this issue in Sutherland’s original formulation of differential association

263

theory. Therefore, they wanted to explore the relationships between the various theoretical elements Sutherland used, both within the theoretical propositions themselves and between the nine propositions as a whole. Another aim of De Fleur and Quinney was to unpack the theoretical assumptions that underpinned Sutherland’s original theory, which, again they felt had not been appropriately articulated by Sutherland himself. Perhaps most important, they also wished to examine the extent to which Sutherland’s theory was empirically verifiable and thus useful for future criminological research.

Reformulating the Theory To answer these questions, De Fleur and Quinney converted the original nine verbal propositions of differential association theory into the mathematical language of set theory. Set theory is a branch of mathematics that examines the relationship between “sets” or collections of objects. For De Fleur and Quinney, set theory was the ideal method for examining the relationship between the theoretical concepts that comprised Sutherland’s original theory, such as “deviant behavior,” “symbolic interaction,” “learned behavior,” and so on. Set theory allowed De Fleur and Quinney to observe precisely how Sutherland’s theoretical concepts were grouped together and to examine the specific relationships between the propositions. Once the original nine propositions had been converted into set theory statements, those statements were then converted again into nine new verbal propositions (see Table 1). One of the major advantages of the conversion process into (and then out of) the set theory statements was that it became possible for De Fleur and Quinney to construct new verbal statements in such a way that identified “necessary conditions” for criminal behavior. This occurred because the logic of set theory provides a framework for assessing which theoretical elements are contingent upon other theoretical elements in any given situation. Therefore, although Sutherland’s original propositions provided a theoretical explanation for how individuals learn to be deviant, De Fleur and Quinney’s reformulated statements moved the theory closer to being able to generate hypotheses which could be tested through research.

264

De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory

Table 1   De Fleur and Quinney’s Reformulation of the Nine Propositions of Differential Association Theory Sutherland’s Propositions

De Fleur and Quinney’s Reformulation

1. Criminal behavior is learned behavior.

Criminal behavior is a subset of learned behavior in general.

2. Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with others in the process of communication.

Symbolic interaction is a necessary condition for crimerelated behavior.

3. The principle part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups.

The primary group is a necessary condition for crimerelated learning.

4. When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the crime which are sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple, and (b) the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes.

Crime-related learning is a necessary condition for the acquisition of criminal motivations, attitudes, and techniques.

5. The specific direction of motives and drives is learned Definitions of the legal codes as favorable and from definitions of the legal codes as favorable or unfavorable are necessary conditions for the crimeunfavorable. related learning of criminal motivations and attitudes. 6. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of the law.

Overt criminal behavior has as its necessary and sufficient conditions a set of criminal motivations, attitudes, and techniques, the learning of which takes place when there is exposure to criminal norms in excess of exposure to corresponding anti-criminal norms during symbolic interaction in primary groups.

7. Differential association may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity.

The differential association process has four major dimensions of quantitative variation: frequency, duration, priority, and intensity.

8. The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning.

The “differential association process” is a subset of a more general process by which socially significant patterns of behavior are acquired through differential exposure to cultural norms as a result of symbolic interaction within some form of institutionalized group process.

9. While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values since non-criminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values.

Motivations and attitudes are necessary conditions for criminal behavior. However, motivations and attitudes are not both necessary and sufficient conditions for criminal behavior.

Source: Adapted from De Fleur, M. L., & Quinney, R. (1966). A reformulation of Sutherland’s differential association theory and a strategy for empirical verification. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 3, 13–15.

This process of reformulating Sutherland’s theory was further expanded by De Fleur and Quinney by deriving five additional postulates based on Sutherland’s theoretical assertions (see Table 2). For De Fleur and Quinney these postulates represented the basic assumptions underlying Suth­erland’s original theory. This general theory indicated how an individual learns behaviors and attitudes from those

around them, and how subcultural norms are internalized. In other words, the five postulates in fact can be seen as a general theory of socialization and not just a theory of socialization in relation to deviant behavior. In this respect, De Fleur and Quinney saw Sutherland as working within a theoretical tradition closely associated with symbolic interactionism and social psychology as exemplified by the

De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory

265

Table 2  The Postulates of a General Theory Underlying Sutherland’s Nine Assertions Postulate

Summarized Verbal Explanation

I

Motivational processes, attitudinal process, and knowledge techniques for carrying out patterns of action are necessary and sufficient conditions for learned behavior in general.

II

Symbolic interaction within some form of institutionalized group is a necessary condition for the differential pattern of exposure to cultural norms.

III

A differential pattern of exposure to cultural norms is a necessary condition for the selective internalization of norms.

IV

The selective internalization of cultural norms is a sufficient condition for a restructuring of motivational processes and attitudinal processes.

V

Selective internalization of cultural norms is a necessary and sufficient condition for the knowledge and techniques for carrying out patterns of action.

Source: Adapted from De Fleur, M. L., & Quinney, R. (1966). A reformulation of Sutherland’s differential association theory and a strategy for empirical verification. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 3, 13–15.

work of theorists such as Charles H. Cooley and George Herbert Mead. Having reformulated Sutherland’s nine propositions through the lens of set theory and then derived their own five general postulates, De Fleur and Quinney (p. 22) noted, “A truly remarkable feature of the original theory is its basic consistency. Only minor modifications were required in a single assertion to permit demonstration of this consistency with a modern system of formal logic.” De Fleur and Quinney suggested that their reformulated version of assertion 6 contained something of the essential essence of Sutherland’s theory of differential association, noting that assertion 6 “is in fact a set theory model of the differential association theory. It goes beyond Sutherland in that it brings his assertions together in a system of propositions with a formal calculus stating the relationships which prevail not only between concepts but between assertions as well” (p. 7, emphasis in the original). Following the logic of set theory, De Fleur and Quinney noted that each element in this general theory of differential association was best thought of as being a “superset” of other elements. For example, the element “criminal behavior” in assertion 6 is in fact a superset of various different types of criminal behavior, from homicide, to theft, to rape. In addition, these individual types of criminal behavior are themselves subsets of other elements. Evidently, there is a difference in scale and severity

between stealing a bicycle from a street corner and stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a bank. Both are examples of “theft,” but both represent very different kinds of theft. Therefore, De Fleur and Quinney developed a complex series of matrices indicating the structure of these subsets and the elements and indicating the relationship between these subsets and supersets. They stated that “for every element in the superset c [crime], there is a corresponding element in each of the other supersets [e.g., criminal motivations, attitudes]. These elements (subsets) are linked together according to the logical relationships stated in the general model of differential association theory” (p. 19).

Conclusion Upon examining their reformulated version of differential association theory, De Fleur and Quinney came to a number of specific conclusions about how useful the theory might be for understanding criminal behavior. One of the problems they indentified was that Sutherland’s theory could only account for criminal behavior involving a process of socialization within a deviant subculture. Clearly, this does not adequately account for other kinds of deviant acts that occur where there has been no extended period of socialization within a deviant group. De Fleur and Quinney also recognized that opportunity to commit crime

266

DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order

was a variable that needed to be considered and one that had not been factored into the original formulation of the theory. In the end, however, they remained somewhat pessimistic about the prospect of the possibility of empirical verification of differential association theory: “The present analysis has shown the theory to be at such a high level of abstraction that it is not possible to test it directly with empirical data” (p. 22). However, while recognizing the limitations of Sutherland’s original theory, De Fleur and Quinney also believed that differential association theory had been severely underestimated in terms of its potential to generate testable hypotheses. They noted that their reformulation of the theory, through the use of set theory, had shown that “In fact it can generate more testable hypotheses than could be adequately studied in several lifetimes” (p. 20). For De Fleur and Quinney, the task of criminology was to focus on the superset matrices that they had outlined and to examine the nature of the relationships among the elements, subsets, and supersets within those matrices. James W. Skinner See also Akers, Ronald L: Social Learning Theory; Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization; Sutherland Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

References and Further Readings Burgess, R. L., & Akers, R. L. (1966). A differential association-reinforcement theory of criminal behavior. Social Problems, 14, 128–147. De Fleur, M. L., & Quinney, R. (1966). A reformulation of Sutherland’s differential association theory and a strategy for empirical verification. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 3, 1–21. Gaylord, M., & Galliher, J. (1988). The criminology of Edwin Sutherland. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Jeffery, C. R. (1965). Criminal behavior and learning theory. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 56, 294–300. Sutherland, E. H. (1939). Principles of criminology (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott.

DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order John J. DiIulio, Jr.’s perspective on management and prison order can be derived from his book Governing Prisons: A Comparative Study of Correctional Management. This volume is perhaps the most influential scholarly work published in the area of institutional corrections after 1980. Governing Prisons resulted from DiIulio’s exploratory study of the administrations of the Texas, Michigan, and California prison systems that he carried out during the mid 1980s while completing his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University under the direction of James Q. Wilson. From the findings of his study, DiIulio reached two central conclusions: (1) prisons vary in their quality of life, and (2) the quality of life in prisons is primarily influenced by how prisons are managed. In subsequent work, DiIulio extended this position to other institutions such as jails. This entry reviews the background, conceptual framework, empirical support, and impact of DiIulio’s work.

Background In Governing Prisons, DiIulio delivered a sharp criticism of the existing, and primarily sociological, research on inmates and prison. He argued that most of the sociological research on prisons did not appear to offer any insights that were useful to improving the quality of prison life. Trained in political science and public administration, DiIulio did not accept the sociological focus on inmates and the inmate social system. He disagreed with the prevailing notion that prison staff had little control in prisons and could only maintain order by granting concessions to the leaders of the inmate social system. DiIulio argued that the sociological viewpoint that efforts by correctional administrators to govern or tighten security contributed to rioting or increased disorder was incorrect. He suggested that, instead, it may be the lessening of security measures and the compromises made by prison administration that contribute to prison disorder and disturbances in the first place. Yet he acknowledged that the potential relevance of prison management had not received much empirical attention.

DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order

In DiIulio’s view, this was an oversight, and so his analysis in Governing Prisons focused on prison administrators, not inmates.

Conceptual Framework DiIulio’s exploratory study of higher custody prisons in the Texas, California, and Michigan prison systems involved the examination of archival records, interviews with prison officers and administrators, and on-site observations of prison operations in higher custody facilities. He observed that there were three concepts that make up the quality of prison life: order, amenity, and service. Order was defined as the absence of individual or collective misconduct that may threaten the safety of others. Examples of such behaviors might include assaults, riots, or escapes. Amenity refers to anything that may increase the well-being of a facility’s inmates. Amenities might include quality food, a cleanly environment, access to recreation, and so forth. Finally, service is anything that is meant to improve inmates’ lives. Education classes, vocational training, work assignments, and other rehabilitative programming are examples of services. DiIulio noted that each of these concepts is interrelated. Prisons with less order rarely have high levels of amenity or service. Similarly, prisons without much in the way of amenities or services are typically not very orderly. According to DiIulio, order, amenity, and service should be measured both objectively and subjectively. For example, objective indicators of order could include a facility’s rate of assaults, riots, or homicides. Subjective indicators of order might include individuals’ perceptions of the prison environment (e.g., is it stable?). DiIulio found, however, that prisons that scored higher on objective indicators of order also scored high on subjective measures of order. In contrast to order, amenity and service are harder to measure, and so DiIulio’s study focuses almost exclusively on differences in the level of order across higher custody prisons and state prison systems. Some data on the number of inmates enrolled in particular programs were provided, but DiIulio observed that those facilities which ranked higher on order also ranked high on these indicators of service. As a result, DiIulio’s perspective is often considered a theory of prison order or order maintenance.

267

Although not explicitly stated, DiIulio observed that there were intra-system (between prisons) and inter-system (between prison systems) differences on eight interrelated administrative characteristics that were common to models of prison management. The eight dimensions include organizational communication, personnel relations, inmate/staff communication, discretion, regimentation of inmate lives, response to inmate rule violations, response to inmate disruptiveness, and inmate participation in decision making. DiIulio argued that variations in these interrelated elements correspond with differences in levels of order between prisons and across prison systems. Based on the differences he observed in the administrative characteristics outlined above, DiIulio classified the prison managerial styles of the Texas, California, and Michigan prison systems into three different models: the control model (Texas), the consensual model (California), and the responsibility model (Michigan). The control model adheres to a correctional philosophy that emphasizes inmate obedience, work, and education—in that order. Although some intra-system differences did exist, DiIulio found that the administrative routines were generally the same in Texas prisons. All facilities were run as maximum-security facilities. Correctional staff were organized along paramilitary lines and communications between staff and between staff and inmates were formal. Inmates were not allowed to participate in decision making related to facility affairs. Rules and regulations were followed carefully and strictly enforced. Inmates were generally kept busy and permitted to participate in work and treatment programs. Discipline for inmates who violated facility rules was swift and certain, but so were rewards for inmates who adhered to the rules. In contrast to the control model, the responsibility model emphasizes procedures that maximize inmates’ responsibility for their own actions. According to DiIulio, the Michigan system made use of an elaborate classification system to fit inmates into the least restrictive facility. Measures were also taken to minimize the aura of formal governmental authority over the inmates. Communications between staff and between staff and inmates were informal and the administrations of the facilities were less structured than control model prisons. Prisons were managed in

268

DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order

ways that imposed the fewest number of constraints on the inmates. Even higher security prisoners were not subjected to total regimentation. Supervision was not rigorous and rule enforcement was left to the discretion of the officers. Prisoner organizations were encouraged, and inmates were provided with avenues to influence prison affairs. According to DiIulio, the consensual model is a mixture of the control and responsibility models. Consistent with the control model, the correctional staff in California facilities were organized according to a paramilitary scheme, but the communication patterns between staff and between staff and inmates were informal. Still, the staff adhered to the chain of command. Similar to the responsibility model, however, the consensual model relied on an elaborate classification system and allowed for inmate grievance procedures. The emphasis was on less restriction rather than more, but unlike in Michigan there was substantial inter-system variation between California facilities. Inmate discipline was often handled informally and officers were granted wide discretion in their decision making. According to DiIulio, it was perceived that prison governance was often shaped by the population composition of the governed. DiIulio’s comparative study of higher security facilities in the Texas, California, and Michigan penal systems revealed that the Texas model of facility management achieved the most orderly prisons. From his findings, he argued that all higher security facilities should be run according to the control model. As a result, his theory has often been referred to as administrative control theory.

Empirical Support The validity of DiIulio’s findings and related theory was, perhaps, most supported by the work of Bert Useem and Peter Kimball, who reached similar conclusions as DiIulio in their study of prison riots. Useem and Kimball’s study, States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots 1971–1986, which was published just 2 years after DiIulio’s work, is the most comprehensive study of prison riots to date. Unaware of DiIulio’s conclusions, Useem and Kimball’s principal finding was that prison disorder is the product of administrative breakdown or weak, troubled, or otherwise ineffective management. Their finding,

along with DiIulio’s, provided evidence in support of administrative control theory. Still, most penologists agree that the theory cannot account for the range of factors that contribute to disorder in correctional facilities. An empirical test of DiIulio’s theory requires data from multiple facilities. Difficulties faced by researchers in collecting such data has limited the number of quantitative studies which have contained variables depicting managerial styles, let alone the amount of information required to fully examine DiIulio’s hypotheses. The available empirical evidence is mixed. Findings from several studies have revealed that direct measures of control, such as the proportion of inmates in disciplinary housing or use of administrative sanctions, have been associated with lower levels of prison disorder. A greater involvement in services, such as work assignments or facility programming, has also been correlated with lower levels of inmate misconduct. On the other hand, more controloriented styles of facility management have often been linked to higher levels of disorder.

Impact There are two main reasons why Governing Prisons made a significant contribution to the field of institutional corrections and criminology more generally. First, DiIulio’s sharp criticism of the existing research on inmates and prisons was not well received in the academic community. Although most penologists do not disagree with his point that prison management may be relevant to the study of prison order, many prison researchers have argued that DiIulio’s position that management is the most important variable ignores the importance of the composition of the inmate population, the individual differences between inmates, and the relevance of informal controls over their behaviors. Other corrections scholars have suggested that the control-oriented management style DiIulio espoused in Governing Prisons contradicts a good deal of organizational research that has been conducted over the past few decades. This research suggests that the rigid paramilitary structure DiIulio argues in favor of would be inflexible and unable to adapt to the complex problems posed by the inherent uncertainty and dynamic nature of prison conditions. Nonetheless, it was

Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style

the publication of Governing Prisons, along with DiIulio’s subsequent defense of his position, that prompted this debate and forced prison researchers to begin to consider the potential relevance of prison management. More practically, DiIulio’s work resonated well with correctional administrators. The control model he argued for fit nicely with the “get tough” approach to offender treatment which gained favor during the 1970s and 1980s. His impact on the practical sector also helped to generate an interest in policy-relevant prison research among academics. Much of the research conducted since the publication of Governing Prisons has included a practical application. Several scholars have argued that this shift has come at the expense of new ideas regarding the social organization of prisons and changed the focus of researchers from inmates to administrators. Yet even if these arguments are correct, the shift they have described underscores the impact of DiIulio’s work. The increased attention to prison management among practitioners and academics alike adds credibility to DiIulio’s principal finding regarding the quality of prison life: Management matters. Benjamin Steiner See also Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot; Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory; Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory; Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory

References and Further Readings DiIulio, J. J., Jr. (1987). Governing prisons: A comparative study of correctional management. New York: Free Press. DiIulio, J. J., Jr. (1989). Managing constitutionally. Society, 26, 81–82. Reisig, M. D. (1998). Rates of disorder in higher-custody state prisons: A comparative analysis of managerial practices. Crime and Delinquency, 44, 229–244. Stohr, M. K., Loverich, N. P., Menke, B. A., & Zupan, L. L. (1994). Staff management in correctional institutions: Comparing DiIulio’s “control model” and “employee investment model” outcomes in five jails. Justice Quarterly, 11, 471–497. Toch, H. (1989). Being tough versus being fair. Society, 26, 84.

269

Toch, H. (1989). Review of governing prisons: A comparative study of correctional management Society, 26(2), 86–88. Useem, B., & Kimball, P. (1989). States of siege: U.S. prison riots, 1971–1986. New York: Oxford University Press. Useem, B., & Reisig, M. (1999). Collective action in prisons: Protests, disturbances, and riots. Criminology, 37(4), 735–759.

Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style Why is it that when some people get bumped in a hallway they interpret it benignly—that is, “the individual bumped into me by accident”—but other people are convinced that the person bumped into them on purpose and respond with aggression? Kenneth A. Dodge, a pioneer in the research on aggression, argues that the reason why some individuals are more aggressive than others depends on whether they make benign or hostile attributions to potentially provocative behavior. People who are aggressive tend to make hostile attributions, whereas those who are less aggressive make benign attributions to potentially threatening behaviors. In short, developing a hostile attribution style is a major cause of delinquent behavior. Notably, in his earlier research Dodge and his colleagues argued that children develop a hostile attribution style because of early negative socialization experiences. However, in his later work, Dodge argues that aggressive behavior and hostile attributions are inherent universal human characteristics. He assumes that individuals are innately on-guard against potentially threatening behavior, and that this is an evolved characteristic that has been favorably selected across generations. Thus, Dodge (2008, p. 134) contends that “humans are inherently born ready to learn to associate a negative” personal experience (i.e., a behavior that is goal thwarting, restraining, or conflicting) as a behavior that is threatening. He further suggests that they represent it as an attribution of hostile intent, and they naturally respond with aggression.

270

Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style

The question then becomes why are some people more aggressive than others if we are all born to react to negative personal experiences with aggression? In his article “On the Meaning of Meaning When Being Mean: Commentary on Berkowitz’s ‘On the Consideration of Automatic as well as Controlled Psychological Processes in Aggression,’” Dodge argues that the key is individual differences in the capacity to infer benign intent. Children who learn to attribute behaviors that are provocative to a benign intent will not interpret negative experiences as threatening behaviors that demand an aggressive response. Thus, a fundamental cause of aggression—violence—is the failure of children to make benign attributions. It is these children who develop a hostile attribution bias style. For Dodge, the failure to develop the capacity to attribute behavior to a benign intent has potentially lifelong consequences. The development of a hostile attribution style takes on a trait-like significance. It becomes an enduring personality predisposition that generalizes across varied situations and can manifest itself across the life span. Thus, children who develop a hostile attribution style may become chronic offenders with a diminished likelihood of aging out of crime.

impulsively. Second, he argues that the reason most people are not overly aggressive is because they learned to make benign attributions from early prosocial socialization experiences. This ability begins in the 3rd year of a person’s life. Dodge and Jennifer Lansford and colleagues are quite specific as to the early child-rearing socialization experiences that can result in the development of a hostile attribution style. These include but are not limited to physical abuse (i.e., authoritarian parenting—parent-child conflict characterized by yelling and hitting), modeling of hostile attributions by adults and peers, failure in important life tasks, and the rearing in a culture that values selfdefense, personal honor, and retaliation. On the other hand, he asserts that there are specific socialization experiences that teach toddlers and infants how to make benign attributions. These include but are not limited to a secure attachment relationship with a primary caregiver, a nurturing prosocial relationship between caregiver and infant in which trust and mutual exchange are fostered, “modeling of benign attributions by valued adults or peers, success in important tasks, and rearing in a culture that values cooperation and the whole community” (Dodge, 2006, p. 793).

The Causes for Developing a Hostile Attribution Style

The Development of Schemas

Dodge, in his 2008 article, estimates that approximately 7 percent of males qualify for having a conduct disorder—a corollary of the development of a hostile attribution style. Therefore, the “good news” is that the vast majority of the population does not attribute provocative behavior to a hostile intent and, therefore, is not overly aggressive. Instead, the vast majority of people learn to attribute negative behavior to benign causes—for example, “I failed the exam because I never read the textbook” rather than “the only reason I failed the exam is because the teacher singled me out in order to fail me.” (People with a hostile attribution style tend to blame others and not themselves for personal negative experiences.) In his later works, Dodge argues that there are two primary reasons why people learn to make benign attributions. First, he recognizes there are genetic-biological differences in each person’s neurotransmitter-mediated capacity to respond

In essence, Dodge’s theory of aggression argues that because some children are exposed to erratic and violent early socialization experiences, they develop biases in their ability to interpret the behaviors of others and develop a limited “Rolodex” of responses to their biased interpretations. These schemas are consistent with social information processing (SIP) models. SIP models assume that that the relation between an external stimulus and a behavioral response is mediated by the person’s representation of the meaning of the stimulus and the response. Dodge (2008, p. 134) asserts “that humans have evolved to be ready to sense and perceive social stimuli, represent those stimuli with ‘meaning,’ and then generate and enact social behavioral responses. The representation of ‘meaning’ is essential to the model, although the representation is not usually conscious, voluntary, or controlled.” Consequently, Dodge (2008, p. 135) suggests that “negative stimuli do not inevitably lead to aggressive

Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style

response, unless their represented meaning affords this response.” The schemas that children have who make benign attributions are distinct from those who have a hostile attribution style. Adolescents who experience parents’ prosocial behavior toward them, Dodge (2006, p. 807) argues, “may become perceptually ready to attribute positive intent to others in new situations, to discount discrepant information that would favor a hostile attribution, and to attend selectively to informational cues that are consistent with a growing schema of others as benign.” Thus, for example, these children believe that the reason why they are being disciplined by a caregiver is because they did something wrong rather than the disciplinarian “was out to get them.” On the other hand, children who experience negative authoritarian child-rearing experiences tend to develop schemas that cause them to be hypervigilant to future cues that indicate threat. These biased schemas cause children to perceive and interpret future stimuli through a process of perceptual readiness that is consistent with past negative experiences. These schemas tend to be selfperpetuating as future events are perceived through a bias lens that limits what is perceived and restricts the actions that are deemed appropriate. Thus, people with a hostile attribution style have selective vigilance to certain cues and selective recall of schemas that are consistent with those cues. Moreover, a hostile schema causes children to block out new information that would contradict their biased script and can cause them to engage in “preemptive processing.” This is the process whereby individuals with a hostile schema make overly quick and biased attributions in response to specific cues. Consequently, these individuals abandon rational processes of examining information objectively and respond “automatically” with predetermined and inaccurate attributions and behaviors. In sum, schemas orient the person to be sensitive to particular cues exhibited by others. They also provide the interpretation of the cues. Furthermore, schemas cause individuals to respond to their interpretation of the cue in particular ways. For example, according to Dodge, Gregory Pettit, John Bates, and Ernest Valente, physically abused children will perceive that most behaviors directed at them are threatening. Thus, even though the person did not intend to bump into them in the hallway,

271

these children perceive that the person did it on purpose with the intent of hurting them. Once aroused, these adolescents will discount any attempt by the “provocateur” to explain their accidental behavior. Finally, because these children have been intentionally “dissed” by the provocateur, they believe that they have little choice but to respond to this unprovoked hostile behavior by being aggressive. Consequently, they shove the “provocateur” and a possible physical fight ensues.

Proactive Versus Reactive Aggression The literature on aggression notes that there are two theoretically and analytically distinct forms of aggression, each with its own etiology: reactive and proactive aggression. Proactive aggression, sometimes referred to as instrumental aggression, is goal-oriented behavior. For example, James Unnever and Dewey Cornell have found that school bullies may use aggression to accomplish a premeditated outcome such as acquiring another student’s possession. This more deliberate aggression, scholars argue, is a learned behavior that adolescents develop by having their aggression rewarded by valued peers and adults. On the other hand, reactive aggression is not premeditated. It usually occurs as an angry defensive reaction to goal blocking, provocation, threat, or frustration. It is more violent, less controlled, and less predictable. Research conducted by Dodge and his associates indicates that even though the two forms of aggression—reactive and proactive—are related, the link between a hostile attribution style and aggression is substantially stronger for reactive than proactive aggression.

Conclusion A common thread that runs through the general theories of crime—such as Ronald Akers’s learning theory, Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson’s control theory, and Robert Agnew’s strain theory—is that the propensity to engage in crime is related to child-rearing practices. These theories, however, tend to globally state that “bad parenting” is related to crime without fully developing the precise mechanism by which negative early child-rearing practices generate a greater propensity to engage in crime. Dodge not only precisely and empirically identifies bad parental practices but he also has developed a

272

Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency

thesis that explains how parenting relates to aggressive behavior. In short, Dodge’s contribution to the criminology literature is in detailing the precise mechanisms that intervene between negative childrearing practices—such as physical abuse and neglect—and delinquent-criminal behavior. In addition, macro-cultural theories of crime could also profit from integrating his more individual-level analyses into their explanations. Dodge leaves this door open when he argues that a hostile attribution style can arise in children if they are reared in a culture that values self-defense, personal honor, and retaliation. Future elaborations of Dodge’s research may want to explore whether parents are more likely to interpret their children’s behavior as hostile and respond with aggression if they are immersed in a social environment that supports the interpretation of behavioral cues as hostile and supports responding to those cues with aggression. The end result of this mutually reinforcing cycle may be another generation of children who are hypervigilant—ready to interpret any provocation as hostile—and to meet those provocations with violence. James D. Unnever See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending; Widom, Cathy Spatz: The Cycle of Violence

References and Further Readings Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1996). Social information processing mechanisms in reactive and proactive aggression. Child Development, 67, 993–1002. Dodge, K. A. (2006). Translational science in action: Hostile attributional style and the development of aggressive behavior problems. Development and Psychopathology, 18, 791–814. Dodge K. A. (2008). On the meaning of meaning when being mean: Commentary on Berkowitz’s “On the consideration of automatic as well as controlled psychological processes in aggression.” Aggressive Behavior, 34, 133–135. Dodge, K. A., Bates, J. E., & Pettit, G. S. (1990). Mechanisms in the cycle of violence. Science, 250, 1678–1683.

Dodge, K. A., & Coie, J. D. (1987). Social-information processing factors in reactive and proactive aggression in children’s peer groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1146–1158. Dodge, K. A., & Somberg, D. R. (1987). Hostile attributional biases among aggressive boys are exacerbated under conditions of threats to the self. Child Development, 58, 213–224. Dodge, K. A., Lochman, J. E., Harnish, J. D., Bates, J. E., & Pettit, G. S. (1997). Reactive and proactive aggression in school children and psychiatrically impaired chronically assaultive youth. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106, 37–51. Dodge, K. A., Pettit, G. S., Bates, J. E., & Valente, E. (1995). Social information-processing patterns partially mediate the effect of early physical abuse on later conduct problems. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 104, 632–643. Dodge, K. A., Price, J. M., Bachorowski, J. A., & Newman, J. P. (1990). Hostile attributional biases in severely aggressive adolescents. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 99, 385–392. Lansford, J. E., Miller-Johnson, S., Berlin, L. J., Dodge, K. A., Bates, J. E., & Pettit, G. S. (2007). Early physical abuse and later violent delinquency: A prospective longitudinal study. Child Maltreatment, 12, 233–245. Raine, A., Dodge, K. A., Loeber, R., Gatzke-Kopp, L., Lynam, D., Reynolds, C., et al. (2006). The reactiveproactive aggression questionnaire: Differential correlates of reactive and proactive aggression in adolescent boys. Aggressive Behavior, 32, 159–171. Unnever, J. D. (2005). Bullies, aggressive victims, and victims: Are they distinct groups? Aggressive Behavior, 3, 153–171. Unnever, J. D., & Cornell, D. G. (2003). Bullying, selfcontrol, and ADHD. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 18, 129–147. Unnever, J. D., Cullen, F. T., & Agnew, R. (2006). Why is “bad” parenting criminogenic? Implications from rival theories. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 4, 1–31.

Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency In his book Delinquency and High School Drop Outs: Reconsidering Social Correlates, Don Drennon-Gala established himself as an important

Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency

early founder of social support theory. His approach was different from other social support theorists that built upon the sociology of mental illness and suggested that environments that are more supportive tend to encourage prosocial development. Instead, Drennon-Gala built upon Travis Hirschi’s research on social bond theory and suggested that social support from parents and teachers encouraged the growth of social bonds, which in turn constrained individuals from acting on their hedonistic impulses. Not only did Drennon-Gala provide a theoretical contribution, but also his book tested his propositions using a sample of seventh- and eighth-grade students. Specifically, the research uses measures of Hirschi’s social bonding theory, Walter Reckless’s containment theory, and his own conceptualization of social support to predict delinquency and educational failure. In doing so, Drennon-Gala provides substantial support for the notion of social support as a component of social bond theory.

Theoretical Contribution Drennon-Gala used social support to extend social bond theory. Social bond theory is nested within a control perspective that views humans as innately hedonistic and thus as needing social controls (such as social bonds) to discourage antisocial behavior. Hirschi suggests that individuals that have strong bonds to conventional society are not very likely to engage in delinquent behavior. This is because strong social bonds are highly valued and engaging in antisocial behavior jeopardizes prosocial bonds. Hirschi argues that social bonds consist of four elements: attachment to prosocial others, commitment to prosocial institutions, involvement in prosocial activities, and conventional beliefs. Although Hirschi’s work on social bond theory provided substantial support for his propositions, subsequent research has indicated that social bond theory should be revised. As Drennon-Gala notes, prior research on social bond theory reveals that inner containment may also be an important factor in the relationship between social bonds and delinquency. Containment theory was developed by Reckless and suggests that inner containment comprises aspects of the individual, such as self-control or restraint, that help them constrain their hedonistic

273

impulses (see also Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990). Anastasios Marcos and Stephen Bahr sought to revise social bond theory when they proposed that inner containment and social bonds work together to explain delinquency. Their research on adolescent drug use found that inner containment mediated the relationship between measures of social bond theory and lifetime drug use. Drennon-Gala also suggests that social control theory should be revised to include measures of social support. Social support is closely related to social bonds because supportive relationships strongly encourage the development of a strong bond between youths and prosocial individuals. That is, for social bonds to develop, adolescents need to have positive interactions and supportive relationships that are initiated by prosocial adults. Drennon-Gala defines social support as positive contacts, relationships, or behavior that parents and teachers develop with an early adolescent. Social support is seen to exist when parents or teachers respond to adolescent youths’ social, physical, emotional, or learning needs. Examples of social support include youths going to a movie with their parents, spending individual time with their teacher on an assignment, having their parents help them with their homework, engaging in recreational activities with their parents, and having their teachers provide advice on how to deal with personal problems. Drennon-Gala proposes that these types of interactions cause youths to feel that they are well cared for and esteemed. As a result, youths develop strong bonds to these individuals and come to value their relationships with them. This reduces the likelihood that an adolescent will disengage from school or engage in delinquent behavior.

Empirical Evidence Drennon-Gala examined his propositions on social support, inner containment, and social bonds using a self-report questionnaire gathered from a sample of more than 7,700 seventh and eighth grade students in a metropolitan school district. He constructed his measures using factor analyses that combined multiple questions into single items. Parental social support was measured using 18 questions regarding positive contacts that youths had with their parents, such as the amount of

274

Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes

affection youths felt from their parents and how often the family got together for fun activities. Teacher social support consisted of a factor that included nine items, such as the number of teachers that took interest in the youth and whether the youth felt that teachers listened to his or her problems. Similar to his measures of social support, Drennon-Gala used multiple-item factors to measure inner containment, all four of Hirschi’s elements of the social bond, disengagement in education, and delinquent behavior. After operationalizing his measures, DrennonGala used regression analyses that predicted levels of delinquency and school disengagement with measures of social support, inner containment, attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. The results revealed that parental and teacher social support were negatively related to both disengaging in education and delinquency. DrennonGala also found that inner containment, commitment, and belief were related to both the educational and delinquency measures. Conversely, attachment and involvement lessened disengagement from school but not delinquency. These results indicate that social support from parents and teachers is a strong predictor of social adjustment in the realms of education and delinquency.

Conclusion As a result of his findings, Drennon-Gala argues that a revised model of social bond theory is justified that includes parent and teacher social support. In his revised model, teacher social support, parent social support, commitment, and belief all independently predict measures of educational failure and delinquency. Theoretically, Drennon-Gala argues that bonding occurs within the context of interactions between youths and prosocial individuals. When prosocial figures are supportive when they interact with youths, the likelihood of school failure and delinquency is reduced. DrennonGala further suggests that the entrance of both parents into the workforce has reduced social support in the family and made bonding to teachers an important aspect of today’s social development. Matthew D. Makarios See also Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime;

Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: SelfControl Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory

References and Further Readings Colvin, M. W., Cullen, F. T. & Vander Ven, T. (2002). Coercion, social support, and crime: An emerging theoretical consensus. Criminology, 40, 19–42. Cullen, F. T. (1994). Social support as an organizing concept for criminology: Presidential address to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Justice Quarterly, 11, 528–559. Drennon-Gala, D. (1994). The effects of social support and inner containment on the propensity toward delinquent behavior and disengagement in education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester. Drennon-Gala, D. (1995). Delinquency and high school dropouts: Reconsidering social correlates. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marcos, A. C., & Bahr, S. J. (1988). Control theory and adolescent drug use. Youth and Society, 19, 395–425. Reckless, W. C. (1967). The crime problem (4th ed.). New York: Meredith.

Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes Richard L. Dugdale was a successful businessman in New York City in the era just after the Civil War. He also took a strong interest in sociology and Social Darwinism, and he was a member of the executive committee of the New York Prison Association from 1868 until his death, at age 42, in 1883. In July 1874, Dugdale was asked by the Prison Association to visit 13 of the county jails in New York on a “tour of inspection” (Dugdale, 1910, p. 7). In one of the counties, he discovered six people in jail from one extended family. In conducting further inquiries in the local community, he determined that these six people belonged to a family that could be traced back generations

Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes

to the period prior to 1750. This family, which Dugdale disguised with the name “Jukes,” had basically lived in one area and “were so despised by the reputable community that their family name had come to be used generically as a term of reproach” (1910, p. 8, emphasis in the original). This discovery led to a more detailed study by Dugdale. He was able to identify 709 members of the Jukes family, and he offered a careful statistical analysis of the characteristics and behaviors of them in his book The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity.

The Study and Its Context During the second half of the 1800s, much criminological research was influenced by the work of Charles Darwin. His work on evolution and “survival of the fittest” led criminologists to focus on ways that crime might be explained by biological and evolutionary concepts (Vold & Bernard, 1986). At the same time, the United States was still rebuilding from the Civil War, and great tensions existed around issues of segregation and immigration. Studies that identified biological and hereditary causes of criminal behavior were popular in the final decades of the 1800s and the early decades of the 1900s. It was within this context that Dugdale’s work was published. Dugdale was impressed by the scientific methods of Darwin and his followers. He was also fascinated with sociology and believed that the root of social problems lay in the environment. In the preface to the 1877 edition of his book, Dugdale provided insights into how he came to conduct the study of the Jukes. He was inspired by the Inspector of Prisons in Italy, Mr. Beltrani-Scalia, who had written that “until we shall have studied crime in its perpetrators and in all its relations and different aspects, we will never be able to discover the best means to prevent or correct it, nor can we say that penitentiary science has made any great progress” (p. 1). When Dugdale came upon a number of related individuals in the same jail at the same time, he decided to conduct the type of study that Beltrani-Scalia had called for. In pulling together a genealogy of the Jukes family, Dugdale was careful to collect the facts and then, using inductive reasoning, to generate a set of suggestions and implications rather than firm conclusions.

275

Dugdale was able to trace the genealogy of the Jukes back to a man that he called Max. Max was born between 1720 and 1740 and was a descendent of a prominent family in the colony of New York. He lived on his own in the backwoods and was the father to two sons. His sons both married sisters from another family. Dugdale followed the descendents from five of the sisters in that family (two that married Max’s sons and three others). Distinctive patterns emerged following the bloodlines from those five women (Dugdale created names for them: Ada, Bell, Clara, Delia, and Effie). In tracing the descendents from these five sisters, Dugdale found “groups which may be considered distinctively industrious, distinctively criminal, distinctively pauper, and specifically diseased” (1910, p. 16). Of the 709 members of the Jukes family that he identified, 280 were found to be paupers as adults. One hundred and forty were found to be criminals, with 60 found to be habitual thieves. Seven members of the Jukes family had been murdered. Fifty of the women in the family had been prostitutes. Forty of the women were identified as having had sexually transmitted diseases, and Dugdale determined that a total of 440 persons had contracted the diseases from these women. Dugdale went on to estimate that the cost to society for the crimes and needs of this family—he referred to this as the “social damage” of the Jukes—was more than $1.3 million at that time (1910, p. 67). Dugdale considered whether the patterns he found in his study were the result of heredity or environment. He allowed that physical capacity and mental capacity were determined primarily by heredity. Yet he argued that behavior was influenced more by environment than by heredity. He suggested that the environment tended to be similar from generation to generation, thus contributing to the perception that heredity was determining behavior. He proposed that a good way to control crime was to change the environment.

Heredity Versus the Environment Keeping in mind that Dugdale aspired to be a sociologist and a social scientist, his position that the environment was the key factor influencing the development of criminal activity fit within his worldview. Even so, his approach provided an

276

Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes

opportunity for others to offer their own interpretation of the data. His data were presented in careful detail in the book. The reaction that would follow over the next several decades, and the way his work would be portrayed in the criminological literature, exemplifies how a set of data can be used to effectively support competing positions. Dugdale’s study of the Jukes was often hailed by those involved in the founding of the eugenics movement in the final decades of the 1800s. Nicole Hahn Rafter notes that Dugdale’s work was very influential among those convinced that “bad” genes were responsible for such social ills as pauperism, mental illness, and criminality. As she further observes, the Jukes study fanned the flames with language that made references to heredity, using such terms as “criminal stock” and “Juke blood” (1997, p. 38). The use of the methodology of genealogy was also suggestive, according to Rafter, of an intent to link criminality with heredity. An expansion of the Dugdale study would more deliberately attribute the behavior of the Jukes to heredity. In 1911, original documents written by Dugdale were found among the archives of the New York Prison Association. These documents provided identifying information on who the Jukes were, and this allowed a follow-up study 40 years after the original research of Dugdale. Arthur H. Estabrook, of the Eugenics Records Office, conducted the follow-up research and produced the book The Jukes in 1915. Estabrook extended the original analysis of Dugdale to include 2,094 members of the Jukes clan. He concluded, One half of the Jukes were and are feeble-minded, mentally incapable of responding normally to the expectations of society, brought up under faulty environmental conditions which they consider normal, satisfied with the fulfillment of natural passions and desires, and with no ambition or ideals in life. The other half, perhaps normal mentally and emotionally, has become socially adequate or inadequate, depending on the chance of the individual reaching or failing to reach an environment which would mold and stimulate his inherited social traits. (p. 85)

Estabrook went on to argue that all of the criminals in the Jukes family were feebleminded,

and he proposed that there were only two possible solutions that could be translated into policies. One potential solution was to institutionalize the persons for the rest of their lives. This would mean building enough institutions to provide the kind of space that would be required. A second solution, which he allowed would be less accepted by the general public, was the forced sterilization of these persons. Both of these strategies were implemented to some degree in the United States in the decades following the publication of Estabrook’s book, yet neither one of these approaches is likely to be considered as appropriate or viable today.

Dugdale’s Legacy Genealogical studies, such as that of the Jukes, became popular in the decades following the publication of Dugdale’s book. Henry H. Goddard was the author of a study focusing on the Kallikak family. The Kallikaks were a New Jersey family that Goddard traced back to a Revolutionary War soldier. He focused on the presence of feeblemindedness in the ancestors of a young girl he worked with at the Training School for Backward and Feeble-minded Children at Vineland, New Jersey. Another example of such an approach is the work of Oscar C. McCulloch, who studied the so-called Tribe of Ishmael. McCulloch collected information on about 250 families within this clan based in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the mid-1800s. He found patterns of intergenerational poverty, intermarriage, and incarceration among various members of the “tribe.” When the 4th edition of Dugdale’s book was published in 1910, Franklin Giddings of Columbia University provided a new introduction in which he lamented that the work of Dugdale had been interpreted to be a “demonstration of ‘hereditary criminality’” (p. iv). Giddings also expressed concern that “since Mr. Dugdale’s studies came to a too early end the whole subject of heredity has undergone re-examination at the hands of biologists” (p. iv). Dugdale’s contribution to criminological research would continue to be misunderstood in some of the more influential criminology textbooks over the next century. Edwin Sutherland and Donald Cressey noted that the use of the family tree was a strategy to “prove that criminality is inherited” and cited the Jukes study as the most

Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes

famous example (p. 124). James Inciardi, in his discussion of biological theories of crime, noted that Dugdale had concluded that “crime was caused by ‘bad’ heredity” (p. 99). George Vold and Thomas Bernard indicated that Dugdale had attributed the patterns of crime and pauperism found across the generations of the Jukes family to the “‘degenerate’ nature of the family” (p. 68). Don Gibbons carried this theme further when he described the Jukes study as one that demonstrated that “presumably feebleminded ancestors produced a long line of social misfits. The conclusion was that feeblemindedness is inherited and leads to social inadequacy, deviation, and criminality” (p. 23). More recently, Donald Shoemaker took up the matter of the debate between heredity and environment in his textbook. He characterized Dugdale’s conclusions as being that “pauperism, illegitimacy, crime, and heredity were all related and fixed in nature” (p. 27). Recent scholars have criticized the statistical methods of Dugdale. Vold and Bernard charged that his study “was based on unreliable, incomplete, and obscure information and was filled with value judgments and unsupported conclusions” (pp. 68–69). Rafter (1997) noted that Dugdale’s book was influential because it gave the appearance of being a scientific study. These criticisms are perhaps overly harsh for a man with little formal training in social science research. Given the state of social science research in the mid-1850s, the Jukes study is impressive. Dugdale’s data sources included genealogies; interviews with local residents familiar with the family, members of the family, employers, and criminal justice officials; and the examination of records from the Sheriff’s office, the prisons, the poor houses, and the county clerk’s office. Indeed, his study represents an integration of qualitative and quantitative methods—part ethnography and part descriptive analysis of counts of events of interest. Of the variables that he purported to examine, his methods appear rigorous. In addition, Dugdale was open in his discussion of the limitations of his methods. He noted, for instance, that records of criminal offenses were only available for the most recent 40 or so years. Other sources of official data were similarly limited. Findings from Dugdale’s work are consistent with evidence that has been offered by criminological research in modern times as well. As Dugdale

277

argued, heredity is now seen as a factor that sometimes interacts with environmental factors to enhance the likelihood of criminal activity. The finding that delinquents and criminals tend to have family members involved in crime is also a common conclusion in criminological research. Finally, there is a great deal of recent attention on the impact that having parents in prison has for children. G. Roger Jarjoura See also Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism; Goddard, Henry H: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

References and Further Readings Carlson, E. A. (2001). The unfit: A history of a bad idea. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Degler, C. N. (1991). In search of human nature: The decline and revival of Darwinism in American social thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Dugdale, R. L. (1910). The Jukes: A study in crime, pauperism, disease and heredity. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Estabrook, A. H. (1916). The Jukes in 1915 (Carnegie Institution of Washington publication No. 240). Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Farrington, D. P., Jolliffe, D., Loeber, R., StouthamerLoeber, M., & Kalb, L. M. (2001). The concentration of offenders in families, and family criminality in the prediction of boys’ delinquency. Journal of Adolescence, 24, 579–596. Gibbons, D. C. (1992). Society, crime, and criminal behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goddard, H. H. (1935). The Kallikak family: A study in the heredity of feeble-mindedness. New York: Macmillan. Inciardi, J. A. (1978). Reflections on crime: An introduction to criminology and criminal justice. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. McCulloch, O. C. (1891). The tribe of Ishmael: A study in social degradation. Indianapolis, IN: Charity Organization Society. Mednick, S. A., Moffitt, T. E., & Stack, S. A. (1987). The causes of crime: New biological approaches. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rafter, N. H. (1988). White trash: The eugenic family studies, 1877–1919. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

278

Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide

Rafter, N. H. (1997). Creating born criminals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Seymour, C. B. (1998). Introduction—children with parents in prison: Child welfare policy, program, and practice issues. Child Welfare, 77(5), 469. Shoemaker, D. J. (2000). Theories of delinquency: An examination of explanations of delinquent behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Sutherland, E. H., & Cressey, D. R. (1966). Principles of criminology (7th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott. Vold, G. B., & Bernard, T. J. (1986). Theoretical criminology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist, well known for his focus on broad social topics, such as education, religion, and crime. Often credited as the “father of modern sociology,” Durkheim has contributed numerous works that have helped shape the field, including The Division of Labor in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. In one of his most famous and widely examined works, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Durkheim investigated the relationship between broad social forces and suicide. For this work, he collected information on demographics and suicide rates for several European countries. Though it is valued as an impressive piece of empirical research, this work is considered especially important for two reasons. First, it is one of the earliest, widely published attempts to explain individual behavior as a function of broader social influence. Second, key to Durkheim’s discussion of the causes of suicide is “anomie,” a concept that has become a relative staple in sociological research.

Types and Causes of Suicide In Suicide, Durkheim identifies four main types of suicide, describes their social causes, and identifies characteristics of individuals that make them more or less likely to commit suicide. As previously stated, Durkheim used data from several European nations to perform his analysis. Consequently, he found that suicide rates were relatively consistent across nation-states. “[T]he term suicide is applied

to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result” (Durkheim, 1951, p. 44). With this definition, Durkheim sought to limit suicidal death as a result of those acts committed intentionally only by the individual. In doing so, he distinguishes between suicidal death and accidental deaths or homicide. Further, Durkheim described four main categories of suicide: egoistic suicide, altruistic suicide, fatalistic suicide, and anomic suicide. In discussing the influence of society on the prevalence of suicide, Durkheim identified two key processes—social integration and moral regulation. By social integration, Durkheim is referring to the development of bonds with other individuals, groups, and/or institutions within society. Integration allows individuals to adopt social norms, values, and goals that serve to embed them in the fabric of society. With moral regulation, Durkheim emphasized the role of traditional social institutions and processes (i.e., marriage, religion, employment) in the regulation of individual behavior. Regulation is essential to ensure order and restrain the passions of individuals within society. Social integration directly influences both egoistic and altruistic suicide, with each type occurring at opposite ends of the integration spectrum. Similarly, fatalistic and anomic suicide are both directly influenced by the level of moral regulation, with each occurring at opposite ends of the regulation spectrum. Egoistic Suicide

According to Durkheim, some individuals are unable or unwilling to form substantial bonds with other individuals or institutions. They experience very low levels of social integration and cannot adequately adopt social norms, values, and/or goals. Not only are these individuals incapable of assimilating to conventional social groups, but also they often lack the emotional or psychological support that is typically provided by these groups. As a result, individuals who are poorly integrated into society have a higher likelihood of committing suicide. Durkheim provided evidence for egoistic suicide in his comparison of suicide rates among Catholics and Protestants. The Catholic Church closely governs the activities of its parishioners, essentially forcing social integration, while the

Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide

Protestant Church is much more lax. Consequently, Durkheim found that suicide is much more common among Protestants than Catholics. Altruistic Suicide

At the other end of the spectrum, some individuals are so strongly bonded to social groups and institutions that they essentially lose their sense of individuality. These individuals are considered to be too socially integrated. In losing their individuality, these altruistic individuals may easily become a tool of the larger group or institution. Often, they are willing to sacrifice their health, livelihood, and even life for the betterment of the group as a whole. As a result, individuals that are too integrated have a higher likelihood of committing suicide. According to Phyllis Puffer, such behavior can be seen in some cults, such as Heaven’s Gate, or even among military personal that are so integrated they are willing to give their lives. Fatalistic Suicide

As previously stated, moral regulation is essential for ensuring order and restraining individual passions. In some societies, certain groups of individuals may be overregulated. Essentially, these individuals are oppressed, often lacking any basic freedoms, such as slaves or individuals who married too young. As a result, overregulated individuals are more likely to commit suicide. As stated by Durkheim, overregulation is rare in the modern world, and fatalistic suicide does not deserve much attention. Anomic Suicide

The final type of suicide—anomic suicide—is by far the most reviewed and discussed type offered by Durkheim. This form of suicide is highly influenced by what Durkheim terms as anomie. According to Puffer, anomie is a popular term within sociology, though it is frequently misunderstood. Most commonly, anomie is associated with a sense of normlessness within a society. As the term suggests, normlessness is often used to refer to a state in which traditional norms and patterns of behavior have been abandoned. While technically accurate, the term normlessness is a very broad interpretation of Durkheim’s original

279

definition. As described in Suicide, anomie refers to the inability of groups and/or institutions to effectively regulate normative behavior. While the lack of adequate regulatory abilities may lead to an erosion of social norms, it does not necessarily result in a completely normless state. While some norms may erode, others still exist (Puffer, 2009). According to Durkheim, the inability to effectively regulate norms and behaviors—anomie— produces a disconnect between desire and reality. Essentially, with no restraints upon aspirations, “wants” quickly outpaces the “means.” As a result, the frustration and anxiety produced by the inability to fulfill one’s desires may lead some to suicide as a means of escape (Cullen, 1984). Further, he discussed the influence of anomie arising from both broad structural conditions and conditions closer to the individual. In terms of structural conditions, Durkheim explored the effects of economic anomie (acute and chronic). With economic anomie, he examined the relationship between changes in the ability of social groups and institutions to regulate behavior and needs and the rates of suicide within that society. With conditions closer to the individual, Durkheim explored the effects of domestic anomie (acute and chronic). With domestic anomie, he described the relationship between changes in regulatory relationships and likelihood of committing suicide. These categories of anomie are described in more detail below.

Categories of Anomie As previously mentioned, Durkheim discussed four main types of anomie: acute economic anomie, chronic economic anomie, acute domestic anomie, and chronic domestic anomie. Acute economic anomie refers to temporary fluctuations in the ability of social groups and institutions to effectively regulate behavior and fulfill social needs. Such groups and institutions include religion, government, and financial institutions. A common example of acute economic anomie is a brief and abrupt change in economic situation, such as the distribution of wealth. Chronic economic anomie refers to long-term changes in the ability of social groups and institutions to effectively regulate behavior and fulfill social needs. A common example is the extended influence of the industrial revolution.

280

Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide

With the industrial revolution, traditional forms of social regulation were gradually eroded and new forms were not established. The new goals of obtaining wealth and property were not enough to fulfill social needs, according to Durkheim. Acute domestic anomie refers to abrupt changes in an individual’s life, including disruptions in relationships, to which the individual is unable to adequately adapt. A common example is the death of a significant other. As a spouse often serves as a regulator, his or her death may alter the level of regulation one experiences. Chronic domestic anomie refers to long-term changes in an individual’s life, including shifts in relationships that greatly modify one’s level of behavioral regulation. The most common example discussed is the institution of marriage, because it often changes the level of regulation one experiences. Marriage is unique, however. While it may provide necessary regulation on the risky behavior of men, it may serve to over-regulate women, who are already regulated by a number of other groups and institutions. In his examination, Durkheim found several clear examples of anomic suicide. As stated previously, economic anomie results in the erosion of the level of regulation provided by social groups and institutions, specifically financial institutions. Further, the new goals of obtaining wealth and property were not enough to fulfill social needs. This serves to explain why Durkheim found that suicide was more prevalent among the wealthy than the poor. Domestic anomie, on the other hand, is directly related to individual relationships and the ability to adapt to changes in the amount of regulation. In this regard, Durkheim found that it was common for widows to commit suicide. Further, he found that single men were more likely to commit suicide than married men, most likely due to the lack of regulation experienced by single men.

Conclusion With Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Durkheim had a substantial influence on the growth sociology as a discipline. His research not only provided evidence that individual-level behavior may be influenced by broader social processes, but also it served to further develop the concept of anomie,

which has remained a central topic of research. Durkheim believed that his examination of suicide provided insight into the social forces that actually led to anomie, and that these forces resulted from the decrease in mechanical solidarity and the increase in organic solidarity produced by both the division of labor and industrial revolution. Further, with his assessment of the influence of social integration and moral regulation on the prevalence of suicide, Durkheim shows that these forces affect all members of a society—the young and old, men and women, the poor and wealthy. Billy Henson See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Anomie and White-Collar Crime; Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime; Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

References and Further Readings Adler, F., Laufer, W. S., & Merton, R. K. (Eds.). (1999). The legacy of anomie theory (Advances in criminological theory: Vol. 6). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Cullen, F. T. (1984). Rethinking crime and deviance theory: The emergence of a structuring tradition. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. Durkheim, É. (1951). Suicide: A study in sociology (J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson, Trans.). New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1897) Durkheim, É. (1997). The division of labor in society (W. D. Halls & L. Coser, Trans.). Chicago: Free Press. (Original work published 1893) Emirbayer, M. (1996). Durkheim’s contribution to the sociological analysis of history. Sociological Forum, 11, 263–284. Pope, W. (1976). Durkheim’s “Suicide”: A classic analyzed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Puffer, P. (2009). Durkheim did not say “normlessness”: The concept of anomic suicide for introductory sociology courses. Southern Rural Sociology, 24, 200–222. Thompson, K. (2002). Émile Durkheim. New York: Routledge Press. Turner, S. P. (1993). Émile Durkheim: Sociologist and moralist. New York: Routledge Press.

E who manage places. This extension led to the development of the crime triangle. Second, he has continued to investigate new analytical techniques and methods of problem conceptualization to improve research strategies and evaluations of crime reduction initiatives. For example, he has demonstrated the importance of using theory to guide interpretations of crime maps. More recently, he has explored the merits of crime pattern computer simulations for practice and theory. Third, he has helped reduce specific crime problems by producing manuals for police practitioners, crime analysts, and researchers that summarize the basic tenets of environmental criminology and recent evaluation findings. In addition to producing manuals to reduce harms associated with student party riots, pedestrian-vehicle accidents, and spectator violence in stadiums, he developed a crime analysis manual that has been translated into 16 different languages and is used throughout the world. Eck also developed the SARA (scanning, analysis, response, assessment) model, which helps police engage in problem-solving policing. The primary focus of this essay is Eck’s extension of routine activity theory and contribution to the development of the crime triangle. First, the origins of the place management addition to routine activity theory are briefly explored. Second, the various elements of the crime triangle are presented along with a discussion of how the triangle is used to address crime problems. Finally, a recently proposed definition of place management and the latest applications of this concept are presented.

Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle The fact that crime tends to cluster in particular places is widely accepted and supported by a large body of research. French scholars André-Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet were among the first to “map” crime and identify relationships between crime rates and community characteristics. Also, U.S. Chicago School researchers, including Robert Burgess and Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, examined crime patterns and discovered relationships between ecological characteristics and concentrations of criminal activity. However, these early studies ignored the heterogeneous collection of both high-crime and low-crime places that clustered together to form high-crime neighborhoods. Social scientists in the 1970s began to develop a collection of theories to explain this phenomenon. These theories form the basis of environmental criminology, often referred to as crime science. Crime science is not concerned with explaining an individual’s propensity to commit crime. Instead, crime science research identifies environmental factors that create attractive crime opportunities and proposes interventions to reduce or eliminate these opportunities. John E. Eck has advanced the crime science paradigm and its application through three significant contributions. First, he extended Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson’s routine activity theory by calling attention to the importance of people

281

282

Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle

The current version of routine activity theory suggests that crime will occur when offenders and targets converge in places where all three controllers—guardians, handlers, and managers— are ineffective, absent, or negligent. The theory is often depicted as the crime triangle, also called the problem analysis triangle (see Figure 1). The first, inner layer of the triangle lists the three elements that must be present for a crime to occur, while the outer triangle represents the controllers that may intervene on behalf of each element to stop crime from occurring. The crime triangle is used to guide investigations of crime problems and identify potential solutions. Analyses based on the crime triangle

r ge na Ma

The Crime Triangle

ce Pla

Routine activity theory was published in 1979 by Cohen and Felson. These researchers proposed that crime is a function of people’s routine activities. In the original version of this theory, Cohen and Felson argued that crimes occur when motivated offenders find suitable targets not protected by capable guardians. In an attempt to link the theory with Travis Hirschi’s control theory, Felson later developed the idea of “handlers.” Handlers are people who can influence offender behavior. These individuals can be parents, friends, spouses, teachers, or probation officers. While handlers are people who control potential offenders, guardians are tasked with protecting potential targets. Eck further extended routine activity theory by proposing a third type of crime controller: the place manager. Managers are people who regulate specific places, such as landlords, bar bouncers, homeowners, and classroom teachers. In conducting research on drug markets during his tenure at the Police Executive Research Forum, Eck discovered that dealers operating open-air drug markets in San Diego, California, often selected places characterized by weak or absent management. A subsequent study published by Eck and Julie Wartell in 1998 found that efforts to improve the management of rental apartment housing increased evictions of drug offenders and decreased crime, providing more evidence to support the proposed association between management practices and crime at places.

Ha nd ler Of fen de r

Place Management

CRIME

Target/victim Guardian

Figure 1   Crime Triangle Source: Adapted from Cullen, F., Eck, J., & Lowenkamp, C. (2002). Environmental corrections: A new paradigm for effective supervision. Federal Probation, 66(2), 28–37.

encourage researchers to examine the characteristics of the three elements and three controllers related to a specific crime problem. Interventions to reduce the crimes are then developed by considering whether one or more of the three elements can be altered or removed, and whether one or more of the associated controllers can be made more effective or put into place. The crime triangle is often used to guide the analysis stage of problemoriented policing projects. Eck’s contributions to routine activity theory and the problem analysis triangle have encouraged police to work with property and business owners to reduce community crime problems. Research suggests that significant reductions in crime can be achieved through partnerships with place managers. When managers refuse to address crime problems at their places, police have found success in bringing legal action against property owners who facilitate crime. Police efforts to compel place managers to reduce crime opportunities are often referred to as third-party policing.

Defining Place Management Most recently, place management has been defined as “a set of four processes that owners, their employees, and others use to organize the physical and social environment of a location so that the

Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle

functions of the place can be carried out” (Madensen, 2007, p. 19). These processes are (1) organization of physical space—the design of the physical space, including site selection, construction, repair, and upkeep; (2) regulation of conduct—the promotion of desirable and prohibition of undesirable activities, including but not limited to crime and disorder; (3) control of access—the inclusion and exclusion of people, including but not limited to potential offenders; and (4) acquisition of resources—the attainment of money and other resources that can be used for the first three processes, as well as any profit. A recent study by Scott Hoke examined the effects of encouraging correctional officers to act as place managers. The officers were given control over the four place management processes in an attempt to reduce incidents of inmate misconduct. This increase in officer management activities reduced reports of inmate misconduct by more than 77 percent. The impact of place management on crime helps to explain why two similar facilities in close proximity to each other can have very different crime levels. Bars that generate high numbers of calls for service are often located next to bars that require no police intervention. According to Tamara Madensen and Eck, this difference can be attributed to the management practices of those who own and operate the specific establishments, rather than community-level influences.

Conclusion Eck has made substantial contributions to the crime science paradigm through his place-based research. His examinations of crimes at places led to the recognition of place managers and their influence on criminal activity. Research of place management practices has extended our knowledge and understanding of effective crime strategies. Such studies have helped researchers identify the mechanisms through which crime is facilitated or suppressed. The crime triangle, which was derived from the place management extension of routine activity theory, is commonly used to investigate crime problems and develop interventions to reduce crime. As the popularity of the crime science perspective continues to grow, many more researchers and practitioners will likely agree with the assertion

283

that “place should be a central component in crime theory and crime prevention” (Eck & Weisburd, 1995, p. 3). Consequently, place management research will continue to provide critical insight for both crime science theorists and practitioners. Tamara D. Madensen See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design; Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

References and Further Readings Buerger, M. E. (1998). The politics of third-party policing. In L. G. Mazerolle & J. Roehl (Eds.), Civil remedies and crime prevention: Crime prevention studies (Vol. 9, pp. 89–116). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Burgess, E. W. (1925). The growth of the city. In R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, & R. D. MacKenzie (Eds.), The city (pp. 37–44). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chamard, S. (2006). Partnering with businesses to address public safety problems (Problem-Solving Tools Series No. 5). Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. Clarke, R. V., & Eck, J. E. (2005). Crime analysis for problem solvers in 60 small steps. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–605. Cullen, F., Eck, J., & Lowenkamp, C. (2002). Environmental corrections: A new paradigm for effective supervision. Federal Probation, 66(2), 28–37. Eck, J. E. (1994). Drug markets and drug places: A casecontrol study of the spatial structure of illicit drug dealing. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park. Eck, J. E., & Wartell, J. (1998). Improving the management of rental properties with drug problems: A randomized experiment. In L. G. Mazerolle & J. Roehl (Eds.), Civil remedies and crime prevention: Crime prevention studies (Vol. 9, pp. 161–185). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.

284

Economic Theory and Crime

Eck, J. E., & Weisburd, D. (Eds.). (1995). Crime and place: Crime prevention studies (Vol. 4). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Guerry, A. (1833). Essai sur la statistique morale de la France [Essay on the moral statistics of France]. Paris: Crochard. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoke, S. A. (2008, July). Effective place management in institutional settings. Presentation at the International Seminar on Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis (ECCA) 17th International Symposium, Anchorage, AK. Madensen, T. D. (2007). Bar management and crime: Toward a dynamic theory of place management and crime hotspots. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati. Madensen, T. D., & Eck, J. E. (2008). Violence in bars: Exploring the impact of place manager decision making. Crime Prevention and Community Safety, 10, 111–125. Quetelet, A. J. (1842). A treatise on man. Gainesville, FL: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints. Scott, M. S., Eck, J., Knutsson, J., & Goldstien, H. (2008). Problem-oriented policing and environmental criminology. In R. Wortley & L. Mazerolle (Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (pp. 221–246). Portland, OR: Willan Publishing. Scott, M. S., & Goldstein, H. (2005). Shifting and sharing responsibility for public safety problems (Response Guide Series No. 3). Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wortley, R., & Mazerolle, L. (Eds.). (2008). Environmental criminology and crime analysis. Portland, OR: Willan.

specification of the basic rational choice ideas laid out by these early thinkers. Becker’s model is indisputably a simple model of criminal behavior, with its assumptions of a static model in which everyone has perfect information. In little more than a decade of Becker’s work, economists had recognized the shortcomings of this model and had accepted that population heterogeneity and imperfect information needed to be key features of any formal economic model of crime. There is now a large body of sophisticated economic theory that can explain many of the unique features of criminal behavior. A paper by David Lee and Justin McCrary does move away from this abstraction by specifying and empirically testing a dynamic model of criminal behavior. They find evidence of extreme myopia among serious youthful offenders. This finding is consistent with criminological research on low self-control and time preferences. This work raises questions about the power of deterrence, particularly for youthful or embedded criminals. However, it should not lead to doubts about economic theory, which can accommodate people who do not seriously consider the future. Of course, a reasonable criminologist might question the usefulness of a sophisticated (and highly mathematical) paper such as the one by Lee and McCrary. While economists might find it gratifying that a formal economic model can reflect reality, most criminologists accept the finding that criminals appear myopic without reference to formal economic models. After providing a general overview of economic theory, this entry examines how economic theory can help guide current criminological research using an example from sentencing.

Economic Theory Applied to Crime

Economic Theory

and

Crime

Gary Becker’s 1968 “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” serves as the starting point for the study of crime by economists. It is noteworthy that Becker cites both Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, early criminologists responsible for the rational or utilitarian approach to crime and punishment. Becker’s work is a more formal

The main insight of Becker was that crime, and the control of crime, were choices that could be modeled in the standard labor economic model of individual decision making about the allocation of time. In this framework, crime is simply another choice, like the decision to work or to invest in education. Such choice to an economist has a clear conceptual structure. Individuals face an array of options (goods/activities) that are linked to outcomes. In the simplest model, all choices are

Economic Theory and Crime

known and the probabilities of the associated outcomes are known (perfect information). Individuals weigh these outcomes with the help of an “objective function,” which is a statement of goals. This objective function evaluates the various outcomes in terms of how well they help the individual achieve his or her goals. In the simplest consumer choice model, the individual allocates a fixed amount of money between two or more goods. The individual’s objective function describes what will make the person the happiest/most satisfied, given his or her income constraint. This framework points to a central concept of economics: opportunity cost. The cost of choice A is not the money price of that choice but the cost of not choosing B, the next best option. This conceptualization is crucial to understanding the cost of crime to the potential offender because the true cost of an incarceration sentence is the opportunity cost of spending time in prison, according to Becker. This may vary among individuals, even though the actual sentence will be the same for all of them. One hallmark of the economists’ approach is their willingness to write the theory down in mathematical form, which includes the mathematical specification of the preference or objective function of individuals. These utility functions include parameters that weigh the tradeoffs between returns now and in the future (time discounting), and parameters that describe the value of an additional unit given current levels of consumption. For example, economists assume diminishing marginal returns—that is, that the benefit of the next unit of a given good is smaller than the benefit of the last unit consumed. Because these objective functions must be written down mathematically, they are necessarily highly simplified descriptions of human behavior. Nonetheless, they include explicit assumptions about human behavior, and, more importantly, they can generate testable predictions. But it would be a mistake to focus too much on the individual and the implications of rational behavior in a discussion of the economic approach. Economics is largely the study of supply and demand for goods. As such, there are two sets of actors, producers and consumers, trying to maximize their objective functions (profits for producers, utility or well-being for consumers). The key claim of

285

microeconomics is that producers and consumers can interact to reach an equilibrium price and quantity without any explicit intervention. This focus on two competing forces interacting to reach an equilibrium is an explicit part of economists’ thinking. In fact, Ronald Coase (1978, p. 209) suggested that this tendency by economists to think about the economic system as a unified interdependent system means they are “more likely to uncover the basic interrelationships within a social system than is someone less accustomed to looking at the working of a system as a whole. This system focus was explicit in Becker’s original approach to the topic. In Becker’s view, the social system that generates crime is not limited to potential offenders on one hand and the criminal justice system on the other, but on any part of the social and economic environment that changes the incentives to commit crime. This fundamental realization that the total amount of crime is determined as an outcome of the interactions between all members of the system is not uniquely economic, but it is not surprising that economists have focused on this insight from the beginning of their study of crime. In an economic market, the fact that quantity sold is a function of the interaction between supply and demand is recognized by the specification of two simultaneous equations, one for supply and one for demand. In economic language, price is endogenous, determined by the system of equations. In contrast, other factors are exogenous, meaning that they exist outside of the system and do not depend on what happens as the system arrives at an equilibrium. A drought that affects the production of corn is an example of an exogenous shock to the market. The key variables in the crime system are not quantity and price but crime and the crime prevention measures taken by the criminal justice system as well as potential victims. Crime is dependent on, among other factors, the crime prevention measures taken in the social system. But these measures are in turn dependent on the amount of crime in the system, among other things. That means that crime prevention is endogenous—that is, that crime and crime prevention are simultaneously determined. This fact is the biggest hurdle to models that attempt to study the deterrent impact of prison and police.

286

Economic Theory and Crime

This analogy of a market for crime has value in its identification of interacting parties who simultaneously affect each other’s behavior. Estimates of the impact of policies that fail to take into account the endogeneity of these policies and the response of the potential offenders (i.e., displacement) to these policies are fundamentally flawed. But this endogeneity is not just a statistical problem—it is a substantive problem that fundamentally frames the economists’ approach to the study of crime since the criminal justice system, potential victims, and the offenders are reacting to each others’ action. A standard economic critique is that the author has failed to take into account the feedback loop between the actions of the system and would-be offender. For example, consider the potential tension between reintegration for exoffenders and deterrence. A policy that encourages reintegration may reduce barriers to reentry, but it also simultaneously lowers the punishment cost of an arrest and conviction.

Example Economist William Landes followed Becker’s model of criminal activity with an important article titled “An Economic Analysis of the Courts.” He provided a mathematical model of the court behavior, which he then tested with empirical data. The criminal justice system is on its face probably more amenable to the economic approach than is crime itself. The actors in the criminal justice system are known, and are more likely to behave rationally, in the economic sense of consistently following their objective function. These objective functions are likely to be “reasonable,” in the sense of striving to achieve intuitively appealing goals. Data on the behavior of the court actors are also available for every case, which means that the models are likely to be easier to test. Landes’s model is simple, and like any good economic modeler, he makes his assumptions clear. The prosecutor’s objective function is such that he or she attempts to maximize the expected number of convictions weighted by the expected sentence given at trial, subject to a budget constraint on his resources. This maximization exercise produces what economists call the first-order conditions—the things that must be true if the

prosecutor maximized his objective function under these assumptions. These first-order conditions create impli­­­ca­­tions or predictions that can then be tested. For example, his model predicts that pretrial detention (meaning that someone was not released on bail) would lead to higher opportunity costs for the defendant than if he or she were released on bail. These higher costs would lead to acceptance of longer sentences in plea bargains for those held on bail relative to those who are released on bail. If making bail is a function of wealth, then this model suggests that the current bail system will lead to discriminatory sentencing outcomes for those with less wealth. In particular, lower income participants who do not make bail will be more likely to plea guilty and get harsher plea sentences. It is useful to compare this economic theory with criminal justice theory. Those theories that do exist, while often quite rich, are discursive and informal. An example is the current dominant theory in sentencing, focal concerns theory (Steffensmeier et al., 1993; Steffensmeier et al., 1998). The focal concerns theory states that courtroom actors’ sentencing decisions reflect three primary focal concerns: (1) the blameworthiness or culpability of the offender, (2) the desire to protect the community by incapacitating current offenders or deterring potential offenders, and (3) the resource constraints of the courts. The argument is that because actors do not have enough information to accurately determine an offender’s culpability or dangerousness, they develop a shorthand based on stereotypes and attributions that are themselves linked to offender characteristics such as race, sex, and age. Direct tests of focal concerns are complicated by the lack of a formal model. Some parts of the theory are consistent with Landes’s—for example, the existence of a budget constraint is common between the two models. But focal concerns theory argues that actors such as prosecutors have a more complex objective function than the one specified by Landes and that actors cannot maximize effectively. While these assertions are clearly possible and even plausible, they have not been tested in the current literature. For example, Jeffery Ulmer and Mindy Bradley attempt to use focal concerns theory to explain the size of the trial penalty—the difference between

Economic Theory and Crime

287

the plea bargain and the penalty at trial—with particular attention to the potential for racial discrimination by prosecutors. This is very similar to the problem modeled by Landes in 1971. But Ulmer and Bradley do not include measures of the probability of conviction, the existence of pretrial detention, or attitudes toward risk—three major factors that explain plea bargaining in the Landes model. At the very least, the simple Landes model presents an important alternative explanation or competing theory that could serve as a useful stalking horse or straw figure that criminologists could use to show the need for more complicated theories. Moreover, the absence of key variables predicted to be major players by Landes underscores Steven Klepper, Daniel Nagin, and Luke-Jon Tierney’s concerns about misspecification in the absence of formal models. Simple but formal economic models might provide very useful paths for future research.

this process of generating a prediction based on the idea that incentives matter for choices is what some people mean when they say someone is “thinking like an economist.” It is analogous to how thinking like a sociologist involves paying particular attention to social context. While neither approach will capture all of the important variation in crime by itself, they are both valid and valuable approaches to the study of behavior.

Conclusion

Becker, G. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76, 169–217. Bushway, S., & Reuter, P. (2008). Economists’ contribution to the study of crime and the criminal justice system. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 37, 389–451). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coase, R. (1978). Economics and contiguous disciplines. Journal of Legal Studies, 7, 201–211. Cook, P. (1980). Research in criminal deterrence: Laying the groundwork for the second decade. In N. Morris & M. Tonry (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 2, pp. 211–268). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cook, P. (1986). The demand and supply of criminal opportunities. In N. Morris & M. Tonry (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 7, pp. 1–28). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klepper, S., Nagin, D., & Tierney, L.-J. (1983). Discrimination in the criminal justice system: A critical appraisal of the literature. In A. Blumstein (Ed.), Research on sentencing: The search for reform (pp. 55–128). Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Landes, W. (1971). An economic analysis of the courts. Journal of Labor Economics, 14, 61–107. Lee, D., & McCrary, J. (2006). Crime, punishment, and myopia (NBER Working Paper No. 11491). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Economic theory is consistent with rational choice theory in criminology. However, it differs from rational choice in that it is typically formal, or mathematical. This has both advantages—assumptions and predictions are made clear—and disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that most economic theory is fairly simple and unlikely to be completely consistent with known behavior. Economic theory can then provide a useful straw figure for the development of other, potentially less formal theories. Behavioral economics is an example of a research area where the traditional model provides a platform for the development of more realistic models of behavior. Another version of economics does not actually require the researcher to test the exact formal theory but rather to test broad implications of the theory in a manner more similar to what criminologists typically call theory testing. This is the basic approach that motivates the wildly popular book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, which is based on a series of studies by Levitt and various co-authors. Levitt examines a series of situations in which individuals have clear incentives, generates predictions of specific outcomes, and then analyzes the data to compare actual outcomes with his predictions. Colloquially,

Shawn D. Bushway See also Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime; Cook, Philip J.: The Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders; Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime

References and Further Readings

288

Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency

Levitt, S., & Dubner, S. (2005). Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. New York: William Morrow. Loewenstein, G. (1996). Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 65, 272–292. Miles, T., & Levitt, S. (2007). The empirical study of criminal punishment. In A. M. Polinsky & S. Shavell (Eds.), The handbook of law and economics (pp. 453–495). Amsterdam: North-Holland. Nagin, D., & Pogarsky, G. (2004). Time and punishment: Delayed consequences and criminal behavior. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 20, 295–317. Spelman, W. (2008). Specifying the relationship between crime and prisons. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 24, 149–178. Tonry, M. (2008). Learning from the limitations of deterrence research. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 37, pp. 279–312). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency A strong proponent of the integrated approach, Delbert S. Elliott (1985) highlighted the strengths of integration. Elliott describes the process of theoretical integration as a natural outgrowth of theoretical development. Theories develop through a critical evaluation of existing schools of thought and, to some extent, a synthesis of earlier approaches through reformulation and refinement. The interest in theoretical integration, however, was somewhat distinct in that it represented a departure from the traditional methods of testing competing hypotheses of classic theories to determine which one is correct to an interest in the empirical veracity of the theories. This change was fostered in part through methodological advances allowing an examination of specific concepts derived from the theories. Specifically, methodological advances in statistical analyses allowed for increased isolation of key constructs and the relative strength of empirical support for each. Theoretical integration, Elliott argued, provided an opportunity to develop more intricate

explanations, which better represent the complexity of delinquency and crime. Methodological advances, necessary for examinations of more complex models, allowed for more rigorous assessments of hypotheses. Taken together, the dissatisfaction with the classic approach, coupled with methodological advances, presented an opportunity to better reconcile theoretical and empirical realities. Elliott, Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter were among the first to advance an integrated approach to the study of delinquency. Originally introduced as an article in 1979, their perspective guided one of the largest “pure research” efforts in criminology: the National Youth Survey (NYS). This perspective was empirically tested using data from the NYS, and refined in a later book, Explaining Delinquency and Drug Use. It also opened up considerable debate as to the appropriateness of integrated approaches, as opposed to more “pure” theoretical orientations. The exchanges between Elliott and Travis Hirschi were based primarily on Elliott et al.’s original work.

The Foundation Elliott and colleagues’ focus was on explaining multiple etiologies of the onset and maintenance of sustained delinquent behavior. This emphasis has three major components. First, their emphasis was on individuals who were engaged in delinquency on a repeated basis, rather than on one-time offenders. This varied from many earlier theoretical explanations that failed to distinguish between individuals who offend one time only from those who offend on a more frequent and lasting basis. Second, Elliott and colleagues were interested in factors that led delinquents to begin and continue their delinquent behavior. In this sense, the theory recognized that factors leading to offending onset may differ somewhat from those leading to offending continuation. Third, Elliott et al.’s framework recognized that there were multiple pathways— different combinations of factors—leading individuals to become repeat offenders. That is, not all delinquents share the same experiences or face the same consequences. Rather, variation between individual delinquents remains important in Elliott and colleagues’ framework. The integrated approach offered by Elliott et al. drew primarily from three major perspectives:

Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency

(1) strain, (2) social learning, and (3) social control. To this time, each of these approaches had been used independently to explain delinquency. Elliott and colleagues used a strategy of pulling the major strengths from each perspective and placing them into a unified framework (described below). Noting that each of these perspectives had received empirical support, the authors also acknowledged that the support was not universal. Their criticisms were varied. Of particular importance was the emphasis of prior theories on delinquency being concentrated in lower social classes. Indeed, this was what Elliott and colleagues viewed as a critical flaw of the perspectives as traditionally employed.

The Theory Elliott et al.’s integrated theory was based on elements of strain, social learning, and social control theories. The basic building block is the assumption that youths have different experiences early in life, and these different experiences lead them to form differing degrees of commitment to and integration into conventional groups. In this approach, commitment refers to sources of internal control, while integration referred to sources of external control. Thus, individuals differ in their initial levels of conventional social bonding. This initial level of bonding, developed from early socialization practices, has important ramifications for a youth’s likelihood of engaging in and pathway to delinquency. The next component is based on strain theories. According to this approach, strain results when there is a discrepancy between the goals that one wants to achieve and the means of actually achieving those goals. For example, those with a strong desire to accumulate material goods (i.e., the goal) but who have limited money (i.e., the means) may search for unconventional methods of procuring those goods (e.g., through theft). Combining these two approaches, Elliott and colleagues postulated that the effect of failing to achieve conventional goals on delinquency varies by the initial level of conventional bonds. Specifically, they state, “Limited opportunities to achieve conventional goals constitute a source of strain and thus a motivational stimulus for delinquency only if one is committed to these goals” (1979, p. 9, emphasis added). Thus, Elliott and colleagues highlight the importance of differentiating

289

different types of bonds which an individual holds. Specifically, they suggest that levels of bonding to conventional norms and goals have different consequences and pathways than bonding to delinquent norms and goals. Peer groups provide the final component of the integrated theory whose importance is drawn from social learning theory. As Elliott and colleagues note (1979, p. 13), “access to and involvement in delinquent learning and performance structures is a necessary (but not sufficient) variable in the etiology of delinquency.” Delinquent groups are hypothesized to provide opportunities and reinforcement for pro-delinquent attitudes and behaviors, which is viewed as a necessary component for sustained involvement in delinquency (which is their primary emphasis). Involvement in delinquent groups is not a sufficient mechanism to explain delinquency, however, because the role of the group varies by (1) individuals’ initial levels of bonding to conventional society and (2) factors related to anomie, strain, and/or alienation (referred to as “attenuating” factors or experiences). This perspective highlights several alternative pathways affecting the likelihood that youths will become involved in delinquency. For youths who are strongly bonded to conventional society, their risks of becoming involved in sustained patterns of delinquent behavior are relatively low. Youths with strong initial bonds to conventional society may have these bonds strengthened even more through involvement and success in conventional activities and peer groups. The conventional peer group provides opportunities for increased involvement in conventional activities, mechanisms to reinforce the importance of conventional activities, and an increased likelihood of positive labeling experiences (e.g., being viewed as a “good kid”). Individuals who are strongly bonded to the conventional social order, however, are not immune from involvement in delinquency. Goals and means become critically important at this juncture. Initially high levels of conventional bonding may be attenuated through factors such as limited opportunities, failure to achieve valued goals, negative labeling experiences, and levels of social disorganization, making involvement in delinquency more likely over time. Although viewed as an atypical case, Elliott and colleagues suggest that a second path to delinquency may involve a direct

290

Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency

link between strain and delinquency. As they (1979, p. 14) state, “If attachment to the goals is strong enough . . . , attaining these goals may provide sufficient reinforcement to maintain [delinquent] behavior.” More likely, however, participating in a delinquent group adds to the attenuation of initially strong levels of conventional bonding. The delinquent peer group provides additional support and reinforcement for individual delinquent activity. That is, delinquent groups provide a social context where delinquency can be learned, rewarded, and sustained. It also provides more opportunities for youths to obtain a delinquent label (e.g., being viewed by others as a “bad kid”). This movement through delinquent groups illustrates a third main pathway to delinquency. Elliott and colleagues propose two additional interesting pathways to delinquency. The first involves youths who are weakly committed to conventional society, while the second involves youths who fail to gain personal gratification from conventional success. For these individuals, involvement in the delinquent peer group becomes of primary importance. Weak conventional bonding makes involvement in delinquent peer groups more likely, and this provides the motivation and reinforcement for individual delinquent behavior more likely. Weak social bonds may be further attenuated through the processes of strain, labeling, and social disorganization, which may increase the individuals’ likelihood of delinquent behavior either directly or through involvement in delinquent peer groups. Conversely, youths who reject conventional success may turn to delinquent peer groups in search of alternative, more personally gratifying forms of “success” (e.g., delinquency and/or drug use).

Empirical Support The NYS was a longitudinal study involving multiple birth cohorts. A national-level multistage probability sample of youths aged 11 to 17 was selected in 1976. This sample contained seven birth cohorts (youths born in the years 1959–1965), and a total of 1,725 youths (73 percent of the original sample) were interviewed in the initial wave of data collection. The study consisted of five annual waves of data collection (1978–1981, covering the

years 1977–1980) with additional waves collected in 3-year increments. The study is currently ongoing and has been renamed the National Youth Survey–Family Study (http://www.colorado.edu/ IBS/NYSFS). In 1985, an empirical assessment of the integrated model proposed by Elliott and colleagues was published in the book Explaining Delinquency and Drug Use. Using data collected from the first three years, the results were supportive of a theoretical model originally devised, although a revised, more parsimonious model was also presented based on the empirical assessment. Of primary importance, bonding to delinquent peers and prior delinquency were found to have the only direct effect on delinquent behavior. Less support was found for strain and control theories. Specifically, weak conventional bonds were found to affect delinquency indirectly through bonding to delinquent peers and strain affected delinquency only through its moderating effects on levels of conventional bonding.

The Debate The integrated theory utilized by Elliott and colleagues was novel in its approach. By combining components of empirically supported components of well-recognized theoretical perspectives, the integrated theory offered by Elliott et al. was argued to have the potential to reconcile theoretical and empirical discrepancies found in prior studies. Not everyone agreed, however, as highlighted by a lively debate between Elliott and Hirschi. Hirschi’s critiques were aimed more specifically at Elliott and colleagues’ integrated theory in 1979, with a broader scope outlined in 1989. One of the main criticisms was the integrated approaches’ inability to reconcile the conflicting claims and underlying assumptions of the original theories on which they were based. Since this was often unachievable, Hirschi favored the classic competing hypotheses approach where hypotheses were drawn from two distinct theories and examined against one another. This approach avoided problems of conflicting underlying assumptions and allowed for an examination of which theory was best supported by the evidence. In short, Hirschi (1989, p. 37) preferred classic approaches to

Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency

theoretical development because they “tended toward clarity and internal consistency.” This approach allowed future refinement of theories, thus fostering their development. In stark contrast, Elliott (1985) implicated the competing hypotheses approach as a detriment to criminological theoretical advances. Elliott argued that criminological theories were receiving declining interest due to their simplistic approaches. Tests of competing hypotheses were unfulfilling because they often provided inconclusive results (e.g., varying across samples and operationalization of key variables) and because they focused on specific components of the classic theories rather than on the larger theory as a whole. As Elliott (1985, p. 126) stated, “In sum, the competitive hypothesis approach has often served to inhibit theory development rather than to enhance it.” Additional disagreement arose between Elliott and Hirschi over whether integrated approaches could achieve what they set out to do. Of considerable controversy was the ability of integrated approaches to increase the explanatory power of criminological theories. Each provided evidence to support his position: Elliott taking the side that integrated theories did, in fact, increase explanatory power, with Hirschi taking the approach that they did not. A third disagreement focused on the necessary assumptions associated with how integrated theories were structured. To highlight his concerns, Hirschi (1979) illustrates three approaches that can be used in developing integrated theories. The most common model (“end-to-end”) comprises a developmental approach, where components of original theories are placed in a sequential order representing developmental pathways. This was the appro­ach used by Elliott and colleagues and thus commands the most attention here. Hirschi (1979, p. 34) describes the approach in the following way: “The dependent variables of prior theories become the independent variables of subsequent theories.” Hirschi’s main criticism of the end-to-end approach involves the implications of where each component of the original theory is placed in integrated approaches. Specifically, the theoretical orientation placed as the most proximate cause of the outcome is, by definition, considered to be the most important (and all others are wrong). In

291

other words, it is often up to the perspective of the integrated theorist as to which is the most important cause. Thus, the problem of impartiality proposed as a strength of integrated perspectives is unachieved. Elliott (1985) countered Hirschi’s criticisms of the end-to-end approach by highlighting the importance of indirect (as opposed to direct) effects. Concurring that Hirschi’s criticism may be valid if one were interested in only direct effects on delinquency, Elliott argued that indirect effects—that is, those that operate through other factors to affect the final outcome variable—were also important for two main reasons. First, intervening variables identify the process of how the dependent variable is affected, thus allowing for a more precise mechanism of understanding relationships. Second, from a policy standpoint, it is often easier to influence the more distal (as opposed to more proximate) factors through intervention efforts.

Conclusion The integrated theory introduced by Elliott, Ageton, and Canter was much more than a new explanation of delinquent behavior. In some ways, the content of the theory was simply a reformulation of existing theoretical perspective. Their introduction, however, provided a new approach for theoretical and methodological advancement, sparking considerable debate and helping to shape criminology as a social scientific discipline. Terrance J. Taylor See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Peers and Delinquency; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization; Thornberry, Terrance P.: Interactional Theory

References and Further Readings Elliott, D. S. (1985). The assumption that theories can be combined with increased explanatory power: Theoretical integrations. In R. F. Meier (Ed.),

292

Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory

Theoretical methods in criminology (pp. 123–149). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Elliott, D. S., Ageton, S., & Canter, R. (1979). An integrated theoretical perspective on delinquent behavior. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 16, 3–27. Elliott, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Ageton, S. (1985). Explaining delinquency and drug use. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Hirschi, T. (1979). Separate and unequal is better. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 16, 34–38. Hirschi, T. (1989). Exploring alternatives to integrated theory. In S. F. Messner, M. D. Krohn, & A. E. Liska (Eds.), Theoretical integration in the study of deviance and crime: Problems and prospects (pp. 37–49). Albany: SUNY Press.

Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory Lee Ellis’s evolutionary neuroandrogenic theory (ENA) aims to explain why males exhibit a higher prevalence of competitive/victimizing behaviors than females. As the name implies, there are two main components to ENA theory: (1) an evolutionary component and (2) a neuroandrogenic component. The evolutionary component attempts to explain why individuals commit crimes, specifically why males tend to commit crimes at higher rates than females, regardless of geographical location. The neuroandrogenic component, on the other hand, focuses on explaining how the male’s brain promotes criminal behaviors, especially during the teenage years. Or put another way, ENA theory examines (1) how competitive/ victimizing behaviors have been naturally selected over time in the evolutionary process, and (2) how androgens, such as testosterone, influence aspects of brain functioning, which tend to promote competitive/victimizing behaviors. Behaviors that are deemed competitive and victimizing are viewed on a continuous scale, with one extreme consisting of crude forms of the behavior (i.e., criminal behaviors) while the other reflects more sophisticated forms of the behavior, such as providing goods and services (i.e., careers in for-profit businesses).

Evolutionary Component The first component of ENA theory involves the evolutionary process. According to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, biological and physical characteristics that increase the likelihood of survival also tend to increase the likelihood of procreating. Therefore, characteristics that bolster survival are more likely to be passed on to future generations. For example, the strongest and most competitive organisms of a given species are more likely to survive and thus produce offspring, while the weaker and more timid organisms are more likely to die off before they have the chance to procreate. Similar to natural selection, sexual selection also promotes the transmission of certain characteristics. For example, competitiveness in males can be considered a desired and sought-after characteristic for females who are looking to reproduce. Therefore, males who can demonstrate this desired trait would be more attractive mating partners. This process is often referred to as female choice. Female Choice

Previous research has shown that males commit more violent crimes than females. From an evolutionary perspective, ENA theory asserts that female mating preferences explain, in part, why males typically engage in higher rates of aggressive behaviors. Specifically, women are more likely to mate with males who are reliable providers of necessary resources. In other words, a female is more likely to choose a sexual partner based on his ability to compete for resources and provide for her and her children. In turn, this allows the woman to focus on caring for and raising children as opposed to spending her energy on obtaining resources. Therefore, the female choice phenomenon has the effect of encouraging competitive and victimizing behaviors in males. For example, males will aggressively compete with other males, even to the extent of victimization, in order to procure resources and increase their chances of being chosen by a female as a sexual partner. Genetics

Since the majority of females prefer competitive males, genes that promote competitive/victimizing

Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory

behaviors are more likely to be passed on from generation to generation. This theoretical perspective helps to explain why males are, in general, more prone to committing aggressive crimes compared to females. Thus, genes that promote competitive/victimizing behaviors in males have evolved indirectly through a desire to be chosen as a mating partner. From a genetic standpoint, males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome while females have two X chromosomes. Therefore, if competitive/victimizing behaviors have in fact been selected for in the natural selection process, then it would be expected that most of the genetic information related to competitive/victimizing behaviors be located on the Y chromosome, since females do not possess a Y chromosome. This claim, however, has not yet been determined.

Neuroandrogenic Component The second component of ENA involves male sex hormones (i.e., androgens), especially testosterone. Although it is referred to as a male sex hormone, testosterone is also found in low levels in females. This difference in testosterone levels may help to explain why males are more likely to engage in aggressive and victimizing behaviors compared to females. ENA theory examines the effects of testosterone on brain functioning and how high levels of testosterone promotes aggressive and competitive behaviors. The brain is affected by testosterone at two different stages in development: perinatal and postpubertal. High levels of testosterone during the perinatal stage increases the probability of competitive/victimizing behaviors; however, these same effects are most pronounced in the teenage years when the second surge of this androgen occurs at the postpubertal stage of development. Promoting Competitive/Victimizing Behaviors

There are three neurological factors that increase the likelihood that an individual will exhibit competitive/victimizing behaviors. Increased levels of testosterone at both the perinatal and postpubertal stages affect brain functioning in three ways: (1) suboptimal arousal, (2) susceptibility to seizures, and (3) rightward shift. According to ENA theory, these neurological effects are engrained prior to birth and are

293

usually expressed to their fullest at the beginning of puberty when levels of testosterone are at high levels again. Overall, these neurological effects have evolved in order to promote competitive behaviors in males; in turn, competitive behaviors have become pronounced within the human species because women prefer mating with men who are reliable providers. Suboptimal Arousal

Exposing the brain to testosterone, both at the perinatal and postpubertal stages, results in decreased brain sensitivity to incoming environmental stimuli. This reduction in sensitivity, often referred to as suboptimal arousal, increases the likelihood that an individual will exhibit criminal forms of competitive/victimizing behavior. Sub­ optimal arousal is characterized by a higher threshold to pain, increased tolerance to aversive stimuli, and increased need for stimulation. In other words, individuals who are suboptimally aroused, due to increased androgren levels in the brain, are more likely to engage in antisocial forms of competitive/victimizing behaviors. Seizure Susceptibility

High levels of testosterone in the brain increases the susceptibility of the limbic system to experience seizures. At the extreme, the brain exhibits reoccurring discharges of electrical impulses and the individual is likely to experience convulsions and be diagnosed with epilepsy or Tourette’s syndrome. On the other hand, less extreme forms of seizures, known as episodic dyscontrol and limbic psychotic trigger action, which occur in areas of the brain that regulate emotions may result in impulsive bursts of rage, especially when an individual is exposed to stressful events. In other words, increased levels of testosterone in the brain increase the brain’s susceptibility to seizures, thereby resulting in aggressive forms of competitive/ victimizing behaviors. Rightward Shift

The brain can be separated into two halves, known as hemispheres: (1) the left hemisphere, and (2) the right hemisphere. Different types of thought processes occur in each hemisphere, with the left

294

Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory

side dominating language abilities and moral reasoning while the right side is best at spatial reasoning. Increased levels of testosterone shifts the brain’s functioning away from the left hemisphere of the brain toward the right hemisphere. In other words, individuals who are exposed to increased levels of testosterone at the prenatal and postpubertal stages of development are more likely to experience a rightward shift in brain functioning. These individuals tend to have better spatial reasoning abilities while simultaneously lacking in language-based reasoning, thereby increasing the probability of engaging in antisocial forms of competitive/victimizing behaviors. Inhibiting Competitive/Victimizing Behavior

While the three biological factors mentioned above operate to promote competitive/victimizing behaviors, two neurological factors function to inhibit criminal forms of competitive/victimizing behaviors. These two factors include an individual’s ability to learn (i.e., intelligence) as well as their ability to plan and foresee consequences (i.e., executive functioning). These factors can counterbalance the effects of androgens by way of increased brain functioning. Specifically, greater mental capabilities can result in an increased likelihood of exhibiting more sophisticated and socially acceptable forms of competitive/victimizing. In other words, more intelligent males can learn how to express their competitive behaviors in noncriminal ways faster than less intelligent males. Intelligence

According to ENA theory, an individual’s level of intelligence will be associated with the speed in which he transitions from crude to socially acceptable expressions of competitive/victimizing behaviors. That is, males with higher intelligence are more likely to express their competitive/victimizing behaviors in a prosocial manner because they have learned that expressing their competitive behaviors in aggressive ways has many negative consequences. Therefore, they quickly learn to express their competitive behaviors in nonaggressive ways (i.e., become businessmen). On the other hand, males who have learning difficulties will take

longer to transition from criminal to noncriminal forms of competitive/victimizing behavior. Executive Functioning

ENA theory asserts that individuals with effective executive functioning are more likely to refrain from engaging in aggressive forms of competitive/ victimizing behaviors. Effective executive functioning refers to the ability to successfully plan courses of action as well as the ability to anticipate the various consequences of their actions. Executive dysfunction, however, lowers an individual’s ability to express his or her competitive/victimizing behaviors in prosocial ways. Ineffective executive functioning can result from various factors including genetics, birth complications, physical trauma, and substance abuse. Overall, individuals with ineffective executive functioning capabilities will exhibit criminal forms of competitive/victimizing behaviors for longer periods of time compared to those with effective executive functions.

Empirical Research To date, there has only been one empirical study examining the effects of androgens on criminal behaviors using ENA theory. Ellis, Shyamal Das, and Hasan Buker recently tested three hypotheses related to ENA theory: (1) whether males commit more crimes than females; (2) whether physiological traits associated with high levels of androgens (i.e., body appearance, physical strength, sex drive, low-deep voice, masculine mannerisms, upper and lower body strength, amount of body hair, and penis size) are associated with various criminal behaviors, especially violent behaviors; and (3) whether sex differences in crimes can be explained by androgen-promoted physiological traits. First, self-reported questionnaires from over 11,000 North American students revealed that males did in fact commit more crimes than females. Second, all androgen-related physiological traits were found to be significantly related to violence (i.e., serious and non-serious) in males. For females, on the other hand, the most consistent predictors of all types of offenses were masculine mannerisms, masculine body type, and a low vocal pitch (i.e., deep voice). Finally, multiple regression analyses, which allowed androgen-promoted traits to

England, Ralph W.: A Theory of Middle-Class Delinquency

covary with gender, demonstrated that these traits accounted for the sex differences in violent crimes. Overall, these findings provide general support for ENA theory.

Conclusion Ellis’s ENA theory incorporates both an evolutionary and a biochemical explanation to the high prevalence of competitive/victimizing behaviors in males. First, the evolutionary component incorporates the theory of natural selection to explain why males tend to commit crimes at higher rates than females through the process of female choice. Second, the neuroandrogenic component explains how testosterone affects the brain by promoting criminal behaviors through suboptimal arousal, susceptibility to seizures, and rightward shift. Individuals with higher intelligence and effective executive functioning will quickly learn to transition their competitive/victimizing behaviors from criminal to noncriminal forms of the behavior. Danielle Boisvert See also Psychophysiology and Crime; Vila, Brian J., Lawrence E. Cohen, and Richard S. Machalek: Evolutionary Expropriative Theory; XYY Aggression Theory

References and Further Readings Ellis, L. (2000). Theories of criminal/antisocial behavior. In L. Ellis & A. Walsh (Eds.), Criminology: A global perspective (Part III). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Ellis, L. (2003). Biosocial theorizing and criminal justice policy. In A. Somit & S. A. Peterson (Eds.), Human nature and public policy: An evolutionary approach (pp. 97–120). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ellis, L. (2003). Genes, criminality, and the evolutionary neuroandrogenic theory. In Biosocial criminology: Challenging environmentalism’s supremacy (pp. 13–34). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science. Ellis, L. (2005). A theory explaining biological correlates of criminality. European Journal of Criminology, 2, 287–315. Ellis, L., Das, S., & Buker, H. (2008). Androgenpromoted physiological traits and criminality: A test of the evolutionary neuroandrogenic theory. Personality and Individual Differences, 44, 699–709.

295

England, Ralph W.: A Theory of Middle-Class Delinquency The period of social change in the United States following World War II inspired sociologists to study the behavior of youths, particularly juvenile delinquency. Most criminologists at this time focused on the delinquent behavior of poor, innercity youths and the development of street gangs. Ralph W. England, on the other hand, was more interested in explaining why middle-class youths commit crime. He thus developed a distinct theory to account for an increase in criminal and deviant behaviors that occurred among middle-class youths during the 1950s. His work culminated in his seminal article, “A Theory of Middle-Class Juvenile Delinquency,” published in the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science in 1960.

The Marginalization of Youth Before advancing a specific explanation for delinquent behavior, England speculated on changes in the status of youths in American society. Through the 20th century, society shaped the development of a youth subculture, or a set of values, beliefs, and behaviors specific to teenagers and which sometimes conflict with the values of the dominant adult culture. England argued that the urbanization and industrialization of the 19th century caused youths to assume a marginalized status in American society. In other words, adolescents found themselves in a phase stuck between childhood and adulthood. As the United States moved from an agrarian to an industrialized economy, youths were no longer necessary to the survival of the family farm or business. Even in cities, the emergence of child labor laws prevented youths from engaging in the larger economy. Without a clear adult role and no longer considered children, the function of youths in U.S. society was unclear. In response to this marginalization, England contended that a distinct youth subculture formed, largely after World War II. In developing his theory, England drew on Talcott Parsons’s proposition that a “youth culture,” focused on “having a good time” exists among American adolescents

296

England, Ralph W.: A Theory of Middle-Class Delinquency

(p. 608). This subculture was characterized by hedonism and materialism. Hedonistic behaviors included drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, dating, and “riding around.” These behaviors are seen by adolescents as “adult” activities and reflect youths’ values of trying to attain adult status. These youths also valued materialism. American teens viewed cars, clothes, music, and entertainment as status symbols.

Relevance for Middle-Class Youths England argued that this marginalization was most acutely experienced by middle-class youths. Because their more affluent families provide their children with disposable funds, these youths were less likely to seek employment compared to lowerclass youths. Middle-class children have a “typically lengthened period of ambiguous status compared with working class youngsters” because they begin working later in life (p. 536). With full wallets and unencumbered by the responsibilities of employment, these youths were free to engage in the behavior of the emerging hedonistic and materialistic youth subculture. For middle-class youths in particular, the prosperous U.S. economy supported their ability to accumulate material goods to express these values.

The Teenage System After proposing that teenagers had become marginalized in U.S. society, England explained specifically how the youth subculture developed. He termed the youth subculture the teenage system. This system arose due to an increase in communication that occurred post–World War II. The developing mass media at this time allowed the teenage system to spread easily and caused teens to recognize themselves as a population group distinct from children and adults. England maintained that this awareness occurred through five main influences. First, the mass media also began to acknowledge and specifically market material goods to teens. Second, disc jockeys in post-war radio broadcasting disseminated music aimed at the teenage audience. Third, the emergence of television programs aided this communication. Fourth, England wrote that the print media catered to

teens through the development of a group of magazines “distinguished by its portrayal of hedonistic values within an essentially amoral setting: the teen years are not ones of preparation for responsible adulthood, but of play and diversion” (1960, p. 537). A final influence that led teens to become aware of themselves as a distinct group was an increase in the public’s focus on juvenile delinquency as a social problem. England proposed that teenagers recognized the growing concerns of adults who viewed teens as a problem population and reacted to this perceived alienation and discrimination by acting out.

How the Youth Subculture Contributes to Delinquency Once he defined the values of the youth subculture, and proposed an explanation for how it arose, England went on to use this subculture to explain the growing problem of middle-class delinquency. He argued that some delinquency is a result of the interaction of youth subcultural norms with those of the larger culture. This means that in order to adhere to the youth subculture, teenagers must emphasize a hedonistic, self-centered ethos while also de-emphasizing the non-hedonistic pressures from the adult world. Middle-class youths accomplish this either by rejecting the values of their parents and other adults or by changing them to conform to those of the youth subculture. England contended that teenagers extract only the values of adults that are hedonistic, and act them out in ways that adults define as delinquent. So, youths pursue behaviors that adults engage in, but in doing so, this creates conflict with adults. England noted several behaviors of the youth subculture that illustrate this process. First, middleclass youths value the use of automobiles. While this is considered an “adult” behavior, teenagers transform this value into criminal behaviors by abusing traffic or safety regulations or by stealing cars for joy-riding. Second, teenagers value a competitive spirit, but express this value through delinquent behaviors such as assaults and vandalism. Finally, the youth subculture values behaviors that are permitted for adults, such as pre-marital sex and alcohol use, but engage in these behaviors irresponsibly. In general, because the youth subculture values hedonistic pursuits, the theory best explains

England, Ralph W.: A Theory of Middle-Class Delinquency

297

why middle-class youths are likely to engage in these typically minor forms of delinquency.

the resources necessary to adhere to its materialistic and hedonistic standards.

Theoretical Integration

Conclusion

While England did not specifically suggest that his theory integrates multiple theories of crime, it seems that elements of both subculture theory and strain theory are relevant to the middle-class theory of delinquency. First, England’s teenage system defines a set of beliefs and behaviors that comprise a distinct youth subculture that values some delinquent activities. As subculture theories of criminal behavior propose, a conflict of the subculture with the larger culture produces crime and delinquency. Second, strain theory is necessary to explain why this value system is particular to middle-class youths. According to Robert Merton’s strain theory, in American society, not everyone has the ability to achieve prescribed goal of monetary success through socially approved means. Those who do not have access to legitimate means to achieve societal goals experience strain. One reaction to strain is to commit crime in order to achieve these goals. England argued that lower-class youths, in response to strain produced by socio-economic deprivation, either commit instrumental crimes or are compelled to enter into the labor market and establish adult roles sooner than middle-class youths to attain monetary goals. Middle-class youths, on the other hand, because they are more affluent, are able to afford a prolonged period of irresponsibility, which allows them to pursue crimes for hedonistic purposes. In other words, because they feel little strain, middle-class youths are better able to attain the goals of the youth subculture because they have both the disposable income and the free time necessary to pursue them. It is important to note that subcultural and strain theorists disagree about whether there are class differences in values and goal orientation. Albert Cohen and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin imply that values and goals are similar for all classes, although the ability to attain them may differ according to class. Other criminologists propose that class differences in values between lowerclass and middle-class children are slight. England’s theory of middle-class delinquency instead maintains that his youth system or subculture is particularly attractive to middle-class youths, who have

England’s theory of middle class delinquency was one of the first proposed explanations for the rise in delinquency among middle-class youths following World War II. He integrated ideas from his contemporaries who focused on strain and subcultural theories of criminal behavior in order to shed light on the relationship between social class and delinquency. His theory also offered a competing view on why middle-class youths commit crime. Alternative explanations for middle-class delinquency have purported that middle-class youths are insulated from delinquency by conventional value orientations. The control perspective in general contends that conventional value orientations inhibit delinquency while subculture theories argue that deviant subcultural values are likely to induce delinquent involvement. England’s theory is consistent with the latter claim. But the similarities between his theory and those proposed by studies of lower-class youths end here. According to England’s middle-class theory of delinquency, the subcultural values of middle-class youths center on materialism and hedonism, and these values are reflected in the types of delinquent activities middle-class youths choose. Stephanie L. Kent See also Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency; Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World

References and Further Readings Cernkovich, S. A. (1978). Evaluating two models of delinquency causation. Criminology, 16, 335–352. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. England, R. W. (1960). A theory of middle class juvenile delinquency. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 50, 535–540.

298

Environmental Toxins Theory

Eve, R. A. (1975). “Adolescent culture”: Convenient myth or reality? A comparison of students and their teachers. Sociology of Education, 48, 152–167. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Landis, J., Dinitz, S., & Reckless, W. (1963). Implementing two theories of delinquency: Value orientations and awareness of limited opportunity. Sociology and Social Research, 47, 408–416. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Miller, J. G. (1970). Research and theory in middle-class delinquency. British Journal of Criminology, 10, 33–51. Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower-class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14, 5–20. Parsons, T. (1942). Age and sex in the social structure of the United States. American Sociological Review, 7, 604–616.

Environmental Toxins Theory Toxins are poisonous substances produced by living organisms. Environmental toxins are chemical pollutants that result from the production of commodities in mass consumption societies and have become ubiquitous across the face of the globe. The production of environmental toxins has attracted serious public attention in the United States. Several influential works have been written about this issue including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers’s Our Stolen Future, Louis Gibbs’s Love Canal, and Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream. Efforts at controlling environmental toxins’ impact on human health have resulted in the passage of legislation such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Superfund Act (or CERCLA), and the National Environmental Policy Act. Criminologists have become increasingly interested in environmental toxins as a subject of study. This is the case for two reasons. First, the production of environmental toxins is often studied as a form of corporate and/or governmental crime. Many of these studies focus on specific cases that have caused considerable human suffering and death (e.g., the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India

which killed thousands of people; see Pearce & Tombs, 1998). More recently, however, criminologists have become interested in how exposure to environmental toxins may structure individual behavior in ways that make them more likely to engage in crime and delinquency.

Conceptual Framework Over the past half century, more than 85,000 industrial chemicals, many of which have toxic impacts, have been registered for use in the United States. A significant literature examines the effects of only a small fraction of these chemicals on human health and behavior. These chemicals are a concern because of their widespread impacts on and appearance in contemporary societies (e.g., see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Third National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, which measures exposure to 148 environmental chemicals examined among a random sample of the U.S. population). Further evidence of the ubiquitous nature of environmental pollution stems from an extensive literature on the distribution of these pollutants that have been discovered in diverse locations and media, ranging from Antarctic marine mammals to Siberian ice core samples. Concerns about the impact that environmental toxins may have on criminal behavior are pervasive. Notably, Philippe Grandjean and Philip J. Landrigan recently argued that environmental toxins may be causing a host of behavioral disorders that are related to crime and delinquency. The researchers identified more than 200 neurotoxins in the Hazardous Substance Data Bank and report that nearly half of those chemicals are used often during manufacturing processes and are likely to impact brain development. Moreover, the Inter­ national Scientific Committee, International Conference on Fetal Programming and Develop­ mental Toxicity released a statement warning that even unborn children may suffer the effects of environmental toxins and that there is a high potential that these effects can alter brain development to the extent that it negatively impacts future behavior. Researchers interested in environmental toxins and primarily concerned with the impacts of industrial chemicals on human health are referred to as

Environmental Toxins Theory

ecotoxicologists. Ecotoxicology is primarily concerned with the effects of industrial chemicals on human health. In ecotoxicology, a toxin is any environmental chemical that causes adverse health effects at a given concentration or dose. Acute toxicity is measured by the likelihood of death. But, at lower doses, toxins may have other adverse health effects ranging from temporary to chronic conditions that involve diseases (e.g., cancer), biological system impairment (e.g., IQ impacts), or genetic mutations. Several researchers, such as Adrian Raine and David Rowe, have noted crime and delinquency may also be an outcome of chronic exposure. According to Joseph Rodricks, the likelihood of toxicity is related to dose or concentration and duration of exposure. Duration of exposure impacts dose except in the case of super-toxic chemicals where one, small dose may result in death. Toxicity is derived from studies and represents statistical means concerning doses (e.g., as a concentration is a liquid denoted in microgramsper-deciliter or concentration of body weight denoted in milligrams-per-kilogram). Toxicity represents the statistical average for a sample population and is calculated using the LD50 procedure. This procedure is used to identify the chemical dose that causes a lethal outcome for 50 percent of a laboratory animal test population. Laboratory test animals are bred to be genetically identical, so variation in response to toxins is less of a concern than variations among humans. Toxicity is derived from a population and represents the population average rather than any specific individual within a population. Several factors impact susceptibility to toxins across individuals including (1) initial health; (2) diet; (3) the presence or absence of other chemicals, minerals and agents that may accelerate or impede the toxin; (4) individual metabolism; and (5) ingestion or absorption route (skin, respiratory, oral).

Empirical Support Research suggests that environmental toxins may be related to criminal behavior. The most common example used to support environmental toxins theory is the study of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury. For instance, lead (Pb) has been used in the production of many products

299

including gasoline, paint, and batteries. Lead is a known neurotoxin that has been shown to be associated with crime and violence by disrupting the brain’s ability to restrain emotional impulses. The idea that lead may be related to criminal behavior emerged in 1990 when Herbert Needleman argued that as much as 20 percent of all crime is likely to be associated with environmental lead exposure. Since that time a handful of studies have examined the notion that environmental toxins such as lead may disrupt neurotransmitter and hormonal systems in ways that induce aggressive and violent behavior. For instance, Deborah Denno’s 1990 study of the association between blood lead levels and crime among African American males found that early childhood lead poisoning was among the most important predictors of future delinquent outcomes, including the number of adult offenses. In a similar study, Robert O. Pihl and Frank Ervin found that inmates incarcerated for violent crimes had higher levels of lead in their bodies than inmates incarcerated for property crimes. The relationship between violent and property crimes persisted despite the inmate’s length of incarceration, demographic factors, and crime and drug use histories. In another study, Needleman et al. discovered a strong relationship between bone-lead levels and adolescent delinquency. More recently, a prospective study by Kim Dietrich et al. showed that over the life course, early exposure to lead was consistently related to future delinquent behavior, including drug use. Finally, John Paul Wright et al. found that a 5-micrograms-per-deciliter increase in blood lead levels across a sample of 376 six-yearolds increased the risk of being arrested for a violent crime in adulthood by a factor of nearly 1.5. These individual-level findings have been replicated in aggregate-level studies of crime. For instance, in 2000 Rick Nevin discovered a relationship between preschool blood lead levels and subsequent violent crime rates in the United States between the years of 1941 and 1998. In another study in 2007, Nevin found that the relationship between lead and crime could be replicated in other countries, including Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes also examined crime rates across states adjusting for state-specific reductions in leaded gasoline over 30 years and concluded that lead was strongly associated with

300

Environmental Toxins Theory

violent crime and weakly associated with property crime. Reyes argues that reductions in lead exposure were likely responsible for substantive reductions in the violent crime rate in the 1990s. In 2001 Paul Stretesky and Michael Lynch reported that counties with higher air lead levels also have higher homicide rates even when controlling for other forms of pollution. In a similar study in 2004, Stretesky and Lynch discovered that variations in air lead levels may help explain higher crime rates in poor and minority communities. That is, rates of crime may be higher in minority communities, in part because residents in these communities are more likely to be exposed to lead. Empirical evidence that environmental toxins can influence criminal behavior through a variety of mechanisms is just beginning to emerge and researchers in a variety of disciplines are concerned about the potential relationship between environmental toxins and delinquent and criminal behavior. Recent research has found effects that suggest that manganese, PCBs, dioxin, and mercury are all environmental toxins that may be associated with various behavioral problems, including crime and delinquency.

Critiques The notion that environmental toxins are related to crime is becoming more pervasive, but several criticisms of this theory still exist. First, critics are quick to point out that youths who have a tendency to be delinquent also come from poor backgrounds and poverty is correlated with pollution exposure. Thus, the relationship between environmental toxins and crime may be the result of an individual’s poverty status as opposed to environmental toxins. This criticism is addressed when researchers studying the relationship between environmental toxins and crime design studies to hold poverty conditions constant. For example, in the case of lead exposure, medical researchers such as Needleman have designed their studies so that subjects come from the same income level and similar neighborhoods. In addition, researchers often control for poverty in their statistical analysis to determine if the effect of lead will disappear. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to prove a causal link between lead exposure and delinquent and criminal behavior. Still, the same

criticism concerning causality applies to all known explanations of criminal behavior; none are directly observable, and therefore cannot be proven in any definitive sense. Critics of environmental toxins theory also claim that it is difficult to determine which environmental toxin may be related to crime and delinquency. The criticism is that various types of pollution tend to cluster together, and it may appear as if one environmental toxin is the cause of the behavior simply because other forms of pollution are not adequately controlled or measured by the researcher. Moreover, critics assert that it is not possible to tell if environmental toxins interact under specific conditions to produce a behavior, meaning that the results of one study may not be generalizable in all situations. Again, these criticisms would hold with respect to other explanations for criminal behavior. For example, peer relationships, socio-economic status, life course, and so on may all interact. In addition, each of these forces is present in an individual’s life to varying degrees, and current research fails to address the various admixtures of these potential causes of crime. Finally, critics of environmental toxins theory argue that even if there is an association between toxins and crime, the impact of those toxins is small and not worthy of consideration as an important cause of crime. These critics go on to argue that the enormous economic cost of cleaning up environmental toxins to reduce a rather small number of crimes is an inefficient crime control policy (see Land & McCall, 2004). An alternative approach is to focus on other social problems (such as reducing poverty) where mitigation efforts achieve greater reductions in crime for lower costs. To be sure, the cost of cleaning the environment would be large. But cleaning the environment and preventing further environmental damage has numerous benefits outside of reducing crime, such as a general increase in health, lowered medical costs, and, as other studies suggest, possible significant positive impacts on educational efficiency and even a rise in general intelligence. Likewise, efforts to reduce crime that aim at individual-level factors are costly and generally ineffective at reducing crime. Michael J. Lynch and Paul B. Stretesky

Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans See also Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of LifeCourse-Persistent Offending; Neurology and Crime; Prenatal Influences and Crime

References and Further Readings Aono, S., Tanabe, S., Fujise, Y., Kato, H., & Tatsukawa, R. (1997). Persistent organochlorines in Minke Whale (Balaenoptera Acutorostrata) and their prey species from the Antarctic and the North Pacific. Environmental Pollution, 98(1), 81–89. Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2005). Third national report on human exposure to environmental chemicals (NCEH Publication Number 05-0570). Atlanta, GA: National Center for Environmental Health Division of Laboratory Sciences. Colborn, T., Dumanoski, D., & Myers, J. P. (1997). Our stolen future: Are we threatening our fertility, intelligence, and survival? A scientific detective story. New York: Dutton. Denno, D. W. (1990). Biology and violence: From birth to adulthood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dietrich, K. N., Ris, M. D., Succop, P. A., Berger, O. G., & Bornschein, R. L. (2001). Early exposure to lead and juvenile delinquency. Neurotoxicology and Teratology, 23, 511–518. Eyrikh, S., Schwikowski, M., & Papina, T. (2005). Reconstruction of mercury air contamination by analysis of an ice core from Belukha Glacier, Siberian Altai. In Laboratory for radiochemistry and environmental chemistry’s annual report, 2004. Villigen PSI, Switzerland: Paul Scherrer Institute. Gibbs, L. (1982). Love canal: My story. Albany: SUNY Press. Grandjean P., & Landrigan, P. J. (2006). Developmental neurotoxicity of industrial chemicals. Lancet, 368, 2167–2178. International Scientific Committee of the International Conference on Fetal Programming and Developmental Toxicity. (2007, May 24). The Faroes statement: Human health effects of developmental exposure to environmental toxicants. Copenhagen, Denmark: International Conference on Fetal Programming and Development Toxicity. Land, K. C., & McCall, P. L. (2004). Trends in environmental lead exposure and troubled youth, 1960–1995: An age-period-cohort-characteristic analysis. Social Science Research, 33, 339–359. Needleman, H. (1990). The future challenge of lead toxicity. Environmental Health Perspectives, 89, 85–89.

301

Needleman, H., Riess, J. A., Tobin, M. J., Biesecker, G. E., & Greenhouse, J. B. (1996). Bone lead levels and delinquent behavior. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 275, 363–369. Nevin, R. (2000). How lead exposure relates to temporal changes in IQ, violent crime, and unwed pregnancy. Environmental Research, 83, 1–22. Nevin, R. (2007). Understanding international crime trends: The legacy of preschool lead exposure. Environmental Research, 104, 315–336. Pearce, F., & Tombs, S. (1998). Toxic capitalism: Corporate crime and the chemical industry. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. Pihl, R. O., & Ervin, F. (1990). Lead and cadmium levels in violent criminals. Psychological Reports, 66, 839–844. Raine, A. (1993). The psychopathology of crime. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Reyes, J. (2007). Environmental policy as social policy? The impact of childhood lead exposure on crime. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, 7, 51. Rodricks, J. V. (1997). Calculated risks: The toxicity and human health risks of chemicals in our environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rowe, D. (2002). Biology and crime. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Steingraber, S. (1997). Living downstream: An ecologist looks at cancer and the environment. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Stretesky, P. B., & Lynch, M. J. (2001). The relationship between lead exposure and homicide. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 155, 579–582. Stretesky, P. B., & Lynch, M. J. (2004). The relationship between lead and crime. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 45, 214–229. Wright, J. P., Dietrich, K., Ris, D., Hornung, R., Wessel, S., Lamphear, B., et al. (2008). Association of prenatal and childhood blood lead concentrations with criminal arrests in early adulthood. Plos Medicine, 5, 732–737. Zakrewski, S. (2002). Environmental toxicology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance was written by Kai T. Erikson and published in 1966. Erikson uses the Puritan colony in

302

Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans

Massachusetts Bay as a case study to examine ideas about deviant behavior. Erikson’s arguments are premised upon the Durkheimian theoretical perspective characterized by the ubiquity, inevitability, and positive functions of crime in a society. Wayward Puritans has enduring importance in that it analyzed the concept that powerful members in society will define deviance in such a way as to maintain that power. This contribution led to a bridge between structural-functionalist and conflict perspectives in the sociology of deviance. In the opening chapter, Erikson lays out the plan for the work, listing three themes. The first is that deviance changes according to a society’s characteristics or needs. Erikson’s second theme is that the volume of deviance in a society will remain constant over time. Specific acts of deviance will rise and fall, but the total levels of deviance will be relatively constant. The final theme examines what Erikson defined as “deployment patterns.” Different societies will use different methods for assigning certain members to deviant roles.

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Chapter two provides an historical background to the Puritan settlers. Erikson details the events that led to the establishment of the colony in America, the Puritan ethos and theology, and the Puritan conception of law and authority. A constant theme in Wayward Puritans is transition. Seventeenth-century England experienced considerable upheaval. The populace gained in civil and political power and increasingly felt disinclined to place their religious beliefs at the mercy of monarchical vicissitudes. The Puritans promoted the doctrine that church membership should be reserved for those individuals who by their piety and behavior had demonstrated their salvation. Additionally, they supported the autonomy of individual congregations, enabling them to make their own covenants with God and to elect their own leaders. The English Puritans were prone to quarreling over minor points of doctrine. They looked upon the Bible as a manual for Christian living, and adopted a very literal interpretation of the scriptures. The Puritans took their legal system directly from biblical scripture. This civil utilization of religious writings brought about many difficulties; many common offenses in the colony were not

specifically mentioned in the Bible. This required considerable interpretation by the religious leaders when passing judgments of guilt or innocence and consequent punishment. This contributed to a sense of unease between those colonists that wanted transparency in the application of biblical law and those that wanted the discretion to interpret biblical law as they deemed fit.

The Shapes of the Devil Chapter three addresses Erikson’s first theme of the book: examination of the relationship between deviancy and a community’s boundaries. To illustrate this relationship, Erikson uses three “crime waves” that occurred during the early to late 17th century in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The first incidence is the Antinomian controversy; the second is the Quaker invasion; and the third is the Salem witch trials. In each of the three crime waves observed, it was the religious boundary of the community that was violated, which led to the creation of a certain pattern of observed deviance. During each of the three crime waves that Erikson discusses, the Puritan society experiences significant social, political, or religious transitions and uncertainties. Erikson notes that it is this uncertainty that is a primary motivating factor in increased levels of deviance. The Antinomian Controversy

The first of these three crime waves took place from 1636 to 1638. The Puritans were making a difficult transition from reformation to administration. They had become accustomed to throwing rocks at the established ruling and religious authority, but in the new world, they were the ruling authority. The Puritan experiment was conceived in order to show how a civil society could be governed as a church congregation, but the day-to-day administrative tasks proved more arduous than originally anticipated. The traditional Puritan virtues of piety and self-expression shifted to those of loyalty and obedience while the individual’s covenant with God transitioned to God’s covenant with the colony as a whole. The Puritan clergy kept order in their congregations, instructed congregants in their duties to the state and to God, led congregants in deciding

Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans

which of the settlers were eligible for church membership, and ultimately determined who in the congregation demonstrated sufficient piety to be awarded the franchise. There were no certain guidelines to identify which settlers were destined for salvation, so the clergy made that evaluation. Throughout this time of change and social uncertainty there was a faction of settlers casting doubt on the authority of the church leaders that grew more prominent. This group centered on Anne Hutchinson, who asserted that few of the church leaders in the Massachusetts colony were competent to determine the grace or lack thereof in an individual congregant. Hutchinson’s statements divided the colony; the traditional leaders and original founders stood against her while many of the more recent arrivals and charismatic church leaders sided with her. The term Antinomian was the name given to the desperate heretics of Martin Luther’s day and was a term that was often leveled at the Puritans themselves prior to their departure of the new world. The church leaders were uncertain as to how to designate the Antinomian beliefs as criminal. Ultimately, they charged Hutchinson and her followers with violating the biblical commandment to honor thy mother and thy father—“father” symbolizing church leadership. By finding Hutch­ inson guilty, the leaders made a public statement about the strength of church authority within the colony. The Quaker Invasion

Quaker infiltration of 1656 to 1665 was similar to the Antinomian controversy 20 years earlier, in that the central theme of the crime wave was the subversion of church authority. In this instance, the “danger” came from outside the colony rather than within. Prior to the Quaker infiltration, the Puritans again experienced a period of instability. At this time, the uncertainty stemmed from the deaths of several colonial founders, an English civil war that created an atmosphere of increased religious tolerance, a significant decrease in immigration to the colony, and the severed ties between Massachusetts and the rest of the world. During the mid-17th century, increasing numbers of Quakers entered the colony. The established Puritans deemed this influx of religious

303

deviants as potentially dangerous to the stability of the community even though most Puritans were ignorant of the Quakers’ specific beliefs. The punishments levied against the Quakers were incrementally increased in severity in hope that they would eventually be sufficient to deter continued entry into the colony. However, the opposite effect occurred. The more severe the punishment, the more ecstatically the Quakers sought to suffer it. This clash of wills concluded only when King Charles II declared an end to any corporal punishment against the Quakers. This seemed to diminish the interest of the Quakers in martyring themselves, and the whole conflict simply faded away. This exemplified Erikson’s assertion in chapter one that the mere act of labeling a behavior as deviant unintentionally encourages its violation. Though the Puritans may have won the Antinomian conflict, they decidedly lost the fight regarding the Quaker invasion. In the end, religious tolerance was required of the Puritans by the monarch, leaving the settlers with no option but to make allowances. The Witches of Salem Village

The third crime wave Erikson described is the Salem witch trials that took place from 1692 to 1693. As with the previous two panics, the trials occurred against a backdrop of social insecurity. The monarch began exerting increasing influence on the governance of the colony, and there were rumors of the king revoking the colony’s charter altogether. The Puritans were anxious, dissension was spreading, and lawsuits were at an all-time high. The accusations of witchcraft centered on two young girls and a Caribbean slave named Tituba purported to be versed in the magical arts. During the initial trial, Tituba spoke vehemently about the presence of numerous spirits and devils within the colony. The other two accused women were guilty more of failure to be accepted by the other settlers than of witchcraft. Enraptured by the flourishing of attention and power, the two young girls went on a spree of accusation, including not only other townspeople but even strangers that they had never met from places they had never been. A spate of trials ensued that resulted in six women being hanged in Salem in the first month alone. It was

304

Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism

only when accusations began to be leveled at the most influential members in the society that a more cautious attitude was introduced to the proceedings. The entire witchcraft panic ended within a year of its beginning. By the time the hysteria had finished, more than 150 people were arrested, 29 convicted, and 19 hanged. Through much of their history, the Puritans found themselves subject to external or outside enemies: other religious denominations, American Indian nations with whom they were in conflict for land and resources, and a growing tendency toward religious pluralism in England. Despite these obstacles, the Puritans managed to flourish. Their victory over the devil outside their community left only one place for him to lurk: within each other. This boundary movement left the Puritans vulnerable to significant social instability and panic that resulted in the accusations of scores of their own citizens of being witches.

Stabilities and Instabilities in Puritan Crime Rates Erikson’s second theme in Wayward Puritans is that levels of deviance will remain fairly constant over time. Erikson used historical records to document the rates of crime in Massachusetts Bay. Even during the three crime waves, the crime rates for the community were largely unchanged. During periods of excess crime of one type, other crimes were generally less prosecuted. Erikson explains that those individuals that were arrested during the crime waves would have committed some other crime if not for the intense focus on Antinomianism, Quakerism, or witchcraft. His second explanation is that other deviant members of the society would have replaced the individuals swept up in the crime wave if the political and social climates had been different. Erikson suggests that a society will always have as much deviance as it can logistically support. There are only so many jail cells, stocks, and social control personnel in a community. If a certain type of deviance is given increased attention, then it follows that other types will be de-prioritized.

Puritanism and Deviancy The Puritans employed a method of assigning individuals to deviant roles that was consistent with

their religious doctrine, echoes of which are still observed in contemporary American society. The Puritans did not support the possibility of rehabilitation. If an individual was consigned to a deviant role, then the person permanently occupied that role. In many ways this contributed to social stability: A deviant individual was always deviant; there was no blurring of social boundaries. This perspective has had long-lasting consequences for U.S. penal institutions. Modern prisons are rarely geared toward the reformation of the offenders, but rather to their isolation and punishment. Erikson argued that the specific characteristics of a society will determine which types of behavior will be labeled deviant, which classes of residents will be directed into those roles, and, finally, how those deviant-labeled individuals will be punished. Jared M. Hanneman See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime; Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization Evil; Turk, Austin T.: The Criminalization Process; Vold, George B.: Group Conflict Theory

References and Further Readings Durkheim, É. (1981). Rules of the sociological method. New York: Free Press. Erikson, K. T. (1966). Wayward puritans: A study in the sociology of deviance. New York: Wiley. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672–682.

Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism As defined by Patrick J. Ryan (2007, p. 254), eugenics is “the applied science of improving the hereditary characteristics of human beings.” The early American eugenics movement sought to use newly developed scientific concepts and technologies to improve the human race by promoting the reproduction of productive citizens and limiting it for unproductive citizens. The definition of

Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism

unproductive was rather broad, encompassing epileptics, the mentally handicapped, alcoholics, drug addicts, and criminals. Eugenicists often used the term feebleminded to refer to individuals carrying the propensity for social ills. Eugenics found its theoretical basis in the work of Sir Francis Galton. Several prominent Americans—including Charles Davenport, Richard Dugdale, and Henry Goddard—used Galton’s writings in their attempts to further establish the eugenics movement in the United States. Various prescriptions were advocated by these eugenicists, such as sterilization and birth control. Public support for the eugenics movement eventually declined, in part because of a 1942 Supreme Court decision and the discovery of the Nazi eugenics program.

Feeblemindedness as the Carrier of Social Ills Feeblemindedness was widely believed to be the underlying cause of criminal behavior in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This alleged social ill was held to condemn humanity to a rising tide of “dependency, delinquency, and mental deficiency” (Bruinius, 2006, p. 9). Sir Charles Trevelyan, a member of an English charity organization society, is believed to be the first to use the term feebleminded. The distinction drawn by Trevelyan was that, whereas idiots could never learn, feebleminded individuals could be taught to care for themselves and to learn basic tasks, enabling them to secure employment and support themselves outside of institutions. The definition of feebleminded was expanded to describe a class of people that was in a perpetual state of adolescence and appeared “normal” to the untrained eye. In France, Théodore Simon and Alfred Binet developed an intelligence test, which was later imported to the United States by Henry Goddard in 1908. These tests were purported to measure and identify feeblemindedness. Goddard coined the term moron to describe those individuals determined through intelligence testing to be adults with a mental age of 7 to 12 years. Goddard developed two main purposes for IQ testing while working at a school for feebleminded children in Vineland, New Jersey: (1) classifying children and (2) segregating those who scored poorly, thus preventing reproduction and the propagation of their genes into future generations.

305

In addition to low functioning and intelligence, it was believed that feebleminded individuals could not control their animalistic instincts. They were considered the source of a never-ending cycle of poverty and crime through their supposed high rates of sexual activity and large numbers of offspring. Goddard stated that “it is hereditary feeblemindedness that is the basis of all [social] problems, and it is hereditary feeble-mindedness that we must attack” (Ryan, 2007, p. 256). Major works, such as The Jukes and The Kallikak Family, brought these issues to the forefront of the American conscience.

Eugenic Leaders The eugenics movement was initiated in England by Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton published Hereditary Genius, an Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences in 1869, which combined Darwin’s evolutionary theory with Gregor Mendel’s mechanism of heredity to explain how genius is transmitted through generations. Galton also incorporated the newly described Gaussian distribution (now referred to as a normal distribution or a bell curve) to understand how genius and its reverse, imbecility, was inherited through families. One tool developed by Galton in his search for the underlying genetic predisposition to intelligence was the family-study method, which used family pedigrees to trace inheritance of certain traits. Galton’s work provided the theoretical basis for, and a measurement tool to, the American eugenics movement. The growth in popularity of American eugenic thought and corresponding political support can be traced back to a book written by Richard Dugdale in 1885, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity. Dugdale did not write The Jukes in hereditary terms, but rather focused on a detailed analysis of the economic costs created by this particular family. When the costs were added up for 709 descendents of the six main progenitors of the Juke family, over the span of 75 years, it was estimated that the public had spent more than $1.25 million on various forms of welfare as well as associated costs of their criminal activity. A book written by Goddard in 1912 cemented the eugenics’ hold on the American conscience. The volume, The Kallikak Family: A Study in Hereditary Feeble-Mindedness, followed the offspring of one

306

Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism

man, Martin Kallikak, and two women who bore him children. One woman, a “feebleminded tavern girl,” allegedly gave rise to generations of criminals, drunks, prostitutes, and other social undesirables, while the other, a Quaker whom Kallikak married, gave birth to “normal” citizens. The Kallikak Family was written for a broad audience, which only served to solidify the public’s fears of “the menace of the feebleminded” (Ryan, 2007). Charles Davenport, a zoologist, also took Galton’s ideas to heart. Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910. His goal was to complete family records for individuals under the custody of state institutions and hopes of tracing a single Mendelian gene that led to feeblemindedness and criminal behavior. These family studies, like those of the Jukes and the Kallikaks, would supposedly provide evidence of the hereditary nature of criminal behavior and justify restricting their reproduction. Davenport’s work found support in Harry Laughlin, the individual responsible for crafting the Model Sterilization Law, an effort culminating in the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell.

Social Controls The eugenics movement did not restrict itself merely to describe a social phenomenon, but also pursued a policy agenda with the goal of producing a population with more desirable traits and with fewer undesirable traits. The birth control movement exemplifies positive eugenics, as its early stages were aimed at ensuring highly intelligent people reproduced and people with mental deficiencies used birth control methods. Negative eugenics focused on eliminating the least fit individuals through reduction or elimination of their reproductive abilities. Sterilization laws aimed at eliminating feebleminded individuals from the population became popular (Ryan, 2007). The decision in the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the feebleminded “for the protection and health of the state.” Informal Social Controls: The Birth Control Movement

The Progressive era was a time of change and reform in the United States, which included the

eugenics movement. During this time, the movement became known as the birth control movement, with hopes of returning human reproduction back to its purpose of propagating productive offspring. According to Donald Pickens, Margaret Sanger was a strong supporter of the birth control movement, whose philosophy was based on the idea that women and men should follow their “good instincts” and realize the good life without modern civilization’s corrupting influence. Sanger supported Davenport’s belief of “less children for the poor and more children for the rich” and the idea of stopping the multiplication of the unfit. If used correctly, said advocates, birth control provided natural social control by restoring women’s instincts to control her social and reproductive behavior. However, use of birth control was neither mandatory nor regulated by the state. Formal Social Controls

The 19th century marked the beginning of new technological and medical advances. At the turn of the century, Edwin Kehrer in Heidelberg, Germany and A. J. Ochsner in Chicago perfected the art of “tying” the fallopian tubes in females and the operation of severing the vas deferens in males. These operations became the standard practices in sterilization. They were viewed as relatively minor surgeries with no long-term after-effects, given that the procedures did not completely remove the sexual aspect of individuals’ lives like castration did. After World War I, several states introduced sterilization legislation for feebleminded individuals. The sterilization movement was focused on economics and social order, holding states responsible for stopping the irresponsible reproduction of the mentally inadequate. States such as Connecticut, Kansas, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana passed legislation forbidding the marriage of the feebleminded, insane, syphilitic, alcoholic, epileptic, and criminal. In 1927, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Buck v. Bell. The Court upheld a Virginia law permitting salpingotomy (cutting of the fallopian tubes) of an inmate of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, an 18-year-old “feebleminded” patient named Carrie Buck. Carrie’s 52-year-old mother had also been deemed feebleminded by the colony, as well as

Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality

Carrie’s child (who later earned the honor roll before dying at a young age). Doctors at the Colony claimed that anyone labeled feebleminded represented a genetic threat to society and should have their reproduction privileges removed. The Supreme Court agreed and ruled that the salpingotomy was not a violation of due process and equal protection of under the Fourteenth Amendment and, therefore, that the Virginia statute was reasonable. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes presented the following in the majority opinion: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough. (p. 200)

Eugenicists continued to advocate sterilization following Buck v. Bell. Several new cases emerged in the courts dealing with the eugenic aspect of sterilization. Eugenics and sterilization would be­­ come a source of contention and controversy amongst U.S. citizens. Eugenicists’ interest in sterilization was positivist in nature. Substantial medical opinion in the 19th century, reflecting the influence of Cesar Lombroso, argued that criminals were born, not made. Ochsner, who developed the vasectomy, urged using this operation on criminals. As early as 1888 in the United States, an Ohio reformer advocated sterilization for punishment and to protect society from the “vicious, criminal and defective classes” (cited in Pickens, 1968, p. 92).

Conclusion In 1942, a Supreme Court decision declaring an Oklahoma law unconstitutional severely undercut the punitive justification of sterilization. The statute, the Oklahoma Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act of 1935, was contested on the grounds of the Fourteenth Amendment. Within the provision of the law, crimes of moral turpitude were punishable by vasectomy. The Court ruled that the law violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, mostly because of inequitable distinctions as to what constituted a felony involving moral turpitude. After this point, public support

307

for the eugenics movement began to wane, drastically diminishing after the discovery of the horrors of the Nazi regime. However, Matt Ridley notes that the American eugenics movement’s highest aspiration was to improve society as a whole, thereby reducing the number of future criminal offenders and their victims. But the cost of this improvement was the sacrifice of individual rights and liberties, such as reproduction, which are considered fundamental to the human condition. Kristan A. Moore and Jennifer L. Lux See also Dugdale, Robert L.: The Jukes; Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency; Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal; Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

References and Further Readings Bruinius, H. (2006). Better for all the world: The secret history of forced sterilization and America’s quest for racial purity. New York: Knopf. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Pickens, D. (1968). Eugenics and the progressives. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Rafter, N. H. (1988). White trash: Eugenics as social ideology. Society, 26, 43–49. Ridley, M. (2008). Foreword. In J. A. Witkowski & J. R. Inglis (Eds.), Davenport’s dream: Twenty-first century reflections on heredity and eugenics (pp. ix–xi). Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Ryan, P. J. (1997). Unnatural selection: Intelligence testing, eugenics, and American political cultures. Journal of Social History, 30, 669–685. Ryan, P. J. (2007). “Six blacks from home”: Childhood, motherhood, and eugenics in America. Journal of Policy History, 19, 253–281. Simmons, H. G. (1978). Explaining social policy: The English Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. Journal of Social History, 11, 387.

Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality In his landmark book, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, Gordon Allport defined personality

308

Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality

as “the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustment to the environment” (p. 48). Donald R. Lynam and Karen J. Derefinko have simplified this definition as “Personality refers to an individual’s characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and acting” (2006, p. 133). They identify three core features of personality: (1) it is internal (i.e., lies within the individual); (2) it has cognitive, affective, interpersonal and behavioral components; and (3) it is reasonably stable over time and across situations. In accordance with the above definitions, a number of personality theories have been developed and applied to delinquent and criminal behavior, including Hans J. Eysenck’s PEN model and the Five-Factor model, which are two influential and competing models. These two theories differ in terms of the number of factors they measure (i.e., three versus five) and how the factors were derived. In this entry, the focus is on Eysenck’s PEN theory and its contribution to explaining the “causes” and “cures” of criminality.

Eysenck’s Theory of Personality Eysenck’s three-factor theory is commonly referred to as PEN, which stands for Psychoticism (P), Extraversion (E), and Neuroticism (N). These three factors were derived from factor analysis of questionnaire items and, according to Eysenck (1996), represent the three main dimensions (super factors) of personality. According to Eysenck, the causal chain link between personality and crime starts with DNA, which is the genetic structure underlying individual differences. Eysenck views DNA as a “Distal Antecedent,” which feeds into “Limbic System Arousal”/“Biological Intermediaries” (referred to as “Proximal Antecedents”). The DNA and “Biological Intermediaries” are the primary determinants of personality constellations and crime, although Eysenck acknowledges the importance of social and environmental factors in the causes and cures of criminality (Eysenck & Gudjonsson, 1989). The personality factors, in turn, have “Proximal Consequences” and “Distal Consequences.” The former influences conditioning, sensitivity, vigilance, perception, and memory, whereas the latter has direct bearing on social behavior, including sociability, sensation seeking, impulsivity, criminality, and psychopathology.

Central to explaining crime and personality are individual differences and the ways in which these mediate between genetic and environmental factors. P, E, and N are personality dimensions, or super factors, which are built on a hierarchical system, with each of the three dimensions being composed of a number of primary (elementary) traits. P is primarily made up of antisocial personality traits, which include disregard for rules, hostility, aggression, impulsivity, emotional/interpersonal coldness, lack of empathy, and egocentricity. E comprises primary traits like sociability, liveliness, assertiveness, and sensation-seeking (i.e., the functional aspect of impulsivity). N includes primary traits like anxiety, depression, emotional instability, shyness, and low self-esteem. Eysenck’s theory does not directly link N with impulsivity, but the current evidence is that P and N are both linked to impulsivity, whereas E is more associated with sensitivity to reward.

Eysenck’s PEN and Crime According to Eysenck’s theory, personality plays a central role in mediating between genetic and environmental forces in explaining the causes of criminality. According to Eysenck, P, E, and N all predispose people toward criminality and psychopathy. In this context, criminality is viewed as a “disposition to commit crimes.” P and E are linked to criminality through low cortical arousal, poor conditionability, and failure to develop a conscience. In contrast, N is associated with emotional instability and emotional arousal, which facilitate criminal behavior through its driving propensities. Eysenck’s earliest work on crime and personality dates back to 1952, when he argued that extraverts are prone to antisocial behavior and psychopathy. This work was extended in his later publications and now includes all three dimensions, P, E, and N. P is the most recent dimension and unlike E and N did not develop out of theory, but empirical observations of psychotic patients and their relatives. P and its relationship with criminality were introduced in 1977 in the third edition of Eysenck’s book on personality and criminality. Eysenck subsequently provided a detailed theoretical explanation for P, which overlaps substantially with that of E.

Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality

Eysenck did not originally link his theory to specific types of offenses; rather, his theory was seen to predict all types of crime. But in his later work, he postulated that there might be differences related to the type of offense committed, particularly in relation to extraversion. This idea was empirically investigated by Eysenck and colleagues in 1977, who studied five different groups of criminals and found that confidence tricksters were most different from the other four groups, scoring low on P and N, but high on E. In contrast, offenders with a history of “inadequacy” scored high on P and N, but low on E. Violent and property offenders tended to score high on P and N. Therefore, the relationship of E with criminality may be influenced by the type of crime committed. This is apparently not the position with regard to P and N, or at least not to the same extent. There is empirical evidence that out of Eysenck’s three dimensions, P has the strongest and most direct relationship with the persistence and severity of delinquent and criminal behavior whether measured by criminal convictions or self-reported offending. Importantly, in a 2001 study by Sigurdsson and colleagues, P was shown to be a significant predictor of reoffending at 5-year follow-up among first offenders given conditional discharge after a guilty plea. This study is important because it is a prospective study (i.e., personality was tested 5 years prior to the follow-up and at the time of first apprehension for a criminal offense) and the detection of reoffending was based on official recording rather than self-report. P, E, and N have also been linked to psychopathy, which is a severe form of antisocial behavior and criminality. Theoretically, psychopaths should have higher scores on P, E, and N, although Ronald Blackburn draws a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” psychopaths and argues that high P characterizes the primary psychopath and high N and E the secondary psychopath. In 2007, Lynam and Derefinko reviewed six studies into the relationship between Eysenck’s PEN dimensions and psychopathy. The results show that of the three dimensions, P has the strongest relationship with psychopathy. These results confirm the early work of Robert Hare into psychopathy and Eysenck’s PEN theory. Eysenck’s PEN theory has been applied to how offenders attribute blame for their crime once they

309

are apprehended by police. Gisili Gudjonsson and Krishna Singh identified two main attributions relevant to offending: external attribution of blame (i.e., blaming the crime on the victim, provocation or social factors) and mental element (i.e., blaming the crime on metal health problems and loss of control), which can be measured using the Gudjonsson Blame Attribution Inventory (GBAI-R). The GBAI-R also measures the reporting of feelings of remorse over the offense. P has been consistently found to be associated with external attribution of blame, whereas feelings of remorse for the offense are associated with introversion (low E) and high N. Therefore, Eysenck’s PEN predicts not only offending but also how offenders construe their offending after apprehension, which has important implications for offense-related work. N is also commonly elevated in offender populations. However, there is a problem with interpreting E and N scores among incarcerated offenders, because N may increase and E decrease as a direct effect of incarceration and are therefore unlike P potentially context bound.

Eysenck’s Theory and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder In the first edition of his book on crime and personality, Eysenck suggested that delinquent children should be treated with stimulant medication to improve their level of conditioning in order to improve their learning and prosocial behavior. This was an innovative idea at the time and highlighted the important relationship between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder and potentials for treatment intervention. ADHD is a developmental disorder, which is associated with childhood. It consists of three core symptoms: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. It is increasingly recognized that in some cases, these symptoms persist into adulthood. ADHD is commonly found among prisoners, and the core symptoms are significantly associated with management problems in prison, according to Young and colleagues. Research into ADHD and personality in terms of Eysenck’s theory has been very limited, but there is recent evidence to demonstrate its importance. In 2009, Gudjonsson and colleagues investigated the

310

Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality

relationship between ADHD in childhood and current symptoms and personality among prisoners using Eysenck’s PEN model. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis, controlling for the effects of non-verbal intelligence, revealed that adult ADHD symptoms were best explained by N and to a much lesser extent by P. The authors concluded that the key link with offending may be that N exacerbates existing propensities for poor behavioral inhibition (“dysfunctional impulsivity”).

Super Factors Versus Primary Traits There is an interesting dispute in the literature about whether primary traits (e.g., disrespect for rules, impulsivity, sensation seeking) are better than super factors, such as P, E, and N, in predicting criminality. Super factors measure broad features of personality, which may dilute the relationship with criminality. Investigating specific primary traits may produce more powerful predictors. With this in mind, Stephen Levine and Chris Jackson present some data to show that Eysenck’s primary traits were better predictors of selfreported offending among students than P, E, and N. They found that P was the single best super factor, but a primary scale of P items consisting of “Disrespect for Rules” was an overall better predictor than P and should be targeted for treatment. Similarly, in 2006, Sigurdsson and colleagues investigated the relationship between P and use of violent films and video games among students in further education. Multivariate analyses showed that the relationship between P and violent media use was fully mediated by the acceptance of violence as measured by the Maudsley Violence Questionnaire. Therefore, primary traits may function as important mediating variables between super factors and certain types of offending behavior. There may also be important gender differences. For example, in 2006 Gudjonsson and colleagues found that 30 percent of the variance in self-reported offending was accounted for by personality factors. P was a powerful predictor of self-reported offending among both male and female students. However, some gender differences emerged with impulsivity being a relatively better overall predictor than P of offending among males, but P was a better predictor than impulsivity among females.

Gudjonsson and Sigurdsson in 2007 found that the motivation behind offending is important when investigating the relationship between crime and personality. They identified four main motives for offending: “Compliance” (comprising peer pressure/influence), “Excitement,” “Provocation,” and “Financial.” They found that different motives were associated with different personality factors (e.g., sensation-seeking and anger were the best predictors of an excitement motive, a compliant temperament was the best predictor of a compliance motive, and anger was the single best predictor of provocation and financial motives). The main conclusion from this study is that motivation for offending was better predicted by primary traits (i.e., compliance, sensation seeking, and angry disposition) rather than P, E, and N. The authors interpreted their findings within Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s general theory of crime where acting in the pursuit of self-interest and angry disposition is a salient driving force behind the offending of young persons.

Conclusion Criminal behavior is multifaceted, and no one single theory explains it fully. Indeed, Eysenck (1996) argues “that there are many causes of criminality, each only contributing a rather small amount of variance to the total of criminality” (p. 151). Eysenck’s PEN theory, which has a strong heredity and biological basis, postulates that Psychoticism (P), Extraversion (N), and Neuroticism (N) all provide a partial explanation for criminal behavior. Personality is seen as mediating between genetic and environmental factors in causing criminality. P and E are theoretically linked to criminality through faulty conditioning, failure to develop proper conscience, and impulsivity (implying poor socialization), whereas N functions as a driving force for existing offending tendencies. The impulsivity component of P is more dysfunctional than that of E, the latter being more associated with sensation-seeking (functional impulsivity) and sensitivity to reward. The empirical support for the relationship between crime and E and N is mixed, whereas there is considerable evidence that P is significantly related to the persistence and severity of criminal conduct, psychopathy, and external

Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality

attribution of blame for offending. Recent evidence suggests that the motivation for the offending may interact with the relationship between crime and personality. Eysenck’s theory offers a more limited scope for understanding the “cures” of criminality than explaining its “causes.” Gisli H. Gudjonsson See also Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder; Yochelson, Samuel and Stanton E. Samenow: The Criminal Personality

References and Further Readings Allport, G. W. (1937). Personality: A psychological interpretation. New York: Holt. Blackburn, R. (1993). The psychology of criminal conduct: Theory, research and practice. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Eysenck, H. J. (1952). The scientific basis of personality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Eysenck, H. J. (1996). Personality and crime: Where do we stand. Psychology, Crime and Law, 2, 143–152. Eysenck, H., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (1989). The causes and cures of criminality. New York: Plenum Press. Eysenck, S. G., Rust, J., & Eysenck, H. J. (1977). Personality and the classification of adult offenders. British Journal of Criminology, 17, 169–179. Gudjonsson, G. H. (1997). Crime and personality. In H. Nyborg (Ed.), The scientific study of human nature. Tribute to Hans J. Eysenck at eighty (pp. 142–164). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. Gudjonsson, G. H., Einarsson, E., Bragason, O. O., & Sigurdsson, J. F. (2006). Personality predictors of selfreported offending in Icelandic students. Psychology, Crime and Law, 47, 361–368.

311

Gudjonsson, G. H., & Sigurdsson, J. F. (2007). Motivation for offending and personality. A study among young offenders on probation. Personality and Individual Difference, 43, 1243–1253. Gudjonsson, G. H., Sigurdsson, J. F., Young, S., Newton, A. K., & Peersen, M. (2009). Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). How do ADHD symptoms relate to personality among prisoners? [Electronic version]. Personality and Individual Differences, 47(1), 64–68. Gudjonsson, G. H., & Singh, K. K. (1989). The revised Gudjonsson Blame Attribution Inventory. Personality and Individual Differences, 10, 67–70. Hare, R. D. (1982). Psychopathy and the personality dimensions of psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism. Personality and Individual Differences, 3, 35–42. Levine, S. Z., & Jackson, C. J. (2004). Eysenck’s theory of crime revisited: Factors or primary scales? Psychology, Crime and Law, 9, 135–152. Lynam, D. R., & Derefinko, K. J. (2006). Psychopathy and personality. In C. J. Patrick (Ed.), Handbook of psychopathy (pp. 133–135). New York: Guilford Press. Sigurdsson, J. F., Gudjonsson, G. H., Bragason, A. V., Kristjansdottir, E., & Sigfusdottir, I. D. (2006). The role of violent cognition in the relationship between personality and the involvement in violent films and computer games. Personality and Individual Differences, 41, 381–392. Sigurdsson, J. F., Gudjonsson, G. H., & Peersen, M. (2001). Differences in the cognitive ability and personality of desisters and re-offenders: A prospective study. Psychology, Crime and Law, 7, 33–43. Young, S., Gudjonsson, G. H., Wells, J., Asherson, P., Theobald, D., Oliver, B., et al. (2009). Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and critical incidents in a Scottish prison population. Personality and Individual Differences, 46, 265–269.

F to intervention, prevention, and treatment than between-individual differences. As Farrington (2006a, p. 335) puts it, the “concept of cause implies that within-individual change in a causal factor is followed by within-individual change in an outcome, and ideas of prevention and treatment require within-individual change.”

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory This entry describes the theoretical principles and the empirical origins of the integrated cognitive antisocial potential (ICAP) theory by David P. Farrington. ICAP offers a developmental explanation of crime. Farrington defines criminological psychology as “the study of criminal behavior by individuals” (2006b, p. 152). Numerous crime theories, alternative hypotheses about causes of crime, and often unsystematic methods of testing them contributed to a great confusion about the causes of crime and about how to intervene effectively. An interesting approach of joining theory-testing and policymaking was identified with Thomas Bernard and Jeffery Snipes’s risk-factor approach, which focuses on the explained variance, the predictive power of independent factors and variables, and the direction of causation. This perspective is at the basis of a developmental and life-course (DLC) theories. DLC theories aim to explain the development of antisocial behavior, the risk and protective factors most salient at different ages and at different stages of a criminal career, and the effects of life events upon an individual’s potential for antisociality. DLC theories are especially concerned with documenting and explaining within-individual variations in offending in the life course. Within-individual changes are more relevant to causes, and pertinent

The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory In 1988, Farrington assumed that, in studying the causes of offending, the endeavor should be to develop “an explicit scientific theory that yields unambiguous quantitative predictors that can be tested against empirical data” (p. 159). In line with these assumptions, Farrington, in 1992, proposed a tentative theory, as he defined it then, of the development of delinquency. After years of empirical testing, his theory is now known as the integrated cognitive antisocial potential (ICAP) theory. The ICAP theory reflects the findings of the major longitudinal studies in the Western world and, especially, those of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD). The CSDD is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 South London males from age 8 to age 48. The ICAP theory is intended to address offending. It includes modifiable risk factors for antisocial acts and behavior; unchangeable factors such as gender and race are excluded. The theory especially aims to explain offending by white lower-class inner-city males. It is an integrated theory in the sense that it includes concepts from strain, control, social 313

314

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

learning, differential association, and labeling theories, and it leaves room for biological, neuropsychological, and genetic perspectives to deepen and complete the understanding of delinquent development. Even though Farrington (2005) does not explicitly investigate biological and genetic factors, he suggests that they could have an effect on antisocial behavior, even indirectly through their impacts on more central constructs. The ICAP theory offers a comprehensive model of studying offenders and their criminal behavior by including two interrelated, but distinct aims in its investigation and empirical testing: (1) explaining the development of antisocial potential; and (2) explaining the commission of crimes in particular times, places, and situations rather than in others. This requires addressing two main empirical questions: “Why do people become offenders?” and “Why do people commit offenses?” (Farrington, 2005, p. 73). Becoming offenders focuses its attention on between-individual differences in the development of a criminal potential (the potential to commit crimes). It serves as an exploratory quest for examining why some people possess a high antisocial and criminal potential, while others have a relatively low potential. Committing offenses is primarily concerned with how this potential becomes an actualization of criminal actions in different situations. The focal points are within-individual differences in the commission of antisocial behavior and offenses—the differences in the likelihood of crimes occurring in some places and times instead of others. This distinction has not always been appreciated and addressed by many researchers. The golden lesson of the ICAP theory is related to the importance of working toward a general model for explaining antisocial and criminal behavior that might inspire and guide research, and yield pragmatic suggestions for effectively reducing and preventing crime. The rationale of the ICAP theory is synthesized in Figure 1, which shows the long-term influences on antisocial potential development, and the shortterm factors involved in the commission of crime. The model’s design could be perceived as two integrated dimensions of one general model of criminal behavior. The top half could describe the long-term potential for antisocial behavior, which could be the same for all types of crimes and antisocial behavior. The bottom half could describe

the short-term potential for antisocial behavior, and could be different for different types of crime (e.g., short-term potential for violence can differ from short-term potential for burglary).

Focusing on the Causes of Offending: Variation Within Individuals It may not sound logical to draw conclusions on within-individual variations in antisocial potential from findings on between-individual differences. The problem identified in some criminological research is that causes were inferred from changes between individuals rather than from variations within individuals (Farrington, 1988). For instance, a study might suggest that males commit more crime than females, and this result may be similar even after holding other variables constant and even after repeated analyses. If gender is a cause, it should be possible to reduce offending by changing males into females, but this is not possible. To suggest that gender is the cause of offending sounds somewhat inexact, because it would be an illogical jump to conclude that there are variations within individuals (offenders) resulting from differences between individuals (males and females). Speaking about causes requires measuring and controlling for all the possible factors that might influence the dependent variable; the control of extraneous causal variables is usually poor in comparative studies, which inevitably have a low internal validity (Farrington, 1988). Randomized experimental or quasi-experimental studies are different because randomization techniques ensure that the average individual in one condition is equivalent to the average individual in another; all the extraneous variables are kept constant. The causes of offending can be explored most effectively by focusing on changes or on degrees of continuity within individuals over time. Such studies inevitably require longitudinal surveys whose internal validity can be enhanced by combining experimental or quasi-experimental studies with longitudinal data. Within-individual change investigation compares an individual in a certain condition (e.g., while unemployed) with the same individual in a different condition (e.g., while employed), with long-term characteristics such as antisociality or impulsiveness or social class held constant or controlled. In the CSDD, the relationship between unemployment and offending was analyzed by looking

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

School failure Low income Unemployment

Criminal parents Antisocial siblings Delinquent schools Delinquent peers High crime neighborhood

Low anxiety Poor child rearing Disrupted families

LT energizing/directing Capabilities

Antisocial models

Attachment Socialization

Life events

LT antisocial potential: between-individual differences

Impulsiveness

ST energizing factors: bored, angry, drunk, frustrated, male peers

ST antisocial potential: within-individual variations

Opportunities Victims

Cognitive processes: decisions, costs, benefits, probabilities, scripts

Routine activities

Antisocial behavior Crime Violence

Consequences: reinforcement, punishment, labelling, learning

315

Figure 1   Farrington’s Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential (ICAP) Theory Source: Adapted from Farrington, D. P. (2005). The integrated cognitive antisocial potential (ICAP) theory. In D. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 14, p. 78). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Note: LT = Long-term; ST = Short-term.

316

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

at the same man both while employed and unemployed. The study revealed that when out of work, individuals were more likely to become involved in crime than when employed. This difference was significant only for certain types of offenses such as theft, robbery, and burglary, and not for crimes such as violence. In this case, the causal link between unemployment and crimes was shortage of money.

Antisocial Potential The central construct underlying antisocial behavior and offending is antisocial potential (AP), which is defined as the potential to commit antisocial acts and criminal offenses. The choice of the word potential—instead of predisposition, proneness or propensity—resides in the interest of using a term free from biological or deterministic connotations. The ICAP theory assumes that AP is an unobservable hypothetical construct, and that changes that occur in AP could be observed indirectly through the modifications of other dimensions (e.g., antisocial models) that can be empirically measured. It follows that the behavioral manifestations of offending reflect this underlying construct, and presupposes that the translation of AP into antisocial and criminal acts depends on cognitive (thinking and decision-making) processes that also involve opportunities and potential victims. It could also be suggested that AP could be measured by antisocial attitudes and so could be more easily separated from antisocial behavior. AP is thought of reaching its peak during the teen years, because of both high prevalence and frequency in offending during this period of life. The changes in behavior with age are explained by changes in situational factors, which trigger and activate changes in AP. In line with Per-Olof Wikström and with Robert Sampson and John Laub, Farrington (2005) proposes that that there are age-appropriate behavioral manifestations of antisocial tendencies that mostly depend on changes in situational factors. These age-appropriate manifestations help to explain the onset sequences of antisocial and offending behavior. Furthermore, Farrington (1995) argues not only that antisocial onset sequences are age-appropriate (a 5-year-old boy would have some difficulty

in stealing a car) but also that certain types of behavior may promote, facilitate, or act as a kind of stepping stone to others. Thus, vandalism is likely to be carried out before shoplifting; shoplifting tends to occur before burglary; burglary takes place before robbery; violence is more likely to take place following a process of escalation and aggravation in a criminal career. The ICAP theory does not propose any distinct types of offenders, nor different models for different types of crimes or for different stages of a criminal career (onset, persistence, escalation, deescalation and desistance). Because research shows that offenders are versatile rather than specialized, it may not be necessary to have different models for different types of offenders or crimes; it may suffice to start with a general model of criminal behavior. However, the theory recognizes chronic offenders as those individuals who have a high AP, and who persistently translate this potential into behavior. Figure 1 is an oversimplification. There could be different figures, for example, for the onset and persistence of criminal behavior. It may be important to develop different models for its various dimensions. To the extent that risk factors for onset of offending may differ from the ones involved in reoffending, diversified models for antisocial onset or persistence or desistance could have a more direct impact on how to organize intervention. There could also be differences in situational influences that explain different types of crimes. Adult life events are also addressed as significant aspects that foster desistance, in the sense that AP can decrease/increase depending on the effect of late life events (e.g., marriage, jobs or divorce, unemployment). Farrington (2006a) suggests that a way to address these issues is to see Figure 1 as a dynamic whole in which each level adds up either to reinforce or to weaken AP; translation of AP into criminal actions can then occur or be discouraged. Continuity and Discontinuity

Continuity exists from child to adult antisociality, and perhaps the most robust finding in criminological research is the positive correlation between past and future offending; past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Empirical

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

findings show that there is relative stability in conduct over time (e.g., the relative ordering of people on measures of antisocial behavior is significantly stable). However, they also reveal absolute change in behavioral manifestations over time, as individual abilities, opportunities and social contexts can change. As Farrington (1995) notes, only children at school can be truant or be excluded from school; only older people can beat up their spouses; older people may find it difficult to commit a robbery. It follows that offending is but one manifestation of a more general syndrome of antisociality that emerges in childhood and tends to persist through adulthood (West & Farrington, 1973). The focus on this wide-ranging syndrome has the advantage of looking at the continuity between criminal, antisocial, and non-criminal behaviors. In fact, acts such as stealing, violence, and robbery are likely to be associated with heterogeneous antisocial manifestations such as heavy drinking, disruptive and recklessness attitudes, bullying, sexual promiscuity, irregular job commitments, and neglected accommodation. Thus, AP may vary in its expression with changes in lifestyle, opportunities, and short-term situational factors, even though the level of it may remain constant. A validated explanation for the continuity in antisociality over the life course is that there are persisting individual differences in an underlying potential to commit antisocial, aggressive, criminal, and violent behavior. Even though absolute levels of antisociality and its behavioral manifestations vary at different ages, people who are relatively more antisocial at one age tend to be relatively more antisocial at later ages. The issue of continuity and discontinuity in behavior can be summarized by referring to two processes that, despite their diversity, are not mutually exclusive of each other: persistent heterogeneity and state dependence. Persistent heterogeneity refers to the differences between persons in an initial potential to commit crime that has implications along the life course and that affects the probability of antisocial conduct from childhood onward. Thus, the continuity of offending would then depend on stable differences between individuals that impact criminal behavior. These stable characteristics have been identified with self-control, which is based on initial socialization experiences,

317

personality traits and neuropsychological deficits or biological mechanisms. State dependence considers how individual actions have a causal effect on the probability of subsequent behavior. Any correlation between past and future offending is not based on the a priori power of the initial distribution of criminal potential or on stable personality characteristics. It is instead based on the fact that previous behavior can dynamically increase or decrease the probability of crime by opening up new opportunities for antisocial behavior, by closing off new chances for other criminal activities, or by the consequences of offending (e.g., labeling). The ICAP theory employs a combination of both notions. Long-Term and Short-Term Antisocial Potential

The ICAP theory distinguishes explicitly between the long-term (LT) development of AP and the short-term (ST) occurrence of offenses and other antisocial behaviors. Long-term AP refers to between-individual differences; short-term (ST) AP implies within-individual variations. Regarding long-term AP, people can be ordered on a continuum from low to high. It is recognized that a relative ordering of people on AP is consistent over time (long-term between-individual differences). Further, the distribution of AP in the population, independently of age, is held to be skewed, in the sense that relatively few people have a very high AP. There exists a relative stability of AP in the life course. Its high versatility, high frequency, and seriousness in antisocial behavior are conceived as manifestations of a high AP, which reaches its peak in adolescence. This difference depends on within-individual variations in those factors that influence long-term AP (e.g., in adolescence the increasing significance of peers, and the lessening influence of parents). People with high AP tend to have an early antisocial onset. They are also likely to continue to be involved in antisocial activities in the course of their life, to persist in a longer (duration) and more serious (aggravation) criminal career, and to commit many different types of antisocial acts and offenses. Specialization in criminal careers, when it occurs, is more likely after 25 years of age (Piquero et al., 2007). Concerning short-term AP, people

318

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

could be prompted to manifest antisocial acts or to offend depending on the immediate situational influences, on the force exercised upon the individual by short-term energizing factors (e.g., boredom), on decision-making processes (e.g., cost-benefit calculations), and also on the opportunities and victims available. Understanding the distinction between longterm persisting between-individual differences in AP and short-term within-individual variations in AP is crucial. It permits the identification of diverse risk factors and risk situations implicated in the commission of crimes (short-term antisocial potential), which are different from the processes involved in influencing long-term AP. As shown in Figure 1, long-term (persisting) between individual differences in AP are influenced by long-term risk factors, which can be individual, familial, and social. Their long-lasting influence facilitates the stability of antisocial potential (i.e., heterogeneity continuity). On the other hand, short-term within-individual variations in AP depend partly on long-term individual differences and partly on short-term situational influences (e.g., anger, drunkenness, victims).

Risk and Protective Factors An integrated cognitive theory of criminal behavior encourages efforts to identify which risk factors are robust and significant predictors of late offending and to ascertain how risk factors have independent, additive, interactive, or sequential effects (Farrington, 1991). According to Helena Kraemer and colleagues, risk is a probability. It is a variable or a situation that increases the probability of an antisocial outcome; it is shown to precede the outcome. However, while all risk factors are correlates, not all correlates are risk factors. This point is crucial insofar as it is quite difficult to establish the precedence of a factor before the outcome; researchers usually measure the correlate and the outcome simultaneously. When studying antisocial behavior, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the different variables and to pinpoint which of them directly, indirectly, or moderately influence the behavioral outcome. Longitudinal prospective studies could help to solve this problem because only what occurs before an outcome offers evidence about the possible

causes of the outcome. Ideally interventions should target risk factors that are causes. Findings from the Cambridge Study have demonstrated that not all risk factors are equal. The probability of antisocial and criminal behavior increases with the number of risk factors involved. The impact of risk factors also depends on the individual vulnerability toward their influence; hence, not all risk factors have the same impact on different individuals or on the same individual at different times of his or her life. A factor that predicts a positive outcome and is “associated with the likelihood of reduced antisocial behavior/delinquency” is defined as a promotive factor (Loeber et al., 2006, p. 173). For Michael Rutter, “protective factors are those influences that alter a person’s response to some environmental hazard that predispose to a maladaptive outcome” (p. 600, quoted in Farrington, 1988, p. 165). A protective factor is a variable that interacts with a risk factor in order to buffer its effect. Reuben Baron and David Kenny speak of moderators when they refer to such interactive variables. It follows that if increases of school failure would lead to an increase of delinquent behavior only among those children from low-income backgrounds, and not for those from high-income families, higher income would be a protective factor. However, protective factors are not absolute in their protective influence. They depend both on the susceptibility of people exposed to their impact and on the interval length of the exposition to them. Their influence increases until a certain plateau and then stabilizes, and their impact is not always direct and could affect the individual after a certain time interval, “sleeper effects.” In the Cambridge Study, family disruption was a significant predictor of late offending. The explanation of this was found in the sequence of stressful events that were likely to characterize that situation (e.g., parental conflict, poor child-rearing methods). These were indeed the causes of offending and not simply of family disruption. Further, what occurred after the disruption moderated its effect. Thus, if boys remained with their mothers after the separation, they had the same delinquency rate of boys from intact low conflict families. But if boys remained with their father or with other relatives, their delinquency rate was significantly high. Research findings also have demonstrated

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

that some kind of disrupted families are not criminogenic (e.g., when the family disruption depended on the death of a parent or hospitalization), while some intact families are criminogenic (e.g., when the family was characterized by high conflicts). Risk factors could have long-term or shortterm influences. Even though the interactions between long-term factors and short-term influences are, for the pursuit of simplicity, not explicit in Figure 1, they are implied by the double directions of the arrows. The image is an attempt to show some of the processes by which risk factors exert an influence on antisocial potential. There are at least two ways of analyzing the model. One way of looking at the model is top-down; the focus will be on the longterm risk influences on antisocial potential, and hence on between-individual differences. Another way is bottom-up; the focus will be on short-term risk influences on antisocial potential, and hence on the within-individual variations. Long-Term Influences

There are risk factors that predict long and persistent between-individual differences in AP. As shown in Figure 1, the long-term level of AP depends on long-term risk factors and on three processes that maintain and sustain it: energizing, directing, and inhibiting. The long-term influencing risk factors are impulsiveness, antisocial models, socialization processes, and life events. Long-term AP is significantly high for people who are impulsive, and who do not think about the consequences of their behavior (long-term risk factors). Long-term AP is also related to attachment and socialization processes. AP will be low if parents consistently reward good and reprimand bad behavior. Children with low anxiety will be less well socialized because they may not be bothered about their parents’ reactions. Disrupted families may impair both attachment and socialization processes. Moreover, AP will be high in those children who are not attached to their parents, and this is likely to happen when parents are cold and emotionally distant. Long-term AP also depends on learning processes, and it may be high when people are constantly exposed to and influenced by antisocial models in the family (criminal parents and siblings).

319

Delinquent schools and high-crime neighborhoods constitute significant factors affecting AP. Referring to strain theory, the main energizing factors that potentially lead to high long-term AP include desires for material goods, status, and reputation among intimates, excitement, and sexual satisfaction. These incentives contribute to high AP if antisocial methods of satisfying them are regularly chosen. Events occurring after offending may contribute to changes in energizing, in directing, in inhibiting, and in decision-making processes, because of the dynamic system. As a result of a learning process, the consequences of antisocial and criminal behavior may lead to changes in a long-term AP and in future cognitive decisionmaking processes. This effect is especially likely when the consequences of antisocial behavior can be reinforcing, labeling, and stigmatizing, because this will make it more difficult for the offender to achieve his or her aims lawfully and in a prosocial way. People who find it difficult to satisfy their needs legally are likely to choose antisocial means; people who gather failures at school and at work, and who have a low income or an erratic job pattern, tend more often to turn to antisocial solutions. The more these antisocial means are fulfilling, the more they reinforce the antisocial script. Short-Term Influences

There are also short-term within-individual variations in AP. The occurrence of offenses and other antisocial acts does not occur in a psycho-social vacuum. It depends on the interaction between the individual, who possesses a certain degree of AP, and the social environment. This interaction is influenced by a decision-making and motivational process in criminal opportunities, and by the presence of potential victims, who could serve as triggers for antisocial interests. For simplicity, Figure 1 depicting ICAP theory does not show explicitly such interactions; even so, the theory allows for the inclusion of them at any level of the AP. Short-term AP varies within-individuals according to short-term energizing factors such as being bored, drunk, encouraged by peers, angry, or frustrated. The motives for offending are also agerelated. They differ within individuals—from being hedonistic, excitement seeking, and pleasure in adolescence to utilitarian and rational in adulthood.

320

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

The ICAP theory also attempts to explore cooffending dynamics. It suggests that co-offending decreases within individuals from teenage to adult years; with age, individuals become less sensitive to the influences of peers and siblings. Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson’s routine activity theory underlies the influence exercised by opportunities and accessibility to victims. Thus, encountering a tempting opportunity or a victim may cause shortterm increase in AP, and a short-term increase in AP may motivate a person to look for extra opportunities and victims. When faced with an opportunity for criminal behavior, a person with a certain level of AP would act criminally. This depends on cognitive processes that involve subjective benefits, costs, the probability of succeeding, and the possibility of achieving alternative outcomes. This process of decision making would be tempered by immediate situational factors, such as the likelihood of getting away with it, family factors such as the disapproval by parents, and social factors such as the recognition and encouragement from peers. People usually tend to make rational choices for them (Farrington, 2005). On the other hand, those with a high short-term AP, caused by anger or drunkenness, may lead people to commit offenses even when it is not rational or convenient to do so. The consequences of offending might lead to changes in long-term AP and future decision-making processes through a process of learning. The quality of these changes depends on the consequences involved that could be reinforcing the antisocial behavioral pattern (e.g., gaining material goods, peer approval) or discouraging and punishing it (e.g., legal sanction). Labeling and stigmatizing results could have a reinforcing influence on AP because labeled people may find it more difficult to achieve their goals legally, which implies state dependence.

Conclusion Criminological psychologists should conduct more research on the distinction between individual differences in the development of antisocial and criminal potential and within-individual variation in the commission of crime. Understanding this distinction may improve answers on how to prevent and reduce offending. As Farrington (2006a,

pp. 358–359) notes, researchers should aim “to establish the degree to which within-individual changes in possible causal factors are followed reliably by within-individual changes in offending, after controlling for within-individual changes in other factors.” The key points of the ICAP theory are summarized as follows: Antisocial potential (AP) is defined as the potential to commit antisocial and criminal acts. The ordering of people along the antisocial continuum (low to high) remains relatively constant over time. Onset is the beginning of a criminal career. It is advanced that an early onset of offending predicts a high individual rate of offending and a serious and a long criminal career. High frequency and high offending seriousness reflect a high AP. An early onset indicates a relatively high level of AP. Continuity in offending over time is the patterning of offending along the life course. It is found that there exists a relative continuity in offending from childhood to adulthood. Risk factors are the antecedent variables of a consequent outcome; they exert their influence differently on different people, depending on the interaction between their strength and duration of their influence and the individual vulnerability to their impact. Different risk factors affect the beginning of a criminal career, while others contribute to its persistence, to its aggravation, and to its de-escalation and desistance. Some have a long-term influence, while others have a short-term one. Age-appropriate antisocial sequences indicate that the behavioral manifestations of AP are generally age-graded. The onset sequences reflect persistent heterogeneity, where an antisocial manifestation at one age (e.g., cruelty to animals at age 5) can constitute the precursor to another antisocial sequence (e.g., bullying and aggression at school at ages 8 to 10, and spouse violence in adulthood). State dependence is considered important because the development of offending over time can be discouraged or encouraged depending on learning and labeling processes following the commission of crime, and depending on late life events that can influence the criminal conduct. Although the Cambridge findings show a general continuity in offending over time,

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory

they also demonstrate that offenders can change, and when desisting they can also tend to lead quite satisfactory lives. Prediction involves the process of establishing which factors predict offending independently of other factors and variables. Longitudinal studies are those that permit the investigation of within-individual variation in antisocial potential and in offending. Longitudinal research, especially that which includes randomized experiments or, alternatively, quasi-experiment designs, could help researchers to establish causality. This is because the observed differences in outcomes can be attributed to diversity in interventions rather than in pre-existing differences. The importance of these studies is based on the grounds that if a manipulable variable were proved to have a causal effect on antisocial potential and then on offending, this finding would have significant implications in addressing intervention, treatment, and prevention. Intervention and prevention are involved in the scope of this theory. It is crucial to any theory of offending to both hamper the development of the delinquent lifestyle and encourage its ending as soon as possible. This is in line with the principles of intervention that “never is too early, never is too late.”

The ICAP theory explains crime committed by males from a working-class background, but its scope can be extended to include female offenders, middle-class and upper-class offenders, violence, white-collar crimes, and different cultural and social contexts. It emphasizes the interest in involving new longitudinal studies and in re-examining data from well-known longitudinal studies. The ICAP theory thus represents a significant marker in a new scientific tradition of studying criminal behavior and in its development. Georgia Zara See also Bernard, Thomas J., and Jeffrey B. Snipes: Variable-Centered Approach; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory and Deviant Behavior; Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-CoursePersistent Offending; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

321

References and Further Readings Baron, R. M., & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The moderatormediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1173–1182. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Farrington, D. P. (1988). Studying changes within individuals: The causes of offending. In M. Rutter (Ed.), Studies of psychosocial risk: The power of longitudinal data (pp. 158–183). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Farrington, D. P. (1991). Antisocial personality from childhood to adulthood. The Psychologist, 4, 389–394. Farrington, D. P. (1992). Explaining the beginning, progress, and ending of antisocial behavior from birth to adulthood. In J. McCord (Ed.), Facts, frameworks and forecasts (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 3, pp. 253–286). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Farrington, D. P. (1995). The development of offending and antisocial behavior from childhood: Key findings from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 36, 929–964. Farrington, D. P. (2005). The integrated cognitive antisocial potential (ICAP) theory. In D. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 14, pp. 73–92). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Farrington, D. P. (2006a). Building developmental and life-course theories of offending. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 335–364). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Farrington, D. P. (2006b). Criminological psychology in the twenty-first century. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 14(3), 152–166. Flannery, D. J., Vazsonyi, A. T., & Waldman, I. D. (Eds.). (2007). The Cambridge handbook of violent behavior and aggression. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gulotta, G. (Ed.). (2002). Elementi di psicologia giuridica e di diritto psicologico [Juridical psychology and psychological law]. Milan, Italy: Giuffrè. Kraemer, H. C., Lowe, K. K., & Kupfer, D. J. (2005). To your health: How to understand what research tells us about risk. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

322

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life

Loeber, R., & Farrington, D. P. (Eds.). (2001). Child delinquents. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Loeber, R., Slot, N. W., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (2006). A three-dimensional, cumulative developmental model of serious delinquency. In P.-O. H. Wikström & R. J. Sampson (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms and development (pp. 153–194). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Piquero, A. R., Farrington, D. P., & Blumstein, A. (2007). Key issues in criminal career research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rutter, M. (1985). Resilience in the face of adversity: Protective factors and resistant to psychiatric disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry, 147, 598–611. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (2005). A general agegraded theory of crime: Lessons learned and the future of life-course criminology. In D. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 14, pp. 165–181). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Thornberry, T. P., & Krohn, M. D. (Eds.). (2003). Taking stock of delinquency: An overview of findings from contemporary longitudinal studies. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Welsh, B. C., & Farrington, D. P. (Eds.). (2006). Preventing crime: What works for children, offenders, victims, and places. New York: Springer. West, D. J., & Farrington, D. P. (1973). Who becomes delinquent? London: Heinemann. Wikström, P.-O. H. (2005). The social origins of pathways in crime. In D. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 14, pp. 211–245). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life Marcus K. Felson’s work Crime and Everyday Life, the first edition of which was published in 1994 with subsequent revisions following, builds upon his earlier path-breaking work with Lawrence E. Cohen. More specifically, an article by Cohen and Felson in 1979 titled “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach” outlined routine activity theory as an explanation for crime trends in the United States between 1947 and 1974. The routine activity theoretical perspective

discussed in this seminal work suggested that the large increase in crime over the time period examined was due to increasing opportunity for crime. Criminal opportunity was defined as the extent to which motivated offenders (which were assumed a “given” in any society) encountered suitable targets in the absence of capable guardianship. Importantly, Cohen and Felson linked such criminal opportunities to societal shifts in routine daily activities. For instance, increasing percentages of Americans were pursuing work, school, and leisure activities outside the home from 1947 to 1974. These activities, quite simply, increased the likelihood that those motivated to offend would encounter suitable targets/victims in settings or situations where capable guardianship was lacking. Felson’s Crime and Everyday Life expanded the routine activity approach, more fully elaborating upon the idea that opportunities for crime emerge from the legal activities of everyday life, creating a “chemistry for crime.” In particular, Felson emphasizes how the structure, timing and tempo of everyday life in terms of transportation, activities/ expectations of modern youths and the physical environment all are a part of this chemistry for crime. These ideas are discussed in more detail as follows.

Transportation and Criminal Opportunity Similar to his earlier work with Cohen, Felson emphasized how routine daily activities—and the criminal opportunity they present—had changed historically. However, in Crime and Everyday Life, he invoked a much broader historical perspective than before, comparing routine activities (and resulting criminal opportunity) in early societies to those in contemporary metropolitan societies. Felson (1998) argues that, as a society changes and grows, it can become a more suitable environment for crime. This growth can be examined especially well through analysis of a society’s technological advancements in transportation. Thus, as technological advances in transportation occur, individuals within a society are better able to move from one region to another quickly, and the distances that individuals can, and do, travel routinely are greatly increased. Transportation advances alter the routine activities of individuals within a society and heighten interaction among

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life

its members, which in turn increases the opportunity for crime. According to Amos Hawley, areas transform in conjunction with transportation advances in five distinct yet potentially coexisting stages: village, town, convergent city, divergent metropolis, and the metropolitan reef (Felson, 1998, p. 77). Each of the stages of change in everyday life within a society has differing crime rates. It is not until the emergence of the convergent city that crime rates are expected to be high. Though convergent cities are the first stage that induces high crime rates, within these cities are what Herbert Gans called “urban villages” (Felson, 1998, p. 83), which serve to reduce crime rates within their borders through ethnic homogeneity and increased personal contact amongst inhabitants. The final stages in a society’s growth, the divergent metropolis and the metropolitan reef, represent the insertion of, and the reliance on, the transportation technology of personal automobiles as the primary form of transportation. As such, the divergent metropolis, and especially the metropolitan reef, is expected by Felson to produce environments most conducive to crime. The prevalence of automobiles as the primary mode of transportation increases the availability of vehicles (suitable targets) to potential offenders and increases the length of time that individuals are away from home. The latter of these two consequences decreases the potential that a capable guardian will be attending to their personal space at home, and thus increases the likelihood of potential offenders in locating a suitable target that is unsupervised.

Out of Sync Youths Youths commit a disproportionate amount of crime with respect to their overall representation in the total population. Also, in Crime and Everyday Life, Felson notes that the youths of modern society commit more criminal acts than previous generations. Felson posits that increased crime rates among youngsters are related to modern-day youths’ out-of-step position in their society. Felson contends that the youths of today do not have viable social roles to fulfill and consequently turn to crime. In generations past, juveniles engaged in manual labor and were expected to start families of their own while at a considerably young age. Felson

323

argues that, as society has changed, so too has the traditional role of a society’s youths. The manual labor market of old has been reduced significantly in modern society and, as a result, so has the outlet for many youths to expend their pubescent energy in socially productive and acceptable ways. Modern youths are also entering puberty at significantly earlier ages in life, creating larger amounts of time that they are full of sexual and physical energy with few acceptable ways to be rid of it. Felson asserts that because youths have no viable economic role, they have little choice but to prepare for future employment and must continue schooling further than generations past. When coupled with the absence of an economic position, increased years of schooling creates another issue for modern youths: spare time. The spare time of previous generations was largely consumed by some kind of labor position or by family regulation. Family members may reduce a juvenile’s temptation to engage in crime by limiting opportunities through parental supervision after school or enforcement of a curfew. Families may also instill beliefs or expectations that raise the threshold at which a juvenile would commit a crime; the greater the presence of family members as capable guardians over youths, the higher the youths’ threshold to commit crime. Felson, however, is not contending that families must have a constant presence, or that previous generations had this constant supervision around their children. Rather he suggests that the routine presence of family control reduces the child’s general opportunity to commit crime and creates a bond for the child to consider when dealing with criminal temptations. With rising commonality, youths are released from school early in the afternoon and do not receive family supervision for several hours, leaving many of them to their own devices. This routine activity of no, or little, supervision can lead to many youngsters committing delinquent criminal acts, according to Felson.

Local Design Against Crime The last of the elements discussed above, the setting for crime, is addressed by Felson in Crime and Everyday Life as being combatable through environmental controls and management of those environments. Felson contends that a setting does not

324

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life

need to be a fortress to prevent crime, but rather that the environment needs to incorporate the concepts of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) as trumpeted by C. Ray Jeffery. CPTED utilizes the routine activities in everyday life of the citizenry to reduce, if not eliminate, the environment for crime. In other words, crime can be effectively designed out of any area. Felson posits that the essential elements of CPTED that need to be embraced to combat criminogenic settings are (1) to control access to a given area, (2) to provide natural surveillance through elimination of niches or hidden areas for offenders to seek refuge in, and (3) to encourage territorial behavior of citizens. Controlling access to an area can be accomplished through the creation of paths or markers that signal to individuals that they are entering or exiting a personal or collective space. This may be as simple as a row of hedges leading up the walk of a private residence or as advanced as the engineering of roads that indicate a complex and personal suburban area. Natural surveillance can be accomplished in a number of ways. Felson explains that the key to increasing natural surveillance is in the creation and expansion of sightlines. Basically, guardians need to be able to see their environment to be able to identify both targets at risk and potential offenders. Increasing territorial behavior among citizens is the response of individuals exerting ownership over a given space. This is especially relevant to housing, in that as controllers of a space lay claim to an environment and therefore make the space personal, fewer outsiders are willing to potentially violate the now established personal space. These three components of CPTED can be accomplished using one, or a combination of, three security strategies: natural, organized, and mechanical strategies. Felson explains that natural categories include security strategies that stem from the pre-planning and predetermined use of a given space. Natural strategies are organic security strategies in that they are preemptive, and the security gleaned from them is wholly reactive to their original purpose. Organized security strategies revolve primarily around increases in officially sanctioned guardians such as the police or security personnel. Mechanical security strategies are largely tied to organized strategies, in that they originate with the increased use of technological products, such as alarms, cameras, and the like,

which usually require monitoring by sanctioned guardians. Of the three security strategies, Felson argues that natural strategies are by far the most cost-effective and successful because they are designed to eliminate the environment for crime at its inception. Felson contends that the mixing of unsafe activities in safe areas (and vice versa) can combat an environment for crime. By “channeling” the safe activities of individuals in potentially unsafe areas, a fusion of the routine activities of potential offenders and capable guardians can occur in a shared space. This fusion creates an environment that feels safer to individuals routinely entering and leaving the space and, in turn, decreases the venue as an acceptable environment for crime. Felson also asserts the importance of area managers. Again, this is especially relevant to housing complexes; however, its premise extends to all areas. Managers of a space are responsible for the semi-private and semi-public areas of an environment and thus are responsible for exerting, and illustrating, ownership over those spaces. A poor manager who lets the areas they are responsible for fall into dereliction can create an environment for crime to seep into the area.

When Crime Feeds Crime In Crime and Everyday Life, Felson contends that crime can bring about more crime, and that the converse is also true in that prevention of some crime can lead to the prevention of other crimes. Within this respect, crime is to be viewed as cyclical in nature; one crime builds off another by offenders digging themselves deeper into criminality, victims become more readily and routinely available, present criminal offenses create the conditions for further and escalating crime, and settings deteriorate to a criminogenic breeding ground. Felson explains that crime can lead to more crime in four arenas: “the individual offender, the victim, the offense, and the setting” (p. 126). The individual offender’s emergence in crime offers a variety of situations that can push the offender deeper into a criminal life or pull them out of that same lifestyle. Felson offers 13 points that illustrate these situations. However, they can be summed in two categories: continued criminality and desistance.

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life

The first, continued criminality, establishes that as an offender delves deeper into a life of crime, his or her routine activities can become criminogenic. This may take the form of spending the spoils of the offender’s crime on further illegal acts (robbery money used to buy drugs) or of creating criminal, and potentially dangerous, relationships (befriending other criminals and creating criminal enemies). At its core, continued criminality establishes that as the individual offender successfully commits a minor or less serious crime, the completion of that crime offers the offender an opportunity to commit more crime with increasing seriousness of offense; offenders thus dig themselves deeper into trouble and effectively sever ties that may be able to extract them from their criminal lives. It is important to note, however, that as easily as offending may contribute to further and prolonged crime, it may also be the catalyst into crime desistance. Criminal life can be extremely taxing by way of stress and can produce physiological changes in an offender that reduces his or her ability to commit crime. The prolonged alcohol and drug abuse experienced by many criminals can reduce an individual offender’s capacity to commit crime, and physical deterioration can make those individual offenders more noticeable to potential targets and capable guardians. In addition, their ability to create criminal relationships can be compromised. In sum, persisting offenders can become physically tired of their life of crime, and this may be enough to offer temptation to desist from criminality. Victimization may also contain the elements needed for crime to build on itself. Victims of crime are commonly repeat victims. These victims often do not understand why they are viewed as suitable targets, thus inhibiting their ability to prevent future victimization. The successful victimization of a target by an offender builds the confidence of the offender while simultaneously reducing the confidence of the victim. Further, criminal victimization may lead to future crime as victims seek an outlet to rectify the loss caused by their own victimization. The setting of crime also provides a venue for crime to breed more crime. The presence of minor crime in an area, whether a specific city block, a neighborhood, or an entire suburb, that is not addressed and dealt with provides a potential

325

environment for further and escalating criminality. This element is the core of Felson’s application of environmental criminology.

Situational Crime Prevention Since Felson maintains that crime is a spatial and temporal event, one method of crime reduction that the author advocates is situational in nature. Though environmental considerations are important, they cannot control for every crime and every variation in a situation. For these variations, Felson offers a crime control method that can change from situation to situation. He is quick to note that situational crime control and prevention is an immediate and practical response to crime that holds little long-term utopian value. Situational crime prevention seeks to view a potential crime through the perspective of the offender, and therefore seeks to create controls for that offender to prevent a specific crime from happening. Felson (1998, p. 179) explains that this can be accomplished by addressing five categories: “target’s rewards, inducement, guilt, effort, and risk on the spot (TIGER).” A target’s reward is described by Felson as the potential benefit that an offender gains from obtaining that target. Felson contends that a target’s reward or potential benefit can be reduced in a number of ways, including total elimination of potential targets, reducing the value of oft-targeted items, and identification of targets making them more easily tracked and more difficult to fence or dispose of. Guilt, or rather the increase of guilt, is illustrated by Felson as simply instigating a potential offender’s conscience and encouraging feelings of guilt in the potential offender. Felson argues that guilt can be increased by making the law easy to adhere to and by removing potential excuses that offenders may rely on in justifying their criminality. Effort, as defined by Felson, is primarily enacted by target hardening, or making targets more difficult to attain. Effort may utilize the principle of inertia and those of CPTED. By controlling access to and making targets more difficult to attain, situational crime prevention can reduce criminal behavior by adding extra physical factors in a potential offender’s calculation of whether or not to commit a crime.

326

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature

On-the-spot risk is described by Felson as making the potential offender aware of the presence of capable guardians. Through supervision and surveillance by capable guardians, on-the-spot risk increases for a potential offender as they become more aware that they, and their target, are being watched. Felson asserts that situational crime prevention represents a practical and narrow application of crime prevention, noting that situational crime prevention is especially useful when it is focused to a particular crime phenomenon, such as car theft or graffiti. Felson further contends that situational crime prevention when held in concert with local design against crime can be viewed as a “natural crime prevention” approach (1998, p. 182).

N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (pp. 225–256). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. K. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Eck, J. E., & Weisburd, D. (1995). Crime places in crime theory. In J. E. Eck & D. Weisburd (Eds.), Crime and place (pp. 1–33). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Felson, M. K. (1987). Routine activities and crime prevention in the developing metropolis. Criminology, 25, 911–931. Felson, M. K. (1995). Those who discourage crime. In J. E. Eck & D. Weisburd (Eds.), Crime and place (pp. 53–66). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Felson, M. K. (1998). Crime and everyday life (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Conclusion Through his work in Crime and Everyday Life, Felson has presented an integration of routine activities into the many theories of crime prevention, and this important piece has sought to remand the study of crime from the arena of the theoretical to the realm of the tangible. Felson reminds students of criminal justice and criminology that crime must be appreciated in the happenings and processes of everyday life, and that to understand and prevent crime, it is first necessary to appreciate that the activities in everyday life create the environment for crime to form and grow. Lisa Growette Bostaph and Jonathan Bolen See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature; Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

References and Further Readings Brantingham, P. L., & Brantingham, P. J. (1981). Notes on the geometry of crime. In P. J. Brantingham & P. L. Brantingham (Eds.), Environmental criminology (pp. 27–54). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Clarke, R. V. (1983). Situational crime prevention: Its theoretical basis and practical scope. In M. Tonry &

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature Crime and Nature is a book in which Marcus K. Felson formulates a perspective on crime that is inspired and influenced by the way the life sciences describe and explain their subject matter. It is not a book on “environmental crime” or on the violation of laws that protect the environment, nor is it concerned with genetic, hormonal, neurological, or other physiological correlates of crime. Similar to other theoretical perspectives that Felson has helped develop, such as routine activity theory and situational crime prevention, the perspective on crime that is articulated in Crime and Nature deals with the tangible and observable aspects of criminal behavior. It is not concerned with the variation in criminal propensity between individuals that is at the heart of etiological theories of crime. According to Felson, all attempts to distinguish “criminal man” have failed and been a waste of time. This view echoes the dominant position among ecologists and naturalists, who generally consider inter-individual differences irrelevant for understanding their subject matter. Crime and Nature borrows core concepts from ecology, such as habitat, parasitism, and foraging, and uses them to help explain criminal phenomena. The starting point of the perspective is that the seven basic requirements of life—organization,

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature

adaptation, metabolism, movement, growth, reproduction, and irritability—can be fruitfully applied to understand crime. This entry provides an overview of how Felson applies concepts from ecology and related fields to crime. It discusses his answers to the following questions (book chapter numbers in parentheses): What is crime and what are its stages? (chapters 2 and 3). What are the micro and macro environments that influence crime? (chapters 4 to 8). How does crime interact with its environment? (chapters 9 and 10). How can the relationships between offenders and their environment be characterized? (chapters 11 to 14). How do offenders search and approach targets and how do they defend themselves against other offenders and against law enforcements? (chapters 15 to 20). How can criminal acts be classified? (chapter 21). The entry concludes with a short note on the early reception of Crime and Nature.

Definition and Three Stages of Crime Any theory of crime needs to define its subject matter. According to Felson, a useful definition of crime reconciles local variation with global uniformity and mirrors how naturalists define and update their subject matter. He proposes the following 15-word definition: “Crime is any identifiable behavior that an appreciable number of governments has specifically prohibited and formally punished” (p. 35, emphasis in the original). This definition allows the analyst to ignore oddities, such as specific behaviors that have been prohibited in only one place at one specific time, and to exclude behaviors that some people consider harmful, amoral, or distasteful but that are not prohibited by authorities. In line with the basic assumptions underlying the ecological perspective, Felson defines only crimes, not criminals. Crime and Nature analyzes criminal events as part of a logical sequence of events, most of which occur near in time and space, and some of which may involve other illegal behavior. This sequence can be divided into the prelude, the incident, and the aftermath. The prelude includes the processes that directly precede and lead into the crime. The incident is the illegal activity itself. And the aftermath includes escape and the processing of stolen items. Often, the aftermath of one incident forms

327

the prelude to another incident, which gives rise to chains of crimes committed by the same or different persons. For example, the proceeds of a burglary are traded against illegal drugs, but that transaction fails and leads to an assault.

Micro- and Macro-Environments of Crime Crime and Nature emphasizes that the environment has a decisive influence on whether, where, when, and how crimes take place. Crime needs its environment, as there can be no crime if there are no victims, targets, accomplices, people to sell stolen goods to, vehicles to escape from the crime site, and so on. The macro-context of crime is referred to as the ecosystem, a term used in ecology to refer to the complex web of ongoing interactions between all organisms in a geographic area. When applied to crime, read it as society. Between the micro-level of the criminal act and the macro-level of the ecosystem, various levels can be distinguished. In the order of increasing size and complexity, they are a setting, a habitat, and a niche. A setting is “a location for recurrent use, for a particular activity, at known times” (Felson, 2006, p. 102), such as a house, a bar, or a street corner for the gang who hangs out there. A habitat is a somewhat larger spatial entity that contains at least several settings. Examples are an airport, a university campus, or a shopping mall. The concept of a crime niche is not necessarily geographical as it goes beyond particular places. It includes everything that supports a particular type of crime. For example, a crime niche for burglary includes everything that supports the commission of burglary, ranging from meeting places for offenders, places to stash stolen items and people to sell them to, cell phones for offenders to communicate, tools to break into properties, and vehicles for transportation, to mention just a few. Fundamental niches are potential resources that could be used for crime, while realized niches are the resources actually used to commit crime. In sum, crime feeds on the opportunities and resources that are available in its environment.

Mechanisms of Interaction Competition and adaptation are mechanisms by which crime interacts with its environment.

328

Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature

Competition occurs when organisms in the same community need the same scarce resource. Criminal activities sometimes compete with one another— usually in the illegal markets for drugs, sex, and gambling—or with legal activities. A prostitute may compete for customers with other prostitutes and with legal destinations for the customer’s money. Adaptation occurs when an organism changes in response to changes in its environment that challenge its survival. Adaptation of crime takes place when criminal activities respond to measures taken by potential victims or law enforcers to stop them. It characterizes the “arms race” between crime and crime prevention. Where criminal opportunities are blocked by situational crime prevention measures, criminals adapt by finding ways to circumvent or bypass the block. Subsequently, crime prevention adapts and searches for new strategies against the adapted crime, and the process repeats itself continuously.

Relationships Crime and Nature applies four relational concepts from ecology to crime: symbiosis, mutualism, parasitism, and passive assistance. Symbiosis is the general term that encompasses the other three concepts. “Crime symbiosis is a close and prolonged relationship between two parties, providing illicit benefit to at least one of them” (Felson, 2006, pp. 163–164). Quite often, both parties are involved in related criminal activities—for example, drug dealers and their customers or thieves and fences. Sometimes, only one of the parties is involved in criminal activities, while the other presents a fully legitimate activity, such as the owner of a restaurant where offenders meet to prepare an offense. When both parties benefit from the relation, such as the prolific thief and his or her long-term fence, it is called a mutualism. Parasitism is a relation in which one party benefits while the other party is harmed. The male racketeer, who demands payment in exchange for “protection” against crimes that he himself instigates unless the payment is made, and his victim form an excellent example, like many other forms of repeated or ongoing victimization committed by the same offender. Passive assistance refers to a situation where one party benefits from the other without helping or harming the other party. Passive assistance is a large category

that includes crime that benefits from legal activities. For example, many illegal activities are facilitated by telecommunication services, but the proportion of calls involving illegal activities is negligibly small. Passive assistance also occurs when legal activities benefit from criminal activities (e.g., some doctors make a living from treating victims of violent crimes).

Attack and Defense To survive, all living beings must eat and not be eaten. They must develop strategies that are good enough to provide them with what they need and that also prevent them from being attacked by predators. The perspective outlined in Crime and Nature applies the concepts of foraging and vigilance to crime. Criminal foraging applies to how offenders search, choose, and attack their targets. It displays tactical diversity in terms of diet breath, hunting method, and geographical range. Diet breath refers to variety in the type of targets an offender is after. Many property offenders prefer cash money above anything else, but will easily broaden their set of acceptable items of cash is not available. Hunting method refers to how an offender searches and attacks a target. Robbing a victim may be quick but dangerous; burgling the victim takes more time and effort but might be less risky. Geographical range is the size of the area where an offender searches for targets. Wide area foraging may increase the number of potential targets, but could be more risky and more energyconsuming. Many offenders’ foraging trips start and end at a central setting, which is their home. Unless they are driven to offend almost constantly for need of drugs, they normally commit crimes in and around the places they are familiar with through their legal daily activities. Similar to foraging animals, they need to be vigilant in order not to be eaten themselves, offenders must be prepared and defend themselves from being stopped and apprehended by the police or other law enforcement agencies and from being attacked by potential victims or other offenders.

Taxonomy of Crime Naturalists use a variation of Linaeus taxonomy of living things to order their observations and

Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence

communicate about them (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species). For the same reason, Felson’s Crime and Nature proposes a crime taxonomy, one that is explicitly presented as open to future enhancements. The taxonomy classifies crime “in terms of the trip towards the crime target and the main features of daily life that enable or impede that trip” (Felson, 2006, p. 329). Thus, it classifies crime in terms of its physical story. The taxonomy uses five levels that all represent a step in accessing the target: paths, barriers, tools, convergences, and targets. Paths are legitimate infrastructures that an offender uses to move toward targets, such as highways, the Internet, or the position an offender holds within an organization. Barriers are things that stand in the way of committing the crime—for example, “no trespassing” signs, doors, fences, and guards. Tools are objects that help an offender to successfully commit the crime. They include tools for entering locked locations, such as a crowbar or a (false) permit or keys, tools for transport (e.g., a van or a motorcycle), and tools for enforcement (weapons). A convergence refers to the level of interaction between offender and target. The degree of convergence varies from situations with no contact between offender and target to situations that characterize the most obtrusive crimes. At the former end of the continuum are situations of trespass, observation, and retrieval that require no contact between offender and target, and at the other extreme are attacking and hijacking the crime target. The target of crime is what the offender is after. Many offenders want money, but some are after specific products or information, or after a specific person.

Reception The first edition of Crime and Nature appeared in 2006, and it may be too early to assess the impact. It has not yet been reviewed or commented upon broadly. It was the subject of an “Author Meets Critics” session at the American Society of Criminology meeting in Atlanta in 2007. One recent paper by Carlo Morselli and Marie-Noële Royer explicitly tests a foraging hypothesis developed in Crime and Nature. Wim Bernasco

329

See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Vila, Brian J., Lawrence E. Cohen, and Richard S. Machalek: Evolutionary Expropriative Theory

References and Further Readings Felson, M. (2002). Crime and everyday life (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Felson, M. (2006). Crime and nature. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Krebs, J. R., & Davies, N. B. (1993). An introduction to behavioral ecology (3rd rev. ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Morselli, C., & Royer, M.-N. (2008). Criminal mobility and criminal achievement. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 45, 4–21.

Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence Richard B. Felson and James T. Tedeschi met at the State University of New York at Albany, where Felson was a social psychologist in the sociology department and Tedeschi was a social psychologist in the psychology department. Both of them were interested in the study of self-presentation, aggression, and violence, but they were also dissatisfied with the compartmentalization of theories and research related to violence across the social sciences. Stimulated by each other’s ideas, they developed a more general perspective during the 1980s that places rational individuals within their social contexts in which violence is understood as a means toward achieving desired outcomes. This perspective, known as the social interactionist theory of violence, posits that violence and aggression are goal-oriented behaviors and often involve influencing others, retribution

330

Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence

against perceived injustice, status maintenance, and thrill-seeking as major motivations. The social interactionist theory of violence rests on three major assumptions. First, violence is a means to achieve interpersonal goals. The actor makes decisions based of perceived benefits, costs, and moral values. Second, the theory also posits that social-psychological and situational factors will affect the probability of violent behaviors. The relationships between the actors, the dynamics of exchanges, and the role of third parties must be taken into account when explaining violent encounters. Third, social interactionist theory involves an understanding of the phenomenology of actors, who frequently believe that their use of violence is legitimate and even morally justified given the circumstances. Hence, the perceptions, judgments, expectations, and values of individuals are important factors to understand their violent behaviors.

Understanding Violence: Motivations and Goals A first motivation for violence is to influence others. Although not necessarily the best solution, violence can be used successfully to intimidate or force others to comply against their will. From that perspective, violence is a trump card against unsuccessful negotiations, a non-negotiable attempt to succeed. For example, a man may sexually assault a woman after unsuccessful attempts to seduce her, or a nation may invade another nation when negotiations over conflicts failed. Violent acts motivated by the desire to influence others include predatory violence, dispute-related violence, and defensive violence. Conflicts are a common occurrence of everyday life between co-workers, friends, neighbors, family members, lovers or would-be lovers, and even strangers. Although the majority of them are resolved through compromises, negotiations, or non-violent display of power, some conflicts lead to a violent resolution. Retribution against perceived injustice is also a frequent motivation for violence. This happens when the actor has a grievance against another party, and violence is judged to be an appropriate response. Grievances are common in social life because individuals frequently disregard rules or otherwise behave in ways that are offensive to others. In addition, various attribution biases lead

people to attribute blame to others for negative outcomes even when blame is objectively unwarranted. Retribution against wrongdoers combines moralistic and strategic values: The inflicted harm is morally justified and well deserved, and it can also deter future wrongdoing. Ironically, criminals often kill each other for moralistic reasons, at least by criminals’ standards, according to Maurice Cusson. For example, partners in crime may shoot each other when someone tries to take an undeserved lion’s share of the loot, and offenders who turn police informants are exposed to significant risks of mortal retaliation and must often receive special protection from police. The classic article by Donald Black, “Crime as Social Control,” illustrates how individuals who engage in dispute-related violence often feel self-righteous and think of their behavior as an act of justice. To fail to retaliate against the misdeeds of others would be immoral. A third common motivation is status maintenance. The status or identity of individuals can be challenged by the actions of others such as insults, criticisms, and provocations. In those situations, a submissive behavior is likely to generate a loss of status and a negative self-perception. In contrast, a dominant behavior involving a successful violent response (e.g., beating or intimidating the insulter) not only can maintain but even improve one’s status and self-perception. Although the presence of an audience is not necessary to feel the need to defend one’s status, the fact that third parties are watching sometimes increases the motivation to save face. Another formulation of the status-maintenance argument involves the benefits of developing or keeping a reputation among deviant peers and enemies as a “tough guy” or “bad ass”: lower risk of victimization, greater respect, better “job” opportunities when violent skills are an asset, or better dating/sexual opportunities with some women. Thrill-seeking is a fourth common motivation for violence. Some individuals find everyday life in industrialized modern societies to be too predictable, too safe, too disciplined (Ferrell, 2004). In short, boredom is the enemy. The desire for thrills, the “adrenaline rush,” and the enjoyment of risk make violence an attractive activity for some individuals, young men in particular (Cusson, 2005; Katz, 1988). Successfully evading the police and

Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence

the legal consequences can also be a form of thrill. An interesting aspect of thrill-seeking as a motivation for violence is that the risks and the dangers are viewed as pleasurable and valuable outcomes instead of costs (Felson, 2004). Obviously, a violent act or series of violent acts can also be motivated by a combination of these motives. A fight between members of different street gangs might well be motivated by a desire to influence the other party, retribution for prior misdeeds, status maintenance, and thrill-seeking all at the same time.

Rationality, Social-Psychological Factors, and Situational Factors The rational actors presented in the social interactionist theory are very different from the cold, efficient, and almost omniscient Homo Economicus of traditional economics textbooks. While the actors are goal-oriented, their rationality is affected by many social-psychological and situational factors: They lack the time to think carefully; they are influenced by their adversaries and by the presence of third parties; they are sometimes under the influence of alcohol or drugs; and fear, anger, pain and other emotions can cloud their judgment. Hence, behaviors that seem irrational, costly, and immoral to an outside observer are understood as the result of poor decision-making or miscalculation instead of an irrational outburst. Many violent encounters are unplanned, and once they begin they tend to be very short. Professional boxing matches might last 12 rounds, but the typical fistfight, robbery, or homicide last only a few seconds. Violent encounters involving deadly weapons like guns and knives might be even shorter. Given that time frame, the actors must make split-second decisions that may result in severe consequences for them or others. Although the relationship between the duration of violent encounters (or the situation that just precedes it) and the ability of actors to make rational decisions is not well known, it seems likely that split-second decision-making is detrimental to clear thinking. Actors must also make decisions based on the available information about the adversaries and the behavior of third parties. Adversary effects posit that actors’ behaviors must take into account the dangerousness of adversaries (Felson & Messner,

331

1996). A dangerous adversary is more likely to inspire submission or retreat from the actor, but might be the target of a more severe assault if a confrontation does occur. When the adversary is believed to be particularly dangerous, the cost of an unsuccessful attack would be far greater; so if the actor decides to attack, he or she has an incentive to use more force to increase the probability of success. The influence of third parties during a conflict depends on their actions. The simple presence of an audience increases the need for face-saving and the risk of escalation, but this risk is even higher when the audience acts as instigators by promoting a violent response. In contrast, the audience can reduce the risk of escalation by promoting a nonviolent response (i.e., peacemakers). Alcohol and drug use is common among violent offenders and their victims. Ethnographic research on serious offenders shows the importance of a party lifestyle for many of them. The criminogenic effects of alcohol and drugs are not limited to the serious offenders, however. Other people are also at higher risk of committing violence when intoxicated or high. Individuals lose their inhibition when they use too much alcohol or drugs, and they are more blunt, annoying, and careless in their social interactions. They are also more likely to accept an invitation to fight. Their judgment is clouded, and their calculations inaccurate. Finally, the situation leading to a violent encounter, and the violent encounter itself, are often filled with strong emotions such as fear, anger, and pain. The cognitive mechanisms by which emotions and rationality function in the mind is a complex topic beyond the scope of this text, but it is widely accepted that strong emotional arousal negatively impacts rational decision-making. The long-term consequences are ignored in favor of a focus on the problem at hand when the actors are fearful, angry, and in pain. Harming the adversary can also be more valued in that situation.

Conclusion A possible concern regarding the social interactionist theory is that by focusing on the individual actor, rationality, and the immediate socialpsychological and situational risk factors, attention will be drawn away from the sociological explanations of violence. On the contrary, this

332

Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model

approach does not downplay the importance of structural and macro-social criminogenic processes, but it suggests that these contextual influences must ultimately affect the individuals for violent behaviors to happen. In that sense, the social interactionist theory is complementary: Structural and macro-social factors can generate violence because they increase the need or the opportunities for influencing others through violent means, for retribution against perceived injustice, for status maintenance, and for thrill-seeking. Felson and Tedechi’s social interactionist theory of violence is a sound, empirically supported, and versatile perspective to explain violence, aggression, and coercive behaviors. In the view of some scholars, the theory is currently underused and underrated in criminological theory and research. Paul-Philippe Pare See also Alcohol and Violence; Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence; Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders; Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime; Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence

References and Further Readings Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: W. W. Norton. Black, D. J. (1983). Crime as social control. American Sociological Review, 48, 34–45. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. K. (1979). Social changes and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Cromwell, P. (2006). In their own words: Criminals on crime (4th ed.). Los Angeles: Roxbury. Cusson, M. (2005). La délinquance, Une vie choisie [Delinquency : A life chosen]. Montréal: HMH. Felson, R. B. (2004). A rational choice approach to violence. In M. A. Zahn, H. H. Brownstein, & S. L. Jackson (Eds.), Violence: From theory to research (pp. 71–90). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Felson, R. B. (2006). Violence as instrumental behavior. In E. K. Kelloway, J. Barling, & J. J. Hurrell, Jr. (Eds.), Handbook of workplace violence (pp. 7–28). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Felson, R. B., & Messner, S. F. (1996). To kill or not to kill: Lethal outcomes in injurious attacks. Criminology, 34, 519–545.

Felson, R. B., & Tedeschi, J. T. (1993). Aggression and violence: Social interactionist perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Felson, R. B., & Tedeschi, J. T. (1993). A social interactionist approach to violence: Cross-cultural applications. Violence and Victims, 8, 295–310. Ferrell, J. (2004). Boredom, crime and criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 8, 287–302. Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions of doing evil. New York: Basic Books. Tedeschi, J., & Felson, R. B. (1994). Violence, aggression, and coercive actions. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model Since the 1960s, hundreds of researchers have examined fear of criminal victimization. This research has identified a number of important correlates and consequences of fear of crime, and this knowledge has helped criminal justice policymakers and practitioners in their quest to reduce fear of crime among the general public. Although a number of theoretical models exist that explain fear of crime, the most well-known of these models is the risk interpretation model developed by Kenneth Ferraro in his seminal work Fear of Crime: Interpreting Victimization Risk. Ferraro’s risk interpretation model is a theoretical framework designed to help understand the relationship between micro-level and macro-level predictors of fear of crime, perceived risk of victimization (the likelihood that one will be victimized by crime), and constrained behaviors (changes to one’s daily activities that an individual does to avoid criminal victimization). Ferraro was one of the first fear-of-crime researchers to distinguish clearly between fear of crime and perceived risk. Ferraro argues that many fear-of-crime researchers apparently assume that the definition of fear of crime is obvious and refrain from clearly delineating exactly what fear is. Ferraro attempts to remedy this problem by defining fear of crime as “an emotional response of dread or anxiety to crime or symbols that a person associates with crime” (1995, p. xiii). Ferraro and his colleague Randy LaGrange demonstrate that,

Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model

until the late 1980s, measures of risk of criminal victimization were often mistaken for measures of fear of crime. They argue that questions such as “Is there any area right around here—that is, within a mile—where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” (the question used by the General Social Survey to measure fear) and “How safe do you feel or would you feel being out alone in your neighborhood at night?” (the question used by the National Crime Victimization Survey to measure fear) are asking people to appraise their victimization risk, not their actual fear of crime. They point out that fear and risk are conceptually distinct measures, and that an elevated sense of perceived risk does not automatically lead to heightened levels of fear. Ferraro contended that fear is an emotional response, while risk involves a cognitive judgment. In Ferraro’s view, many researchers not only fail to make the distinction between fear of crime and perceived risk but also fail to measure risk of criminal victimization at all. After reviewing the extant research available at the time, he argued that there are two basic approaches to measuring risk. One method used to assess risk was to examine official crime statistics to provide an official or “objective” risk assessment. In the second method, researchers asked respondents to evaluate their own risk of victimization—a method he called perceived risk of victimization. Ferraro reviewed 29 studies available at the time that used both an indicator of risk and measures of fear. He suggested that few, if any, of the researchers accurately measured official risk, perceived risk, and fear of criminal victimization. In an effort to explain why people fear crime, he then built a theoretical model to bridge the gap between macro-level and micro-level theoretical perspectives designed to incorporate neighborhood factors, measures of risk, and constrained behaviors, alongside demographic factors known to be associated with fear of crime. He argued that there are ecological forces that increase both criminal opportunities and the perceptions of risk of victimization of potential victims, and that, to fully understand why people fear crime, these ecological forces must be combined with micro-level factors that impact fear and risk. He posited that both the prevalence of crime in a community and the characteristics of a community affect perceived

333

risk, fear of crime, and behavioral adaptations to risk and fear. He further suggested that the personal and interpersonal phenomena eventually impact community-level predictors as well, and he cited media reports of crime and participation (or lack of participation) in community organizations as evidence of that feedback loop. Ferraro’s model is illustrated in Figure 1. Ferraro’s model of explaining fear of crime is superior to most others because it includes both the macro-level and micro-level of explanation. In Ferraro’s model, macro-level factors—such as crime prevalence (e.g., whether crime occurs in a community) and community traits (e.g., community size, regional location)—affect the neighborhood traits (i.e., social and physical incivilities, as well as cohesion), perceived risk (i.e., perceived likelihood for victimization), and constrained behaviors (i.e., defensive and avoidance behaviors) in that community, which in turn impact the fear of crime among the residents of those communities. At the micro-level, personal factors—such as age, race, and gender—combine with victimization experience (both direct and indirect) and the residential traits to explain perceived risk, constrained behaviors, and fear of criminal victimization.

Ecological (Macro) Crime prevalence Community traits Neighborhood Traits Incivility Cohesion

Behavioral Adaptations Constrained action Defensive action

Perceived Risk

Fear

Personal (Micro) Status characteristics Victimization Residential traits

Figure 1   Risk Interpretation Model Source: Ferraro, K. F. (1995). Fear of crime: Interpreting victimization risk. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 18.

334

Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model

Ferraro’s model was superior to its predecessors because he recognized the importance of neighborhood incivility, perceptions of risk, and constrained behaviors in understanding fear of crime. Ferraro also recognized the importance of examining both direct and indirect (through risk and constrained behaviors) effects of the aforementioned variables on fear of crime. Ferraro was the first researcher to empirically examine his risk interpretation model when he used responses from more than 1,000 adults to examine the major relationships in his model. To examine both micro-level and macro-level predictors of fear and risk, he included both measures of perceived risk and official risk, as well as specific fear. Ferraro determined that, in general, perceived victimization risk correlated highly with official statistics on the prevalence of crime in an area (official risk). In other words, in areas with higher crime rates, residents could accurately assess that they are at higher risk of criminal victimization. Ferraro also determined that a number of micro-level predictors (e.g., gender, race, and victimization experiences) were significantly correlated with perceived risk of crime. Specifically, women, nonwhites, and those who have been victimized by crime had higher levels of perceived risk of victimization. Ferraro further concluded that gender, race, education, and age strongly affected fear of criminal victimization and that fear of crime was associated with an individual’s constrained behaviors and the incivility of the neighborhood in which he or she lived. He found that the best predictor of fear of crime was an individual’s perceived risk of victimization, that the second best predictor was an individual’s constrained behaviors, and that the influence of these two factors was additive. In other words, the higher people’s level of perceived risk, the greater the likelihood that they will change their everyday activities to avoid crime victimization (constrained behaviors), and the more people constrain their activities, the higher their level of fear of crime. The macro-level variables in the model, however, did not impact fear of crime as much as the micro-level ones did. In fact, most of the macrolevel associations with fear of crime were indirect. For example, while crime rates had a strong association with perceptions of risk of victimization in the model, the direct effect on fear was weak. Ferraro encouraged researchers to use the risk

interpretation model to examine fear of crime among other respondents in diverse settings. In this regard, a number of researchers have empirically examined the effectiveness of Ferraro’s risk interpretation model in a wide variety of settings. Most of these studies have found support for at least some components of Ferraro’s model, with the greatest support for the model present for the hypothesis on the relationship between levels of perceived risk and fear. In every study that examines the linkage between the two, individuals with higher levels of perceived risk also have higher levels of fear. These findings support Ferraro’s argument that perceived risk would be the pivotal factor influencing fear. In addition, a number of researchers have examined the impact of ecological characteristics in the risk interpretation model. Although they generally find some support for Ferraro’s hypothesis that ecological factors influence fear, they often find that the impact of these ecological characteristics is mediated by the influence of other variables included in the model (e.g., perceived risk, neighborhood incivility, and constrained behaviors). The contributions of these researchers have demonstrated that the risk interpretation model helps understand correlates of fear of crime and perceived risk in a number of settings. Ferraro suggested that his model be tested across a wide array of samples and victimization experiences to help improve the understanding of what produces fear of crime. Future researchers will likely continue to do so; the available evidence suggests that, with slight modifications in some settings, Ferraro’s risk interpretation model provides a solid foundation for understanding constrained behaviors, perceived risk of victimization, fear of crime, and the interaction among the three phenomena. David C. May See also Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots; Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear; Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk; Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory

References and Further Readings Ferraro, K. F. (1995). Fear of crime: Interpreting victimization risk. Albany: SUNY Press.

Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School Ferraro, K. F., & LaGrange, R. (1987). The measurement of fear of crime. Sociological Inquiry, 57, 70–97. Hale, C. (1996). Fear of crime: A review of the literature. International Review of Victimology, 4, 79–150. Ricketts, M. L. (2007). K-12 teachers’ perceptions of school policy and fear of school violence. Journal of School Violence, 6(3), 45–67.

Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School Enrico Ferri, a student of Alberto Ardigo and later Cesare Lombroso, is acknowledged as one of the founders of the Positivist School of Criminology and, therefore, strongly opposed to the Classical School of Criminology. Ferri’s early education was a bit sporadic, marked with truancy, transfers to different institutions, and private tutoring. He began his studies under Ardigo as an adolescent, where he excelled in mathematics and Latin. Afterwards, he studied at the University of Bologna where he wrote a thesis on the topic of free will. Ferri later moved on to the University of Pisa, where he developed his skill as an orator. According to Thorsten Sellin, after winning a fellowship, Ferri traveled to France where he conducted a study on statistical trends and characteristics of criminality. It was after his stay in France, that he moved to the University of Turin, which is also where Lombroso was a professor. It was at the University of Turin where Ferri began his career as a lecturer. After a year of study with Lombroso, Ferri returned to the University of Bologna as a professor of criminal law. During this time, he would present numerous lectures and papers that would later become his most influential work. Ferri also spent time working as a trial lawyer and was elected to Parliament. During this time, Ferri continued his work as a lecturer, mainly on reform, visiting villages about Italy. He later became the editor of Avanti, the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party, and founded his own journal, La Scuola Poitiva. The Positivist School, along with Ferri, is responsible for applying scientific techniques to the study of criminals. They argued that before crime could be understood, one must first understand the criminal. Ferri thought that using scientific methods would be the only way to garner useful information in order to explain the crime

335

problem, as noted by Sellin. Whereas Lombroso focused primarily on the biological aspects of positivism, Ferri’s interests were broader. In Criminal Sociology, he sought to incorporate into the study of crime anthropological or individual conditions (race, age, sex, intelligence), physical conditions (the seasons, climate, length of the day, average temperature), and social conditions (population and migration changes, public opinion, religion, family circumstances). Indeed, according to Ferri, there were multiple causes of criminal conduct. Ferri held strong views related to the study of criminals, prevention, reforming the criminal justice system, and developing a social defense against crime. For Ferri, studying the offender was more important than studying the act itself, for which he received criticism. Ferri established and coined the term criminal sociology and wrote a book on the topic. He developed criminal sociology from anth­ ropological studies and integrated aspects of several different disciplines: psychology, statistics, and sociology.

Classification of Criminals During his studies with Lombroso, Ferri coined the term born criminal and developed a classification system in order to identify criminals. This system included five types: (1) the criminal who is, essentially, born criminal since he or she inherits their criminal tendencies; (2) the mad criminal (mentally ill); (3) the criminal who commits crimes of passion or those that are the result of an emotional state; (4) the occasional criminal; and (5) the habitual criminal. Later, he added a sixth category of involuntary criminals (those crimes that result from negligence). According to Ferri, the category that warrants the greatest amount of attention is the occasional criminal. These offenders comprise the largest group. Ferri also asserted that this group would be most responsive to punishment. The habitual criminal and the born criminal are most likely to recidivate and display criminal tendencies rather early in life, which distinguish them from the occasional criminal. However, these two groups are the least likely responsive to punishment. Ferri noted that not all criminals fit neatly into an exclusive category and that criminals could switch categories (i.e., an occasional offender could likely become a habitual offender).

336

Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School

Ferri and the Classical School of Criminology Ferri, a proponent of crime prevention and the rehabilitative function of punishment, disagreed with the Classical School of Criminology. Accord­ ing to Sellin, he found their work to be too abstract and attacked them for their use of deductive logic. Further, he took issue with the Classical School’s concept of moral responsibility, as it was not possible to measure, and called for its eradication from the system. Ferri developed the concept of legal responsibility, where any individual who engages in criminal behavior is to be held accountable for that act, as a member of society. A system that adheres to moral responsibility allows for serious offenders to be acquitted or avoid prosecution, according to Ferri. The Classical School holds that crime is the result of an individual’s free will and rational thought, a position the Positivist School rejects. In his lectures, Ferri argued it is the conditions, internal and external, experienced by the offender, that cause the behavior. For Ferri, the notion of free will leaves too many questions unanswered, such as how criminal behavior is produced and why crimes of every type are committed repeatedly in all countries; free will is an insufficient explanation. Ferri stated that people are not always aware of future decisions until they make a decision. Only by examining psychological (or individual) and environmental conditions can these types of questions be answered, thereby facilitating the development of a proper social defense. In addition, the Classical School argues that punishment is necessary to deter criminal behavior. By contrast, Ferri maintained that punishment, or threats of punishment, were not successful in deterring criminals from offending, especially for those crimes committed in the heat of passion, for those offenders who are mentally ill, or for the habitual criminal. Essentially, he found punishment, or repression, to be useless because it did not prevent criminal behavior. As can be seen in Criminal Sociology, Ferri also believed that punishment had a negative, rather than positive, effect on the offender. First, punishment does not affect all offenders in a similar manner, and second, it is ineffective in producing any real behavioral change in the individual. Punishing an occasional offender too harshly would likely cause the individual to recidivate and potentially turn them into a habitual offender.

Ferri also doubted that crime would be reduced by increasing the severity of punishment and thought that its deterrent effect was limited. The only way to lessen criminal behavior would be to determine the conditions that cause the conduct and then focus on improving or eliminating those causes. In addition, Ferri was strongly opposed to the extreme solitary confinement imposed on prisoners by the Pennsylvanian system, because he thought that it was inhumane, unwise, and too expensive. Therefore, he was a proponent for prison reform. Ferri argued that allowing the prisoners to work outside would be much more beneficial.

Proposals for Reform Ferri believed that through the scientific study of the criminal, transformations in justice would occur. In his works, he proposed that the rehabilitative function of punishment could be the driving force for crime prevention. He also advocated for the training of legislators, judges, and criminal justice personnel in a scientific manner. Ferri opposed jury trials, because he thought that adequately trained judges would be better equipped to properly assess offenders than juries, according to Sellin. He also believed in the use of indeterminate sentencing as punishment and supported restitution for victims. Retributive punishments should be replaced with a more scientific approach that includes calculating the degree of harm posed to society and the offender’s blameworthiness. According to Ferri in Criminal Sociology, after an offender is sentenced to an institution, a committee—comprising judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, psychiatrists, and anthropologists—would later review the offender’s case to determine eligibility for release. Ferri developed what he referred to as penal substitutes that would be used to treat the social conditions of crime. This process begins with the legislators changing the laws to recognize the causes of crime. Ferri believed that broad social reform was necessary to ameliorate criminality. Not only does the offender need to be reformed, but also the social environment needed to be reformed to prevent relapse. Social reform was said to be more effective in preventing crime than the penal code. Social factors must be manipulated in order to have an impact on the development of criminal behavior.

Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory

Ferri called for changes in the economy, such as free trade to prevent famine and high taxes, political changes, technological or scientific changes, administrative changes, and, finally, educational changes— all with the ultimate goal of reducing crime. These changes, according to Ferri, would be much more effective than relying on the penal code. Although most of Ferri’s work was written more than 100 years ago, the issues he presented are still relevant and continue to be debated today. His work influenced many, and without him, it is likely that the Positivist School would not have been quite as influential. Angela N. Estes See also Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism; Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School; Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Phrenology

References and Further Readings Beck, N. (2005). Enrico Ferri’s scientific socialism: A Marxist interpretation of Herbert Spencer’s organic analogy. Journal of the History of Biology, 38, 301–325. Ferri, E. (1900). Criminal sociology. New York: Appleton. Ferri, E. (1900). Socialism and modern science: Darwin, Spencer, Marx (R. R. La Monte, Trans.). New York: New York International Library Publishing Company. (Original work published 1894) Ferri, E. (1968). Introduction. In S. E. Grupp (Ed.), The Positive school of criminology: Three lectures by Enrico Ferri. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. (Original work published 1901) Ferri, E. (1968). The Positive school of criminology: Three Lectures by Enrico Ferri (S. E. Grupp, Ed.). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. (Original work published 1901) Sellin, T. (1972). Enrico Ferri. In H. Mannheim (Ed.), Pioneers in criminology (pp. 361–383). Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.

Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory The field of criminology has been, and continues to be, dominated by environmental explanations of

337

crime and delinquency. What this means is that criminological theories attempt to explain the development of antisocial behaviors by focusing on environmental factors, such as parents, peers, neighborhoods, subcultures, and virtually every other imaginable social variable. The most wellknown criminological theories, such as social learning theory, social disorganization theory, strain theory, and social bonding theory, explain criminal behavior solely through environmental factors. At the same time, the possibility that biological factors could be implicated in the etiology of crime has not been explored by most contemporary criminologists. Criminologists, in general, have been vehemently opposed to research that examines the biological underpinnings to offending behaviors. There are two overarching reasons why criminologists oppose biological research. First, most criminologists have been trained as sociologists. That necessarily means that they are quite familiar with the social factors that may be able to mold and shape human behaviors, but there is a downside: Most criminologists have received very little, if any, formal education of biology. Even more troubling, most sociologists are highly antagonistic toward biological explanation to human behavior. As a consequence, criminologists are taught that biology does not matter, that biology is dangerous, and that biology should not be studied. So it should come as no surprise that when confronted with the daunting question of what causes crime, criminologists rely on their sociological background and attempt to explain crime through social factors. The second main reason that criminologists generally oppose biological research is because they view biological research as promoting oppressive, inhumane policies. To illustrate, there is an overriding assumption among many criminologists that if certain biological markers were found to be related to crime, then everyone could be screened to determine whether they possess these biological markers. If they did have the biological marker, they would then be sterilized. Since sterilization would prevent reproduction, then these biological markers would not be passed on to future generations and thus crime would cease to exist in the future generations. At first glance, this attack on biological research might seem believable; however, such a view is a caricature of biological research. Biological markers are risk factors that

338

Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory

increase or decrease the odds of engaging in antisocial behaviors. Stated differently, possessing a particular biological risk factor will not determine with 100 percent accuracy who will and who will not become a criminal. Moreover, no criminologist who studies biology would argue that the environment is unimportant to crime. Contemporary criminologists who study biological influences on crime do not focus just on biological risk factors; instead, they conduct research that highlights the importance of biology and the environment in the production of antisocial behaviors. This line of inquiry has become known as biosocial criminology because it fuses together biological factors with environmental factors to create interdisciplinary explanations of criminal behavior. With the mapping of the human genome and with brain imaging machines available that can detail subtle differences in brain structure and brain functioning, the biosocial perspective is beginning to gain traction. It is important to point out, however, that as a recently as a decade or two ago, this was not the case; any mention of biological influences was a political minefield that often resulted in academic exile. As a result, very few criminologists were brave enough to systematically map out the ways in which biological factors could relate to criminal involvement. One of these was Diana H. Fishbein—a pioneer in advancing the biosocial criminological perspective.

Fishbein’s Biosocial Scholarship Fishbein has made immense contributions to the field of criminology. She has published research exploring gender differences in offending behaviors, the neurocognitive effects on antisocial outcomes, and the prevention and treatment of criminals. Especially noteworthy, however, has been her research discussing and outlining the biosocial perspective. Two pieces of scholarship have been particularly instrumental in this regard. The first, published in 1990 in the most prestigious criminology journal, Criminology, was titled “Biological Perspectives in Criminology.” In this article, Fishbein drew attention to the fact that existing criminological theories are impoverished because they ignore the potential effects that biological factors have on the development of antisocial outcomes. But she did more than simply point

out the problems with these criminological perspectives; she exposed the reader to the empirical research showing that biological factors are extremely important to the study of crime and criminals. In doing so, she explained basic biological processes, presented the research methodologies used to study biological effects on crime, and, perhaps most noteworthy, advocated an interdisciplinary explanation of antisocial behaviors. To do so, Fishbein discussed the various ways in which biological processes may be involved in the etiology of crime and delinquency. Importantly, Fishbein did not argue that all criminological theories were wrong or that they should be abandoned. Instead, she highlighted the importance of integrating biological concepts into mainstream criminological theories. Fishbein’s article was significant to the biosocial perspective for two main reasons. First, citing rigorous empirical research, she challenged the prevailing assumption that biology was unimportant to the study of crime. And given that this article was published in the top criminology journal, thousands of criminologists read it. Second, Fishbein’s article revealed that the “nature versus nurture” debate was dead. No longer was it tenable to assume that behaviors were the result of either the environment or biology; rather, scientific evidence had emerged to establish that all human behaviors were due to interactions between environmental variables and biological factors. Fishbein’s second piece of scholarship that was highly influential to the biosocial criminological perspective was her Biobehavioral Perspectives in Criminology, published in 2001. This book provided a very detailed, well-researched, and rigorous treatment of the biosocial perspective. Fishbein explained complex biological concepts in a way that was easily accessible to criminologists lacking a background in biology. For example, she provided detailed discussions of evolutionary theory, genetics, and biochemistry. In addition, she drew attention to some potent environmental factors, including prenatal influences, abuse, neglect, and the media. She concluded by laying out a series of policy implications that flow from biosocial research. This book was critically important to biosocial criminologists because it provided the first concise yet thorough account of the biological influences

Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory

on antisocial behaviors. Up until this point, criminologists who were interested in the biosocial perspective did not have any books that provided a balanced and accurate appraisal of the biological influences on criminal behavior. Moreover, many of the resources that did cover biological influences on human behavior were written in highly technical language that was inaccessible to criminologists. Fishbein’s book overcame these obstacles and provided a rich resource that could be used by criminologists attempting to learn about the biosocial effects on various types of criminal and delinquent outcomes. Taken together, these two pieces of scholarship have provided a wealth of information about the biosocial correlates to antisocial behaviors. Fishbein has also been instrumental in detailing the ways in which biosocial research can be used to guide and inform policies related to the prevention and treatment of crime and delinquency. She has written extensively on this topic and in 2000 published an edited volume titled The Science, Treatment, and Prevention of Antisocial Behaviors: Application to the Criminal Justice System. In this book, Fishbein once again advocated an interdisciplinary perspective when studying the causes and correlates to crime. For her and other scholars who contributed to the volume, all potential causes (including biological and environmental factors) of crime should be studied. Then, prevention researchers should use the results of these studies to identify the environmental and biological risk factors that should be targeted for change. Stated differently, Fishbein argued that the more that is known about the causes of crime, the more that can be done to reduce it. Fishbein thus provided a very sophisticated overview of the biosocial correlates to a range of different antisocial behaviors, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, alcoholism, aggression, impulsivity, antisocial personality disorder, drug use, and crime more generally. Based on these findings, she then introduced a number of different policies that could be implemented to prevent the development of antisocial behaviors or to treat antisocial behaviors after they have surfaced. As mentioned previously, critics of the biosocial perspective often argue that biological research can only lead to oppressive policies, such as a new eugenics, where criminals are subjected to forced

339

sterilization. The research covered in Fishbein’s book goes a long way to allay these unfounded fears by showing that biological markers are not necessarily immutable and that biological markers can be used in prevention and intervention strategies. Just as important is that changing the effects of biological markers does not necessarily entail prescription medicines or any type of invasive treatment. To illustrate, brain functioning has been linked to a host of different antisocial outcomes. Research has also shown that brain functioning can be altered through certain intervention programs, such as cognitive-behavioral therapies. What this necessarily means is that biological influences can be changed through environmental interventions. Fishbein’s edited book makes this argument very clear by providing specific ways in which prevention and intervention programs can target both biological and environmental risk factors to reduce the prevalence of violence, crime, drug use, and many other antisocial behaviors.

Conclusion Fishbein’s research has provided criminologists with a great deal of information regarding the complex ways in which biological and environmental factors interlock to produce different types of antisocial outcomes. However, most mainstream criminologists have failed to follow the lead of Fishbein and instead have focused only on the environmental correlates to offending behaviors. Given the rich amount of empirical research showing that biology matters in the etiology in all types of criminal behaviors, perhaps, as the 21st century progresses, more and more criminologists will recognize the importance of Fishbein’s research and begin to employ a biosocial perspective when studying the development of crime, delinquency, and other types of antisocial conduct. Kevin M. Beaver See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Moffitt, Terrie E.: Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending; Neurology and Crime; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

340

Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots

References and Further Readings Beaver, K. M. (2009). Biosocial criminology: A primer. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Fishbein, D. H. (1990). Biological perspectives in criminology. Criminology, 28, 27–72. Fishbein, D. H. (2000). The importance of neurobiological research to the prevention of psychopathology. Prevention Science, 2, 89–106. Fishbein, D. H. (2000). The science, treatment, and prevention of antisocial behaviors: Application to the criminal justice system. Kingston, NJ: Civic Research Institute. Fishbein, D. H. (2001). Biobehavioral perspectives in criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Paschall, M. J., & Fishbein, D. H. (2002). Executive cognitive functioning and aggression: A public health perspective. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7, 215–235. Walsh, A. (2002). Biosocial criminology: Introduction and integration. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Walsh, A., & Beaver, K. M. (Eds.). (2009). Biosocial criminology: New directions in theory and research. New York: Routledge. Wright, J. P., Tibbetts, S. G., & Daigle, L. E. (2008). Criminals in the making: Criminality across the life course. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots In their article “Fear Spots in Relation to Microlevel Physical Cues: Exploring the Overlooked,” Bonnie S. Fisher and Jack L. Nasar define fear spots “as those specific places or areas where individuals feel fear of being victimized but where crime may not be frequent or where the police may not have recorded any criminal incidents either during the day or night” (p. 215). So what does this mean? Simply put, fear spots pertain to the non-random distribution of fear across locations. Some places are naturally more feared than others. The quintessential example of this is the dark alley. But more than just the dark alley, we all experience fear or a heightened perception of risk associated with certain places.

Conceptual Framework The phrases bad neighborhood or the wrong side of the tracks evoke a common emotional response.

Fear and places are intrinsically linked from the childhood fear of haunted houses to the very adult risk perception and assessment of dangerous places. Moreover, fear of places can exist even on a larger scale. Fear of the city in general, and even fear of whole countries, make the conceptual development of micro-level fear spots a natural step forward in understanding fear of crime. The development of fear spots as a research topic suggests that some places are more feared than others. Conceptually, this is extremely similar to the concept of hot spots of crime. In the process of learning more about how crime is distributed, Lawrence Sherman and colleagues found that a majority of the calls for service to police were associated with a very small number of physical locations. In fact, the majority of the city did not experience any calls for service at all. This study, which is widely credited for dubbing the term hot spots of crime, provides a conceptual foundation for the exploration of fear spots. When it comes to thinking about crime and its correlates and consequences, criminologists often place theories in two broad categories. First, there are those theories that suggest that crime is a result of criminological traits being distributed across populations (e.g., Gottfredson and Hirschi’s low self-control theory). Second are those theories that discuss the distribution of crime events distributed across locations (e.g., Brantingham and Brantingham’s crime pattern theory or Cohen and Felson’s routine activity theory). This process of thinking about events being non-randomly distributed across places provides the fundamental underpinnings for the discussion of how the impacts of crime could be distributed. So, rather than looking at who becomes fearful of crime, these authors try to explain which types of places and which characteristics of these specific places are responsible for the fear of crime felt by citizens. Location-specific research is an increasingly important area of research in criminology. Much of the crime prevention research conducted today focuses on specific types of events at specific types of places. This also includes the study of locationspecific outcomes and impacts of crime such as fear. Nasar and Fisher establish three different levels at which fear spots will exist: macro, meso, and micro. First, the macro level is the most geographically expansive level associated with the

Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots

generation of fear. For example, different countries or cities will produce varying levels of risk perception in people. People may be more fearful of traveling to Mexico than to Canada. Still, people may be much more concerned with traveling to war-torn Afghanistan than either Mexico or Canada. Of course, conditions apply, but generally speaking countries can carry a certain stigma of danger or risk. Cities also can have a reputation for being dangerous. Individuals traveling to New York City might concern themselves with the possibility of becoming a victim of a crime. These same individuals, when traveling to Indianapolis, may not even ponder the possibility. This is the power reputation influencing one’s perception of risk and possibly even fear of crime. The meso level refers to the smaller areas with a city, particularly neighborhoods or districts. For example, the downtown business district of Cincinnati is not often associated with high levels of predatory crime, but an adjacent neighborhood known as Over the Rhine has a long-standing reputation as one of the city’s most dangerous communities. This broader area is associated with crime and is subsequently thought of as a place to avoid. Existing research on neighborhoods does support what common sense might suggest—that some neighborhoods are more feared than others. This research simply supports the notion that like crime, fear is not “distributed” randomly across neighborhoods. Lastly, the micro level fear spots are those specific places within the larger context which evoke fear. A certain bar or a bus stop, a specific park or vacant lot, are examples of specific places which may generate fear. In “Fear Spots in Relation to Microlevel Physical Cues,” Fisher and Nasar build on Sherman et al.’s definition of a place: “a fixed physical environment that can be seen completely and simultaneously, at least on its surface, by one’s naked eyes” (p. 31) in one important way. They understand that some places are big and thus consist of many smaller places that they define as areas. An area, in terms of understanding the true micro nature of the fear and place association, can be as small as the backyard of a house. Conceptually, the house is a place, but the property may seem perfectly safe on three sides. Likewise, a shopping center may be a place, but the food court may be the source of fear.

341

This type of micro-level understanding of places stems from the earlier work of Oscar Newman and Sally Merry. While Newman discussed the nature of high-rise design and what is referred to as defensible space, Merry further explored the nature of social reaction to architectural layouts. Ultimately, it is known that physical design of structures plays a role in both crime and the perception of relative safety. Thus, the further exploration of micro-level fear spots is a logical and important step in understanding the impact of our physical environment.

What Makes a “Fear Spot”? There are three major physical components that contribute to the development of a micro-level fear spot. These are lack of prospect, hiding places for potential offenders, and blocked escape. Prospect refers to an individual’s view of the landscape. That is, a greater degree of prospect is associated with an unrestricted view of the environment. Conversely, it is limited prospect that is proposed to correlate with greater apprehension and fear associated with a specific location. To that end, Erving Goffman’s concept of “lurk lines” or Mark Warr’s concept of “blind spots” represent different limitations to prospect that shroud portions of an area in darkness. These limitations to prospect are thought to increase the perceived risk of an area or specific location. Logically, darkness and shadows present the possibility of hiding places (sometimes referred to as concealment). In addition, places with limited prospect will have more hiding places. This is consistent with the notion that the passerby will not be able to fully observe the entire setting. Thus, the result is the inability to account for all that is present within the setting, leaving the possibility that a threat exists. The possibility that a would-be assailant is lurking in the shadows generates fear. Those micro-level places and areas that are consistently more feared have such hiding places. An easy example can be constructed from the converse. When presented with a place that has no hiding places (or that all areas are visible), one can be reassured that no threat exists. Knowing that no threat exists creates a scenario where fear should not be generated. Further still, the generation of fear or the risk assessment process would not take

342

Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots

place at all. Only the presence of a possible threat should facilitate this process. Finally, the blocked escape (sometimes referred to as boundedness) refers to the inability of the would-be victim to get away from his or her assailant. Furthermore, a place high in boundedness may also limit the ability of others to come to the aid of a victim, as they may not be able to observe the crime in progress. Fisher and Nasar (1995, p. 220) suggest that “designs that provide an open area for escape will be less fearful than will those that have bounded areas or dead ends that block escape.” This is viewpoint is consistent with other work regarding fear and design. Simply put, we will be more afraid when we are trapped by our assailant than when we are not. The remaining aspect of the micro-level fear spot is social context. While the actual physical characteristics of a place clearly play a major role in how fear is inspired, people take additional cues from their social context. Some of these cues include new environments, night time, and whether or not one is alone. Sometimes, fear of places is further related to the known or suspected activities which take place at the location. Additionally, it is reasonable to assume that one may take cues from one’s pre-established level of fear pertaining to the meso or macro environment. For example, individuals may be already fearful of the neighborhood, which may influence their interpretations of the specific places within said neighborhood. A perfectly ordinary house within a feared neighborhood may be more feared than if it were located in a neighborhood deemed safe. Thus, contextual cues of both the social and physical nature may play a deciding role.

Empirical Testing The conceptual components of micro-level fear spots do receive support though empirical testing. A test of the relationship between fear and each of the components of a micro-level fear spot (prospect, concealment, and blocked escape) shows significantly higher levels of fear. In examining this relationship, Fisher and Nasar (1995) survey the characteristics of a relatively new structure without an established criminal history. This choice of site helps to eliminate the possibility that a preexisting reputation may influence the outcome.

Regardless of the general neutrality of the specific site, some contextual influences such as time of day will likely always be argued to have an impact. However, in this case, the level of fear associated with the building did not significantly increase at night. The correlation between concealment and fear of victimization was larger at night but did not achieve statistical significance. The continuing investigation of micro-level fear spots is important for several reasons. First, simply gaining a better understanding of what heightens fear of crime and victimization will allow criminologists to improve general quality of life. Understanding that fear of victimization can be a construction of both social context and physical construction facilitates the exploration of other aspects of the physical environment that may negatively impact citizens. Second, those physical aspects of a place that related to fear of crime may in fact also relate to crime itself. It is reasonable to think that criminals use places where they can hide and trap their prey to facilitate crime. Thus, the reasons we fear these places or areas are legitimized by their actual history of criminal use. Third, if the two are in fact correlated, designing out fear could be synonymous with designing out crime. At the very least, the criminals’ ability to conceal themselves or to corner a potential victim could be designed out.

Potential Difficulties The primary issues that could detract from any research regarding fear spots of crime and victimization are those issues that are associated with the measurement of fear. Fear is a difficult construct to actually measure. Often when criminologists want to measure fear, they are in fact assessing risk perception. Fear as an emotional response is extraordinarily difficult to understand and capture empirically. Comparatively, to try and understand how fear grips an individual in any given circumstance is similar to trying to understand pain. Every person has a different threshold for pain and thus trying to develop a scale that is valid and reliable may not be possible. Fear and pain are subjective and individualized matters. Nevertheless, fear as a perception of risk may be more useful. While it is important to understand that crime and the thought of victimization

Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman

can evoke an emotional response, it may be more useful to understand how the rational mind evaluates risk and reacts to risky situations. Ryan Randa See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Crime Hot Spots; Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model; Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield, Coping With Crime

References and Further Readings Brantingham, P. L., & Brantingham, P. J. (1982). Mobility, notoriety and crime: A study of crime patterns in urban nodal points. Journal of Environmental Systems, 11, 89–99. Brantingham, P. L., & Brantingham, P. J. (1994). The relative spatial concentration of criminality and its analysis: Towards a revival of environmental criminology. Criminology, 27, 81–97. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. K. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Eck, J. E. (1994). Drug markets and drug places: A casecontrol study of the spatial structure of illicit drug dealing. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park. Eck, J. E., & Weisburd, D. (1995). Crime and place. New York: Criminal Justice Press and PERF. Ferraro, K. F. (1995). Fear of crime: Interpreting victimization risk. Albany: SUNY Press. Ferraro, K. F., & LaGrange, R. (1987). The measurement of fear of crime. Sociological Inquiry, 57, 70–97. Fisher, B. S., & Nasar, J. L. (1992). Fear of crime in relation to three exterior site features: Prospect, refuge, and escape. Environment and Behavior, 24, 35–65. Fisher, B. S., & Nasar, J. L. (1995). Fear spots in relation to microlevel physical cues: Exploring the overlooked. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 32, 214–239. Fisher, B., & Sloan, J., III. (1993). University response to the Campus Security Act of 1990: Evaluating programs designed to reduce campus crime. Journal of Security Administration, 16, 67–80. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Micro-studies of the public order. Psychiatry, 32, 357–387. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

343

Maltz, M., Gordon, A., & Friedman, W. (1990). Understanding and using information about crime. Mapping crime in its community: Event geography analysis. New York: Springer-Verlag. Merry, S. E. (1981). Defensible space undefended: Social factors in crime control through environmental design. Urban Affairs Review, 16, 397–422. Nasar, J. L., & Fisher, B. S. (1993). “Hot spots” of fear and crime: A multi-method investigation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 13, 187–206. Newman, O. (1972). Defensible space. New York: Macmillan. Newman, O. (1986). Creating defensible space. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sherman, L. W., Gartin, P. R., & Buerger, M. E. (1989). Hot spots of predatory crime: Routine activities and the criminology of place. Criminology, 27, 27–56. Skogan, W. G. (1992). Disorder and decline: Crime and the spiral of decay in American neighborhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press. Warr, M. (1990). 1990. Dangerous situations: Social context and fear of victimization. Social Forces, 68, 891–897.

Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman Sigmund Freud has been called the “father of psychology.” It cannot be denied that his contributions to the field are vast. Whether we are aware of it or not, phrases such as Oedipal complex or anal can be traced directly to Freud and his theory of psychoanalysis. Freud had much to say about the psychology of man, but what about the psychology of woman? What did Freud say about the deviant woman? Freud addressed the issue in his essays, including “Female Sexuality” in 1931 and “Femininity” in 1932. For Freud, the deviance of woman can be traced back to her lack of a penis. Her troubles and her illnesses are the result of changes of the formation of the superego as a result of her castration. Her lack of a penis causes envy; she envies man and his superior genitalia. This envy, in turn, results in a woman being more unjust because she has been treated unjustly in that she has no penis and has had to reconcile herself to her inferior genitalia.

344

Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman

She is less willing to submit to the exigencies of life and allows her judgment to be influenced by her feelings because of modification to the formation of her superego as a result of her castration. This modification of her superego can be traced back to her early development. In order to develop normally, it is necessary that a young child form a love attachment to the parent of the opposite sex. Freud argues that one of the difficulties in the natural development for a girl is that the first love attachment is to the mother. There are a number of reasons the girl experiences her mother as her first love attachment. The obvious one is that her mother meets her most primary need in providing her with nourishment. Additionally, her mother (or mother surrogate) is the first person to provide her with genital stimulation. This occurs when the mother is taking caring of normal hygiene. Regardless for her attachment to her mother, in order for her to proceed in healthy development she must transfer her love attachment from mother to father. If she does not successfully transfer her love attachment to her father, the result will be deviance.

Developmental Pathways Freud describes three developmental pathways that are opened up to a woman once, as a girl, she discovers that she has been castrated. First, she may experience fear in comparing her clitoris to a boy’s penis and become dissatisfied with her clitoris. This dissatisfaction results in her giving up her sexuality in general and masculinity in other areas of her life. The second pathway is one of denial. The young girl clings defiantly to the fantasy that she may someday be able to obtain a penis of her own. This pathway results in the indulgent fantasy of being a man, which may continue into adulthood. The third and final developmental option is also the only one that results in normal development. In this instance, the girl successfully transfers her attachment from her mother who has provided and protected her to her father. Freud explores a number of reasons that a young girl will replace her mother with her father as a love object. First, she may resent her mother for failing to give her a penis. Essentially, this is the female version of the castration complex. Rather than fearing that she will be castrated, the young girl experiences resentment toward her mother

because she failed to provide her with a penis, thus effectively castrating her. Another possible reason is that her mother did not give her enough milk. Here Freud notes that in primitive societies, mothers nursed their children for 2 to 3 years, whereas modern societies wean a child after only 6 to 9 months. Further, a girl may resent being forced to share her mother with others. She may also resent her mother because, as discussed earlier, she was the first person to provide her with the experience of genital arousal (during baths or other necessary hygiene experiences), but then she restricted her from continuing to participate in this pleasant experience by prohibiting masturbation. Finally, he considers that it may be that the attachment to her mother is bound to fail because it is so intense that it will inevitably result in disappointment for the girl. Freud concludes with the observation that all of these reasons may be too weak to result in the young girl turning from her mother to her father as her love object and ends with the following conclusion. The mother is replaced by the father as the love object because of the ambivalence inherent in the relationship between the girl and her mother. The ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship is inevitable due to the conflict between the positive experiences provided by the mother as described above and the resentment of the girl who blames her mother for her castration. The consequences for the woman who fails to follow the third developmental path are numerous, according to Freud. If the woman follows the second path and refuses to acknowledge that she has been castrated, she may entertain the fantasy of eventually procuring a penis of her own and may choose persons of the same sex as love objects in adulthood. Another possible outcome includes an unpleasant marriage in which she recreates the ambivalent feelings she has toward her mother in her marriage, thus resulting in a great deal of conflict with her husband.

Further Insights The deviant woman is therefore created through developmental pathways as a result of her inability to successfully transfer her love attachment from her mother to her father as a young girl. Further insight into Freud and his theories about the deviant woman can be found in his discussion in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freudian Theory

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud states a woman opposes civilization because she represents the family and the sex life but society takes man away from the sex life and the family. As society becomes more and more modern, men are required to devote more and more of their time to it. Time devoted to the demands of a modern society by men is time that must be taken away from woman and the family. This focus on society by man and away from home and family makes a woman develop a hostile attitude toward society. Freud also recognized that biology plays a role in the development of female sexuality. In his discussion on female sexuality and in his lectures on femininity, he notes that science had not advanced to the point where it was possible to be sure what role in the development of women could be attributed to biology and what could be attributed to society. He particularly observed that the passivity of woman could be the result of social customs.

Conclusion At this point, one may ask, what does the sexuality or femininity of woman have to do with the deviant woman? According to Freud, her sexuality affects everything. In the first of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he notes that although people who have abnormal sexual practices may be normal in all other areas of their lives, any abnormality found in other areas of life can be attributed to “abnormal sexual conduct” (p. 104). Thus, it is possible to conclude that the deviant woman results from the failure to successfully develop a normal sex life. Valerie Bell See also Freudian Theory; Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender; Pollack, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender; Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl

References and Further Readings Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In E. Young-Bruehl (Ed.), Freud on women (pp. 89–145). New York: W. W. Norton. Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Freud, S. (1931). Female sexuality. In S. Saguaro (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and woman: A reader (pp. 21–34). New York: New York University Press.

345

Freud, S. (1932). Femininity. In E. Young-Bruehl (Ed.), Freud on women (pp. 89–145). New York: W. W. Norton. Saguaro, S. (Ed.). (2000). Psychoanalysis and woman: A reader. New York: New York University Press. Young-Bruehl, E. (1990). Freud on women. New York: W. W. Norton.

Freudian Theory The psychoanalytic perspective on human behavior and criminality is most commonly associated with Sigmund Freud, who created the theory as an explanation of human personality and emotional development and as a guide to clinical practice. While there have been many expansions and refinements to the original work, Freudian theory is utilized as an explanatory tool and in therapeutic intervention in its original form and conceptualization even today. Freud was without doubt one of the most influential thinkers of his time.

The Human Mind Freud viewed the human mind as being composed of three major parts, each performing a distinctly different function for the individual. The first of these parts, the conscious mind, is represented by the individual’s current awareness. This generalized and current knowledge of self is made up of our feelings, our perceptions, and our considerations of both. The second part, the preconscious, is composed of memories of experiences that are not presently in the conscious mind but which can be brought into immediate awareness without much effort from the individual. Finally, the unconscious is a part of the mind of which a person is unaware but that nonetheless exerts a great deal of control over the individual’s behavior. The unconscious contains two major sources of influence: (1) repressed memories and thoughts and (2) universally present and innate drives that are basic to the individual’s personal evolution. Repression is a psycho-dynamic mechanism that allows the individual to keep threatening ideation out of the conscious and helps the person reconcile his or her current state of being with reality. In addition to these individually acquired and repressed influences, Freud also postulated that

346

Freudian Theory

there exists in every individual two basic drives, one sexual and one hostile in nature, that are stored in the unconscious. Because of the social consequences associated with expressing these basic impulses, they too are kept repressed but also influence action. In its simplest conceptualization, Freud suggested a very deterministic view of human behavior. He felt that there are no accidents. Rather, dynamic unconscious forces constantly move the individual’s behavior and conscious thoughts in one manner or another; and when these unconscious forces came into conflict, aberrations in behavior could occur.

The Human Personality Freud also believed that the human personality, like the human mind, comprised three parts. These he called the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the most primitive of these three parts of personality and is contained in the unconscious. The id is governed by the need for immediate gratification, and it has no concern for the needs or welfare of others. Freud called this most basic reality of the human personality the pleasure principle. We are all driven toward, sex, food, aggression, and all life necessities. The impulsive natures of the id suggest that we will act toward these wants in potentially socially unacceptable manners. The sex drive Freud called the libido, and the drive toward aggression and death he termed thanatos. These life and death drives and the conflict between them are at the core of the impulse laden id. The ego develops as the individual matures through Freud’s prescribed stages of psycho-sexual development. The child governed by the id learns that simply following impulses can have negative consequences. The individual learns that society is governed by rules and learns that the desires he or she is feeling have to be regulated or that sanctions and alienation might result from behavior. The ego provides this governance. Ruled by the “reality principle,” the ego directs the instinctual id toward what is practical in the situation and, even further, toward what is conventional in relation to social expectation. The superego develops from the ego and becomes manifest in late childhood. The superego is often

described as the internalization of parental and, even more broadly, societal standards. It might be considered the individual conscience and as such can be a source of guilt and anxiety when the standards that are internalized are violated. The superego acts as a balance to the id, and the hydraulic dynamic between the two is mediated by the ego. The individual is protected from much of this conflict as it occurs in the unconscious and preconscious. But it can occasionally emerge in the conscious, and it can cause problems for the person involved and with his or her relation to society at large. Should the unconscious struggle between the id and the superego make its way into the conscious mind, Freud suggested that one or more of a variety of defense mechanisms would be engaged to allow the individual to cope with the intrusion and lower the individual’s personal inner tension. There are 10 such mechanisms that Freud suggested. These include but are not limited to the following: repression, whereby the individual removes offending memories and impulses entirely from the conscious mind; reaction formation, whereby the individual adopts a behavior that is in diametric opposition to the behavior that is of interest and thereby acts out the internal need; and displacement whereby the individual moves feelings of aggression away from the source of hostility toward a safer but typically innocent target. The use of these defense mechanisms should not be misconstrued as being unhealthy for the individual or as a problem in the personality in and of themselves. Freud, in fact, viewed their use as a sign of a mature personality which had constructive tendencies.

Stages of Psychosexual Development Freud also postulated a universal developmental sequence through which the majority of a person’s personality evolves. He believed that these stages to be psychosexual in nature and that each reflected the conflicts that are inherent among the id, the ego, and the superego within the human personality. Freud also suggested that the responses that an individual’s caregiver might provide to their burgeoning sexuality would have major impact on who they would eventually become. In order of their appearance in a Freudian developmental

Freudian Theory

sequence, these periods of life are called the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. In the oral stage (which lasts up until the child is approximately 18 months old), a young person can develop a deep sense of mistrust if he or she is not given adequate care. In the anal stage (18 months to 3 years), children who are over-disciplined may become stubborn or controlling. In the phallic stage (3–6 years old), the child is resolving a sexual conflict about his or her parents. If children cannot successfully negotiate this conflict, they may experience confused sexual identity and/or a highly sexualized attitude toward others. During the latency period (6–12 years old), the sexual drives of individuals tend to recede and their developmental focus is on learning appropriate social skills and bonding within their own gender. Inadequate success in this period can lead to isolation, alienation, and feelings of aloneness. The final developmental step (which beings around 12 years of age and at the onset of puberty) Freud called the genital stage. This stage is the culmination of the successful resolution of earlier phases, and it allows the individual to enter into mature romantic relationships. Freud suggested that as individuals grow, they will either successfully negotiate the particular conflict inherent in a specific stage or they may become fixated. If they do fixate, they will manifest behavioral patterns associated with the psychosexual stage where they became trapped. The psycho­ dynamics of fixation can lead to a variety of abnormal behaviors, including neurosis and psychosis, and ultimately to various types of criminal behavior. Neurosis is a more common type of Freudian malady and is the result of individuals losing control of their personality, especially as related to the ego. It can lead to impulse control problems and may result in less serious crimes such as shoplifting and vandalism. More serious types of criminality are the result of psychosis, an individual deficit in which the person’s id becomes the dominate part of the overall personality. With the primitive id at the forefront of the individual’s capacity to function, behavior can become extreme, fragmented, and detached from reality. Serious crimes of violence are often associated with psychosis. While these conflicts are inherent and universal, in Freud’s conception of development various

347

environmental realities may also impede the realization of psychological maturity. These problems are idiosyncratic to the particular personality. Extreme neglect in childhood may, for example, lead to the underdevelopment of both the ego and the superego, while a permissive environment may prohibit the superego from developing at all. In both cases, the id will dominate the personality and lead to a variety of associated problems. If children are raised with moral training but without parental affection, on the other hand, they may have a willingness to adhere to rules but will not be positively oriented toward people. Again, these are both simply examples; environmental barriers to psychological maturity are nearly infinite in their form and consequence.

Explaining Crime While Freud did write extensively on neurosis, psychosis, and environmental impediments to development, and while much can be inferred about criminal consequence from these writings, the theorist himself actually commented very little on the root causes of criminal behavior specifically. In his essay “The Ego and the Id,” Freud suggested that criminal behavior, especially as it exists in youthful offenders, can be tied to an overarching sense of guilt as generated by the experience of either the Oedipus complex in boys or the Electra complex in girls. In both of these conflictive complexes, the child wants to possess the parent of the opposite sex and desires to remove the competing same-sex parent. These wishes generate a sense of guilt that the individual wishes to displace on something “real and immediate.” The criminal act then becomes experienced as the source of the guilt, as opposed to the parental complex, and the individual garners psychodynamic relief. But, in fact, the criminal act is a result of guilt, not a source. Beyond the specific writings of Sigmund Freud, several Freudian thinkers have applied his theoretical perspective to the emergence of criminal intent and behavior. Two of the more important theorists in this regard are August Aichorm and Seymore Halleck. The former suggested that a general predisposition toward crime might develop within the Freudian personality and that it might,

348

Freudian Theory

when working in tandem to external societal stress, lead an individual into criminality. Aichorm called this predisposition latent delinquency and characterized it as the need for immediate gratification, a heightened selfishness, and a lack of guilt. Halleck viewed criminality as the result of an oppressive circumstance that pushes individuals to expressive themselves in a freeing manner, one which is criminal. Freudian defense mechanisms would allow individuals to live with their behaviors through, for example, rationalization, displacement, and intellectualization. Drawing on the work of a variety of other thinkers, Don Andrews and James Bonta provide a good overview of types of offenders that might result from interpretations of Freud’s original theory. In their book, they suggest that the “Weak Superego Type” is characterized by a persistent and overriding disregard for rules and an inability to feel guilt. Because of this, behavior is guided only by the constraints of the immediate circumstance and the need for gratification. The “Weak Ego Type” is defined by immature social skills and a lack of strong self-determination. These individuals can be influenced by others in terms of criminal behavior or cause themselves trouble simply because of their own ineptitude. Finally, the “Normal Antisocial Offender” is typified by the fact that the individual has progressed through the various stages of psychosexual development in a normal manner, but through identification with a criminal role model the ego is directed into antisocial behavior.

Conclusion According to the psychodynamic perspective, the routes to criminality are many and such behavior can arise from a variety of sources. The unconscious can influence the individual to act, and it is filled with instinctual impulses, repressed yet powerful memories of experiences, and conflicted tension between the parts of the personality. Problems in development or issues inherent in the immediate environment can cause these forces to erupt inappropriately from the individual and be a cause for individual criminality. Patrick Timothy Kinkade See also Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth; Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime; Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Youth

References and Further Readings Aichhorn, A. (1935). Wayword youth. New York: Viking Press. Andrews, D. A., & Bonta, J. (2003). The psychology of criminal conduct (3rd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Eysenck, H. (1987). The rise and fall of the Freudian empire. New York: Plenum. Freud, S. (1953). A general introduction to psychoanalysis. New York: Permabooks. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. T. (1950). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halleck, S. L. (1971). Psychiatry and dilemmas of crime. Berkeley: University of California Press.

G Gangs

and the

considerable attention to the complexity of these issues. There is compelling evidence, however, that gangs and the underclass are intertwined, and that modern gangs in inner cities have undergone radical transformations during the past three decades.

Underclass

Gangs have captured the interest of scholars and members of the general public for several decades. Frederic Thrasher’s work remains a classic reading for those interested in gangs, in terms of different types, how they develop, and what their members actually do. Interest in gangs was pronounced in the 1960s, waned during the 1970s, and then garnered considerable attention again during the late 1980s to date. The latest interest was sparked primarily by the perception of the inextricable link between gangs, drugs, and violence. The current entry summarizes the research findings of the link between gangs and the underclass. Although gang research during the past century has pursued a variety of paths, this entry focuses on key studies of the relationship between structural conditions within the underclass framework. Before proceeding, however, a number of empirically supported caveats are in order. First, gangs and gang members are not monolithic, easy to define or identify, or restricted to the underclass. Second, gang membership is typically a transient state, with members transitioning in and out of the gang setting. Third, gangs are not unique to America. Fourth, the majority of youths, even in the most impoverished areas, do not join gangs. These are important considerations, as discussing gangs and the underclass is only a subset of the larger gang phenomenon. Thus, generalizing findings of studies of gangs and their members within the underclass context should not be done without

The Underclass Framework Scholars have long discussed the concentration of crime, poverty, and other social ills in inner-city areas inhabited primarily by minority residents. William Julius Wilson provided a solid review of the ebb and flow of the “underclass debate” and reached a stark conclusion: The 1970s and 1980s marked periods of increased concentration of race, poverty, alienation, young single parents, welfare dependency, and crime in inner cities. At the same time, older males were being increasingly removed from the community— either due to self-initiated movement to suburban areas or through official mechanisms of arrest and imprisonment. Finally, industrial jobs on which residents in these areas typically relied for survival were declining, replaced with the transition to serviceoriented and skills-based jobs, which remaining residents were unprepared or unable to acquire due to the increased isolation in underclass areas, inadequate schooling, lack of workplace network connections, and other related problems. As Wilson summarizes: If I had to use one term to capture the differences in the experiences of low-income families who live in inner-city areas from those of the experiences of those who live in other areas in the 349

350

Gangs and the Underclass

central city today, that term would be concentration effects. The social transformation of the inner city has resulted in a disproportionate concentration of the most disadvantaged segments of the urban black population, creating a social milieu significantly different from the environment that existed in these communities several decades ago. (1990, p. 58)

In Wilson’s view, then, inner-city areas were a breeding ground for many social ills, including crime. The importance of perceptions of a youth violence epidemic driven by the relationship between gangs, crack cocaine, and guns drew increased attention to a “new reality” of youth gangs as inter-generational, highly structured, violent gangs heavily involved in drug distribution.

Race/Ethnicity, Context, Gangs, and the Underclass John Hagedorn and Joan Moore are perhaps the leading scholars on the role of the underclass as it relates to contemporary gangs. Drawing heavily on the work of Wilson, Moore’s ethnographies in Los Angeles and Hagedorn’s ethnography in Milwaukee represented an important advance in gang studies. As Moore states in the introduction to Hagedorn’s People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City: “[W]hen we talk about gangs, we are talking about quasi-institutionalized structures within the poorer minority communities” (1988, p. 6). It is important to note that these are the relatively rare, highly organized, and typically long-lasting “traditional gangs” Cheryl Maxson and Malcolm Klein describe in their gang typology. They are also the gangs epitomized by the ethnographies of both Moore and Hagedorn, thus presenting the clearest picture of the connection between gangs and the underclass. Both Moore and Hagedorn highlight the importance that the trappings of the underclass are not limited to black inner-city residents; rather, the same factors are faced by Latinos. James Vigil’s concept of multiple marginality—that is, cultural and language barriers combined with discrimination for Latino gang members—helps explain how discrimination and isolation apply to both black and Latino members of the underclass. Additionally, the introduction of heroin in Latino communities

and crack cocaine in black communities presented additional similarities across groups. These studies also highlight important distinctions between the two groups—such as the cumulative effect of historical racism (one of Wilson’s key factors contributing to the rise of the underclass) being more important for blacks than Latinos. Thus, Moore highlights the important historical context in which Latino gangs emerged in Los Angeles, including the importance of cultural events, such as the zoot suit fads and riot, and the resultant attention these events drew to Mexican immigrants by the general public and law enforcement officials. Moore highlights that a single incident—the Sleepy Lagoon case—played a crucial role in the establishment of Latino gangs in Los Angeles, but no such single incident occurred in Milwaukee. These observations provide important insights into both the commonalities and differences historical context plays in the establishments of gangs.

How History and Social Structure Affect Gang Development and Solidarity Moore and Hagedorn present compelling insights into the gangs in Los Angeles and Milwaukee. The gangs described in these works are characterized by age-graded subgroups, with some members aging out, and others continuing gang involvement well into their adult years, often reinforced through the pipeline in and out of prison. At the heart of their arguments are the transformations highlighted by Wilson, including the influx of immigrants to cities after the Depression, World War II, and the changes in these patterns during the 1970s on. While both Moore and Hagedorn highlight the difficulties faced by minorities in locating jobs even after arriving in cities with employment opportunities available to many residents, Hagedorn presents the importance of deindustrialization in Milwaukee as a particularly detrimental problem for relatively young newcomers. Like Chicago, Milwaukee was a city founded on industry, with black residents particularly susceptible to economic changes in the respective locales. Unlike Chicago, however, the black population had been relatively small. According to Hagedorn, the 1980s were a tipping point for black residents, with Milwaukee losing approximately 36,000 manufacturing jobs between 1980 and 1985, and

Gangs and the Underclass

service-oriented jobs outnumbering manufacturing positions by 15,000 in 1982 (1988, p. 42). Black residents of Milwaukee, similar to those Wilson identified in Chicago, were hit particularly hard. Although the number of black residents who had moved into more stable middle-class management jobs had increased, it did not increase at nearly the rate of that of white residents. As Wilson found in Chicago and Moore found in Los Angeles, Hagedorn notes that the main sources of income for poor blacks and Latinos in Milwaukee came primarily from three sources: (1) low-wage, parttime work, (2) welfare, and (3) involvement in the illicit economy. The importance of the decline of public schools during this period cannot be underestimated. The change to unskilled, service-oriented jobs made education less important for getting jobs. Even the most educated graduates often found that their only employment opportunities were in service-oriented industries, such as fast-food establishments. Dropping out increased, as the utility of school became less apparent. Additionally, the racial divide in academic achievement for youths remaining in school continued to increase. As Hagedorn states, Black and Hispanic youth who had a poor quality education can no longer compete for “good jobs” that could provide meaningful mobility. For a gang member, the gang experience, rather than being a temporary “right of passage” into an adult role of family and work, continues into adult years filled with joblessness or meaningless part-time work. (1988, p. 46)

Additional conflicts with authorities (primarily the police) augmented the isolation of black residents, leading to a segmented society with few opportunities for advancement. In short, this was the establishment of the underclass in Milwaukee. The close physical proximity to other gangs is noted in the work of Moore and Hagedorn. Moore highlights the physical proximity of gangs in different areas of Los Angeles, while Hagedorn highlights the close proximity between Milwaukee and Chicago. Similarly, Scott Decker and Barrik Van Winkle, as well as Jody Miller explore similar relationships between Saint Louis and Chicago. What is important to emphasize, however, is that physical proximity to other areas was not responsible for

351

the development of gangs in any of these studies. Contrary to views often perpetuated by law enforcement and popular media depictions, gangs in each of these cities were independently spawned within the contexts of neighborhoods within these cities. The context of the underclass helps to explain why this is the case. Isolation is one of the key components, making it illogical to assume that the development of gangs is due primarily to recruiting efforts of gang members in other cities. Rather, the “cumulated disadvantage” (Wilson, 1990) experienced by poor, minority residents is the primary mechanism by which gangs develop in underclass neighborhoods. Although this was observed more than 80 years ago by Thrasher, it is important to highlight this consistent finding. It suggests that policy efforts to combat gangs should be specific to local communities. This is not to say that proximity to gang members in other cities has no effect. Gangs may adopt names, signs, symbols, colors, or other identifying characteristics from gangs in other locales. This is typically due to a process of cultural diffusion rather than to active recruitment efforts of gangs and their members across the country. In fact, local gangs are often resistant to efforts of “outside” gang recruiting efforts. In People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City, Hagedorn describes a specific situation where Milwaukee gangs attempted to form a gangster coalition, but it met its demise when Chicago gangs wanted to become involved. The key point here is that gangs may express affiliation with gangs in other locales, but they are typically localized and highly protective of their independence.

Conclusion There is considerable evidence that gangs and the underclass are closely connected. The underclass context provides the mechanisms necessary to spawn gangs, while also making it more difficult for members to break their ties. Wilson’s concept of cumulative disadvantage associated with the underclass in terms of historical discrimination, economic changes, and the concentration of social problems—including long-term welfare dependence, crime, violence, alienation, and youths—provides the mechanisms of gang formation and continuity.

352

Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School

Equally important is the localized nature of gangs and gang activity. It must be noted that gangs differ in their structure, characteristics, and activities. The social processes associated with the underclass may lead to similarities in processes of development, but each locale and each gang has its own flavor. This recognition is absolutely essential if antigang strategies are to be effective. Thus, comprehensive programs, such as those developed by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, must be utilized while also tailoring them to the unique community contexts in which the targeted gangs are located. It is also important to consider how the factors associated with gang formation, organization, and solidarity operate, as popular anti-gang strategies such as police suppression efforts often have unintended effects.

Moore, J. W. (1978). Homeboys: Gangs, drugs, and prison in the barrios of Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moore, J. W. (1991). Going down to the barrio: Homeboys and homegirls in charge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. National Gang Center: http://www.nationalgangcenter .gov Thrasher, F. (1963). The gang: A study of one thousand three hundred thirteen gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1927) Vigil, J. D. (1988). Barrio gangs: Street life and identity in Southern California. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wilson, W. J. (1990). The truly disadvantaged: The inner-city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Terrance J. Taylor See also Bourgeois, Philippe: In Search of Respect; Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency; Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street; Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization; Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory; Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender; Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio; Thrasher, Frederick H.: The Gang; Vigil, James Diego: Multiple Marginality Theory; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

References and Further Readings Decker, S. H., & Van Winkle, B. (1996). Life in the gang: Family, friends, and violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hagedorn, J. M. (1988). People and folks: Gangs, crime, and the underclass in a rustbelt city (2nd ed.). Chicago: Lake View Press. Howell, J. C. (2003). Preventing and reducing juvenile delinquency: A comprehensive framework. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Klein, M., & Maxson, C. L. (2006). Street gang patterns and policies. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. (2001). One of the guys: Girls, gangs, and gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower-class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14, 5–19.

Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School Raffaele Garofalo was born November 18, 1851, in Naples into a noble family of Catalan origin and is considered one of the main exponents of the Positivist School of Criminology. He enjoyed a rich and successful career as a lawyer, with prestigious Bench and Ministry of Justice assignments and was active until his death on April 18, 1934. Garofalo was Cesare Lombroso’s disciple with whom he collaborated on the Archives of Psychiatry, Anthro­pology and Penal Sciences together with the third representative of the “glorious triad” (as Grispigni wrote of the three founders of the new school in the Dictionary of Criminology in 1943, p. 398), the lawyer Enrico Ferri. In his work, Garofalo systemized the theories of his teacher and tried to give a juridical position to the new criminal theories. One of the characteristics of Garofalo’s work, which stemmed from his professional background, was the strong attention given to the practical aspects of the reform. According to Mary Gibson, it was probably Garofalo who coined the term criminology, shifting away from Lombroso’s term criminal anthropology. The new term also marked the autonomy of this new discipline, characterized by the application of the scientific method and a

Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School

broadened approach to include medicine, psychiatry, and law.

Criminology Garofalo’s ideas were incorporated into the debate concerned with the formulation of a new code for post-unified Italy, in which the relationship between free will and juridical responsibility was set against a deterministic vision of humans. While the Classical School placed emphasis on criminal offense and based imputability on the concept of moral responsibility and philosophical free will, the Positivist School emphasized the subject of the crime, the “criminal man,” and his (or her) organic and psychological nature, strongly embracing determinism and basing the juridical concept of imputability on that of social responsibility. In Criminology and in On Recidivists and Recidivism, Garofalo outlined his theory, placing emphasis on the criminal rather than on the crime. He criticized the extreme abstractness with which the Classical School dealt with recidivism and proposed that attention should shift to the “recidivists.” He believed that a criminal’s tendency to repeat crime constituted one of the scales on which to measure each criminal’s social dangerousness and inadaptability to the penal environment. Criminology is Garofalo’s main work. It was published in 1885 and a second Italian edition came out 6 years later. It was translated into Spanish and Portuguese and into French directly by Garofalo. The English translation was carried out by Robert W. Millar of the Northwestern University School of Law and was published in 1914 in the Modern Criminal Science Series. The complete title, Criminology: Essay on Crime, Its Causes and Means of Repression, indicates the nature of the project and the field that Garofalo intended to explore. His research on the etiology of crime is based on a psychological understanding of the criminal within a rigidly deterministic and hereditarian perspective. This meant applying to the study of criminology, following the positivist approach, the scientific method and viewpoints of anthropology, biology, and psychology—the experimental sciences that could help explain the physical and social influences that induce man to crime. Garofalo was close to Lombroso in reading physical anomalies as a “sign” of the criminal. On

353

the other hand, his search for a uniform, coherent, and constant criterion led Garofalo to propose a classification system more accurately laid out than Lombroso’s and based on predisposition to crime. According to Gibson, Garofalo is to be credited for “making the measurement of ‘dangerousness’ central to the positivist program of penal reform” (2002, p. 35). The starting point of his classification is the concept of “natural crime,” which set the framework for the definition of the “true criminal.” “Natural” is that “which is not conventional . . . which exists in human society independently of the circumstances and exigencies of a given epoch or the particular views of the law-maker” (Garofalo, 1914, p. 4). In this distinction between “natural” and “conventional,” Garofalo presupposed the existence of an unchangeable basis of society, made up of some basic human sentiments and shared through a moral sense by all those who belong. These altruistic sentiments are, according to Garofalo, pity (respect for people) and probity (respect for property). Such a “sociologic notion of crime” (Allen, 1960, p. 257) would imply that a given society’s public opinion of that which is acceptable or not depends on its level of civilization and, therefore, that these criteria could vary according to context or other factors. Nonetheless, the underlying axiom that allows for theoretic formulation is that this nucleus of sentiments exists in every society and is shared. A person without a moral sense, thus presenting a form of “permanent psychological anomaly” (Gillin, 1945, p. 341), is therefore a true criminal who threatens healthy coexistence, and society must defend itself from such individuals as a priority. Garofalo singled out different physiognomic types: the murderer, the violent criminal, the thief and, somewhat less clearly defined, the lascivious criminal. The murderer shows a lack of altruism, of pity, and of probity and therefore presents a higher level of social dangerousness. Violent criminals (including, in a way, lascivious offenders) carry out crimes against the sentiment of pity, whereas a thief lacks the sentiment of probity. Garofalo is more ready to admit the influence of social factors for this last category, although he is not prepared to abandon his belief in a sort of congenital criminality, inherited or acquired in infancy. This inherent “absence or weakness of the moral sense” always

354

Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School

carries with it “the possibility of new crimes” (p. 239). For Garofalo, therefore, rehabilitation of the criminal is unimaginable except in rare cases. In his analysis of recidivism, he presents a large amount of statistical data and a comparative study of the situation in other European countries.

Policy Implications Drawing from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, one of the main paradigms of the second half of the 19th century, Garofalo identified the main characteristic of the true criminal as “lack of adaptation to his social environment” (Allen, 1960, p. 265). It followed, therefore, that the necessary consequence was the elimination of criminals. “Dangerousness” was considered the criterion for commensuration of the punishment, and the punishment itself functioned to eliminate the criminals from the social and penal environment. For less dangerous criminals, that is, younger criminals and those more influenced by environmental factors, Garofalo believed in internment in penal agricultural colonies or transportation, whereas in the case of mental insanity, he proposed fines, community labor, or internment in appropriate hospitals, according to the seriousness and nature of the disease. On the other hand, due to his total mistrust in the possibility of rehabilitation, Garofalo felt that the most dangerous criminals should suffer the death penalty, which he saw as the only instrument capable of guaranteeing the defense of society. This conviction is rooted in social Darwinism, which applied the theory of natural selection to society. Social Darwinists thought that a person’s place in society owed to their heritable, transmissible nature; hence, Garofalo believed that by killing criminals the state would be following the example of nature, selecting against a criminal “breed” of humans. Garofalo justified theoretically the need for the death penalty with the moral anomaly of true criminals, since this lack of the human sentiments of pity and probity alienates the sympathy of society from them. Due to his belief in the hereditary component of recidivism, he did not consider that punishment could function as a mechanism for producing regret and therefore moral regeneration. Similarly, he did not believe that the death penalty could

work as a deterrent. According to Francis Allen, Garofalo articulated an accurate criticism of the classical theory of deterrence, maintaining that its main defect lay in its inability to provide precise criteria that could be used to calculate the extent of the punishment to be carried out. He was, nevertheless, willing to recognize that the death penalty had an intimidating quality, believing that punishments could, in a certain sense, “regulate” behavior by guaranteeing social sanction against certain kinds of conduct. By attaching punishment to a behavior, a corresponding societal taboo would be created which would ensure effective extra-legal sanctions on top of the punishment meted out by law. As Garofalo (1914, p. 266) wrote, “no doubt for many persons, the consciousness of the evil involved would destroy any pleasure which the criminal act might afford and is therefore sufficient to cause abstention from crime.” As far as the debate on the death penalty was concerned, Garofalo’s conviction was not shared by the majority of his contemporaries. He maintained his stand participating in the works of the commission for reform of penal code chaired by Enrico Ferri (expressing his position in the pamphlet Against the Stream!) and again when the Rocco code, which re-established the death penalty, was approved in 1930. Garofalo’s uncompromising position was coherent with his political views. He was a convinced conservative, supporting fascism right from its onset, and for many years he expounded his argument against socialism, which he retained to be non-scientific. Garofalo’s support of the death penalty and his political stance led to a gradually increasing fracture with the “group” of the Positivist School and, in particular, with Ferri, an exponent of the Socialist Party. Francesca Patuelli See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School; General Deterrence Theory; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

References and Further Readings Allen, F. A. (1960). Raffaele Garofalo. In H. Mannheim (Ed.), Pioneers of criminology (pp. 254–276). London: Stevens and Sons.

Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals Ferri, E. (1895). Discordie positiviste sul socialismo: Ferri contro Garofalo [Positivist discords on socialism: Ferri against Garofalo]. Palermo, Italy: R. Sandron. Garofalo, R. (1888). Contro la corrente! Pensieri sulla proposta di abolizione della pena di morte [Against the stream! Thoughts on the proposal of death penalty]. Napoli, Italy: Anfossi. Garofalo, R. (1888). Dei recidivi e della recidiva [On recidivists and recidivism]. In P. Cogliolo (Ed.), Completo trattato teorico e pratico di diritto penale [Complete theoretical and practical treatise of penal law]. Milano, Italy: Vallardi. Garofalo, R. (1895). La superstizione socialista [The socialist superstition]. Torino, Roma: Roux Frassati. Garofalo, R. (1914). Criminology. Boston: Little, Brown. (Reprinted from Criminologia. Studio sul delitto, sulle sue cause e sui mezzi di repressione [Criminology: Essay on crime, its causes and means of repression], 1885, Torino: Fratelli Bocca) Garofalo, R. (1933). Ancora sulla pena capitale [Again on death penalty]. Milano, Italy: Vallardi. Gibson, M. (2002). Born to crime: Cesare Lombroso and the origins of biological criminology. Westport, CT: Praeger. Gillin, J. L. (1945). Criminology and penology (Vol. 1). New York: Appleton-Century. Grispigni, F. (1943). Raffaele Garofalo. In E. Florian, A. Niceforo, & N. Pende (Eds.), Dizionario di criminologia [Dictionary of criminology] (Vol. 1, pp. 398–399). Milano, Italy: Vallardi.

Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals Since Edwin Sutherland coined the term whitecollar crime in 1939, it has proven to be both a social science construct and a real world phenomenon that presents major challenges to researchers, law enforcers, and policymakers. Countries around the world continue to be plagued by corruption, financial frauds, economic crime scams, and corporate crimes that threaten not only the fiscal health of consumers and investors but the physical environment as well. The largest recorded white-collar crime waves have occurred in the United States with the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s which cost American taxpayers $150 billion. The corporate and accounting scandals

355

uncovered in 2002, which included Enron, Arthur Andersen, and a spate of other companies, resulted in more than $4 trillion in market losses worldwide. In 2008, the U.S. subprime mortgage and banking meltdown has infected the global economy. These major scandals were preceded by one that occurred decades earlier involving electrical equipment companies in the United States and that was analyzed by criminologist Gilbert Geis.

The Heavy Electrical Equipment Conspiracy In 1967, Gilbert Geis published what was to become a seminal study in criminology, three decades after Sutherland’s introduction of the concept of white-collar crime had passed without any serious additional research or fanfare. With the publication of “The Heavy Electrical Equipment Antitrust Case of 1961,” which appeared as an invited chapter in the text Criminal Behavior Systems: A Typology, edited by Marshall Clinard and Richard Quinney, white-collar crime scandals were back on the criminological map. Moreover, as the next half century would indicate, Geis’s research proved responsible for resurrecting interest in the topic, helping to spawn a new generation of criminologists whose primary research agenda was the study of white-collar and corporate crime. The electrical equipment scandal involved pricefixing, one of the most pernicious and damaging forms of white-collar crime. It had been prohibited in the United States since the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. Since that time, states have passed their own antitrust laws that are designed to protect consumers from being deprived of the advantages of competition in the marketplace, the underlying basis of capitalism. “In a truly competitive market, businesses attract consumers by holding prices down and keeping quality up. When competitors conspire to fix prices, however, consumers pay higher prices for inferior goods and services. In other words, collusive arrangements among nominal competitors unlawfully maximize corporate profits at the consumer’s expense” (Rosoff et al., 2007, p. 70). As Geis documented, the climate of ferocious competition that existed among large electrical equipment companies including Westinghouse and General Electric had led firms to conspire rather than to compete in ruthless price wars that hurt

356

Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals

profits. Instead of submitting competitive sealed bids for lucrative government contracts, executives began holding secret meetings at which they would agree in advance on prices and divide up the contracts among their respective firms. The companies had effectively formed an illegal cartel—a flagrant violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Geis found strong support for Sutherland’s theory of differential association in the responses of executives to their offenses. The rationalizations used to justify their crimes strongly reflected attitudes learned within the corporate subcultures. Equally important, Geis’s path-breaking work documented the vast inequalities in the criminal justice system when it came to the sanctioning of powerful defendants, which in this case included both individuals and companies. Ultimately, fines totaling about $2 million were handed out—mostly to GE and Westinghouse. Given the pecuniary magnitude of the crimes that cost billions of dollars over a number of years, the amount may seem insignificant. Geis noted that a $400,000 fine levied at General Electric would be equivalent to a person earning $175,000 a year receiving a $3 parking ticket (Geis, 1967). In 1961, 45 executives from 29 corporations were indicted for criminal conspiracy. All either admitted their guilt or pleaded nolo contendere (no contest). Thirty-one were convicted, of whom seven received jail sentences of 30 days (Geis, 1967). The other 24 convicted defendants were given suspended sentences. One aspect of this case that has long intrigued researchers was the unanimous rejection of any criminal self-identity among those convicted. For example, an officer of the Allis-Chalmers Corporation explained that he had participated only because he had believed it had been part of his duty. In a memorable quote, one General Electric executive described the agreements as “illegal but not criminal.” Yet, as Geis documented, the dynamics of the conspiracy—the clandestine meetings, the frequent use of public telephones, the fake names and secret codes—reveal techniques and behaviors that are strikingly characteristic of organized criminal behavior. Many of the defendants further argued that they had been performing a “positive service” to the economy by “stabilizing prices.” Put another way, “they shifted blame to the market structure rather than to themselves” (Pontell et al., 1994,

p. 357). Such self-serving rationalizations and neutralizations invoked by white-collar criminals have been noted in numerous cases following this one. The reactions of the companies to the lawbreaking varied. Westinghouse stood by its offending executives, calling each a “reputable citizen,” a “respected and valued member of the community” who had not acted for personal gain (Geis, 1967). As Geis noted, this denial of individual benefit offers no hint of the likely professional rewards attached to profitable bid-rigging. In sharp contrast, General Electric fired all its convicted officers, condemning them for violating the company’s purportedly strict ethical policy. Many observers, however, felt that GE was scapegoating its former executives for the sake of public relations. When one of the defendants was asked if he thought he had been “thrown to the wolves” by top management, his answer was “yes” (Geis, 1967). The influence that this work has had on the field of criminology and on white-collar crime scholars who followed cannot be overstated. As but just one indicator, in the first white-collar crime seminar offered at a major law school, Yale University sociologist and law professor Stanton Wheeler, who, in the late 1970s directed the largest white-collar crime research project ever funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, opened his class by remarking to the students, “First, I want you to know that we would not be sitting here today if it had not been for the groundbreaking work of Gilbert Geis.”

Other Major Work on White-Collar Since the writing of that path-breaking piece, Geis’s work in white-collar crime has been prolific and varied. It includes research on the deterrence of corporate crime, consumer fraud laws, victimization, the psychology of white-collar offenders, corporate violence, punishment issues, white-collar crime seriousness, medical fraud, legal and regulatory issues, fraud examination, organizational deviance, as well as a number of general pieces on white-collar crime. Besides being one of the most famous whitecollar crime scholars in history, Geis also is one of the most prolific authors in criminology and all of social science, having written more than 400 articles, chapters, and reports and more than two

Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals

dozen books, in addition to editing numerous special issues of journals. After his initial foray into the topic, he did not return to the subject of whitecollar crime for 5 years, during which time he wrote on other issues in crime and criminal justice, including victim compensation and victimization, female offenders, drugs, victimless crimes, and rape. He resumed his work on corporate crime in 1972, focusing on punishment and, in the following year, published the first major criminological piece on the deterrence of corporate crime. This essay appeared in a volume co-edited by Ralph Nader, whose own 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, about the resistance of the auto industry to providing safe vehicles had brought him national fame as a corporate reformer. This was followed by collaborative work with Herbert Edelhertz, a lawyer and applied social scientist, on criminal law and consumer crimes, and an overview piece on white-collar crime published in a leading criminological text. The late 1970s marked the point at which Geis began to concentrate his work in the areas of white-collar and corporate lawbreaking. Among other topics, he published on corporate violence, the white-collar offender, and fraud against the elderly, and he produced a classic reader on whitecollar crime with Robert Meier which was updated with Lawrence Salinger in 1995. In the early 1980s, he collaborated with John Braithwaite (who, only a few years earlier had begun what was to be a stellar career in criminology) on a classic article that was published in Crime and Delinquency, “On Theory and Action for Corporate Crime Control.” The paper suggested that corporate crime is a more feasible and significant crime control target than traditional crime, and argued that the discredited doctrines of crime control by public disgrace, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation can be successfully applied to corporate crime. That same year he published a major general treatise on white-collar crime, On White‑Collar Crime. He also authored the first in a series of a dozen articles and chapters on medical fraud emanating from a study funded by the National Institute of Justice on which he collaborated with Henry Pontell and Paul Jesilow. That work culminated in the publication of the University of California Press book Prescription for Profit: How Doctors Defraud Medicaid, which

357

was the first major scholarly work on health care fraud. In 1983, Geis collaborated with then-graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, Colin Goff, on the now-classic introduction to the “uncut version” of Sutherland’s book, White Collar Crime. This volume was published by Yale University Press, and included the names of offending corporations that the original publisher had not allowed to be printed in the 1949 edition because of fear of lawsuits. The authors provided an authoritative social history of the events that led Sutherland to focus scholarly attention on whitecollar crime and to challenge mainstream criminological theories. Among his numerous books and articles since is a major study with Mary Dodge of the crimes committed at the University of California, Irvine medical school’s fertility clinic, Stealing Dreams: A Fertility Clinic Scandal, an historical and analytical overview in White-Collar and Corporate Crime, and edited volumes including a special issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime. In 2001, his colleagues honored his major professional achievements in regard to the study of white-collar crime and to their own careers in a collection of original works titled Contemporary issues in crime and criminal justice: Essays in honor of Gilbert Geis. In addition to those already mentioned above, the contributors included Diane Vaughan, Sally Simpson, Francis Cullen, Peter Yeager, Arnold and Virginia Binder, Alan Block, James Short, Nicole Piquero, Duncan Chappell, Joseph DiMento, Stephen Rosoff, Michael Levi, Susan Will, Kitty Calavita, Richard Wright, David Shichor, William Black, Hans Joachim Schneider, Michael Benson, Gabrio Forti, and Peter Grabosky. Henry N. Pontell See also Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Braithwaite, J., & Geis, G. (1982). On theory and action for corporate crime control. Crime and Delinquency, 28, 292–314.

358

Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention

Geis, G. (1967). White‑collar crime: The heavy electric equipment antitrust case of 1961. In M. B. Clinard & R. Quinney (Eds.), Criminal behavior systems: A typology (pp. 139–150). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Geis, G. (1973). Deterring corporate crime. In R. Nader & M. J. Green (Eds.), Corporate power in America (pp. 182–197). New York: Grossman. Geis, G. (1974). Upperworld crime. In A. S. Blumberg (Ed.), Current perspectives on criminal behavior: Original essays on criminology (pp. 114–137). New York: Knopf. Geis, G. (1982). On white‑collar crime. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath. Geis, G. (2007). White-collar and corporate crime. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Geis, G., & Dodge, M. (2003). Stealing dreams: A fertility clinic scandal. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Geis, G., & Goff, C. (1983). Introduction to E. H. Sutherland, White collar crime: The uncut version (pp. ix–xxxiii). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Geis, G., Meier, R. F., & Salinger, L. M. (Eds.). (1995). White collar crime: Classic and contemporary views. New York: Free Press. Jesilow, P. D., & Geis, G. (Eds.). (1993). White-collar crime (The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science No. 525). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Jesilow, P. D., Pontell, H. N., & Geis, G. (1993). Prescription for profit: How doctors defraud Medicaid. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pontell, H. N., & Geis, G. (Eds.). (2007). International handbook of white-collar and corporate crime. New York: Springer. Pontell, H. N., Jesilow, P. D., & Geis, G. (1982). Policing physicians: Practitioner fraud and abuse in a government medical program. Social Problems, 30, 117–125. Pontell, H. N., Rosoff, S. M., & Goode, E. (1994). White-collar crime. In E. Goode (Ed.), Deviant behavior (4th ed., pp. 345–371). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Pontell, H. N., & Shichor, D. (Eds.). (2001). Contemporary issues in crime and criminal justice: Essays in honor of Gilbert Geis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Rosoff, S. M, Pontell, H. N., & Tillman, R. H. (2007). Profit without honor: White-collar crime and the looting of America (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Shover, N., & Hochstetler, A. (2006). Choosing whitecollar crime. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention Criminological theories attempt to explain why offending behavior occurs. Rather than offering an explanation for antisocial behavior, the theory of effective intervention provides (1) support for rehabilitation as a correctional strategy and (2) guidelines for successful delivery of services to an offender population. This theory and its components are commonly referred to as the “what works” literature in corrections. The key determinant of an effective intervention is the ability of a service to produce a decreased rate of recidivism, or future criminal involvement, among participants. Effective programming is identified via an expanse of empirical literature on successful correctional practices. This entry briefly describes (1) the evolution of the theory of effective intervention, (2) the importance of the meta-analysis in identifying the characteristics of effective programming, (3) the emphasis on rehabilitation and a human service approach, and (4) the primary principles of the theory, namely the risk, need, responsivity, and fidelity principles.

The Theory’s Evolution In 1974, a controversial study was conducted by Robert Martinson, who declared that “nothing works” to rehabilitate offenders. This conclusion was based on his review of 200-plus evaluation studies where he reported only isolated evidence of program success. Given the social context of the 1970s and the subsequent emergence of a conservative political climate, the message that nothing works resonated, and the correctional field began to rely heavily on punitive strategies to manage offender behavior. Examples include increased rates of incarceration for non-violent offenders and emphasis on monitoring and surveillance strategies. Yet emerging from Martinson’s 1974 article was a series of rebuttals, including one from Ted Palmer, who argued that the better research question was “which methods work best for which type of offender under what conditions” (p. 150).

Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention

This gave way to the leadership of Canadian psychologists Paul Gendreau, Don Andrews, Robert Ross, James Bonta, and others who began publishing key research that reinforced the importance of rehabilitative strategies (see Andrews & Bonta, 2006). These researchers explored what’s known as the “black box” of treatment programs. The “black box” refers to what is happening inside the treatment programs, and what treatment characteristics are associated with improved outcomes. It was the research from Canadian scholars, particularly Gendreau and Andrews, that produced the theory of effective intervention. This theory is still relied upon to guide the field as to evidence-based correctional treatment strategies.

Meta-Analyses The initial research that both discredited and defended rehabilitation as a correctional strategy relied upon narrative literature reviews to assess the effectiveness of treatment programs. A narrative literature review is a qualitative method of summarizing a body of primary studies. For example, researchers interested in the effectiveness of correctional treatment would collect program evaluation studies, determine the number of studies that produce an effect versus the number that do not, and then summarize whether correctional treatment as a whole appears to be effective at decreasing offending. Key limitations of the narrative review are its imprecise measure of the research question and its susceptibility to researcher bias. A more sophisticated method of reviewing a body of literature emerged called meta-analysis. A meta-analysis can perhaps most simply be described as a quantitative study of studies. This technique produces an effect size between treatment and outcome (usually measured as recidivism). This effect size provides a precise numeric estimate of the effect of treatment. While this methodology carries its own limitations, a key benefit is the interpretability of the results. For example, if a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of treatment produced an effect size of .25, this would suggest that treatment produced a 25 percent decrease in recidivism. A meta-analysis can also produce more than one effect size in a study. This allows for more specific comparison between types of treatment strategies (i.e., cognitive-behavioral versus insight-oriented

359

versus multisystemic programs) in determining which is most effective at reducing recidivism. Results of meta-analyses have not only supported the rehabilitative ideal but have also supported the development and testing of the principles of effective intervention.

Rehabilitation as a Correctional Strategy Certainly, treatment programs are not the only strategy employed to help reduce recidivism among offenders. The correctional system also utilizes criminal sanctions such as incarceration (e.g., jails, detention centers, prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, community residential centers), supervision/monitoring (e.g., probation, parole, intensive supervision probation, electronic monitoring), and community restoration (e.g., fines, restitution, community service) to assist in decreasing the rate of criminal behavior. However, research by Gendreau, Andrews, and others has shown very limited success with these strategies at changing offender behavior. Hence, based upon theoretical and empirical grounds, the theory of effective intervention relies primarily upon a human service and treatment based approach to decreasing recidivism among participants.

Core Components of the Theory On average, correctional treatment programs reduce recidivism by approximately 10 percent (Gendreau et al., 2004). However, there is great variability among programs with respect to the degree of effectiveness. Programs that make use of evidence-based treatment strategies see effects substantially greater than the 10 percent average. To the contrary, well-intentioned treatment providers have also increased the likelihood of recidivism by not utilizing evidence-based strategies, or attempting to employ such strategies, but with poor fidelity. The theory of effective intervention can perhaps most concisely be summarized into four key principles of effective intervention: (1) the risk principle, (2) the need principle, (3) the responsivity principle, and (4) the fidelity principle. The Risk Principle

Simply stated, the risk principle suggests (1) that offenders be classified by risk level, and (2) that

360

Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention

intensive correctional interventions be reserved for higher risk offenders. Classification by risk involves determining whether an offender is of high, moderate, or low risk to recidivate. In order to accurately classify offenders by risk, a validated risk assessment must be employed. There are several validated tools designed to assess both static and dynamic risk factors. Static risk factors are factors that are not subject to change, such as an offender’s criminal history. Dynamic risk factors are those amenable offender characteristics that can be targeted for change, such as substance abuse. It is important to use risk assessments that include dynamic as well as static risk factors so that appropriate treatment targets can be identified. Examples of such correctional risk assessments include the Level of Service Inventory (LSI—adult and youth versions), the Wisconsin Risk/Need Assessment, and the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS). Based upon the empirically informed assumption that one can accurately predict risk by using a validated tool, how this tool is incorporated into practice speaks to the second component of the risk principle: matching offenders to interventions based on risk level. There are many options in terms of correctional interventions for offenders. Interventions include incapacitation (i.e., removal of the opportunity for offending) or supervision (i.e., monitoring) strategies. Examples are incarceration, halfway house placement, intensive probation, general probation, or electronic monitoring. Correctional interventions also include treatment programs, such as community correctional facilities, residential treatment programs, intensive outpatient treatment, group treatment, family interventions or case management. The risk principle again suggests that more intensive interventions, particularly those that involve incarceration, out of home placement or intensive supervision or treatment, be reserved for higher-risk offenders. When low-risk offenders are placed in intensive services, their risk for recidivism can actually increase rather than decrease. This means that valuable correctional resources are being spent to make offenders worse. Low-risk offenders require little intervention because they possess few crimeproducing behaviors that require intervention. It is suspected that low-risk offenders may become worse because those factors that make them low

risk, such as a steady job, prosocial friends, or educational progress, are being disrupted. Likewise, in intensive correctional treatment settings, lowrisk offenders are being exposed to (i.e., learning from) higher risk individuals. Consequently, lowrisk offenders tend to be better candidates for diversion or non-intensive correctional interventions such as community service. There is ample evidence to suggest that correctional interventions, including both supervision and treatment programs, should (1) assess risk using a validated risk tool and (2) use classification information to make decisions about appropriate matching of offenders to services. The risk principle requires that intensive interventions be reserved for higher risk offenders. As such, the theory of effective intervention argues that correctional programs should develop exclusionary criteria that incorporate risk, and then differentiate treatment and supervision based upon level of risk. The Need Principle

The need principle suggests that in order to reduce future criminal behavior, programs must target criminogenic needs. Criminogenic needs can be defined as those dynamic risk factors associated with criminality. Offenders with multiple criminogenic needs are more likely to recidivate than offenders that possess few criminogenic needs. Core criminogenic need areas, as identified by Andrews and Bonta and others, include (1) anti­ social attitudes; (2) antisocial associates; (3) anti­ social personality features (e.g., impulsivity, risk-taking behavior, lack of empathy, aggression/ hostility, poor problem-solving skills); (4) family relationships; (5) substance abuse; (6) educational/ vocational achievement; and (7) structured leisure time. Similar to the risk principle, application of the need principle begins with appropriate assessment of a range of criminogenic needs. As such, a validated risk/need tool should be utilized by treatment and supervision programs to effectively identify criminogenic need areas. Several tools, such as the Level of Service inventory, include both static and dynamic risk factors, so they can be used to ascertain risk level and identify criminogenic needs. Once identified, intermediate objectives can be developed around the criminogenic needs,

Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention

which should form the basis of a correctional case plan. Such practices are important to help ensure that the program’s primary targets are criminogenic in nature. There is much empirical evidence supporting the aforementioned criminogenic needs as accurate predictors of risk for criminality. There is also research that identifies a range of non-criminogenic factors that are often seen as correctional program targets. Non-criminogenic targets are treatment targets that are not related to likelihood of recidivism. Examples of such non-criminogenic targets include self-esteem, mental health issues, vague emotional problems, physical fitness, and bonding among antisocial peers. The research suggests that targeting these areas fails to decrease an offender’s propensity to commit crime. In summary, the need principle asserts that programs focusing primarily on criminogenic factors are more successful at reducing recidivism among participants. In order to do so, programs must adopt a validated needs assessment so that the relevant criminogenic needs can be identified. Thus, the theory of effective intervention requires that correctional programs both systematically assess dynamic risk factors and concentrate treatment efforts on reducing those criminogenic needs. The Responsivity Principle

The responsivity principle consists of two key components: general responsivity and specific responsivity. General responsivity suggests that most offenders respond to cognitive-behavioral and social learning treatment approaches. Specific responsivity asserts that offenders have different learning styles and may possess barriers that impact their ability to succeed in programming/ interventions. Hence, as a whole the responsivity principle maintains that treatment programs should utilize cognitive-behavioral and social learning models, but also individualize services so that learning styles are considered and barriers to success are addressed. General Responsivity

The general responsivity principle suggests that correctional programs rely on a cognitive-­ behavioral and social learning approach when treating offenders, as this approach is found to be

361

most effective at modifying criminal behavior. There are two major components to cognitivebehavioral and social learning interventions, namely, cognitive restructuring and cognitive skills. According to this model, criminal behavior, as well as cognitions that prompt, support and reinforce such behavior, are learned from individuals who model antisocial attitudes and behavior. As such, practitioners must assist offenders to restructure maladaptive and antisocial thinking. Likewise, offenders must be taught prosocial skills to better manage their thoughts and behaviors. Cognitive behavioral approaches are actionoriented, focused on current issues, and rely on a teaching model. Offenders who participate in high-fidelity cognitive-behavioral programming identify high-risk factors and learn more prosocial ways of managing them. Similarly, participants are expected to practice using prosocial skills via role play and other practice techniques. Finally, the targeted behaviors are current issues that are maintaining problematic behavior rather than past trauma or exploration of the unconscious. Cognitive-behavioral programs have been found to be effective with a wide range of offender populations, including adult and juvenile offenders, male and female offenders, and specialized populations such as sex offenders and substance abusing offenders. Specific Responsivity

The specific responsivity principle acknowledges that not all individuals respond to treatment the same way; therefore, it is imperative for programs to address individual learning styles and barriers to treatment while delivering effective interventions. Some offender needs that could be responsivity factors include lack of motivation, transportation issues, mental health issues, language barriers, and housing. None of these needs are strongly correlated with future offending. As such, if a program targets only these factors and ignores the criminogenic needs of offenders, the program will have little impact on the future criminal behavior of participants. In contrast, if a program ignores important responsivity issues (i.e., acute mental illness), the likelihood of the offender completing treatment services is low, which also makes it unlikely that the program will be successful in decreasing his criminality.

362

Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention

As with risk and need, it is important that responsivity factors be measured using standardized and validated tools. Once assessed, offenders should be matched to interventions which will increase their likelihood of success in the program. In summary, the theory of effective intervention suggests that (1) programs employ cognitive-behavioral and social learning strategies as the primary therapeutic model and (2) they modify programming to meet the individual learning styles and needs of offenders. The Fidelity Principle

It is clear from the literature that programs should be using a cognitive-behavioral approach, targeting criminogenic needs and should be focusing intensive services on higher risk offenders. But equally important is the fidelity of the intervention, or the ability of programs to implement these strategies appropriately. The Correctional Program Assess­ment Inventory (CPAI) is a tool developed by Gendreau and Andrews that assesses a program’s adherence to evidence-based treatment strategies. This tool, as well as variations of this tool, assess not only a program’s adherence to the above three principles (risk, need, and responsivity) but also other factors important in delivering effective services. Additional factors outlined by Gendreau et al. (2004) include the following:

1. The program’s organizational culture should support the rehabilitative philosophy. Support should be evidenced by such things as adequate funding of programming, staff retention, and harmony and appropriate response to program problems or crises.



2. Staff and management must be properly credentialed and trained. Additionally, they should be selected based upon clinical skills and characteristics consistent with a treatment environment. Program managers should be involved in treatment, and staff should be adequately supervised and evaluated on their clinical skills.



3. Program staff should engage in the following core correctional practices: prosocial modeling, effective reinforcement and disapproval of behaviors, problem-solving, structured learning/

skill building, effective use of authority, cognitive restructuring, relationship strategies that will build rapport, such as openness, genuineness, flexibility, and optimism, and use of motivational interviewing strategies.

4. The program should broker for clients so that they are provided with high-quality services (i.e., aftercare) in the community.



5. The program should undergo evaluation research to determine its effectiveness at delivering services and programming. Evaluation should include a formal outcome study to compare individuals who undergo treatment with a risk-controlled comparison group. Programs should also conduct internal audits and survey clients as to their satisfaction with the program.

In summary, the final principle of effective intervention, program fidelity, suggests that if a program uses a cognitive-behavioral model and targets criminogenic need factors for higher risk offenders, but does not hire credentialed management and staff, train staff on core correctional practices, provide brokerage for offenders, and provide quality assurance around effective implementation of the model, it is much less likely to be effective in reducing recidivism. Programmatic evaluation tools, such as the CPAI, can be used to assist programs to determine whether they are effectively adhering to the risk, need, responsivity, and fidelity principles.

Conclusion The theory of effective intervention provides a template for programs in the development of evidence-based practices. The principles incorporated in this theory (i.e., risk, need, responsivity, and fidelity) have been used not only for correctional treatment programs but also for probation and parole offices, halfway houses, day-reporting programs, drug courts, detention facilities, prisons, and many other correctional settings. While society has been reluctant to allow scientific research to drive policy, given the limited resources, society is moving toward the use of evidence-based strategies to address public safety issues. As such, the theory of effective intervention has and will continue to be

General Deterrence Theory

used to drive day-to-day correctional practices within a variety of correctional settings. Lori Brusman Lovins See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Cognitive Theories of Crime

References and Further Readings Andrews, D. A., & Bonta, J. (2003). The psychology of criminal conduct (3rd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Andrews, D. A., Zinger, I., Hoge, R., Bonta, J., Gendreau, P., & Cullen, F. T. (1990). Does correctional treatment work? A clinically relevant and psychologically informed meta-analysis. Criminology, 28, 369–404. Gendreau, P. (1996). The principle of effective intervention with offenders. In A. T. Harland (Ed.), Choosing correctional options that work: Defining the demand and evaluating the supply (pp. 117–130). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gendreau, P., French, S., & Gionet, A. (2004). What works (what doesn’t work): The principles of effective correctional treatment. Journal of Community Corrections, 13, 4–30. Gendreau, P., Smith, P., & Goggin, C. (2000). Treatment programs in corrections. In J. Winterdyk (Ed.), Corrections in Canada: Social reaction to crime (pp. 238–263). Toronto, ON: Prentice Hall. Martinson, R. (1974). What works? Questions and answers about prison reform. Public Interest, 35, 22–54. Palmer, T. (1975). Martinson revisited. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 12, 133–152.

General Deterrence Theory The notion of general deterrence holds that crime rates of populations are held down by the threat of generalized punishments. The probabilities of such punishments include those based on perceptions and reality. However, people’s perceptions may not be based on reality but on other sources such as sensational media coverage of crime and punishment. Punishments may include arrest and jail time as well as probation, community service, tethering, and fines. Three characteristics of a punishment need to be at an optimal level in order for the threat of a

363

punishment to deter crime: certainty, celerity, and severity. First, punishments must be relatively certain. The exact level of certainty that must be reached in order for punishments to deter crime, and the presence of nonlinear floor and threshold effects, are largely unknown. However, some research suggests that a floor of at least 30 percent of offenders may need to be arrested before a deterrent effect of arrest for some crimes is realized. It is plausible that there is also a threshold effect wherein gains in certainty may bring little, if any, deterrent effect. Second, punishments need to be relatively swift. If too much time passes between arrest and actual sentencing/punishment in the criminal justice system, punishment is less apt to deter persons in society from committing crime. For example, half a century ago, less than 2 years elapsed between a death sentence and an execution; now the gap is more than a decade, and in California it has approached 20 years. Third, punishments need to be severe enough so that persons in the general population perceive that the costs of punishments outweigh the potential gains (e.g., financial, emotional satisfaction) from crime. Finally, in order for punishment to have the best deterrent effect on crime rates, all three of these dimensions of punishment need to be at an optimal level. There is little research on general deterrence theory that incorporates measures of all three principles: certainty, celerity, and severity, both in terms of realities and perceptions, simultaneously. Work often uses just one, or perhaps two, measures of the three constructs, and focuses on either perceptions or reality. Measures have included imprisonment rates and arrest rates for certainty and mean sentence lengths for severity. Additionally, when a deterrent effect is found, it is often unclear how important a predictor it is relative to noncriminal justice system predictors of crime; the latter are typically not fully covered in such research studies. However, a recent meta-analysis sheds some light on this critical issue. In 2005, Travis Pratt and Francis Cullen conducted a meta-analysis of 214 studies containing 1,894 findings concerning 31 aggregate-level predictors of crime rates. A total of 196/1,894 findings reviewed concern six criminal justice deterrence variables. The incidence of incarceration (46 findings) was the fifth most important predictor

364

General Deterrence Theory

of crime rates (with noneconomic institutions, unemployment duration, firearms, and percent nonwhite being stronger predictors). However, five other criminal justice system deterrence factors were weak or marginal predictors of crime rates. These factors with their respective ranks and number of findings upon which the rank was based were arrest ratio (rank 23rd, 77 findings), police expenditures (27th, 13), get-tough policies (28th, 37), police per capita expenditure (30th, 20 findings) and police size (31st, 3 findings). The latter findings on police variables need to be taken with some caution. While they are among the best available, the coverage is incomplete. They are, for example, based largely on research studies before the year 2000. For example, a recent review of 17 studies (15 not covered by Pratt and Cullen) on the effect of increased policing of crime hot spots determined that police acted as a deterrent in 13 cases. One expected exception was that an increased number of unmarked patrol cars had no impact on crime, and in another study by Edmund McGarrell and colleagues, the increased amount of traffic stops (34/week) was believed to be below a floor level where a deterrent effect might begin. A large amount of work on general deterrence theory has been focused on the ultimate punishment, the death penalty. The odds of the death penalty have always been small, from zero to less than 5 percent, but the celerity of punishment has varied between one and 20 years across jurisdictions. This work has conflicting findings. Bijou Yang and David Lester’s meta-analytic review of 95 studies with adequate data determined an overall effect size of –0.115 (p < .001), indicating a deterrent effect. Studies based on time series or panel data were more apt to report a deterrent effect for executions than studies based on crosssectional data or investigations of a single execution’s effect on homicide. Most of the research on the death penalty and homicide rates has a major limitation: It assumes that the public is equally aware of all executions. However, in fact, most have coverage only on the inside pages of newspapers, if any, and most are not covered on national television. Research on execution certainty is usually based on objective reality, not perceptions of reality. In 2001, Steven Stack provided a meta-analysis of 20 studies that were based on a subset of executions: those that

were widely publicized in the mass media. Awareness of punishments constitutes the first step in the deterrence process. Even these studies had conflicting findings. However, most of the conflicting findings were attributed to several key methodological differences. Five studies reporting no deterrent effect were marked by a questionable assumption that the public would remember and be affected by an execution for a very long period of time (2 months to a year or more). This assumption is foreign to other areas of media research such as that concerning the length of time a media story on suicide results in copycat suicides, which is up to 10 days (Stack, 2005). The public often has a short memory span. Eight of the remaining 15 studies found a deterrent effect. Of the seven that did not, most had critical methodological flaws (they included executions for rape, statistical multicollinearity). When these were corrected, a deterrent effect was often found (Stack, 2001). Steven Stack See also Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime; Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence; Perceptual Deterrence; Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory

References and Further Readings McGarrell, E. F., Chermak, S., Weiss, A., & Wilson, J. (2001). Reducing firearms violence through directed police patrol. Criminology and Public Policy, 1, 119–148. Pratt, T. C., & Cullen, F. T. (2005). Assessing macrolevel predictors and theories of crime: A meta-analysis. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 32, pp. 373–450). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stack, S. (2001). Publicized executions and the incidence of homicide: Methodological sources of inconsistent findings. In M. A. DuPont-Morales, M. Hooper, & J. H. Schmidt (Eds.), Handbook of criminal justice administration (pp. 355–369). New York: Marcel Dekker. Stack, S. (2005). Suicide in the media: A quantitative review of studies based on nonfictional stories. Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior, 35(2), 121–133. Yang, B., & Lester, D. (2008). The deterrent effect of executions: A meta-analysis thirty years after Ehrlich. Journal of Criminal Justice, 36, 453–460.

Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison

Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison Rose Giallombardo was one of the first researchers to examine female prisoners and the inmate subculture within a women’s correctional facility. Previous studies had shown that inmate subcultures existed in male prisons. Giallombardo recognized, however, that males and females may not experience and adapt to the prison environment in the same ways. As a result, she explored the world of the female inmate by spending 1 year conducting research in the West Virginia Women’s Federal Reformatory. During her year-long project, Giallombardo gathered data in a number of ways. One of the primary data sources was direct observation of inmates as they participated in both formal and informal activities during their daily routines. She also conducted interviews with inmates to learn about their experiences and values both inside and outside of prison. Her observational and interview data were supplemented by reviews of official files for more than 650 inmates, as well as interviews with correctional staff and administrators. Giallombardo’s research indicated that females, like males, do experience “pains of imprisonment.” In particular, the female inmates agreed that “prison life is depriving and frustrating” (1966a, p. 273). They had to learn to cope with the loss of autonomy; a lack of freedom, personal security, and privacy; having no access to heterosexual relationships; the lack of emotional support because of removal from family and friends; a loss of self-esteem and responsibility; and having little access to material goods and property that once helped to establish each woman’s self-image. Consequently, similar to their male counterparts, females developed a prison subculture—complete with its own rules and argot—to help neutralize these pains of imprisonment. Although inmate social structures exist in both male and female correctional facilities, Giallombardo noted that the female inmate subculture significantly differs from the male social system in its organizational form. Specifically, the social roles for female inmates are more similar to relationships in the general community, like a “substitute universe” in which women can perform roles

365

similar to those they held, or wished to hold, in the real world (1966b, p. 185). These relationships within the female facility help the women to meet their needs and, in some ways, escape the realities of prison life.

Social Structure Among Female Inmates Through her observations and conversations with the inmates, Giallombardo defined several social roles present in the female prison subculture. Some of the roles were looked down upon by other inmates, while other social positions— especially those based on close friendships and other relationships—were highly regarded and sought after. Several important female inmate social roles are discussed below. Negative Social Roles

The female snitcher may be compared to the “rat” in the male inmate subculture, in that both are inmates that give information to staff members, and that occupy positions held in contempt by other inmates. However, the consequences of crossing communication lines are different based on gender. A known rat may experience severe ramifications or violence from other male inmates, but the female snitcher is not typically punished severely. Snitchers are sometimes even overlooked because others realize that someone may snitch to serve her own self-interest. When snitchers do face ramifications, it is usually through panning (offensive gossip when the subject is not present) and signifying (the same type of gossip when the inmate is present) to let the snitcher know that she is being spurned by others. Female inmates also hold the inmate cop or lieutenant in disdain. Similar to the “center man” in male inmate subcultures, these are the inmates who have some type of authority over others, often giving orders and reporting rule violations to staff. The inmate cops and lieutenants are viewed as a risk to the inmate social structure because they are more dedicated prison staff than other inmates. Two other social roles that are shunned from the larger inmate subculture are the squares and jive bitches. Squares are inmates that do not fit into the inmate community because they are fundamentally anti-criminal and tend to be more like

366

Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison

a prison worker than an inmate. While squares are not trusted by other inmates, some women in the social system say that “they [squares] don’t know any better” (1966a, p. 277). Some squares eventually learn the inmate code, become a part of the social system, and are accepted by other inmates. The jive bitch is an inmate who is a deliberate troublemaker. She will quickly divulge potentially damaging information, usually with the intent of breaking up a relationship between other inmates. Once someone is labeled as a jive bitch, she is not trusted by other inmates and is seen as a threat to inmate solidarity. It is very difficult for someone who was once labeled a jive bitch to be trusted by others. Positive Social Roles

Rap buddies and homeys have some of the strongest friendships within the prison. Rap buddies are two females that can easily talk with and trust each other. Homeys share a similar relationship, but they also share something in common from the outside. While homeys may or may not have known each other before prison, they typically come from the same community and treat each other like relatives. Similar to rap buddies, homeys do not share intimate relationships. Another type of female inmate that is trusted by others is the pinner, who serves as a lookout when inmates are participating in prohibited activities. Since participation in such activities often serves to alleviate some of the pains of imprisonment, it is important that the acts go undetected. If the illicit activities are discovered, the involved parties will likely receive additional punishment, which will ultimately increase the pains of imprisonment. Consequently, pinners serve an important role and are posted to watch for both staff and other inmates who may snitch to authorities. Giallombardo also identified social roles pertaining to the procurement of goods, services, and information. Specifically, the connect is an inmate who is able to negotiate with others to obtain wanted items or information. The booster is an inmate who steals from official prison stores and sells items to other inmates. Unlike the “merchant” in male prisons, who is criticized for exploiting the needs of others for his own profit, connects and boosters are admired by other inmates for taking

risks, making comfort items available, and running a successful trade. Social Roles Based on Pseudofamilial Relationships

Some of the most important social roles recognized by Giallombardo are related to homosexual relationships formed among female inmates. These roles and relationships are important elements to the social organization within the prison. Unlike most homosexual relationships in male prisons, those in female prisons are formed willingly and without the threat of physical force. Further, the relationships are taken seriously by those involved, providing a great deal of support and stability, which may serve to reduce some of the psychological distress that accompanies the deprivations of incarceration. Most female inmates who engage in homosexual behavior while incarcerated are considered to be penitentiary turnouts, or inmates who engage in homosexuality only in prison because heterosexual relationships are not available. That is, homosexual behavior that might have been considered distasteful when the women were free citizens is redefined and accepted in the prison environment. Giallombardo commented that these types of relationships among women are probably more readily accepted than they would be for men because society does not reject women for publicly showing affection with one another. Since females can share affection in the community without being shunned, it might be easier for them to accept homosexuality while in prison. Precise social roles within homosexual relationships are clearly defined, with inmates embracing masculine or feminine positions that mirror those in a traditional family. In particular, the femme or mommy plays the conventional female role in a relationship. This role is highly sought after by inmates. The femme’s partner is known as the stud broad or daddy and emulates the traditional male role. Stud broads are admired by others because (1) they afford a pseudo-male presence in the prison and (2) it is difficult for a normally heterosexual woman to adapt to playing the role of a man. As soon as a relationship has been established between a femme and a stud broad, most other inmates treat them as though they are actually married. Other inmates then join the prison family

Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison

in other family roles such as daughters, aunts, cousins, and even grandmothers. These types of domestic relationships approximate those on the outside world and form the foundation of the female inmate subculture. While the social roles within these relationships may change somewhat over time, the relationship and kinship ties usually last throughout the inmates’ sentences.

The Importation Versus Deprivation Debate Giallombardo found that, similar to male inmates, female inmates developed a prison social structure to help ease the pains of imprisonment. Nevertheless, there were major differences between the structures of the male and female prison subcultures. For example, male inmates have to worry about a great deal of violence, adhering to a strict inmate code, and constantly proving their masculinity. The same concerns were not present in the women’s prison. However, female inmates did have to face something that was not present in men’s prisons; the women admitted that it was difficult to live with each other and that other females could not be trusted. The women also had to deal with malicious verbal attacks, rumors, and jealousy. Further, loyalty to other inmates was much less important for females when compared to males, probably because of the rivalries that existed among the women. These types of differences and the unique structures of the prison social organizations for men and women made it possible for Giallombardo to speculate about the validity of two competing perspectives used to explain the structural forms of inmate social systems. The first theoretical perspective, known as the deprivation model, posits that subcultural systems originate and are organized based on the conditions of imprisonment and the institution itself (see Clemmer, 1940; Sykes, 1958). In other words, the structure of inmate social systems is derived from the total institution of the prison, not the outside world. Given that Giallombardo found that women experienced the same types of pains of imprisonment and deprivations as men, yet the structure of female prison subculture differed from that of males, she concluded that the subcultures could not solely be a function of the deprivations that accompany incarceration. In short, while the deprivations significantly contribute to the manifestation of a

367

prisoner social system (to help inmates ease the pains of imprisonment), they cannot completely explain the organization of the subculture. In contrast, the importation perspective (see Irwin & Cressey, 1962) maintains that inmate social roles are brought into the prison from the outside. That is, the social roles in prison are a direct result of experiences, identities, statuses, and values inmates held before going to prison. For example, the importation viewpoint accounts for the pseudo-family relationship structure among female inmates because the inmate family unit mirrors traditional relationships and gender roles in the community. As is common in larger society, females often place a greater importance on marriage and family ties than do men. These types of relationship systems are recreated in the women’s prison and form the basis of their social system. Therefore, it seems that female inmates import these values and systems into prison from general society. Overall, it is evident that, in different ways, both theoretical perspectives are important in understanding prison subcultures and inmate adaptation. The structure of the familial relationships and overall social system within the women’s prison demonstrates that prisons are not completely detached from the free world and lends support to the importation model. Even so, it is important to realize that prison subcultures may have never emerged if it were not for the deprivations that inmates seek to alleviate. Kristie R. Blevins See also Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory; Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory; Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison

References and Further Readings Casey-Acevedo, K., & Bakken, T. (2001). The effect of time on the disciplinary adjustment of women in prison. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 45, 489–497. Clemmer, D. (1940). The prison community. Boston: Christopher. Giallombardo, R. (1966a). Social roles in a prison for women. Social Problems, 13, 268–288. Giallombardo, R. (1966b). Society of women: A study of a women’s prison. New York: Wiley.

368

Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory

Greer, K. R. (2000). The changing nature of interpersonal relationships in a women’s prison. Prison Journal, 80, 442–468. Irwin, J., & Cressey, D. R. (1962). Thieves, convicts, and inmate culture. Social Problems, 10, 142–155. Maeve, M. K. (1999). The social construction of love and sexuality in a women’s prison. Advances in Nursing Science, 21, 46–65. Sykes, G. M. (1958). The society of captives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory The deterrence doctrine can be traced to Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria, who argued more than 200 years ago that people will refrain from committing crime if they are threatened with certain, severe, and swift legal punishment for it. This argument has strongly influenced the criminal justice policies of Western nations, including the United States and Canada. Despite its long history in criminological thought, empirical tests of deterrence theory were scant before the late 1900s. The impetus for testing came mainly from Jack P. Gibbs’s 1968 article on the deterrent effects of the certainty and severity of imprisonment for homicide, and from his 1975 book on deterrence that set the agenda that guided a generation of deterrence researchers. Gibbs’s goal was the construction of a systematic deterrence theory that could be used to generate effective penal policies.

Effects of Legal Punishment Studies of the death penalty in the mid-1900s generated doubts among many criminologists about the deterrent effects of legal punishment overall. For example, George Vold found that U.S. states without the death penalty had relatively low homicide rates. Gibbs identified several problems with such studies as Vold’s. First, questions about the “general efficacy of [legal] punishment [could not] be answered by [studies of] the death penalty alone”; in fact, other types of legal punishment could be stronger deterrents (Gibbs, 1968, p. 515). Second, Vold ignored the certainty of execution for homicide. Whether persons in a particular state can be executed for homicide—whether there is a statutory provision for

the death penalty—is a different issue than whether they actually are executed. Gibbs observed that the deterrence doctrine makes no predictions about the effects of statutory provision for a type of legal punishment. No punishment can deter if it is never used; hence, defensible tests of deterrence theory need to include actual legal punishments. In his 1968 test of deterrence theory, Gibbs looked at the relation among U.S. states between the actual certainty and severity of imprisonment for homicide and the homicide rate. Certainty was estimated for each state by dividing the number of persons admitted to prison for homicide during 1960 by the 1959–1960 average annual number of homicides. Severity was expressed as the median number of months served on a homicide sentence by persons in prison in 1960. Consistent with the deterrence doctrine, there was a significantly lower homicide rate in states with a high certainty of imprisonment for homicide. However, there was a weaker association between the severity of imprisonment and the homicide rate. Gibbs’s 1968 study inspired a flurry of additional tests of deterrence theory by researchers who conducted further analyses of the same data or examined crimes other than homicide (e.g., Gray & Martin, 1969; Tittle, 1969).

Perceived Deterrence In addition to actual legal punishments, Gibbs believed that tests of deterrence theory should include measures of (1) perceived punishments, (2) other causes of crime, and (3) distinctions among types of deterrence. Much of Gibbs’s research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, conducted with colleagues and graduate students at the University of Arizona, included these additional variables and distinctions. Gibbs argued repeatedly that perceptions of punishment were integral to deterrence theory because actual legal punishments deter only to the extent they are perceived as certain, severe, and swift. Expressed diagrammatically, the argument was AP PP >—< CR, where AP denotes actual legal punishments (e.g., actual certainty), PP denotes perceived legal punishments (e.g., perceived certainty), and CR denotes a crime rate. AP and PP should be positively related

Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory

(denoted by in the diagram), meaning that for any unit of comparison (e.g., individuals) people should be able to accurately perceive the certainty, severity, and celerity of the legal punishment. Moreover, PP and CR should be negatively related (>—< in the diagram), meaning that people should refrain from crime to the extent they perceive legal punishment as certain, severe, and swift. Inclusion of perceived punishments in deterrence studies required the collection of survey data. Using both police data for Tucson and survey data collected from Tucson residents, in 1978, Maynard Erickson and Gibbs found a positive association among types of crime between the actual certainty of arrest and the perceived certainty of arrest. They also found a negative association between both types of certainty and the crime rate. Although these findings are consistent with the above diagram, Erickson and Gibbs found that, contrary to the diagram, the perceived certainty of punishment was not associated with the crime rate through the actual certainty of punishment. Moreover, they found that as social disapproval of crime increased, the perceived certainty of punishment increased and the crime rate decreased. The association between perceived certainty and the crime rate was reduced substantially when social disapproval was taken into account. This finding suggests that the association between perceived certainty and the crime rate could be spurious: Social disapproval may generate a low crime rate, and individuals may “perceive the certainty of punishment in terms of what it ought to be and think serious crimes should be punished more relentlessly” (p. 262). Erickson, Gibbs, and Jensen (1977a) conducted a similar study with survey data collected from Arizona high school students. They found a negative association among types of crime between the perceived certainty of legal punishment and students’ self-reported crimes. However, a very strong association between social condemnation of crime and the perceived certainty of punishment made it difficult to separate their effects on self-reported crime, thus raising doubts about the extent to which the findings supported the deterrence doctrine.

Further Issues in Deterrence Research A 1978 study by Jensen, Erickson, and Gibbs involved a shift in the unit of comparison. While

369

the other perceptual studies analyzed variation in crime rates among types of crime, Jensen et al. reported a negative association among individuals (Arizona students) between the perceived certainty of punishment and self-reported crimes. In contrast to the other studies, they found that the association between perceived certainty and self-reported crime held even after students’ condemnation of crime was taken into account. Moreover, it held with controls for attachment to conventional persons and association with law-violating peers. The Jensen et al. study showed that the associations among deterrence variables can vary considerably from one unit of comparison to the next. Although there may be an inclination to eschew units of comparison other than individuals on the grounds that only individuals can be deterred, Gibbs (1979) argued that other units of comparison are equally appropriate in deterrence studies. For example, the actual certainty, severity, and celerity of legal punishment for a type of crime can be a characteristic of aggregate units, such as states, as well as of individuals; and policy makers might be just as mindful of aggregate units as they are of individuals in formulating penal policies to achieve deterrence. Controls for condemnation of crime, attachment to conventional persons, and association with law-violating peers in the Jensen et al. study reflected Gibbs’s belief that deterrence theory should include other causes of crime. This is because “crime rates reflect not only . . . deterrence but also ‘extralegal conditions’ . . . that inhibit or generate crime. . . . [The] predictive accuracy of a deterrence theory that ignores extralegal conditions could be negligible” (Gibbs, 1975, p. 18). Condemnation of crime and attachment to conventional persons are instances of extralegal conditions that inhibit crime, and association with law-violating peers is an extralegal condition that generates crime. According to Gibbs (1975), theories about extralegal (non-deterrent) causes of crime are useful for identifying other possibly relevant inhibitory and generative conditions; thus, they need to be integrated with deterrence theory. It has been conventional for deterrence researchers to distinguish between two types of deterrence: (1) specific deterrence, which involves the effects of legal punishment on those who directly experience it and (2) general deterrence, which involves the effects of indirectly experiencing legal punishment through

370

Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance

observing or otherwise learning about the punishment experiences of others. However, Gibbs (1975) and Erickson, Gibbs, and Jensen (1977b) argued that each of these types can involve subtypes: (1) absolute deterrence, where people refrain entirely from crime in response to a threat of legal punishment, and (2) restrictive deterrence, where people curtail their criminal behavior to reduce a threat of legal punishment. To illustrate restrictive deterrence, a person may burglarize only one house in a neighborhood rather than two or more out of a belief that the risk of legal punishment increases with each successive burglary. The importance of such distinctions is that legal punishment may achieve only some types of deterrence and not others (e.g., absolute general deterrence and not restrictive specific deterrence). Consistent with such a possibility, Erickson et al. (1977b, p. 448) used different crime rates for absolute and restrictive deterrence and found that “some types of rates provide more support for the deterrence doctrine than do other types.”

Conclusion Gibbs believed it was premature to formulate a deterrence theory without considerable exploratory research on the foregoing and related issues. Although there is still no systematic deterrence theory, Gibbs brought us closer to it than anyone since Bentham and Beccaria. Mark C. Stafford and Elyshia D. Aseltine See also General Deterrence Theory; Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence; Perceptual Deterrence; Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory; Williams, Kirk R. and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and NonLegal Sanctions

Erickson, M. L., Gibbs, J. P., & Jensen, G. F. (1977b). Conventional and special crime and delinquency rates. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 68, 440–453. Gibbs, J. P. (1968). Crime, punishment, and deterrence. Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 48, 515–530. Gibbs, J. P. (1975). Crime, punishment, and deterrence. New York: Elsevier. Gibbs, J. P. (1979). Assessing the deterrence doctrine. American Behavioral Scientist, 22, 653-677. Gibbs, J. P. (1986). Deterrence theory and research. In G. B. Melton (Ed.), The law as a behavioral instrument (pp. 87–130). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gray, L. N., & Martin, J. D. (1969). Punishment and deterrence: Another analysis of Gibbs’ data. Social Science Quarterly, 50, 389–395. Jensen, G. F., Erickson, M. L., & Gibbs, J. P. (1978). Perceived risk of punishment and self-reported delinquency. Social Forces, 57, 57–78. Pratt, T. C., Cullen, F. T., Blevins, K. R., Daigle, L. E., & Madensen, T. D. (2006). The empirical status of deterrence theory. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock (pp. 367–395). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Stafford, M. C., & Warr, M. (1993). A reconceptualization of general and specific deterrence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 123–135. Tittle, C. R. (1969). Crime rates and legal sanctions. Social Problems, 16, 409–423. Tittle, C. R. (1980). Sanctions and social deviance. New York: Praeger. Tonry, M. (2008). Learning from the limitations of deterrence research. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 37, pp. 279–312). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vold, G. B. (1952). Extent and trend of capital crimes in the United States. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 284, 1–7. Zimring, F. E., & Hawkins, G. (1973). Deterrence: The legal threat in crime control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

References and Further Readings Erickson, M. L., & Gibbs, J. P. (1976). Further findings on the deterrence question and strategies for future research. Journal of Criminal Justice, 4, 175–189. Erickson, M. L., & Gibbs, J. P. (1978). Objective and perceptual properties of legal punishment and the deterrence doctrine. Social Problems, 25, 253–264. Erickson, M. L., Gibbs, J. P., & Jensen, G. F. (1977a). The deterrence doctrine and the perceived certainty of legal punishments. American Sociological Review, 42, 305–317.

Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance While exploring the generalizability of social bond theory to explain the desistance of female offenders,

Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance

Peggy Giordano, Stephen Cernkovich, and Jennifer Rudolph developed the theory of cognitive transformation. Their theory provides a symbolic interactionist perspective of desistance by examining how both social influences and internal changes within an individual lead to an offender’s desistance from criminal behavior. Unlike Travis Hirschi’s social bond theory and Robert Sampson and John Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control, Giordano et al. postulate a reciprocal relationship between the actor and the environment, arguing that desisters have not only established prosocial bonds but also have experienced “cognitive shifts” that have facilitated their desistance from criminal behavior (p. 999). More recently, the theory of cognitive transformation has evolved to include the role of emotions in addition to the role of social influences and cognitions in the desistance process.

Development of the Theory of Cognitive Transformation Giordano et al. developed the theory of cognitive transformation as a response to Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control, which argues social bonds formed in adulthood can change the trajectory of an offender’s criminal behavior. In particular, Sampson and Laub contend that people with criminal propensities can form prosocial adult bonds, such as finding a stable job or getting married, which serve as turning points. These bonds, when associated with increased social capital, can reduce the offender’s criminal propensities by exerting control over the offender’s behaviors and activities. In 2003, Laub and Sampson revised their theory of informal social control to include structured routine activities and human agency as conditions that lead to an offender’s desistance. They argue that when offenders experience prosocial bonds they experience new responsibilities (i.e., going to work on time), which creates more structured routine activities. This increase in structured routine activities decreases the opportunities for criminal behavior and increases the probability of desistance. The revised age-graded theory of informal social control also considers the role of human agency. Human agency refers to an intentional, active choice by the offender to engage in or desist from criminal opportunities. The revised theory

371

recognizes that an individual plays an active role in the desistance process, and his or her choices influence his or her exposure to prosocial bonds. However, Laub and Sampson argue that a person’s choice is constrained by the structural contexts of his or her life, and thus human agency is better referred to as “situated choice.” The theory of cognitive transformation and the revised age-graded theory of informal social control are similar in that both prosocial bonds and human agency are fundamental aspects of the desistance process; however, in “Emotions and Crime Over the Life Course: A Neo-Meadian Perspective on Criminal Continuity and Change,” Giordano et al. argue Laub and Sampson’s theories are incomplete and place too much emphasis on the external turning points and not enough focus on the offender’s human agency and subsequent cognitive changes. The theory of cognitive transformation argues that both the cognitive changes within the individual, or “cognitive shifts,” and the exposure to prosocial opportunities are fundamental influences that lead to an offender’s desistance from crime (Giordano et al., 2002, p. 999). Thus, desistance is the result of a reciprocal relationship between the offender and the environment. Due to the emphasis on “cognitive shifts” and human agency, the theory of cognitive transformation refers to prosocial bonds as “hooks for change” rather than turning points (p. 1000). Giordano et al. justify this difference in terminology by arguing that the offender must be exposed to a prosocial opportunity for change, which the offender actively creates through his or her human agency, and be “hooked by” or receptive and willing to use these prosocial opportunities as a catalyst to change his or her behavior and desist from crime.

Four Cognitive Transformations In “Gender, Crime, and Desistance: Toward a Theory of Cognitive Transformation,” Giordano et al. argue desistance is the result of a set of four cognitive transformations. The four cognitive transformations that an offender must pass through are (1) “a general cognitive openness for change,” (2) “exposure to a particular hook or set of hooks for change,” (3) the ability “to envision and begin to fashion an appealing and conventional ‘replacement self’ to supplant the marginal

372

Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance

one,” and (4) “a transformation in the way the actor views the deviant behavior or lifestyle itself” (pp. 1000–1002). The first cognitive transformation involves an openness for change, or the offender’s ability to see change may be possible and could be desirable. In this first transformation, the offender does not completely resist the possibility of desisting from crime. Rather, the offender is receptive to the idea that he or she could stop engaging in deviant behavior if presented with the opportunity. Once the offender has a general openness for change, the individual must be exposed to positive “hooks for change.” Similar to Sampson and Laub, Giordano et al. argue offenders have human agency and actively seek out these change opportunities; however, Giordano et al. place a greater emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between the offender and the prosocial opportunity. Neither a general openness for change nor positive hooks for change is enough for the desistance process to occur. Rather, both need to be present. Thus, an offender must be open for change, be exposed to a positive opportunity, and form a cognitive connection with the opportunity in order for desistance to be possible. If the offender does not have a general openness to change, the offender will not be receptive to or view a prosocial opportunity as a positive development for his or her life and will not form a cognitive connection with the opportunity. However, if the offender is open for change and is presented with a positive opportunity, the offender could form a cognitive connection with the new opportunity, view it as a positive development, and begin to define their current situation and lifestyle as incompatible with continued deviance increasing the possibility of desistance. The third cognitive shift, the development of a “replacement self,” occurs when the offender begins to create a new self-identity defining the type of person the offender hopes to become. This new self-identity serves as a “cognitive filter for decision making” (p. 1001). No longer does the offender view himself or herself as a criminal; rather, the offender begins to accept the self-view as a good worker, spouse, and/or parent. The offender then, using this new prosocial identity, determines if certain behaviors, such as criminal behavior, are congruent with the responsibilities and expectations of the new roles he or she is assuming. Because

antisocial behavior is not compatible with this new prosocial identity, the offender is likely to desist from crime. The final cognitive shift, the change in how the offender views criminal and deviant behavior, is the culmination of the three prior cognitive transformations. In this stage, the offender begins to view criminal and deviant behavior as negative and unappealing, while viewing prosocial behaviors as desirable. Thus, the offender no longer has the motivation or believes the prior rationalizations that led to his or her prior participation in deviant behavior; rather, the offender is now motivated to engage in prosocial behaviors that are compatible with his or her new self-identity. When this final cognitive transformation occurs, Giordano et al. argue the desistance process essentially is complete and criminal behavior is highly unlikely.

The Integration of Emotions to the Theory of Cognitive Transformation In 2007, Giordano et al. revised their theory of cognitive transformation to include the role of emotions, particularly love, and the offender’s “emotional self” in the desistance process (p. 1608). Giordano et al. argue a strictly cognitive approach to explaining desistance is incomplete. Rather, they postulate that emotions also facilitate crime and emotional transformations are an important aspect of the desistance process. Specifically, they present three life-course changes in the “emotional realm” that are associated with the desistance process: (1) the “diminution of negative emotions originally connected to criminal behavior,” (2) “a gradual diminution of positive emotions connected to crime,” and (3) “an increased ability to regulate or manage the emotions in socially acceptable ways” (p. 1610). Giordano et al. argue that the addition of the emotional realm in explaining desistance is especially important when explaining the beginning stages of moving from an antisocial to a prosocial lifestyle. Rather than the offender intentionally choosing to change his or her behavior, emotions have a strong influence on how and why the offender first develops a general openness for change. Emotions, especially love for another person, also influence the offender’s receptiveness to hooks for change, provide informal social control,

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

and provide the offender with an emotional role model to help the offender envision a new prosocial way of life. Finally, Giordano et al. propose that a loving relationship filled with good emotions will reduce the negative (e.g., anger) and positive (e.g., excitement) emotions associated with criminal offending, provide social support to help offenders manage their emotions, and lead to strong emotional connections to prosocial behaviors and relationships that replace the offender’s attachments to his or her prior antisocial lifestyle. This strong emotional connection to a prosocial lifestyle also helps solidify the offender’s cognitive transformations that resulted in the offender’s new prosocial self-identity and rejection of deviant behaviors. Thus, the combination of prosocial bonds and both cognitive and emotional transformations ultimately results in the offender’s desistance from criminal behavior. Overall, the theory of cognitive transformation is an evolving theory. Beginning as a response to Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control and evolving to include the emotional realm in the desistance process, the theory of cognitive transformation is an important addition to the explanation of the desistance process. The theory provides one of the most comprehensive explanations of desistance as it considers the social, cognitive, and now emotional influences on the desistance of criminal behavior and should be subjected to empirical tests in the future. Cheryl Lero Jonson See also Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistence; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

References and Further Readings Giordano, P. C., Cernkovich, S. A., & Rudolph, J. L. (2002). Gender, crime, and desistance: Toward a theory of cognitive transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 990–1064. Giordano, P. C., Schroeder, R. D., & Cernkovich, S. A. (2007). Emotions and crime over the life course: A neo-Meadian perspective on criminal continuity and change. American Journal of Sociology, 112, 1603–1661.

373

Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys to age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laub, J. H., Sampson, R. J., & Sweeten, G. A. (2006). Assessing Sampson and Laub’s life-course theory of crime. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 313–333). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime Born in Poland, Sheldon Glueck became Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard. He and his wife Eleanor were pioneers in the analysis of criminal careers. They began by studying various samples of delinquents passing through Massachusetts reformatories and following up their subsequent involvements with the criminal justice system. Their work was noteworthy for diligence and comprehensiveness in the collection and collation of information from a variety of sources. They were impressed by the early onset of serious antisocial behavior, by the rapid decrease of offending with increasing age, by the persistent misconduct of a hard core of juvenile offenders, and by the apparent ineffectiveness of prevailing systems of probation and incarceration. They then embarked upon an ambitious project intended to lead to the identification of root causes of delinquency. They would compare the criminal career courses of matching pairs of delinquents and non-delinquents from similar social backgrounds. This project and its subsequent follow-up work occupied them for the rest of their working lives. The resulting publications caused heated debate among criminological theorists and stimulated concern about juvenile justice policies.

The Gluecks’ Research Projects A sample of 500 boys with court records of persistent delinquency, drawn from two corrective

374

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

schools, were to be compared with a sample of non-delinquent boys from state schools, matched individually for age, general intelligence, ethnic origin, and residence in underprivileged neighborhoods. The mean age of the samples was 14 years, 6 months, a majority had IQs somewhat below average, and nearly all were living in delinquencyridden neighborhoods. The aim was to control for factors generally recognized as contributing to male delinquency and to discover what additional factors in the histories of individual boys and their families significantly distinguished delinquents from non-delinquents. Their strategy was to amass data on a very large number of factors supposed to promote delinquency with a view to identifying which factors, and combination of factors, were most influential in the production and continuance of delinquent behavior. They collected data on numerous features of the boys’ personal, family, and environmental histories. These data were obtained from home interviews, social and penal agency records, school reports, psychological tests, a psychiatric interview, a medical examination, and bodily measurements. On every item of their past on which the boys were assessed, they were ranked into a small number of categories—such as family breakdown (home broken/home not broken) and club attendance per week (two or more/ once/less than once/sporadic). Based upon their retrospectively assessed data from childhood, the Gluecks compiled prediction tables of future criminal behavior. They claimed that measurements of features of the family backgrounds and social circumstances at ages as young as six could produce reliable predictors of adolescent delinquency. They believed that the identification of combinations of factors in an individual’s background that correlated with the likelihood of a criminal conviction would reveal the fundamental causes of crime. Their views about the factors that are important in the genesis of continuing criminality continue to reverberate to this day. The Gluecks reported that assessments of personality traits derived from psychiatric interviews with the boys discriminated between delinquents and non-delinquents with much the same degree of efficiency as did the family background factors. One may suspect that this was because the interviews concentrated on self-confessions of bad behavior. It is well known that nothing predicts

future offending as well as does a history of past offending. For instance, in the Cambridge study, school teachers’ reports on pupils’ behavior proved at least as effective predictors of future offending as family background (West & Farrington, 1977). Surprisingly, the Gluecks found a similar degree of discrimination was produced from indications of character derived from blind scoring of the boys’ responses to the Rorschach ink blot test. This is puzzling as it is regarded as a particularly subjective projection test and is little used today for predictive purposes. To produce their final prediction tables the Gluecks selected five of the most discriminatory and meaningful of the family background factors, namely discipline of the boy by father (overstrict or erratic/lax/firm but kindly); supervision of boy by mother (unsuitable/fair/suitable); affection of father for boy (indifferent or hostile/warm); affection of mother for boy (indifferent or hostile/warm); cohesiveness of the family (unintegrated or some elements of cohesion/cohesive). Each of these categorical labels was defined as closely as possible. Thus, cohesiveness meant: “Strong emotional ties among the [family] members, joint interests, pride in their home.” Each of the five key family background factors was very significantly discriminatory. For example, among boys whose maternal supervision was rated as having been “unsuitable,” 83.2 percent were delinquents, compared with only 9.9 percent of delinquents among those rated as having had “suitable maternal supervision.” When the five ratings were combined into a total score, only 16.0 percent of those with favorable scores (under 250) were delinquents compared with 79.1 percent of those with unfavorable scores (250 or more). This looks like a potentially extremely useful exercise in prediction. But even if the split at score 250 divided the sample into roughly equal numbers, it would mean that, had this been a real life prediction, some 50 boys would have been wrongly identified as potential delinquents.

Physique and Delinquency In 1956, the Gluecks provide more detailed analyses of their measures of physique. Their classification of physique into mesomorph, endomorph, and ectomorph was based on measurements taken on half life-size nude photographs. By no means

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

were all individuals pure representatives of their physical type, but each was allocated according to his dominant characteristics. Mesomorphs were heavy-built with prominent muscle and bone, ectomorphs were relatively tall and thin with more surface area in proportion to their mass, and endomorphs were more rounded in build with relatively large abdominal cavity. The names are somewhat metaphorically derived from the three layers of embryonic development that produce respectively muscle and bone, skin and central nervous system, and intestines and internal organs. Similar to others before them (e.g., E. Kretchmer), the Gluecks found significant differences in temperament between the different physiques. The trait “sensitivity” defined as acute awareness of conflicting situations and stimuli and of their implications, resulting in some inhibition of action, had not been found to be associated with delinquency, but it appeared relatively prominent among ectomorphs. Whereas many of the individual traits and social factors in childhood that were associated with delinquency were similarly distributed within the body types, some were more frequent among mesopmorphs. The most outstanding finding was a high prevalence of mesomorphs among the delinquent sample and a relatively low prevalence among ectomorphs. Traits of “adventurousness” and “uninhibited motor response to stimuli” were associated with delinquency among all physical types, but were significantly more characteristic of mesomorphy than of any other physical type. It was assumed that although exercise and diet might have some influence, physique was a relatively fixed, constitutional factor. Mesomorphs might have vulnerability to delinquency because of their greater strength and ability in physical conflict and because of their impulsive and uninhibited traits. On the other hand, in a favorable environment, they might be at an advantage—for example in competitive sport

Later Reflections In 1962, the Gluecks attempted further analysis of interactions of social factors with constitutional factors. Traits such as “stubbornness,” which appeared unrelated to most of the social background factors that had been assessed, were arguably predominantly constitutionally based. In

375

contrast, traits such as “feelings of insecurity,” which were unrelated to body type but correlated with “low supervision” and “lax discipline” by mother and “uncohesive” families, were presumably largely conditioned more by environment than constitution. Other traits, strongly linked with physique, were also linked with family factors. Thus, “uninhibited motor responses” correlated with “disorderly home, poor management of family income.” “Broken home” appeared to have powerful environmental and constitutional causes. They concluded that a multiplicity of constitutional factors, home and family life and external environment, including “delinquent subculture,” determined delinquent or conforming outcomes. The aim of therapeutic intervention should be to ameliorate as many as possible of the perceived pressures and obstacles to social adjustment. In 1968, the Gluecks reflected on the results of their researches and concluded that their follow-up work, which included interviews with substantial proportions of both the delinquent and non-­ delinquent samples at ages 25 and 31, confirmed their earlier findings. They found that half of the delinquents had become non-offenders during the second follow-up period (25–31), but they did not have data on the final termination of criminal careers. They noted, however, that the mere passage of time had more influence on desistance than any of the deterrent or rehabilitative interventions that had been applied. Their most important theoretical conclusion was that there exist powerful factors of individual biological make-up, parental upbringing and personal temperament that combine, in the face of economic and environmental pressures, to make delinquent developments highly likely. In particular, they emphasized the malign influence of unloving, neglectful, and incompetent parents, of energetic and uninhibited expressions of hostility and resistance to school discipline by the boys, and of the continuance of delinquent attitudes and behavior with deleterious effect on employment prospects and general social adjustment as adults.

Methodological and Theoretical Shortcomings Although often cited as a prediction research, the Glueck project was not a truly prospective study.

376

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

The risk factors present at an early age were assessed retrospectively, making it hard to eliminate the possibility of bias, especially in the evaluation of such subjective items as “affection of mother for boy.” It may be possible, by training, to ensure that the different workers in a project are applying similar standards of judgment. But in categorical classification of items such as “discipline,” it is difficult to guarantee that the same standards are being applied in attempted repetitions elsewhere. Any research into causal influences necessarily involves decisions about what to look for. The Gluecks wanted to be as comprehensive as possible, but they were working at a time when psychoanalytic views about stable character formation being dependent upon family relationships in infancy were influential, both in criminology and in social work. Accordingly, they laid perhaps undue stress on parent-child relationships, especially mother-child bonding in infancy. In this respect, their approach resembled that of the British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby, who considered this a crucial factor. Matching delinquents and non-delinquents for environmental deprivation and ethnicity virtually eliminated consideration of crucial sociological factors such as material and educational deprivation, racial discrimination and class-related impediments to accessing rewarding employment. Influenced by William Healy and Augusta Bronner, early exponents of the importance of character formation, the Gluecks emphasized individual rather than group differences. Rather than considering external events and pressures, they attributed failure to desist from offending to personal retardation in “maturation” and they focused on family management of limited resources rather than the effect of poverty per se. For a variety of reasons, the Gluecks overestimated the accuracy of their prediction methods. First, there was a judgmental element in some of their ratings that could have provided scope for bias. Second, they used distinctly bimodal samples, with delinquents contrasted with extreme nondelinquents, boys from equally bad neighborhoods who had been resistant to delinquent pressures. Samples from a national population with a wider social and economic class distribution would be expected to contain a higher proportion of less predictable individuals. Third, by selecting their

predictive items from a large number of measures, they capitalized on chance effects. In a repeat survey the phenomenon of regression to the mean would probably produce smaller effects. Fourth, their initial predictions were of the recorded offending of young adolescents, later extended to young adults, but they had no means of knowing how far their predictive criteria would be applicable to the extension of “criminality” into later adult life. The implausibility of their claims about prediction reached a climax with the assertion that potential delinquents could be reliably identified from family relationships observable at age 2–3 (Glueck, 1964). Although emphasizing the complex interaction of the factors they measured, the Gluecks employed none of the methods of multivariate analysis available today. They paid lip service to the notion of causal pathways but produced no distinctive theories and no testable predictions. They amassed a catalogue of relevant factors, but with no clear prescription for interventions, save to take many things into account.

Some Limitations of Criminal Career Surveys The Gluecks’ attempts to define the essence of criminality and to determine the crucial personal and social factors that produce it remain a core concern of criminologists. Criminal career analysis is certainly a valuable tool, but despite recent methodological advances some fundamental limitations in these researches must be acknowledged. Crime is a culture-bound phenomenon, defined by differing legal systems. Behaviors such as adultery and alcohol consumption are crimes in some countries and not in others. Even within countries of the Western world, with roughly comparable legal systems, there are cultural differences in social behavior, in the distribution of wealth, and in tolerance of nonconformity, which influence how many and what kinds of people are convicted of crime. Sheldon Glueck’s early book, War Criminals, deals with atrocities in circumstances and with causes very different from those of young Massachusetts delinquents. His response then contrasts with his later more liberal approach to criminal justice. Writing when the Axis powers were facing defeat in World War II, he argued for the application of legal principles of just deserts to those responsible for state-supported crimes. He

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

deplored the escape from punishment of nearly 900 Germans accused by the allies of war crimes, including the Kaiser, which he blamed on failure to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He predicted (p. 174) that long-term imprisonment or capital punishment would need to be applied to many German war criminals. He was reflecting contemporary American feeling and could hardly have foreseen subsequent legal developments in restorative justice, the formation of peace and reconciliation commissions, or the reactions against capital punishment. Even in times of peace and economic stability, the findings of any one survey do not necessarily generalize to samples taken in other places or among other generations. To give just one example, the Gluecks found that mothers working outside the home correlated positively with delinquency in their sons. Other investigators have reported the reverse. Where substitute child care arrangements are available and mothers are keen to improve the family income, the outcome can be different. One is not dealing with physical laws that have near universal applicability. Crime is not a single entity. Although there may be some overlap, individuals who become some relatively unusual types of criminal, such as pedophiles, big business fraudsters, or domestic murderers, often fail to display the lack of social bonds typical of the majority of offenders; indeed, some are well integrated into higher echelons of society. In general, population surveys, such as the Gluecks conducted, where criminality is measured by the number of an individual’s arrests or convictions, the less common forms of crime are submerged. The overall statistical trends reflect the characteristics of the majority, namely common thieves, burglars, and violence-prone young males.

Rescuing the Gluecks’ Data The shortcomings of the Gluecks’ publications and their unpopularity with sociologists might have caused them to be completely forgotten. However, after their deaths, Robert Sampson and John Laub unearthed their records. They then reworked and reanalyzed the Gluecks’ data using more sophisticated statistics, extended enquiries up through age 70, and reinterviewed 52 of the subjects when they were in their 60s. Some of the Gluecks’ contentions

377

were confirmed and interesting new findings emerged, notably about developments in later life. Sampson and Laub’s research began by preparing the data for more rigorous scrutiny. Ratings of the same items from different sources (e.g., interviews with the subjects, parental reports, and teachers’ reports) were compared and amalgamated to produce composite rating scales that more faithfully represented underlying concepts such as “antisociality.” Data on factors external to the family, such as association with delinquent peers, changes following marriage or joining the armed services, which were either neglected by or not available to the Gluecks, were included in the analyses. Many of the Gluecks’ empirical findings were confirmed, notably the influence on juvenile delinquency potential of parental behaviors, such as harsh and erratic punishments and neglectful maternal supervision. However, behaviors within the family were themselves mediators of external pressures, such as socioeconomic status. Sampson and Laub favored a social control interpretation in preference to the effect of innate individual characteristics. They saw impediments to social integration as crucial to the development of antisocial attitudes and behavior. They found evidence for a vicious cycle of rebellious behavior fostered by inappropriate upbringing and failures at school further alienating delinquents from employment opportunities and social stability in adulthood. One interesting feature of Laub and Sampson’s research was their interviews with elderly former delinquents, particularly the personal accounts of desistance from crime, which did not always describe desistance from other forms of antisocial behavior. The same factors emerging from the quantitative analysis featured in the interview analysis, particularly the effects of marriage, enrolment in the armed forces, and securing satisfactory employment. The continuance or acquisition of alcoholism was revealed as particularly liable to produce worse than expected outcomes, and a new positive factor, the men’s own resolution to change, something hitherto ignored, appeared significant.

The Gluecks’ Legacy Notwithstanding the limitations already mentioned, there have been great advances in the range

378

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

and methodology of criminal career studies since the time of the Gluecks. Samples have been drawn from a variety of locations, such as London, Philadelphia, Stockholm, and Dunedin. Unlike the Gluecks’ pioneering efforts, projects have become fully prospective, collecting data contemporaneously and following the delinquent life course until offenses become a rarity. Many observations advanced by the Gluecks have since been vindicated and amplified. One such example is the close association between persistent delinquent behavior and a multiplicity of other manifestations of social deviance in later adult life, such as alcohol and other drug abuse, family breakdowns, sexual irresponsibility and economic failure. Persistent offenders not only run foul of the criminal justice system, but also they create problems for themselves and others in many aspects of life. For this reason, successful schemes of delinquency prevention are of collateral benefit to the delinquents’ families and the communities in which they live. The Gluecks’ views on socio-biological etiology were unpopular when exclusively sociological theories became dominant in criminology. Bodily shape, their chief indicator of constitutional factors, was imprecise and uninformative as to the physical processes responsible. They were optimistic that progress might be made through developments in electroencephalography. In the event, many more developments in neurophysiology have come about consequent upon magnetic resonance imaging and other techniques for measuring brain activity and in advances in the pharmacology of neurotransmitters. Above all, the study of DNA has revolutionized research in genetics. One might have expected all these new approaches to have proved revelatory in the matter of the biological origin of, for example, aggressive tendencies, and to have provided new methods of treating antisocial behavior. In fact, progress has not been spectacular. In regard to gross behavior disorders following severe head injuries or birth trauma, the cause may be clear enough. But such cases are rare and without impact on the generality of offending. On the other hand, although as yet without much influence on social policy, the Gluecks’ faith in biological influences on common-place offending has been justified by the discovery of correlations between offending and measurable variations in normal physiological functioning.

To mention just a few examples, a slow resting pulse rate, indicative of sluggish autonomic arousal, has been repeatedly shown to be linked to the development of antisocial behavior. The hyperactivity– attention deficit syndrome has been found to have some genetic basis and to be treatable with Ritalin. Likewise, statistical linkage has been reported between a history of perinatal pathology and antisocial behavior in children and adults in individuals who do not necessarily display measurable physical signs. But, as the Gluecks foresaw, the behavioral outcomes are always mediated by the individual’s upbringing and environment. Some ideas propounded by the Gluecks have been modified in the light of subsequent research. Save for boys who swiftly abandon their relatively minor lawbreaking on passing adolescence, the Gluecks regarded delinquents as predestined by their childhood background to years of social conflict. They were essentially passive observers who watched what seemed to be more or less inevitable outcomes. They collected little data on crucial events in adult life, such as marriage or moving away from a criminal environment, that have since been shown to have a significant bearing on prospects of desistance or continuance. Like most researchers of the past, the Gluecks concentrated on risk factors and vulnerability, but the importance of resilience and protective factors is now recognized. For example, an ability to bond successfully at school, to secure rewarding employment, to exercise a talent, or to acquire a supportive life partner can help forestall or bring about desistance of offending. Modern researchers have sought to identify within their population samples stable statistical patterns in criminal convictions over the total lifespan. It is striking how consistently similar patterns have been reported. All agree that the general trend is of swift increase in frequency of offending up to early adult life with steady decrease thereafter until almost complete drop-out by 60 years. The peak age for crime varies with the type of offense, but all types decline systematically with increasing age. An early onset and high frequency of offending is followed by longer and more serious criminal careers and among this group are found the hard core of most chronic and persistent offenders. The Gluecks’ high-risk factors in childhood are certainly present in the histories of a high proportion

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

of the small minority of adults who make up this hard core, but when detected in childhood these same risk factors are weak predictors of which individuals will be long-term offenders. Prediction tables are bedeviled with false positives. Prediction is even more questionable in relation to latecomers to crime with no record of juvenile offending, a group absent from the Gluecks’ research and, until recently, not much studied. Attempts have been made to distinguish the group of offenders who, once past adolescence, continue offending during their early adult years from those who will be persistent offenders for a longer period. The meaning of such statistical groupings in terms of offending dynamics is a topic of active debate. The Gluecks rightly condemned the futility of seeking unitary causes and emphasized the complex interaction of factors that might have different effects according to external circumstance or an individual’s personal characteristics. Improved statistical methodologies have helped to trace possible causative pathways, to distinguish primary and secondary causes and to give more realistic weights to particular influences. A large measure of indeterminacy remains in the identification of future risk, but the broad picture set out by the Gluecks in regard to young offenders has not greatly changed. It might be supposed that longitudinal prospective studies are not geared to the testing of effects of intervention, but given large enough samples it is possible to apply innovative schemes to subsamples, leaving the wider sample as an excellent control group. A disadvantage of prospective surveys, especially in regard to formulating policy guidance, is the long time before results emerge, but accelerated longitudinal designs, with cohorts selected at successive starting ages and followed up simultaneously, provide indications more swiftly. Pilot testing of schemes for intervention is important, because outcome can be unpredictable. Interventions based on the identification of individuals at risk can backfire through the effect of stigmatization, and interventions directed at the community at large, concerning such matters as housing and education, have social implications beyond the ambit of criminology. The Gluecks were not completely devoid of proposals for intervention. They pointed to the need to start early and to

379

the crucial importance of sound parenting. Both propositions have proved valuable. The effectiveness of pre-school programs of social and educational enrichment has been amply demonstrated, and schemes for parental training are now in vogue. One may well conclude that, notwithstanding their shortcomings in statistical methodology, their neglect of the effects of social factors and historic events, and a certain vagueness about policy implications, the Gluecks’ impressive labors were forerunners of what has become an important branch of criminological research. Donald West See also Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory; Kretschmer, Ernest: Physique and Character; Loeber, Rolf and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime; Sampson, Robert J. and John H. Laub, Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency; Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature

References and Further Readings Blokland, A. (2005). Crime over the life span: Trajectories of criminal behaviour in Dutch offenders. Leiden, Netherlands: NSCR. Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal care and mental health. Geneva: World Health Organization. Farrington, D. P., & Coid, J. (2003). Early prevention of adult antisocial behaviour. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Farrington, D. P., & Welsh, B. C. (2007). Saving children from a life of crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glueck, E. (1964). The identification of potential delinquents at 2–3 years of age. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 12, 5–16. Glueck, S. (1944). War criminals: Their prosecution and punishment. New York: Harper & Brothers. Glueck. S. (1956). Physique and delinquency. New York: Harper & Brothers. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1930). 500 criminal careers. New York: Alfred Knopf. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1934). One thousand juvenile delinquents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1937). Later criminal careers. New York: Commonwealth Fund. Glueck S., & Glueck, E. (1943). Criminal careers in retrospect. New York: Commonwealth Fund. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1950). Unravelling juvenile delinquency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

380

Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency

Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1952). Delinquents in the making. New York: Harper & Brothers. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1962). Family environment and delinquency. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1968). Delinquents and nondelinquents in perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hawkins, J. D., & Herrenkohl, T. I. (2007). Prevention in the school years. In D. P. Farrington & J. W. Coid (Eds.), Early prevention of adult antisocial behaviour. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Healy, W., & Bronner, A. F. (1926). Delinquents and criminals: Their making and unmaking. New York: Macmillan. Kretchmer, E. (1926). Physique and character. New York: Harcourt Brace. Laub, J. H., & Sampson R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys to age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lösel, F., & Bender, D. (2003). Protective factors and resilience. In D. P. Farrington & J. Coid (Eds.), Early prevention of adult delinquency. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moffitt, T. E. (2006). “Life-course persistent” versus “adolescence-limited” antisocial behavior. In D. Cicchetti & D. Cohen (Eds.), Developmental psychopathology (2nd ed., pp. 570–598). New York: Wiley. Piquero, A. R., Farrington, D. P., & Blumstein, A. (2007). Key issues in criminal career research: New analyses of the Cambridge Study in delinquent development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Raine, A., Reynolds, C., Venables, P. H., & Mednick, S. A. (1997). Biosocial bases of aggressive behavior in childhood: Resting heart rate, skin conductance orienting, and physique. In A. Raine, P. Brennan, D. P. Farrington, S. A. Mednick (Eds.), Biosocial bases of violence. New York: Plenum. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (2003). Life-course desisters? Trajectories of crime among delinquent boys followed to age 70. Criminology, 41, 555–592. Thornberry, T. P., & Krohn, M. D. (Eds.). (2003). Taking stock of delinquency: An overview of findings from contemporary longitudinal studies. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. West, D. J., & Farrington, D. P. (1977). The delinquent way of life. London: Heinemann.

Wikström, P.-O. H. (1990). Age and crime in a Stockholm cohort. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 6, 61–83. Wolfgang, M. E., Thornberry, T. P., & Figlio, R. M. (1987). From boy to man, from delinquency to crime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist and pioneer in intelligence testing in the early-20th-century United States, was one of the most prominent proponents of eugenic theories of delinquent behavior. The term eugenics, literally well born, is etymologically derived from classical Greek. It was coined by Francis Galton, a scientist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. In the United States, the eugenic movement was at its apex in the first decades of the 20th century and won a number of admirers with its promise to solve the problems of crime, pauperism, vagrancy, and race suicide through scientific intervention. Eugenics strongly influenced contemporary behavioral sciences, and eugenic theories of crime found an enthusiastic audience among many contemporary jurists, criminologists, penologists, and others associated with the criminal justice system. Goddard received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Clark University in 1899. He joined the Training School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls in Vineland, New Jersey, in 1906 as the director of its newly established Psychological Research Laboratory. He was strongly influenced by Galton and Gregor Mendel’s theories of genetic inheritance (Zenderland, 2001). It was during his tenure at Vineland that he published some of his most well-known works on heredity and intelligence. His initial project at Vineland was to study the genealogical background of the students in order to find out the hereditary physical and psychological traits that could be linked to their cognitive disabilities. The first iteration of his theory on the link between feeblemindedness and delinquent behavior appeared in his monograph The Kallikak Family: A Study in Hereditary Feeblemindedness.

Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency

The Kallikak Family was a work in the contemporary genre of “family studies” of intellectual disability and delinquent behavior first popularized by the publication of Robert Dugdale’s The Jukes in 1876. The study of the Kallikak family began with Deborah, a student at Vineland who was born at a poorhouse and admitted to the school in 1897 with a history of truant behavior. Goddard set out to find the roots of her condition through a careful genealogical search that led him to a family that he gave the fictitious name of Kallikak (from Kalos and Kakos, respectively good and bad in Greek). The Kallikaks descended from one Martin Kallikak, Sr., who, while coming from a “good” family, fathered an illegitimate child with a feebleminded woman. This child, Martin Kallikak, Jr., was the great-great grandfather of Deborah and the ancestor of another 480 persons over six generations. Goddard traced the original source of “feeblemindedness” to Kallikak Jr. and argued that the union between other feebleminded persons in successive generations exacerbated this condition. A very large percentage of Kallikak Jr.’s descendents were found to be suffering from mental and cognitive disabilities with a very marked propensity for delinquent behavior, including alcoholism, petty crime, and sexual offenses. The general depravity and despondency in the lives of Kallikak Jr.’s descendents was in sharp contrast to the other branch of the family, which was the product of Kallikak Sr.’s marriage to a “wellborn” woman and included generations of law-abiding citizens who were successful in their chosen professions and upstanding members of their communities. The diagram of the extended family tree showed a clear division between normalcy and delinquency between the two branches according to Goddard. The scientific methodology of diagnosing mental aptitude was based on the “Measuring Scale of Intelligence” designed by Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon in France. This was composed of a series of tests—including visual perception, memory, verbal skills, abstract reasoning, and comprehension abilities—that were designed to measure cognitive abilities and mental age of school children. Goddard claimed that these tests established a preponderance of feeblemindedness among the delinquent branch of the family and underlined the importance of heredity rather than environmental and situational factors in determining moral behavior.

381

At the same time, he conceded that the contemporary scientific understanding of heredity was not yet mature enough to establish laws of inheritance. However, he argued in The Kallikak Family that Mendel’s theory of genetics and inheritance among plants, particularly the transmission of recessive and dominant characters across generations, could be usefully adopted in order to study human heredity in this context. Stephen Jay Gould has criticized the methodological weaknesses of Goddard and other proponents of the feeblemindedness thesis in their measurement of IQ. Gould also argues that Goddard altered the photographs of Deborah Kallikak and others in order to accentuate facial features that suggested mental retardation in order to make his case. In the concluding section of the book, Goddard claimed that feeblemindedness was a serious threat to a healthy society. In his view, feebleminded people tend to reproduce at a higher level than “normal” people. In turn, the rapid rise of this section of the population posed a clear danger of moral decay and economic loss. The nation is deprived of productive workers, and an inordinate burden was imposed on the public purse for taking care of them. Goddard suggested that these people needed to be segregated from the general population and housed in special colonies by the government. These policies would not only protect the normal members of the society and reduce the birth rate of feebleminded people but also provide for their proper care. This approach may lead to a short-term increase in government spending but will provide for a great return to the investment by reducing the social, moral, and economic cost of the problem feeblemindedness in the long run. According to Goddard, the other option—that is, eugenic sterilization—should only be used as a supplementary measure because the science of genetics was still in its infancy and scientists still had not established exact laws of heredity. The Kallikak Family proved to be a cause célèbre in the contemporary eugenic circles. In the light of its success, Goddard set out to expand the scope of his research through examining the genealogical history of 327 families of the patient/inmates of the Vineland School, which was published in a book titled Feeblemindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. Goddard and his colleagues created a scale of measuring feeblemindedness among the

382

Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency

sample according to the performance in the BinetSimon tests. Goddard identified three levels of intellectual incompetence: “idiots” with a mental age of up to 2 years, “imbeciles” with mental age of 3 to 7, and the “moron” or “feebleminded” with the mental age of 7 to 12 years. Goddard saw individuals in the last category as posing a serious threat to the society because they are not easily identifiable as their behavior is often misinterpreted as common ignorance rather than a serious mental defect. Goddard argued that though there was no accurate record of the number of feebleminded people in the nation, almost 2 to 3 percent of school students of the nation suffered from some form of intellectual deficiency. He distinguished insanity from feeblemindedness as being completely different forms of mental conditions. While the former was a degenerative process that made an individual lose the mental faculties once possessed, the latter was a case of arrested intellectual development since early childhood. However, he cautioned against making a binary distinction between normal and feebleminded traits because the long history of crossbreeding results in complex combinations of these traits that may manifest themselves in varying degrees of intensity across generations. He argued that criminality itself is not hereditary. Rather, it is deficiency of intelligence that is passed on from generation to generation, and it renders the feebleminded person incapable of exercising moral judgment and comprehending the wider consequence of her or his actions. Goddard ruled out the importance of environmental factors influencing criminality because he thought that feebleminded people are a threat to public security and to their own well-being under any condition. Responsibility for one’s life and conduct with prudence and abiding by the laws and customs of the society are beyond the mental capacity of feebleminded individuals; therefore, they are easily tempted to follow their base desires. Such people are beyond redemption. They cannot be taught the virtues of an honest life and may be seen as public health risk as carriers of the disease of feeblemindedness, according to Goddard. Goddard went through a whole list of delinquencies—including alcoholism, pauperism, prostitution, and various forms of petty criminality—that

he believed resulted from feeblemindedness and consequent lack of moral judgment. By his estimation, up to 25 to 50 percent of prison inmates in the nation were feebleminded. However, he saw the incarceration of feebleminded as criminals as ineffective and unjust because these individuals required custodial care rather than penal supervision. Thus, he called for these individuals to be segregated and housed in special colonies where they could be trained to live a somewhat productive and peaceful life under proper medical supervision. Goddard was invited by the immigration authorities to lead a research project on the intelligence of newly arrived immigrants in Ellis Island. Goddard administered the Binet-Simon test to a group of immigrants selected by government physicians. His diagnosis of feeblemindedness among a vast majority of Jewish, Hungarian, Russian, and other immigrants from Eastern Europe resonated with contemporary anti-immigrant prejudices. While he said that this preselected group was by no means a representative sample of the total number of immigrants passing through Ellis Island, he nevertheless argued that probably a vast percentage of all immigrants were feebleminded. Goddard praised the vigilant efforts of the doctors monitoring immigration, though, unlike many other contemporary eugenics, he did not favor the restriction of immigration by national origin (Zenderland, 2001). The eugenic movement has to come to symbolize a dark chapter in American history when thousands of people were incarcerated and sterilized under the auspices of the so-called defective delinquency laws promulgated in several states. However, eugenics started losing its scientific clout and political patronage from the late 1930s onward. Some psychiatrists challenged the notion of heritable mental deficiency as a principle causative factor for crime and focused on the role of emotional disturbances and early life experiences on the origin of pathological behavior (Healy & Bronner, 1936). The prevalence of biological and psychological determinism within American criminology was challenged by the emergent environmental and sociological perspectives that eventually emerged as a dominant discourse. Goddard himself recanted on some of his ideas about feeblemindedness in his later career. He conceded that

Goffman, Erving: Asylums

feeblemindedness is not necessarily an incurable condition, and he spoke out against the sterilization statutes of the defective delinquency laws. Saran Ghatak See also Dugdale, Robert L.: The Jukes; Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism; Hare, Robert D.: Psycopathy and Crime; Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve

References and Further Readings Black, E. (2003). The war against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Goddard, H. H. (1912). The Kallikak family: A history of feeblemindedness. New York: Macmillan. Goddard, H. H. (1915). Feeblemindedness: Its causes and consequences. New York: Macmillan. Goddard, H. H. (1917). Mental tests and the immigrants. Journal of Delinquency, 2, 243–277. Gould, S. J. (1991). The mismeasure of man. New York: W. W. Norton. Healy, W., & Bronner, A. (1936). New light on delinquency and its treatment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rafter, N. H. (1997). Creating born criminals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1991). The Sutherland– Glueck debate: The sociology of criminological knowledge. American Journal of Sociology, 96, 1402–1440. Smith, J. D. (1985). Minds made feeble: The myth and the legacy of the Kallikaks. Rockville, MD: Aspen. Trent, J. W. (1994). Inventing the feeble mind: The history of mental retardation in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zenderland, L. (2001). Measuring minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the origin of American intelligence testing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Goffman, Erving: Asylums Asylums was published in 1961 by Erving Goffman after he spent 1955–1956 collecting ethnographic field data about the subjective experiences of hospital inmates at St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., a federal institution of mental health.

383

Goffman was a visiting member of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health for 3 years, from 1954 until 1957, and that agency funded the research that ultimately formed the basis for Asylums. As mentioned, Goffman employed ethnographic field methods to collect data for the book; ethnography is a qualitative research methodology that involves the study of a particular group through the use of participant observation and interview techniques. Goffman completed his Ph.D. in 1953 from the University of Chicago where he studied under Everett Hughes. Hughes is identified as a member of the sociological tradition known as the Chicago School, and he studied under the well-known scholars Robert Ezra Park and Ernest W. Burgess. It is through Hughes that Goffman is linked with the Chicago School, and it is perhaps the source of his qualitative, interactionist sociology.

Background Of the various paradigms in sociology, Goffman is most frequently associated with symbolic interactionism, which emphasizes the importance of interaction over structure in explaining social action. The emergence of symbolic interactionism as a bona fide sociological paradigm can be traced back to the lectures of George Herbert Mead; however, it was his student, Herbert Blumer, who coined the term. Although Goffman resisted identifying himself with this perspective, Goffman’s own theoretical canon is quite consistent with Mead’s work (Rawls, 1987). For example, Anne Warfield Rawls suggested that the first tenet of Goffman’s interaction theory involves the notion that “the social self needs to be continually achieved in and through interaction” (p. 136), which is similar to Mead’s contention that “the self” arises from social experiences. However, it should be noted that, while linkages between the Chicago School, symbolic interactionism, and Goffman’s theoretical treatises can be made quite effortlessly, these connections have been brought into question. For example, Blumer openly critiqued Goffman’s work, pointing out that his approach focuses too heavily on the individual or the micro-level of analysis and ignores the broader collective, macro-level. This might seem to be an odd criticism coming from a symbolic

384

Goffman, Erving: Asylums

interactionist such as Blumer, but the individualist dilemma is at the crux of most criticisms and misapprehensions of Goffman’s work. According to Jeffrey C. Alexander, the individualist dilemma results when sociologists maintain that social action occurs primarily through face-toface interaction between individuals, and collective patterns emerge randomly from these dyadic relations; however, these same theorists then drew from collective patterns to explain face-to-face interactions. This dualism, or explaining social action by appealing to face-to-face interactions at the expense of deterministic collective patterns, is rampant in Goffman’s sociology. Alexander contended that Goffman’s work suffered from a “brilliant ambiguity,” which ultimately allowed it to draw fire from symbolic interactionists like Blumer. His ambiguity also left his theoretical musings open to structural and systematic interpretations, such as the ones offered by Randall Collins and Anthony Giddens. For example, Giddens pointed to Goffman’s description of the “total institution” in Asylums as an attempt to “approach the overall study of social organization directly” (p. 257). Still, Alexander was probably closer to the truth when he noted that the dualism between the individual and the collective is exceptionally salient in Goffman’s Asylums as he remarked, “Goffman cannot have it both ways, yet there are times when he wants to, when he simply cannot or will not decide” (p. 237). This inconsistency in Goffman’s approach led George Psathas to propose considering Goffman a social theorist malgré lui, but Giddens (among others) maintained that “Erving Goffman was one of the leading post-war sociologists of the post-war period” (p. 250). An additional criticism or observation levied against Goffman concerns the very style of his writing. Giddens identified Goffman’s style as lacking integration and resisting a “certain cumulative quality,” which makes his work “appear light-weight, brimming over with acute and delicate insights, yet lacking the overall intellectual power that derives from the endeavor of an author to grapple with general problems of society and history” (p. 251). Regardless of the various criticisms of Goffman’s writing style, his contribution to sociology was nonetheless profound. Over the course of two decades, from 1959 until 1981, Goffman published 11 books, including The

Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Behavior in Public Spaces, Frame Analysis, Gender Advertisements, and Forms of Talk. Of these, Asylums is “probably the best-known book to audiences outside academic sociology” (Smith, 2006, p. 69).

Four Essays Asylums is a collection of four distinct essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Like Goffman’s other books, the essays in Asylums have the unique quality of being comprehensible while standing alone. Despite Giddens’s contention that Goffman’s aim in focusing on the concept of the total institution in Asylums was to posit a theory of social organization or structure, the theoretical underpinnings in Asylums follow from Goffman’s groundwork in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman championed sociology for its ability to describe the nuances of everyday life and to explicate the mechanisms by which interaction contributes to the development of the self. By focusing on institutional life, the opposite of everyday life, Goffman used the dialectical method to illuminate mechanisms of interaction that contribute to the development of the social self. In other words, by examining its opposite (i.e., institutional life), Goffman advanced his understanding of everyday life. In the first essay of Asylums, “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” Goffman introduced one of his most popular concepts, the total institution, or “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (p. xiii). In contrast to everyday life where individuals work, play, and sleep in different places, with dissimilar actors, under different authorities, and oftentimes without a rational course of action, life in total institutions combines work, play, and sleep in the same space and under a single authority. Work, play, and sleep occur in the company of a finite assemblage of associates who are all treated alike and required to behave similarly as a group. A logical routine, guided by a purpose, organizes the inmates’ daily lives and meets the official goals of the institution.

Goffman, Erving: Asylums

From the concept of the total institution, Goffman then expanded his discussion to include elements of the inmate world, including disculturation or an “untraining” that occurs inside the facility that leaves an inmate incapable of navigating social situations outside the institution. Perhaps one of the more powerful accounts in the first essay deals with the process whereby inmates are stripped of their identity, which is very similar to Harold Garfinkel’s notion of a degradation ceremony. This process occurs when the individual suffers a humiliation that diminishes his or her sense of self. Goffman referred to this process as the “mortification of self,” and it is related to the privilege system of the institution. Privilege systems comprise three basic elements: “house rules” that dictate inmate conduct, tangible rewards exchanged for obedience, and punishments for breaking the rules. In the first essay, Goffman also introduced the concept of secondary adjustments to the mortified self, although he expands this term and compares it with primary adjustments in the third essay. Secondary adjustments include “the angles, knowing the ropes, conniving, gimmicks, deals, or ins” (p. 54), and prison argot or lingo also aids in the development of these skills. In addition, Goffman discussed the various modes of adaptation that inmates engage in at different stages of his or her “moral career.” These involve “situational withdrawal,” the “intransigent line,” “colonization,” and “conversion.” Inmate culture also comprises self-pity or concern, the salience of time wasted, removal activities such as card playing, TV watching, and private fantasy. Goffman also reviewed the staff world in the first part of Asylums, though his intention was always to approach an understanding of the subjective experiences of inmates and the effects on it of the total institution. As such, the staff world is awarded scant attention, and Goffman’s analysis of them reads critical at times and highlights the dilemmas that staff members face due to the different aspects of their job requirements that may compete with their own notions of selfhood. Goffman concluded the first essay with a discussion of institutional ceremonies, which are events that mediate the social distance between inmates and staff. The second essay in Asylums is “The Moral Career of the Mental Patient,” previously published

385

in the journal Psychiatry in 1959. Goffman distinguished a moral career as the changes in the patient’s sense of self that allows him or her to evaluate and judge self and others. Within this essay, the pre-patient, in-patient, and ex-patient phases of the moral career are identified, although Goffman focused his attention on the pre-patient and in-patient phases. He also honed in on the cycle of alienation that inmates experience as they encounter the degradation ceremonies associated with the total institution. The third essay, “The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital,” is the most methodologically driven essay in the volume, where Goffman demonstrated his ethnographic prowess. The most salient aspect of this essay is the efficacy of social bonds, which from a sociological perspective is quite valuable since the social control dictated by social bonds is probably the dominant criminological explanation of deviance. It is within the third chapter that Goffman also revisited adjustments to institutional life. Primary adjustments include circumstances where the inmate “is officially asked to be no more and no less than he is prepared to be, and is obliged to dwell in a world that is in fact congenial to him” (p. 189). Secondary adjustments include “any habitual arrangement by which a member of an organization employs unauthorized means, or obtains unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organizations’ assumptions as to what he should do and get and hence what he should be” (p. 189). “The Medical Model and Mental Hospital­ ization: Some Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Tinkering Trades” is the final essay that rounds out Asylums. In it, Goffman reduced psychiatry to a service occupation, and he pointed out the myriad problems and contradictions raised by this model being out of step with the custodial functions of mental facilities.

Conclusion Goffman’s Asylums offered a disquieting critique of total institutional life, which gained increased attention in the late 1960s as calls were made to deinstitutionalized various “deviant” populations (e.g., the mentally ill, the mentally challenged, juvenile offenders, adult inmates). Asylums become

386

Gordon, David M.: Political Economy and Crime

significant within criminology because it buttressed emerging theory and research showing the detrimental effect of life within correctional facilities. In particular, Goffman’s probing insights lent credence to the view that institutional environments were, by their nature, inherently detrimental to human well-being. In turn, this reality meant that total institutional settings, including prisons, were doomed to create the behaviors they were supposedly created to prevent. Wayne Gillespie See also Incarceration and Recidivism; Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey; Importation Theory; Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory; Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison

Grimshaw, A. D. (1983). Erving Goffman: A personal appreciation. Language in Society, 12, 147–148. Helmes-Hayes, R. C. (2000). The concept of social class: The contribution of Everett Hughes. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 36, 127–147. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Psathas, G. (1996). Theoretical perspectives on Goffman: Critique and commentary. Sociological Perspectives, 39, 383–391. Rawls, A. W. (1987). The interaction order sui generis: Goffman’s contribution to social theory. Sociological Theory, 5, 136–149. Smith, G. (2006). Erving Goffman. New York: Routledge. Williams, S. J. (1986). Appraising Goffman. British Journal of Sociology, 37, 348–369.

References and Further Readings Alexander, J. C. (1987). Twenty lectures: Sociological theory since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press. Blumer, H. G. (1972). Action vs interaction: Review of “Relations in Public” by Erving Goffman. Society, 9, 50–53. Chapoulie, J. M. (1996). Everett Hughes and the Chicago tradition. Sociological Theory, 14, 3–29. Collins, R. (1980). Erving Goffman and the development of modern social theory. In J. Ditton (Ed.), The view from Goffman (pp. 170–209). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Collins, R. (1986). The passing of intellectual generations: Reflections on the death of Erving Goffman. Sociological Theory, 4, 106–113. Garfinkel, H. (1956). Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology, 61, 420–424. Giddens, A. (1988). Goffman as a systematic social theorist. In P. Drew & A. Wootton (Eds.), Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order (pp. 250–279). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-toface behavior. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row.

Gordon, David M.: Political Economy and Crime David M. Gordon was not a criminologist and very little of his substantial body of work focused on crime or criminal justice. Gordon was a pioneer of modern radical political economics and is best known for his work on labor market segmentation, his analysis of social structures of accumulation and the long waves of capitalism, and his critiques of conservative economic policy. Although few of his writings were specifically criminological, Gordon’s contributions to criminological theory are significant.

Capitalism, Class, and Crime in America Gordon’s most explicit contribution to criminological theory is his article “Capitalism, Class, and Crime in America” published in Crime and Delinquency in 1973. Earlier versions of this important article had previously appeared in volumes on the political economy. But the publication of “Capitalism, Class, and Crime in America” in a major criminological journal heralded the growing significance of Marxist criminology and other perspectives within the “Critical” paradigm of criminological theory in the early 1970s. In the article, Gordon critiqued conventional assumptions held by both conservatives and liberals at the time that

Gordon, David M.: Political Economy and Crime

“crimes are committed by irrational individuals who constitute a threat to a rational social order” (p. 163). Gordon also critiqued the emergent neoclassical perspective on crime as a rational choice, espoused by orthodox economists at the onset of the 1970s who also proposed the development of punishments designed to deter rational thinkers from engaging in crime. In contrast to all of the above, Gordon offered a “radical economic analysis of crime” and argued that “crime in America flows almost inevitably from the structure of our social and economic institutions” (p. 163). Despite Gordon’s critique, the more orthodox rational choice theory of crime went on to heavily influence crime policy from the mid-1970s to the present. Gordon’s radical economic analysis of crime in the United States was based on several observations and assumptions. First, he observed that crime is ubiquitous, citing data indicating that most Americans admitted committing acts at some point in their lives for which they could have been sentenced to jail or prison. Based on the observation that crime can be found in all walks of life and in every aspect of society, Gordon argued that it is not logical to view criminal behavior as irrational and abnormal. Instead, he believed that criminal behavior is typically rational and normal given the circumstances in which individuals find themselves. Gordon also observed that there is a “dual system of justice” in the United States, reflected in high levels of public fear and intensive criminal justice system focus associated with some forms of crime, while other forms of crime, arguably equally or more harmful, are ignored (p. 165). For Gordon the concept of a dual system of justice meant, in one respect, that “[i]n the classes of offenses committed by rich and poor equally, it is rarely the rich who end up behind bars” (p. 167). But even more important are system-level disparities, such as the fact that the crimes more typically committed by the poor are defined as crimes and handled by the criminal justice system, whereas the harmful acts of the powerful are treated as civil matters. Gordon argued that, despite massive efforts and billions of taxpayer dollars directed toward a relatively small proportion of the criminal activity in the United States, government efforts fail miserably to curb even that small portion of the crime problem. That failure, he said, is because dominant perspectives on crime fail to challenge the political, economic, and social order

387

responsible for generating the particular forms of crime that are prevalent in the United States. Gordon’s radical economic analysis of crime is based on the assumption that human behavior is shaped by the social and economic structure of society. A related assumption is that the economic class structure imposes constraints on individual opportunities. Thus, explaining individual behavior requires locating individuals in the political and economic structure of society. Gordon described capitalism as an economic system that is dependent on competition and inequality, and in which economic insecurity drives people to desperately struggle over resources. In that context, crime in the United States is a rational manifestation of the economic insecurity produced by the capitalist political economy. Gordon applied his radical economic analysis of crime to three different manifestations of crime in the United States—ghetto crime, organized crime, and corporate crime—arguing that all are essentially rational behaviors to acquire property and some sense of economic security within the limits of existing opportunities.

Criminal Justice and Social Structures of Accumulation Beyond the radical economic analysis of crime articulated in his article “Capitalism, Class and Crime in America,” Gordon made an important contribution to theoretical explanations of U.S. criminal justice by way of his analysis of long cycles of capitalist development and, most particularly, through his concept of social structures of capitalist accumulation. Gordon (1978, p. 27) coined the concept of social structures of accumulation in an article examining the role of the state in the historical development of capitalist economies. Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982) and Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf (1984) further developed a comprehensive theory of the state based on the state’s relationship to the accumulation of capital, and Gordon’s social structures of accumulation became the central concept for a school of economic thought. The social structure of accumulation consists of the entire configuration of social institutions in a capitalist society that affects, either directly or indirectly, the accumulation of capital. One very important institution in this configuration is the state. Within the state, the criminal justice

388

Gordon, David M.: Political Economy and Crime

system plays a critical role in the accumulation of capital—that of maintaining the social order. Criminologists have drawn from Gordon’s concept of social structures of accumulation to explain the development of criminal justice institutions, policies, and ideologies. Such works utilize Gordon’s theoretical framework to examine the role of the criminal justice apparatus in maintaining the social order for the capitalist state, particularly through the social control of economically marginalized populations in the capitalist political economy of the United States.

Conclusion Gordon’s contributions to criminological theory are not widely acknowledged in criminological theory texts. Nonetheless his contributions are significant and represent two major themes in Marxist criminology. The first is that capitalism itself generates the particular forms of crime that are prevalent in capitalist society. The second is that a primary function of the criminal justice system in a capitalist society is to maintain an unequal and unjust social order. Gordon articulated each of these themes, leading him to conclude that to achieve significant reductions in crime in the United States would require a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power. David E. Barlow and Melissa Hickman Barlow See also Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime; Chambliss, William: Power, Conflict, and Crime; Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime; Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory; Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime; Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology

References and Further Readings Barlow, D. E., & Barlow, M. H. (1995). Federal criminal justice legislation and the post–World War II social structure of accumulation in the United States. Crime, Law and Social Change, 22, 239–267. Barlow, D. E., & Barlow, M. H. (1999). A political economy of community policing. Policing: An

International Journal of Police Strategies and Management, 22, 646–674. Barlow, D. E., Barlow, M. H., & Chiricos, T. G. (1993). Long economic cycles and the criminal justice system in the U.S. Crime, Law and Social Change, 12, 135–137. Barlow, D. E., Barlow, M. H., & Johnson, W. (1996). The political economy of criminal justice policy: A time series analysis of economic conditions, crime and federal criminal justice legislation, 1948–1987. Justice Quarterly, 13, 223–242. Barlow, M. H., Barlow, D. E., & Chiricos, T. G. (1995). Economic conditions and ideologies of crime in the media: A content analysis of crime news. Crime and Delinquency, 41, 3–19. Barlow, M. H., Barlow, D. E., & Chiricos, T. G. (1995). Mobilizing support for social control in a declining economy: Examining ideologies of crime within crime news. Crime and Delinquency, 41, 199–204. Bowles, S., Gordon, D. M., & Weisskopf, T. (1983). Beyond the wasteland: A democratic alternative to economic decline. New York: Doubleday. Bowles, S., & Weisskopf, T. (1996). David M. Gordon—1944–1996. Social Research, 63, iii–v. Bowles, S., & Weisskopf, T. (1999). David M. Gordon: Radical political economist and activist (1944–1996). Review of Radical Political Economics, 31, 1–15. Box, S. (1987). Recession, crime and punishment. London: Macmillan. Carlson, S. M., & Michalowski, R. J. (1997). Crime, punishment, and social structures of accumulation. Justice Quarterly, 14, 209–241. Gordon, D. M. (1971). Class and the economics of crime. Review of Radical Political Economics, 3(3), 51–75. Gordon, D. M. (1973). Capitalism, class, and crime in America. Crime and Delinquency, 19, 163–186. Gordon, D. M. (1978). Up and down the long roller coaster. In Editorial Collective Union for Radical Political Economists (Eds.), U.S. capitalism in crisis (pp. 22–35). New York: Union for Radical Political Economics Press. Gordon, D. M., Edwards, R., & Reich, M. (1982). Segmented work, divided workers: The historical transformation of labor in the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order. London: Macmillan. Michalowski, R. J., & Carlson, S. M. (2000). Crime, punishment, and social structures of accumulation. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 16, 272–292. Reiman, J. H. (2004). The rich get richer and the poor get prison: Ideology, crime, and criminal justice (7th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Goring, Charles: The English Convict Rusche, G., & Kirchheimer, O. (1968). Punishment and social structure. New York: Russell and Russell. (Original work published 1939)

Goring, Charles: The English Convict Charles Goring was a British criminologist who lived from 1870 to 1919. Prior to his formal collegiate education, he was employed in several hospitals. He was educated at the University of London, where he received his M.D. in 1903. Following the award of his degree and after teaching for several years, he worked as a medical officer in several English prisons. For his groundbreaking work in criminology, Goring was honored by Oxford University with the Weldon Medal and Premium. Goring was particularly interested in crime and its genesis.

Background In the history of criminology, Goring appeared after the establishment of three basic theories of criminology. The first school of thought was the Classical School, which held that all persons who committed crimes were equally responsible before the law and should be punished accordingly. The Correctionist School thought that there should be reduced criminal responsibility for juveniles and the insane. The Correctionist School was the precursory for modern reformatories and the idea that rehabilitation was possible for criminals. The last was the Positivist School. The Positivist School has also been equated with what is known as criminal anthropology. One of the primary proponents of the Positivist School was Cesare Lombroso, an Italian Army psychiatrist who, in the late 1800s, published the classic work, The Criminal Man. Lombroso thought that criminals are born and that criminal tendencies are a result of atavistic biological characteristics. Lombroso measured these atavistic characteristics, such as the size and shape of the jaw, the cheekbones, and brow, and compared them with the criminal behavior of the subjects. Over the course of 12 years, Goring, assisted by Karl Pearson and the staff at the Biometric Laboratory, collected and organized data from

389

3,000 English convicts on 96 traits in an attempt to understand criminal behavior. A number of authorities consider Goring’s work to be one of the principal foundational contributions to criminology concerning the use of biometric data. Goring was also widely recognized for being one of the first criminologists to use statistical methods to examine questions of criminology. Indeed, Goring has been widely credited with discrediting the theories of Lombroso through his application of statistical methods to criminology. Goring did not so much attack Lombroso’s conclusions. He accepted the possibility that Lombroso may have been correct in his conclusions. It was the methods employed by Lombroso that were the focus of Goring’s criticisms. For example, Goring employed comparative samples between criminals and non-criminals in his research, whereas Lombroso did not. With his work, Goring accepted that there was a biological basis for criminal behavior, but he also acknowledged that environmental factors affected the tendency to criminal behavior. Some authors have classified Goring as a phrenologist, which is the study of the bumps and indentations of the skull. To control criminal behavior, Goring advocated the use of a eugenics program for those who were feebleminded, had defective social skills, or suffered from epilepsy or insanity.

The English Convict Study Goring’s work, The English Convict: A Statistical Study, was a stupendous undertaking for its time. It required 12 years to complete. Goring examined more than 3,000 subjects applying 96 topics of inquiry. The work itself primarily consists of extensive presentations of the statistical data and the calculations conducted by Goring. Goring began The English Convict with a philosophical critique of what he referred to as the superstition of criminology. Goring opined that up to that point, criminology had been more of a collection of conventional prejudices and unfounded beliefs rather than a scientifically based discipline. Although Goring recognized that the Positivist School advanced a more humane theory of criminology than the earlier schools of thought, he extensively criticized it, not for its conclusions but for its methods. Indeed, Goring thought that the Positivist School of Lombroso

390

Goring, Charles: The English Convict

was dead as a science but still alive, dangerously, as a superstition. In the Introduction to The English Convict, Goring addressed the scientific principles he would apply, the informational bases he would rely on, and the two purposes of his study. The purposes of his study were to (1) clear away the old criminology that was based on conjecture, prejudice, and questionable observations and (2) found a new criminology based on scientific facts and inferences. The informational bases of his study were the records of personal condition, social estate, and penal history of the subjects, who were English convicts. The data would be supplemented by physical measurements, family and personal history, and physical and mental qualities obtained through examination and inquiry. The factors to be considered in measuring criminality were environment, training, stock, and physical attributes. No presumptions would be applied in the study. However, the possibility would be assessed that both constitution and environment could affect the determination of the criminal diathesis, which Goring defined as a hypothetical character or constitutional proclivity—either physical or mental or both—that influences the occurrence of criminality in people. One of the basic principles applied by Goring was his recognition that what was considered normal was heretofore improperly applied in criminology. Simply because a characteristic was beyond the statistical norm did not mean that it was bad or evil. Rather, it only meant that the characteristic was rare, which should not be a basis for a determination of criminality. Abnormal, thought Goring, should be used in the sense of describing a qualitative variation from what is natural as opposed to a qualitative deviation from the average occurrence of that characteristic. What is abnormal would never merge into what is normal, as quantitative differences, such as short and tall, merge. With this recognition, Goring applied advanced deductive thought separating prejudice and superstition from true scientific inquiry in his study, in contrast to the assumptions of previous theorists of criminology, such as the positivists.

Findings In Part I of The English Convict, Goring examined the alleged existence of a physical criminal type. The

data were divided into five groups. The first group included head length, head breadth, head circumference, head height, cephalic measurements, and facial length and breadth. The second group included auricular, nasal, and alveolar radius. The third group included occipital projection, chin projection, and measurement of the left and right ears. The fourth group included eyesight, hearing, inclination of the nose, thickness of the lips, right/left handedness, eye shade, hair shade, skin complexion, hair texture, and tattooing. The fifth group included conformation of the palate, eye and hair color, shape of the nose, and asymmetry of the face. From the results of his study on these factors, Goring concluded that any real association between physical characteristics and criminal behavior was so microscopic that it was not revealed by the data. As an experimental control on this part of his study, Goring compared the data gathered on the convicts concerning cephalic measurements, hair and eye color, defective hearing, nose conformation, left-handedness, and tattooing with various non-criminal subjects. The non-criminal subjects included Cambridge University undergraduates, Oxford University undergraduates, Aberdeen University undergraduates, University College staff, inmates of a General Hospital, Scottish people diagnosed as insane, and soldiers. Goring also drew comparisons between habitual and non-habitual criminals and Scottish criminals. Goring rather starkly concluded that there was no evidence supporting Lombroso’s theory of the existence of any physical criminal type. In fact, Goring categorically concluded that no physical criminal type existed. In Part II of The English Convict, Goring examined a number of other factors related to criminals. In Chapter I of Part II, Goring examined the physique of criminals. The examination included social class, stature and weight, general health, classification of crimes, and effects of imprisonment. As an experimental control, Goring compared his data to that of the non-criminal public. Goring presented three conclusions concerning the physique of criminals: (1) English criminals were markedly different in body weight and stature from the general population, (2) violent criminals had physical strength and constitution considerably above that of other criminals and the general population, and (3) thieves and burglars (who were 90 percent of all criminals) and arsonists were inferior in stature and weight to

Goring, Charles: The English Convict

other criminals and puny in comparison to the general population in their bodily growth. Based on these findings, Goring concluded that although there was some minimal basis for criminal anthropology, the findings were insufficient to support the criminal type theories. In Chapter II of Part II, Goring considered the effect of age as an etiological factor in crime. He compared age to different classes of criminals as to whether the convict was a first-time offender or a habitual criminal. As to first-time offenders, Goring found that there were three distinct periods when first offenders committed serious crimes: (1) adolescence to early manhood between ages 20 and 25, (2) middle age between ages 35 and 45, and (3) a transitional period from ages 55 to 65. In Chapter III of Part II, Goring examined the criminals’ vital statistics as to health, sickness, diseases, and death rates. Goring concluded that there was an etiological relationship between sickness and crime. Further, he concluded that there was no relationship between a healthy or delicate constitution with criminal behavior and that criminals tended to be healthier than the average law-abiding citizen. In Chapter IV of Part II, Goring researched the mental differentiation of the criminal. Goring examined, with regard to five basic criminal types, temperament, insanity, tendency toward suicide, mental capacity, and mental defects of criminals. In this analysis, Goring also included class differentiation and the mental capacity of the general population. Goring concluded that there was one vital mental constitutional factor in the etiology of crime, which was defective intelligence. In Chapter V of Part II, Goring considered external circumstances as an influencing factor on the commission of crime. These factors included nationality, employment, education, alcoholism, family life, and recidivism. He also compared the occupation of criminals to the occupations of the noncriminal public. Goring concluded that crime was only slightly related to social inequality or an adverse environment. Goring also found that there appeared to be a relationship between occupation and the type of crime committed. However, Goring qualified his conclusion with the caveat that the occupation did not cause the crime but presented certain opportunities for that particular type of crime.

391

In Chapter VI of Part II, Goring explored the fertility of criminals. He found wide differences in the fertility of different criminal classifications. In Chapter VII of Part II, Goring examined the influence of heredity on the genesis of crime. Goring recognized, at least implicitly, that heredity had not been scientifically established as a cause for the transmission of criminal behavior. However, he recognized that any hereditary connection had to be established through statistics. Essentially, Goring concluded that (1) the criminal diathesis is inherited at the same rate as other mental and physical characteristics of man and (2) the influence of parents is inconsiderable when compared to the influence of inheritance and mental defectiveness.

Conclusion Generally, Goring surmised that there is no anthropological criminal type. He observed that criminal and law-abiding persons of the same age, stature, class, and intelligence have the same physical and mental constitutions. However, English criminals, he concluded, tend to have, on the average, a different physique that includes stature and body weight, and a defective mental capacity measured by general intelligence and antisocial proclivities. William C. Plouffe, Jr. See also Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism; Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Mental Illness and Crime; Phrenology; Psychophysiology and Crime

References and Further Readings Driver, E. (1972). Charles Buckman Goring. In H. Mannheim (Ed.), Pioneers in criminology (pp. 429–442). Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. Goring, C. (1972). The English convict: A statistical study. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. (Original work published 1913) Garland, D. A. (1994). British criminology before 1935. In B. Piers (Ed.), The origins and growth of criminology (pp. 147–163). Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth. (Original work published 1988) Jones, D. A. (1986). History of criminology: A philosophical perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

392

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

Lombroso, C. (1895). L’homme criminel. Paris: Alcan. Lombroso, C., & Lombroso-Ferrero, G. (1972). Criminal man, according to the classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York: Putnam. (Original work published 1911)

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory More than two decades have now passed since the publication of Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s General Theory of Crime. It is this book where they articulated self-control theory, one of the most controversial criminological theories in recent history. Even now, their theory remains at the center of criminological discourse and has resulted in continued theoretical and empirical scrutiny. The roots of this intense scrutiny permeating criminological literature lies in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s controversial, yet parsimonious and well-argued, constellation of propositions—namely the emphasis they place on self-control as the individual level cause of criminal and deviant behavior. Their statements concerning the explanations of criminal behavior practically dismiss most criminological theories as incorrect. Gottfredson and Hirschi argue that traditional theories of delinquent and criminal behavior generate unreasonably assorted explanations for why people commit crime. They further believe that other criminological theories generally propose relationships between social and behavioral domains of life that can be accounted for by their selfcontrol theory. For instance, they argue that the reason an individual who has delinquent peers will also be delinquent is because the person possesses low self-control. Theorists and researchers alike have remained attentive to Gottfredson and Hirschi’s formulation of self-control theory for a number of reasons, including (1) its parsimonious nature, with one main explanatory construct— that is, self-control; (2) its potential explanatory power over the life course; and (3) its explanation of the link between demographic characteristics and crime.

This entry presents an overview of self-control theory as proposed by Gottfredson and Hirschi and the research that has tested its claims. First, an outline and description is provided of selfcontrol theory, which includes a definition of self-control and the main predictions regarding the development of self-control and its consequences. Second, research supporting self-control theory is reviewed. Third, future research and implications for delinquency and crime prevention are discussed as they relate to self-control theory.

The Impact of Self-Control In perhaps one of the most controversial statements ever made in criminology, Gottfredson and Hirschi argue that their self-control theory is a general theory that can explain a wide array of behaviors, including all types of criminal, deviant, and reckless behaviors. They argued that their theory can explain common delinquency (theft and assault), serious crime (burglary and murder), reckless behaviors (speeding), school and employment difficulties (truancy, tardiness, in-school misbehavior, job instability), promiscuous sexual behaviors, drug use, and family violence (spouse abuse or child abuse), all of which have negative long-term consequences. No special motivation for any of these acts is assumed. They all provide immediate, obvious benefits to the actor (as indeed, do all purposeful acts). They typically entail no certain or meaningful shortterm costs. They all, however, invoke substantial long-term costs to the actor. (Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1994, p. 16)

Thus, Gottfredson and Hirschi base their theory on the postulate that crime, among other deviant and reckless behaviors, provides easily accomplished, instantaneous gratification. Furthermore, such behaviors require little or no skill. Those who commit crime and deviant acts have a disposition that dictates their engagement in all behaviors that provide immediate satisfaction and pleasure. To this end, Gottfredson and Hirschi began by redefining crime as acts of force and fraud in the pursuit of self-interest.

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

Gottfredson and Hirschi believe that there is an underlying factor accounting for involvement in all sorts of deviant, criminal, and reckless behaviors. This factor manifests itself across a variety of life’s domains in ways that hinder achieving long-term occupational and educational goals, disrupt relationships, and undermine emotional and physical well-being. As such, crime and other “analogous behaviors”—drug use, school failure, unstable employment, failure in marriage, poor health, and having delinquent peers—are all manifestations of an underlying tendency to pursue short-term, immediate pleasure at the expense of long-term consequences. They call this tendency low selfcontrol. Hirschi and Gottfredson link self-control and crime in the following manner: Criminal acts are a subset of acts in which the actor ignores the long-term negative consequences that flow from the act itself (e.g., the health consequences of drug use), from the social or familial environment (e.g., a spouse’s reaction to infidelity), or from the state (e.g., the criminal justice response to robbery). All acts that share this feature, including criminal acts, are therefore likely to be engaged in by individuals unusually insensitive to long-term consequences. The immediacy of the benefits of crime implies that they are obvious to the actor, that no special skill or learning is required. The property of individuals that explains variation in the likelihood of engaging in such acts we call “self-control.” (1994, pp. 1–2)

In contrast, those who possess more self-control are the opposite from those possessing very little. Individuals possessing self-control have a lower likelihood under all contexts throughout their life course to engage in crime and analogous behaviors in comparison to their counterparts with low selfcontrol. Specifically, people who possess self-­ control are substantially less likely to engage in acts for short-term pleasure even in settings that have little social or legal monitoring. For example, they do not steal, drive recklessly, or do drugs even when opportunities, absent from the possibility of legal or social sanctions, are present. Recognizing stability in criminal behavior, Hirschi and Gottfredson (1994) argue that it would be sensible to attribute the relationship between behaviors over time to a persistent underlying trait.

393

For Gottfredson and Hirschi, this underlying trait is low self-control. To this end, their theory not only attempts to explain juvenile delinquency, but it also offers an explanation for stability in crime and general deviance over the life course. Once formed, Gottfredson and Hirschi argue that self-control (or lack thereof) is relatively stable throughout life. Low levels of self-control increase the probability of virtually all types of criminal and deviant acts that bring pleasure, gratification, and fulfillment in the short term. Although Gottfredson and Hirschi attribute generality and stability of criminal and deviant behavior to a trait that resides in an individual, they argue criminal and deviant behaviors will be probabilistic and contingent on opportunities. Although different people may have the same level of selfcontrol, expressions of specific types of criminal and/or deviant acts can reflect differences in opportunities to commit them. While opportunity is present in self-control theory, their theory accords self-control the most explanatory power.

Defining and Measuring Self-Control Gottfredson and Hirschi define self-control as the blockade that stands between the individual and deviant/criminal activity. Self-control represents the capability to abandon the short-term pleasures that potentially result in long-term, negative consequences. In describing their central construct, Gottfredson and Hirschi provide a detailed account of the elements of self-control. They identify six elements that they contend mirror the nature of criminal acts and largely define one’s degree of self-control. Those lacking self-control will have a “concrete ‘here and now’ orientation,” “lack diligence, tenacity, or persistence in a course of action,” are “adventuresome, active, and physical, are indifferent, or insensitive to the suffering and needs of others,” and “tend to have minimal tolerance for frustration and little ability to respond to conflict through verbal rather than physical means” (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990, pp. 89–90). These characteristics, they argue, come together in individuals with low self-control. While they suggest that the immediate rewards of crime are apparent to all, individuals high in self-control are able to appreciate the harmful costs and refrain from the temptations of the moment, while those low in self-control instead embrace short-term pleasure and rewards.

394

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

Gottfredson and Hirschi link each element of low self-control to the criminal act. First, the “here and now” orientation reflects the immediate gratification provided by crime, and those with low self-control have an inclination to respond to tangible stimuli in the immediate environment. Second, lacking diligence, tenacity, or persistence reflects the easy and simple gratification provided by crime, and those with low self-control tend to want immediate rewards without much effort. Third, being adventuresome, active, and physical is reflective of the excitement, risk, and thrill attached to the criminal act. Those having low self-control will be risk-seekers as well as prefer physical activity. Fourth, being insensitive or indifferent reflects the lack of relevance of the discomfort or pain the victims of criminal acts may experience. Those with low self-control have a tendency to be unkind and lack empathy, and therefore, are insensitive toward people on whom they directly or indirectly inflict pain or discomfort. Finally, possessing a marginal tolerance for frustration reflects not the pleasure of the criminal act but rather the relief from temporary irritation. Those with low self-control will have a minimal tolerance for frustration, and they have a tendency to respond to a situation of conflict with physical rather than verbal means. Gottfredson and Hirschi’s definition of selfcontrol has sparked a debate among criminologists. This debate has led to an interpretive divide. First, a division exists among criminologists concerning the appropriate conceptualization of the self-control construct. Second, operations used to represent or measure self-control have led to an unsettled dilemma among criminologists in choosing indicators that are most appropriate to reflect self-control. Some interpret self-control as being one trait, whereas others argue that the definition put forth by Gottfredson and Hirschi suggest that self-control consists of several traits. The former position would mean that all elements specified by Gottfredson and Hirschi are one and the same indistinguishable, and therefore do not represent different attributes. The latter position implies that self-control could be multidimensional in that different elements indicate different concept. Harold Grasmick and his colleagues conducted one of the first studies of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory and produced one of the first measures of self-control. In doing so, they explicitly interpreted

self-control as one trait which was evident in their following statement: A factor analysis of valid and reliable indicators of the six components is expected to fit a one factor model, justifying the creation of a single scale called low self-control. In effect, this is a very crucial premise in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory. A single, unidimensional personality trait is expected to predict involvement in all varieties of crime as well as academic performance, labor force outcomes, success in marriage, various “imprudent” behaviors such as smoking and drinking, and even the likelihood of being involved in accidents. Evidence that such a trait exists is the most elementary step in a research agenda to test the wealth of hypotheses Gottfredson and Hirschi have presented. (p. 9)

In creating a self-control measure, Grasmick and his colleagues paid close attention to how Gottfredson and Hirschi defined the elements of self-control. They arrived at six components that they interpret as a “personality trait,” which should capture what Gottfredson and Hirschi meant by their concept of self-control. The components they extracted from Gottfredson and Hirschi’s discussion of self-control included the following: impulsivity, preference for simple rather than complex tasks, risk-seeking, preference for physical rather than cerebral activities, self-centered orientation, and volatile temper linked to a low tolerance for frustration. This gave Grasmick and his colleagues a starting point for identifying items that correspond to each component (or element) of self-control. Grasmick and his colleagues used a combination of questions in pre-testing college students to ultimately arrive at a final 24 questions (four items for each of the six components). Some sample questions in the scale include the following: (1) “I often act on the spur of the moment without stopping to think.” (2) “Sometimes I will take a risk just for the fun of it.” (3) “I lose my tempter pretty easily.” According to Grasmick and colleagues, agreeing to many of these items would indicate low self-control or, in other words, higher scores would mean a lack of self-control. Grasmick and colleagues’ self-control measure is often the measuring device of choice among many scholars when testing Gottfredson and Hirschi’s concept of self-control. It has also become

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

a highly contested measure, with scholars arguing that some of its dimensions are more important in predicting crime and deviance than others and that it is measuring more than only one trait. Most recently, Hirschi has revisited their original definition of self-control and offers a reformulation, which blends self-control with social control. Hirschi stated: Redefined, self-control becomes the tendency to consider the full range of potential costs of a particular act. This moves the focus from the long-term implications of the act to its broader and often contemporaneous implications. . . . Put another way, self-control is the set of inhibitions one carries with one wherever one happens to go. Their character may be initially described by going to the elements of the bond identified by social control theory: attachment, commitments, involvement, and beliefs. (2004, pp. 543–544)

Unlike Gottfredson and Hirschi’s earlier definition of self-control that focused on impulsive, shortterm pleasure where individuals fail to consider long-term consequences, Hirschi now includes a larger range of anticipated costs associated with engaging in such behaviors, even contemporaneous ones. Furthermore, he incorporates the four original bonds from social bond theory, implying that when an individual is more bonded he or she is more likely to refrain from deviant and criminal behaviors. Relying on his new definition of self-control, Hirschi arrived at a nine-question measure of selfcontrol from the Richmond Youth Study, which consisted of yes/no questions that asked adolescents about specific bonds; that is, do you like or dislike school, importance of getting good grades, and caring about what teachers think of you. While he found that his measure was related to delinquency, several shortcomings of this measure have been pointed out. In particular, data used to test his new definition did not contain any information on the actual or perceived consequences of acts or behaviors. To date, very little research has focused on measuring Hirschi’s redefined construct of self-control.

The Development of Self-Control How do children develop self-control? According to Gottfredson and Hirschi, this is a dynamic process

395

up through 8 to 12 years of age. In their opinion, the development of self-control originates from socialization of a child from birth through pre-adolescence, largely attributing low self-control to inadequate parenting styles. For Gottfredson and Hirschi, weak direct parental controls in childhood are largely responsible for the inability of individuals to delay gratification and to pursue behaviors that may have negative short- and long-term consequences associated with them. Specifically, they suggest that parents must do three tasks to instill self-control in their children: (1) provide behavioral monitoring, (2) be aware of or recognize bad behavior that their children engage in, and (3) consistently and appropriately punish bad behaviors. Attachment is a key mechanism that determines the quality of parentchild interaction. According to their theory, parents who are attached to their children will monitor, recognize, and punish naughty, unruly, and disobedient behaviors. To Gottfredson and Hirschi, parental affection toward a child is the motivating factor that will satisfy the three conditions above. Conversely, children will lack self-control if parents are not affectionate, do not monitor or supervise their behavior, are unsuccessful at recognizing misbehavior, and do not appropriately punish the behavior when exhibited by the child. Although several studies now lend support for the notion that parenting influences development of self-control, Gottfredson and Hirschi, as well as most researchers, have failed to acknowledge that parenting and the development of self-control occur in a context, one of those being a neighborhood. One study has assessed whether neighborhood characteristics influence children’s development of self-control. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), Travis Pratt and colleagues examined community-level sources of self-control. They hypothesized a direct and indirect influence of adverse neighborhood conditions on the development of self-control and found that the influence of neighborhood conditions on selfcontrol rivaled those of parents. They also discovered that neighborhood conditions influenced self-control through poor parental monitoring and discipline. Even more recently, some research is beginning to question the pure socialization stance that Gottfredson and Hirschi take in explaining the development of self-control. Using a twin design,

396

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

John Paul Wright and Kevin Beaver estimated how much variation in self-control is explained by a heritable component. Their results suggest that much of the variation in self-control that has been attributed to parenting can be explained by genetic hereditability. In fact, they find that once genetic similarity is taken into account, many of the parenting influences become less important.

Self-Control, Race, and Gender Gottfredson and Hirschi devote a lengthy discussion to how their theory may account for racial differences in crime. Racial disparities in offending rates have been consistently observed and widely acknowledged. As Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990, p. 194) point out, “there is substantial agreement that there are large, relatively stable differences in crime and delinquency rates across race and ethnic groups.” According to Gottfredson and Hirschi, past theories trying to explain these racial differences are incorrect; differences can be largely understood through inadequate childrearing and, consequently, differences in self-control. Specifically, they argue that differences in self-control will prevail over differences in supervision when accounting for racial or ethnic variation in crime. Likewise, Gottfredson and Hirschi devote a considerable amount of time to explain why males and females differentially engage in criminal and other forms of deviant behaviors. Once again, they argue that the reason for males being more likely to engage in delinquency and criminal behavior than females can be attributed to differences in self-control. That is, females, on average, will have more self-control than their male counterparts. The reason for gender differences in self-control is due to the fact that parents monitor and socialize their daughters differently from their sons.

Research on Self-Control Theory Numerous studies have now been published that, when considered collectively, show moderate, yet consistent, support for the proposition that low self-control predicts involvement in a wide range of criminal, deviant, and reckless behaviors. Many of these studies also indicate that the effects of low self-control exist in the presence of competing theoretically derived variables; across different

groups consisting of college students, adolescents, offenders, community samples, and different countries; and when using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Pratt and Francis Cullen completed an extensive review of the empirical status of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory. In summarizing the results of 21 empirical studies, they showed that low self-control has an average effect size of approximately .27. According to Pratt and Cullen, this effect size qualifies low self-control as “one of the strongest known correlates of crime” (p. 952). Nevertheless, Pratt and Cullen question whether low self-control is the sole cause of a range of deviant and criminal acts as other variables still have important effects in their meta-analysis, namely social learning variables. Studies testing the relational proposition that low self-control is the cause of a wide array of behaviors have been the cornerstone of support for Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory. Low self-control has been shown to affect the following: gambling; binge-drinking; using force or fraud in the pursuit of self-interest; drunk driving or intentions to drive while drunk; intentions to commit larceny and sexual assault; cutting class and alcohol use among undergraduates; academic dishonesty; drug use among adolescents; offending behaviors among samples of criminal offenders; speeding, driving without a seat belt, and smoking; intimate violence; involvement in accidents; and victimization. Other key propositions embedded in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory have received less empirical attention. As noted earlier, they state that early in a child’s life parents and/or caregivers will have a direct impact on the development of self-control. Once developed, self-control (or a lack thereof) will be a stable trait throughout life that, in the presence of opportunity, will explain variation in the persistence of criminal and deviant behavior, versatility in deviance, and predict other negative social outcomes. Some studies have generated preliminary empirical support for the above claims made by Gottfredson and Hirschi. First, Carter Hay found that a lack of parental monitoring and discipline predicts low levels of self-control. Furthermore, John Gibbs and colleagues found that parental management has an indirect impact on delinquency through self-control. Second, levels of self-control have been shown to be relatively stable over short periods of time (e.g., one academic semester), as

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

well as longer periods of time (e.g., 5 years). Third, moderate support has been observed for an interaction between low self-control and opportunity in predicting deviant and criminal outcomes. Finally, several studies have shown that low self-control is related to negative social consequences beyond deviance and criminal behaviors. For example, Bradley Wright and colleagues found that a lack of self-control in childhood predicted disrupted social bonds (e.g., lack of educational attainment, unemployment, and poor intimate relationships later in life). Furthermore, Chris Gibson and colleagues found similar results in that low self-control predicted lack of school commitment, lack of cohesiveness with parents, limited goals and aspirations, and involvement with delinquent peers. Both the Wright et al. and Gibson et al. studies, however, found that low self-control did not substantially reduce the impact of other social and psychosocial variables on delinquency.

Criticisms of Self-Control Theory Overall, considerable evidence shows support for several predictions made by Gottfredson and Hirschi. On the other hand, self-control theory has attracted numerous criticisms that include the following: The theory is too general by attempting to explain a broad range of deviant behaviors; it is based on a misconception of the age-crime relationship; it ascribes too much explanatory power to self-control; it overlooks the distinction between prevalence and incidents of criminal involvement and the possibility that the predictors of participation may not be the same as those for frequency of offending; and it is tautological. While these are all important criticisms of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory, it is important to discuss one in particular, since it illustrates the difficulties with conceptualizing, operationalizing, and measuring self-control. Ronald Akers has accused Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory of being tautological. Akers states, it would appear to be tautological to explain the propensity to commit crime by low self-control. They are one and of the same, and such assertions about them are true by definition. The assertion means that low self-control causes lowself control. Similarly, since no operational definition of self-control is given, we cannot know

397

that a person has low self-control (stable propensity to commit crime) unless he or she commits crimes or analogous behaviors. The statement that low self-control is a cause of crime, then, is also a tautology. (p. 204)

Akers implies that Gottfredson and Hirschi’s logic is flawed since they contend that crime and low self-control are indistinguishable. This is problematic to Akers because Gottfredson and Hirschi also advocate the use of behavioral indicators to measure low self-control. The results, therefore, would closely resemble an empirical tautology because the independent and dependent variables resemble each other too closely. Thus, Akers writes, “to avoid the tautology problem, independent indicators of self-control are needed” (p. 204). Accusations of tautology do not bother Gott­ fredson and Hirschi, as for them it shows the strength of their theory. They argue that the character of the actor is reflected in the character of the act; therefore, crimes and behaviors analogous to crime are both consequences and indicators of low self-control. Simply stated, their theory implies unrestrained people behave in unrestrained ways. Nevertheless, whether Gottfredson and Hirschi’s logic is flawed or ingenious, this particular dilemma has led to many questions of how to accurately measure self-control in a way that avoids tautological criticism.

Future Research and Policy Implications Studies testing self-control theory have revealed clues that will challenge theorists and researchers to think outside the strict parameters of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theoretical model if the development of self-control and its relationship to criminal and analogous behavior is to be understood. For instance, in support of Gottfredson and Hirschi, studies show that parenting practices and socialization techniques are related to children’s selfcontrol, such as disciplining practices, monitoring, and attachment—to name only a few. However, and perhaps unfortunately for Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory, research shows that parenting factors alone are not responsible for why children vary in their levels of self-control. Stated differently, parenting practices and socialization do not explain large amounts of variation in children’s

398

Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory

self-control. This could be due to inaccuracies in measuring parenting factors or to not considering the full range of parenting factors that may affect self-control development. On the other hand, factors that are largely dismissed by Gottfredson and Hirschi may be important for understanding selfcontrol differences between children. These factors include genetic and biological differences, neighborhood influences, and socialization that occurs within the net of primary caregivers (e.g., teachers, friends). Many past studies testing claims from Gott­ fredson and Hirschi’s theory have used samples of children, adolescents, and adults residing in the United States. While justified, self-control theory is general and should explain participation in and frequency of criminal and analogous behaviors not only in the United States but also across various cultural contexts. Some studies show initial evidence of self-control theory’s applicability to youths residing in different countries, but more research should be conducted in this area to explore the generality of self-control theory. To date, many studies have been concerned with testing propositions from Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory with observational data that are both cross-sectional and longitudinal. Given that these studies have revealed an important relationship between low self-control and a wide array of negative outcomes, it will be important for future research to use experimentally controlled studies, with random assignment, to determine what interventions in childhood may help positively change levels of self-control to benefit children in the short and long run. Furthermore, it will be important to understand if self-control levels can be changed in adolescents and adulthood, and what factors may influence such change. Currently, Gottfredson and Hirschi do not leave much room for substantial change in self-control within individuals after it is developed in early childhood, but this may not be correct and is ultimately an empirical question. While there is much work left undone in understanding how self-control develops and influences various individual outcomes, some im­­­­­plications for prevention are evident and somewhat straightforward. The earlier the interventions the better, especially targeting socialization processes that begin early in the life course. Gottfredson and Hirschi argue that early intervention is critical

because, roughly between the ages of 8 and 12, levels of self-control form and remain relatively stable throughout the life course. A good example of such a program comes from Patterson’s coercive family model, which has shown that family management practices help develop monitoring, disciplining, and problem-solving skills which, in turn, leads to reductions in later delinquency. They have shown moderate success of their program using experimental designs with random assignment. While such programs may show positive results in changing behaviors, programs have yet to be developed that target self-control specifically, and it is unknown if programs will be effective in changing levels of self-control once formed. Chris L. Gibson See also Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency; Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Wells, Edward L., and Joseph H. Rankin: Direct Controls and Delinquency

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1991). Self-control as a general theory of crime. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 7, 201–211. Arneklev, B. J., Grasmick, H. G., Tittle, C. R., & Bursik, R. J. (1993). Low self-control and imprudent behaviors. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 9, 225–247. Geis, G. (2000). On the absence of self-control for the basis of a general theory of crime: A critique. Theoretical Criminology, 4, 35–53. Gibbs, J. J., & Giever, D. (1995). Self-control and its manifestations among university students: An empirical test of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory. Justice Quarterly, 12, 231–255. Gibson, C. L., Wright, J. P., & Tibbetts, S. G. (2000). Empirical assessment of the generality of the general theory of crime: The effects of low self-control on social development. Journal of Crime and Justice, 23, 109–134. Goode, E. (2008). Out of control: Assessing the general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1994). Aggression. In The generality of deviance (pp. 23–45). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Grasmick, H. G., Tittle, C. R., Bursik, R. J., & Arneklev, B. J. (1993). Testing the core empirical implications of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory of crime. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 5–29. Hay, C. (2001). Parenting, self-control, and delinquency: A test of self-control theory. Criminology, 29, 707–736. Hirschi, T. (2004). Self-control and crime. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook of selfregulation (pp. 537–553). New York: Guilford Press. Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. R. (1993). Commentary: Testing the general theory of crime. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 47–54. Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. R. (1994). The generality of deviance. In The generality of deviance (pp. 1–22). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Longshore, D., & Turner, S. (1998). Reliability and validity of a self-control measure: Rejoinder. Criminology, 36, 175–182. Marcus, B. (2004). Self-Control in the general theory of crime: Theoretical implications of a measurement problem. Theoretical Criminology, 8, 33–55. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1993). Enduring individual differences and rational choice theories of crime. Law and Society Review, 27, 467–496. Pratt, T. C., & Cullen, F. T. (2000). The empirical status of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory of crime: A meta-analysis. Criminology, 38, 931–964. Pratt, T. C., Turner, M. G., & Piquero, A. R. (2004). Parental socialization and community context: A longitudinal analysis of the structural sources of low self-control. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 41, 219–243. Schreck, C. J. (1999). Criminal victimization and low self-control: An extension and test of a general theory of crime. Justice Quarterly, 16, 633–654. Wright, B. R., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., & Silva, P. A. (1999). Low self-control, social bonds, and crime: Social causation, social selection, or both? Criminology, 37, 479–514. Wright, J. P., & Beaver, K. M. (2005). Do parents matter in creating self-control in their children? A genetically informed test of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory of low self-control. Criminology, 43, 1169–1202.

399

Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, Health­ South, ImClone, Adelphia, Tyco: These are just a few of the large corporations that, for the average American citizen, would have gone largely unnoticed if not for their questionable business practices in the early 21st century. These practices, though performed by myriad players and in different manifestations, were all in violation of laws set forth concerning white-collar criminality. Whitecollar crime, in a strict legal sense, can be defined as “nonviolent crime for financial gain committed by means of deception by persons whose occupations status is entrepreneurial, professional, or semi-professional and utilizing their special occupational skills and opportunities; also, nonviolent crimes for financial gain utilizing deception and committed by anyone having special technical and professional knowledge of business and government, irrespective of the person’s occupation” (U.S. Department of Justice, 1981, p. 215). How­ever, this definition, along with many other definitions of white-collar crime, could be considered problematic due to the ambiguous nature of the language. As such, the true concept of white-collar crime is masked behind a pervasive grey area. In Stuart P. Green’s Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime, that grey area is cleared by examining white-collar crime as it reflects our moral thinking. More specifically, Green outlines a set of moral wrongs that are the common components of each of the larger whitecollar crimes.

Characterizations According to Green, white-collar crime can be characterized by a set of family resemblances. Because of the often ambiguous nature surrounding white-collar criminality, it becomes difficult to find any single well-defined property that is shared by all white-collar offenses. Rather, what is displayed are a set of resemblances: similarities and differences shaped by the class. In any criminal event, the set of resemblances center on the elements

400

Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime

of mens rea (the mental state with which the act is committed), harmfulness (the harm the act causes or risks causing), and moral wrongfulness. When considering mens rea, or the mental state required when defining an offense or criminal act of white-collar crime, three distinct patterns emerge. First, when defining some white-collar offenses, the mens rea needed is significantly reduced when compared to those traditionally required by criminal law (i.e., Clean Water Act; Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act). Second, and nearly at odds with the first, is that some other white-collar offenses require a heightened emphasis placed on mens rea (i.e., obstruction of justice). Finally, because white-collar offenses typically involve corporate entities, partnerships, non-profit associations, and governmental agencies, the question of who requires the mens rea is raised. The abstractness of such groups clouds the element of mens rea, thus requiring careful attention to each situation. The second element, harmfulness, is concerned with the degree to which a criminal act causes or risks causing relatively lasting or significant setback to a person’s interests. Because white-collar crime is significantly different from traditional street crime, the harms caused to an individual differ. Street crimes typically involve apparent and easily observable harms, characterized by a discrete period during which the perpetrator commits the act and the victim realizes the harm that has been caused. White-collar crime, however, involves harms that are not easily observable—the resulting harm is generally financial and the degree to which one has been harmed is not always clear. The final element, moral wrongfulness, refers to the violation of a moral norm when a criminal act has been committed. Cheating, deception, stealing, coercion, exploitation, disloyalty, promise-breaking, and disobedience are common violations of moral norms as outlined by Green. According to Green, it is these violations of moral norms that are most important and underlie white-collar criminality.

Moral Wrongfulness Each of the eight types of moral wrongfulness— cheating, deception, stealing, coercion, exploitation, disloyalty, promise-breaking, and disobedience— can, and often do, mean different things to different

people. As such, a framework is needed in order to focus the abstract images concerning each type. Cheating, as discussed by Green, can be viewed as occurring when an individual (1) violates a fair and fairly enforced rule, (2) with the intent to obtain an advantage over a party with whom he or she is in a cooperative, rule-bound relationship (p. 57). Deception, unlike cheating, can be viewed in four different contexts: (1) lying, (2) merely misleading, (3) falsely exculpating, and (4) false inculpating. As defined by Green, lying refers to deception that (1) comes in the form of a verifiable assertion and (2) is literally false. When lying, individuals assert what is believed to be false. Differing from this is what Green calls “merely misleading,” whereupon an individual is led to believe a falsity, though no assertion has been made. For example, if asked whether you were at the scene of crime at 11:00 p.m., and you answer “I may have been there or at home,” no lie has been committed. However, a misleading has occurred. False exculpation occurs when an individual who is suspected of engaging in a wrongdoing purposely interferes with another’s attempt at obtaining truthful information (i.e., intimidating a witness, destroying evidence). False inculpation, which differs slightly, occurs when an individual who has information about another’s conduct makes a false accusation against another or prevents another from obtaining information about the third party’s wrongdoing. Stealing is, as Green describes, a violation in some fundamental way of another’s rights of ownership. Similar to cheating and deception, stealing involves the intent to commit. One distinction about stealing that must be made is the difference between the descriptive (or factual) sense of the word and its moral (or normative) sense. The descriptive sense is concerned strictly with the rule itself. The moral sense, however, invokes a wider array of factors. Consider this example by Green: Imagine a society in which all of the real and personal property, even that which is generated through the work of the citizens, is deemed by law to be owned by a despotic dictator, with the citizens making use of only the most meager resources for their own subsistence . . . if a citizen of such a society were to take some reasonable

Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime

share of property from the dictator without his permission, we might say that the citizen had stolen in some descriptive sense of the term . . . but we would not say that he had stolen in the moral sense of the term. (p. 91)

In the moral sense, the “stealing” was not a morally wrongful act since the dictator had no moral rights to the property in the first place. Coercion is “another technique for forcing people to act as the coercer wants them to act and presumably contrary to their own preferences” (Feinberg, 1998). The use of coercion typically involves some form of a threat, either real or perceived to be real. When a threat is made, the consequence for not doing what is being demanded must make the person who is being threatened worse off than some baseline. Contrary to this, the consequence for doing what is demanded will make that person better off in relation to that same baseline. Exploitation, though similar to coercion in some respects, involves taking advantage of another through the use of manipulation. In Joel Feinberg’s definition, exploitation consists of three elements. First, there must be play between two parties where the exploiting party offers inducements, employs flattery, appeals to sympathy, and the like, ultimately with the aim of achieving a desired response. Second, once the desired response has been received, that trait or circumstance is to be exploited (virtues like generosity, loyalty, or courage; vices like greed, recklessness, or lust). Finally, the party doing the exploiting must intend to benefit at the other’s expense. Loyalty has been described as a rejection of alternatives that undermine the principal bond (Fletcher, 1993). Inversely, disloyalty is thought of as the pursuit of alternatives that undermine the principal bond. Disloyalty is thought to take two different forms: passive and active. Passive disloyalty involves a situation in which the principal bond is under question and an individual fails to reply to action. Active disloyalty, however, is taking a physical, active role in the commission of the event. Promise breaking is the deviation of a moral obligation between two or more parties. In order to be bound by a promise, a promise must be addressed and communicated about a future action with the true intention to commit that action. In

401

making a promise, a moral obligation is made between two or more parties and, therefore, when a promise is broken so is the moral obligation. The result is a moral wrong. The final form of moral wrongfulness, disobedience, is what Green acknowledges to be the most controversial (skepticism may exist concerning whether disobedience of the law is morally wrongful at all). First, for disobedience of the law to exist, there must be some rule of law that is socially just and therefore thought of as a moral obligation to obey. Second, a distinction between mala in se and malum prohibita offenses must be drawn. Mala in se offenses, those typically thought of as being morally wrongful regardless of whether they are prohibited by law, are not of primary concern. It is those offenses that are proscribed by law, malum prohibita offenses, that are of vital importance. It is these offenses that involve true disobedience of the law or lawful authority.

Moral Content With the foundation of moral norms and wrongs laid, the moral content of white-collar criminality can be examined. In his analysis of 10 white-collar offenses (perjury, fraud, false statements, obstruction of justice, bribery, extortion, blackmail, insider trading, tax evasion, and “failure to comply” regulatory offenses), Green outlines how the offenses are defined under the American legal statutes and then describes the moral wrongfulness within each offense. For example, though the term obstruction of justice can be found under numerous statutes, the Ombibus Clause under section 1503 is the broadest. It states that the prosecution must prove that the defendant: (1) corruptly, (2) endeavored to interfere, (3) with a pending, (4) judicial, administrative, or congressional proceeding, and (5) that he or she knew such proceeding was pending. As argued by Green, such an act would invoke four forms of wrongfulness: cheating, deception, coercion, and disobedience. Cheating would be invoked due to the gaining of an unfair advantage; deception by false inculpation or exculpation; coercion by using intimidation, threat, or force to persuade another to delay or prevent testimony; and disobedience by disobeying the moral obligation to the law itself.

402

Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime

Similarly, Green outlines the remaining nine offenses by examining them as part of our moral thinking. Perjury (deception), fraud (deception and stealing), false statements (deception), bribery (disloyalty and coercion), extortion (coercion, stealing, and exploitation), blackmail (coercion, stealing, and exploitation), insider trading (cheating), tax evasion (cheating), and regulatory offenses (promise breaking) are examined as concepts in morality, rather than legality, in helping to shape what constitutes a white-collar offense. The end result is a legal definition that is highly dependent on moral judgment as a mechanism for its application.

Conclusion By analyzing the manner in which white-collar crime is reflected in our moral thinking, Green has cleared much of the confusion and ambiguity that exists in the literature to date. In defining what is meant by white-collar crime, the foundation was laid to develop moral concepts that pervade whitecollar criminality. In doing so, Green has articulated that 10 of our most common white-collar offenses (perjury, fraud, false statements, obstruction of justice, bribery, extortion, blackmail, insider trading, tax evasion, and “failure to comply” regulatory offenses) can be reducible to moral wrongfulness. Furthermore, by examining the forms of moral wrongfulness and their interplay with whitecollar offenses, the distinction between aggressive business behavior and white-collar criminality becomes apparent. Given the economic modalities and corporate entities of the 21st century, Green’s work could not have better been timed. Ronald Eckert and Allison Ann Payne See also Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Croall, Hazel: Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime; Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Feinberg, J. (1998). Coercion. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy. London: Routledge. Fletcher, G. P. (1993). Loyalty: An essay on the morality of relationships. New York: Oxford University Press.

Geis, G., Meier, R., & Salinger, L. (Eds.). (1995). Whitecollar crime: Classic and contemporary views. New York: Free Press. Green, G. (1997). Occupational crime. Chicago: Nelson Hall. Green, S. P. (2006). Lying, cheating, and stealing: A moral theory of white-collar crime. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. U.S. Department of Justice. (1981). Dictionary of criminal justice terminology (2nd ed., NCJ-76939). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime The relationship of age and criminality has been noted and remarked upon since the appearance of the original statistical studies of crime, such as Adolphe Quetelet’s. Citing historical and crosscultural studies, researchers had come to note that criminals seem to “age out” of crime as numbers of most offenses decline with age as indicated by arrest statistics and self-reported accounts of delinquent and criminal behavior (Hirschi, 1969; Matza, 1964). However, no serious attention has been paid to age as a social variable and as an important predictor of criminality until David F. Greenberg’s analysis and application of Marxist framework to national, cross-national, and historical statistical data. Until Greenberg’s article “Delinquency and the Age Structure of Society” that appeared in 1977, the age-crime connection was largely attributed to the deleterious biological effects of aging on motivational and physical capabilities of the offenders. Greenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, put a decisive end to the neglect of this variable and brought age to the front and center of criminological debates. His systematic theoretical and empirical exploration of the effects of age on criminality started one of the more fruitful discussions in structural criminology as he refused to accept seemingly linear and uniform negative relationship between age and crime. Greenberg, who received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago, came to academic

Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime

criminology by way of his anti-draft activist involvement in the Vietnam era. In danger of being incarcerated for draft resistance, Greenberg embarked on investigation of prison conditions and subsequently co-authored Struggle for Justice, a book that argued against unchecked discretion at multiple points in the criminal justice system and that identified systematic injustices including racial disparities. His political work combined with brief experience as a pre-adolescent juvenile delinquent inspired Greenberg to seek understanding of systematic correlates of crime and crime identification practices. Prior to 1977, when “Delinquency and the Age Structure of Society” was published, one of his prominent interests was the application of Marxist theories to various aspects of crime and criminal justice. Eventually, this interest resulted in a major book on Marxist criminology, published in 1981. The arguments advanced in the 1977 article demonstrate an interest in integrating Marxist insights regarding the organization of production in society with prominent criminological perspectives, in particular versions of anomie and control theories. For years, Greenberg has been arguing that the effects of age, while promoting certain desistance to crime evident in statistical patterns, both vary with other structural categories (such as race, class, and gender) and are contingent on the arrangements of the markets and organization of production tied to particular historical periods. His main opponents in this debate, Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson, had insisted that aging uniformly reduces criminality, irrespective of time, place, and social and demographic characteristics of the offender. According to them, age matters as a biological constant rather than, as Greenberg would have it, a sociological variable.

Delinquency and the Age Structure of Society Not content with pervasive statistical evidence that demonstrated that for every crime category the number and likelihood of criminal offenses declined with the age of offenders, Greenberg sought to examine the data in depth. He paid attention to specific offenses and broke the offending population up into different demographic categories. Moreover, rather than looking at a general pattern of declining criminal involvement

403

with rising age, he identified differential patterns of decline as well as different peak ages that varied by historical periods and across societies. Although he agreed with the prevalent outlook that delinquents and adult criminals seem to age out of crime, he posed important questions concerned with how and why such desistance unfolds. Specifically, he asked why does the process seem to take place at a different speed for different offenses? In his analysis, he proposed to treat age as a variable remarkable in its social rather than biological significance. Examining the statistical data for 1970, Greenberg noted that for vandalism and property crimes, the arrest rates for males peaked at the age of 15 and 16, only to fall off in 2 years, after which the downward trend continued. The male arrest rates for violence, however, peaked at the age of 19 and 20 but also declined with age, albeit less rapidly. The higher age and less rapid decline for the crimes of violence was, according to Greenberg, a phenomenon that demanded a structural explanation. Greenberg also noted that in 19th-century America, even as criminal involvement declined with age, the peak ages were higher than they were in the end of the 20th century. The same was true for the rates in France, Italy, and Austria. The 19th-century data indicated that agrarian nations had higher peak ages for criminality than the industrialized nations such as England. These data led Greenberg to believe that there must be a relationship between the age distribution of crime and the level of industrial development of a nation. As Greenberg became convinced that economic development and market fluctuations play a role in the relationship between age and crime, he embarked on the evaluation of existing theories of delinquency, paying particular attention to the age component. The prevalent theories of the time, exemplified by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, concentrated on the opportunity structures, legitimate as well as criminal, that presented themselves to the delinquents. In Cloward and Ohlin’s version of the anomie or the structural-strain perspective, the focus was on the opportunities for organized delinquency available or denied to the lower-class juveniles as they encountered a barrier to the legitimate opportunities for success in society. Greenberg noted that neither the opportunity

404

Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime

theory nor David Matza’s subculture theory of delinquency adequately explained the phenomenon of aging out of crime. Moreover, he noticed that there were systematic differences in the ways different groups of juveniles develop desistance to criminal activity, which led him to seek structural explanations that would elaborate the position of young people vis-à-vis the economy. Thus, Greenberg sought to outline the motivation for delinquency, building on the insights of Robert Merton’s anomie theory, elaborated by Cloward and Ohlin, as well as to delve into personal costs attached to delinquent behaviors as posited by the control theory. However, he proposed that it is the Marxist framework of historical materialism that could provide a conceptual home for integrating these major perspectives and filling in the gaps in their insights.

Economic Reorganization of Society Greenberg suggested that the disproportionate involvement of juveniles in major crime categories of the contemporary age could be understood as a consequence of the changing economic position of juveniles in the modern industrial society. From his longitudinal statistical examination of the ratio of adult to juvenile crime, he noticed that in the 1970s (and later in the 1980s) the proportion of crimes committed by juveniles had increased substantially as compared to the adult offenses. This change could not be explained by the demographic shifts alone. Rather, one would have to look to the restructuring of the labor market brought about by the maturation of industrial capitalism and the advent of the consumptionbased economy. The constriction of the industrial labor markets in Europe and America that followed the original transition from a farming-based to an industrial economy gradually changed the position of young people in the labor market. The appearance of child labor laws in the second half of the 19th century, coupled with the evolvement of compulsory education, squeezed juveniles out of the productive employment and confined them within the environment of schools. Greenberg points out that these two features of economic and social development proved to be instrumental in insuring high rates of delinquency among young people.

Teenage Consumption as the Means of Status Attainment Greenberg posited that delinquency in modern society is closely tied to the low economic status of most juveniles, irrespective of the economic class of their parents. He emphasized the connections of capitalist market developments and the increased utilization of school as an institution of containment of the surplus labor force throughout the 20th century. During the Great Depression, there was a dramatic contraction of teenage labor force correlated with the increase in school-leaving age. By the 1930s, teenagers were effectively excluded from meaningful paid employment. Eventually, not only did opportunities for full-time teenage employment disappear, but also the part-time employment that had helped teenagers maintain a modicum of financial independence had declined dramatically into and throughout the 20th century. In the more recent past, in the 1970s, the connection of age and crime was particularly salient for black teenagers who lost out dramatically in their bid for part-time jobs during that time. Drawing on Merton’s anomie theory and its elaboration by Cloward and Ohlin, Greenberg argued that juveniles are particularly prone to the discrepancy between their aspiration to status and the means for its attainment. As he explained it, the participation in the status attainment activities by teenagers requires resources that most juveniles do not have. Teenage consumption of material goods and resources had become particularly prominent in the modern industrial society, and it happened to be coupled with the growth in the compulsory education as well as the increased age of leaving school. As the schools became institutions of containment of surplus labor adjunct to capitalism, juveniles were subjected to the evertightening social control, extended into the increasingly older age. Greenberg argued that if personal and social resources required for the achievement of status are lacking in the kids of advanced school age, these teenagers become particularly focused on the sources of status attainment that require money such as consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, winning friends by spending money for their entertainment, clothes, and make-up for girls. All of these status

Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime

attainment needs can hardly be satisfied within the framework of school, and they frequently lead one into the involvement in illegal activities.

School as a Breeding Ground for Masculine Status Anxiety Another related etiological component of delinquency is the pressure and stress of being treated as a child while perceiving oneself as an adult. This cognitive dissonance often leads to rebellious behavior that expresses itself as minor criminality and vandalism. Being vehicles of discipline and regimentation, schools function as training ground for subordinate positions in capitalist production process. However, as an unintended consequence, schools also promote hooliganism and risk-taking behavior as means of self-assertion. In the rigid and regimented environment, delinquency functions as an alternate system of status attainment among juveniles. As such, the schools not only significantly contribute to the juvenile delinquency, but also they insure that deviant behavior takes place. The students who reap the least rewards from conformity and compliance with the school rules— those who are academically challenged and socially unaccomplished—are most vulnerable to self-expression through the delinquent behavior. The expectations of low-paying employment in the future and the perceived inability to fulfill the traditionally conceived masculine role of a breadwinner, also lead to specifically masculine status anxiety— yet another source of delinquency. Young males prone to this gender-specific anxiety usually live in a lower- class neighborhood where the alternative to the conventional, middle-class means of achievement of masculinity becomes the cultivation of toughness, frequently demonstrated through violent behavior. According to Greenberg (1977, p. 208), One would expect masculine status anxiety to appear with greatest intensity and to decline most slowly in those segments of the population in which adult male unemployment is exceptionally high. This conforms to the general patterns of arrests for violence offenses such as homicide, forcible rape and assaults—offenses often unconnected with the pursuit of material gain and hence most plausibly interpreted as a response to masculine status anxiety. Rates of arrest for these

405

offences peak in the immediate post-high school age brackets (several years later than for the property offences) and the decline is slower than for property offenses.

As teenagers get older and leave school, their status anxiety is reduced, as the material means by which the status could be achieved (including the masculine status) expand. The period of leaving high school usually marks a significant fall in juvenile non-violent crime for the graduating cohort, although the cessation of violent criminality lags somewhat behind.

Rise in the External Costs of Delinquency and Desistance Consistent with the insights of control perspective, Greenberg argued that the willingness to engage in criminal activities is distributed unequally among different age groups because the external costs of apprehension vary for different ages. In the early adolescence, the costs of delinquency (until very recently) were relatively low, especially for youths with few academic prospects. As teenagers become older, the cost of apprehension and intensity of punishment increase. The combination of the increased costs for criminal involvement with increased opportunities for status attainment (e.g., job and marriage) as a juvenile gets older will attenuate their involvement in crime. According to Greenberg (1977, p. 210), “Towards the end of high school, when student concern about the future increases, the anticipation of new opportunities is manifested in desistance from delinquency and avoidance of those who do not similarly desist.” Studies conducted in both the United States and Great Britain confirm that the peak year of delinquent involvement was found to be the year just before leaving high school.

Conclusion Greenberg concluded that the high rates of juvenile crime in the United States and other industrial democracies had their origin in the processes of containment of juveniles within the school system. These processes came about through the contraction of the employment opportunities for young people, generated by the insufficient demand for

406

Grounded Theory

labor of the advanced capitalist economy. Drawing on Marxist analysis, Greenberg conceived of juveniles as a conflict group, excluded from the means of production, whose criminality and deviance could be explained by its low status in society and its struggle for the achievement of social legitimacy. In this perspective, the age of the offender signifies the low economic status just as maturity and aging is connected to the increased opportunities for status achievement and abandonment of crime for the entry into the legitimate opportunity structure. Greenberg insisted that the crime-age connection should always be put into its historical context; thus, he convincingly demonstrated that desistance from crime with age was not a universal phenomenon—though appearing to be one—but a specific function of the economic and social reorganization of society that affected juveniles and their opportunities in a particular manner. Liena Gurevich See also Cloward Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime; Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

References and Further Readings Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity. New York: Free Press. Ezell, M. E., & Cohen, L. E. (2005). Desisting from crime: Continuity and change in long term crime patterns of serious chronic offenders. New York: Oxford University Press. Greenberg, D. F. (co-author, as member of American Friends Service Committee Working Party). (1971). Struggle for justice: A report on crime and punishment in America. New York: Hill and Wang. Greenberg, D. F. (1977). Delinquency and the age structure of society. Contemporary Crises, 1, 189–223. Greenberg, D. F. (Ed.). (1981). Crime and capitalism: Readings in Marxist criminology. Palo Alto, CA: Maryfield Publishing.

Greenberg, D. F. (1985). Age, crime, and social explanation. American Journal of Sociology. 91, 1–21. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. R. (1983). Age and the explanation of crime. American Journal of Sociology, 89, 552–584. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New York: Wiley. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Piquero, A. R., & Mazerolle, P. (Eds.). (2001). Lifecourse criminology: Contemporary and classic readings. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Quetelet, A. (1842). A treatise on man. Edinburgh, Scotland: Chambers. Rowe, A., & Tittle, C. (1977). Life cycle changes and criminal propensity. Sociological Quarterly, 18, 223–236. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (Eds.). (2005). Developmental criminology and its discontents: Trajectories of crime from childhood to old age [Special issue]. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 602.

Grounded Theory The term grounded theory was first introduced to sociological literature by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss with the publication of The Discovery of Grounded Theory in 1967. Grounded theory is a methodological-analytic approach wherein researchers develop theories of human behavior from direct comparisons of the data at hand. This contrasts with the logico-deductive model or logical positivist approaches, wherein researchers deduce hypotheses of how things work and then conduct research to test these hypotheses. Instead, the idea is to develop theory about the nature of human group life by examining the instances in which people do things—to build theory about people’s involvements, activities, relationships and so forth, from the “bottom up” rather than the “top down.” While Glaser and Strauss intended The Discovery of Grounded Theory to be a resource for both quantitative and qualitative researchers, they also recognized the unique promises and challenges of qualitative research. Thus, part of their motivation

Grounded Theory

in developing this text was to clarify and explain qualitative inquiry as well as provide it with more sustained conceptual and methodological rigor. Grounded theory has since become the most prevalent method used in qualitative research (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007, p. 1). In what follows, (1) the positivist-interpretivist debate in criminology is overviewed, (2) Glaser and Strauss’s work on grounded theory is introduced, (3) the central features and practices associated with grounded theory research are outlined, and (4) some of the implications of a grounded theory approach for criminology are considered.

The Positivist-Interpretivist Debate in Criminology Since its inception in the 19th century, criminology has been dominated by rationalist, positivist emphases. Most researchers following Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, and Émile Durkheim stress deductive analysis and the use of quantitative data to comprehend and examine the causes and connections between the phenomena under consideration. Generally speaking, positivist (also structuralist, determinist, objectivist) approaches to the study of crime and deviance attempt to explain deviant behavior through notions of cause and effect—that is, the interplay of internal (physiological and/or psychological deficiencies) and/or external (encompassing a variety of community effects) forces, factors, or variables that produce deviant behavior. Although some scholars have been concerned with developing theory in more abstract terms, a major objective of positivist research has been that of better predicting and controlling aspects of crime and deviance. A major attraction of a logical positivist approach in criminology reflects the success that this methodological emphasis has achieved in the physical or natural sciences. It was anticipated that one might be able to shape human behavior and community life by applying a parallel methodology and associated notions of cause and effect (independent variables and dependent variables) to the human subject matter. Some researchers of crime and deviance hoped we would eventually be able to reduce, if not eliminate, crime through the effective development and implementation of social policy (Prus & Grills, 2003).

407

Indeed, positivist approaches to criminology are appealing to lawmakers and politicians due to the simple and precise answers they provide and their efficient (inexpensive and quick) nature relative to non-positivist or qualitative approaches. Rather than viewing people as neutral mediums for the expression of forces, factors, or variables, interpretivist (also pragmatist, constructionist, interactionist) approaches to the study of crime and deviance would argue that people are different from other objects of study and that people need to be studied mindfully of their capacities for interpretation, interaction, reflectivity, knowledge, deliberative agency, and minded activity. These latter emphases were largely disregarded or taken for granted in the positivist quest to develop a more viable “social physics.” Whereas those invoking a positivist approach use deductive logic to generate theory from generals to particulars, or from the top down, interpretivists stress an analytic-inductive approach where theory is built up from particular instances of human group life and cast into more general or abstract conceptualizations. It is this bottom-up or ground-up approach that Glaser and Strauss championed.

The Discovery of Grounded Theory Although grounded theory has become much more broadly used in qualitative research than in quantitative research, it is worth noting that grounded theory was developed as a joint quantitative and qualitative analytic approach for the social sciences. Glaser was trained at Columbia University as a quantitative sociologist in the tradition of Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton. Strauss was trained at the University of Chicago as a qualitative sociologist, a symbolic interactionist, in the tradition of George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, Everett Hughes, and Herbert Blumer. As colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, Glaser and Strauss collaborated on studies of the process of dying experienced by seriously ill patients. Still, their collaboration had much broader theoretical and methodological implications. One result was their pioneering work The Discovery of Grounded Theory—a text that had far-reaching implications for the study of all aspects of human group life.

408

Grounded Theory

In The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Glaser and Strauss expressed their concern with the growing gap between theory and research in the social sciences. They took issue with top-down theory associated with functionalism, Marxism, or exchange theory, wherein theorists reduce human group life and social behavior to overarching principles of cooperation, conflict, or hedonism, for example. They felt that these approaches were too abstracted and removed from the realities of everyday experience since they had not been developed from careful, sustained study of people’s participation in the social world. Glaser and Strauss intended to close this gap between theory and research and to provide researchers with a practical guide to generating grounded social theory.

Generating Grounded Theory In developing grounded theory studies, researchers invoke what Glaser and Strauss term the constant comparative method. In basic terms, this method involves concurrent data collection, coding, conceptualizing, theorizing, and writing. Throughout this process, particular instances of data, codes, categories, and concepts are compared with one another for similarities and differences. The insights gained from this constant comparison of data suggest subsequent lines of inquiry. Thus, the study is not rigidly preplanned but is actively constructed by researchers and their participants throughout the course of the research, from data collection to the writing of the final paper. Researchers do not embark on projects as tabulae rasae or blank slates, as they often know some things about particular substantive settings and are likely aware of related concepts and literature. Still, once in the research setting, the data are given priority over any preconceived themes that researchers might have considered. As a result, researchers are often taken in new and unexpected directions, where earlier preconceptions may be refined and reformulated, based on the data encountered in the research setting. The constant comparative method for Glaser and Strauss includes four stages: (1) comparing incidents applicable to each category, (2) integrating categories and their properties, (3) delimiting the theory, and (4) writing the theory.

According to Glaser and Strauss, as researchers collect data, they should begin coding their data into initial categories. Coding usually takes two forms: (1) initial coding and (2) focused coding. Initial coding involves categorizing elements of data, often coding interview transcripts line by line. Focused coding involves taking these initial categorizations and identifying prevalent themes, then condensing these into more general overarching categories or concepts. Throughout this coding process, each new incident and category is compared and contrasted with the previous ones to further refine and reformulate the emerging concepts. It is during this stage that researchers begin the memo-writing process. Memo-writing involves taking detailed analytic notes on the elements of each conceptual category that one encounters and how these elements relate to one another. Memowriting is a reflective process wherein researchers converse with themselves by making notes on those aspects of the situation that fit together and those that do not. It is through these more sustained instances of analytic induction and memowriting that the analysis begins to take shape. The task of integrating categories and their properties takes place as researchers begin to formulate more coherent sets of concepts and their relations, rather than working with an assortment of disconnected ideas. This develops through the constant comparison of new and existing conceptual categories and their subcomponents. During this stage, researchers begin theoretical sampling as they pursue data to fill gaps in their theory. Thus, researchers return to the research setting numerous times throughout the study to gain greater insight into the conceptual categories and their elements. In contrast to more traditional statistical sampling, theoretical sampling is not concerned with achieving a certain number of participants or capturing a specific segment of the population. Instead, emerging conceptualizations guide the research. Glaser and Strauss use the term theoretical sensitivity to describe a researcher’s ability to be guided by the emerging theory. Theoretical sensitivity is an emergent ability developed by researchers over many experiences in conducting research and constructing theory. However, although theoretical sensitivity is an advocated ideal, researchers often

Grounded Theory

operate from and are committed to a particular theoretical perspective. When this is the case, researchers can become all-consumed in working out details from that perspective and blinded to other theoretical insights in many regards. As researchers begin to define the conceptual boundaries of their research, the theory becomes more solidified and delimited. This is accomplished by “reducing” its elements to a smaller set of integrated, general, and abstract concepts. Without this delimiting process, the researcher is likely to become overwhelmed, and the theory will ultimately be unfocused and unrefined in its thrust. Saturation occurs at both the coding and theoretical level. Saturation is reached when no new insights are being gained on a particular conceptual category or element of the theory and when there are no longer any gaps in the emerging concepts and theory. Kathy Charmaz cautions researchers not to confuse saturation with observing a number of similar incidents; saturation is only reached when no new theoretical insights are being gleaned from the data. Part of the challenge of determining when saturation has been reached is that it is a matter of researcher judgment, or their theoretical sensitivity, according to Glaser and Strauss. Working with the coded data, detailed memos, and emergent conceptualizations, the researcher can begin to write the theory in more refined manners. It is at this stage that sorting occurs. Sorting involves organizing and condensing the detailed memos into a more logical theoretical framework around the conceptual categories that emerge from the data. It is around these concepts and from the researchers’ memos that the theory is developed. Researchers may also go back to their collected data, coding practices, and/or field to obtain more data to clarify inconsistencies or other matters at hand. It is often at the end of the writing stage that the literature review is conducted. A delayed literature review is particular to grounded theory and is in contrast with the prevalent practice of beginning social research projects with an extensive review of the relevant literature. According to Strauss and Juliet Corbin, part of the reason for the delayed literature review is to discourage researchers from bringing with them any preconceived notions of the area under study. This way the data will be the primary guide to the development of their theoretical analysis. Another reason for the delayed literature

409

review is the uncertain direction in which the research will unfold. Thus, the researcher does not know from the outset the entire extent of what literature will be relevant to his or her study. It is only after gathering data and developing the theory that the researcher will know what literature is pertinent to his or her particular study. Glaser and Strauss contend that their constant comparative method can be used to generate two types of theory: (1) substantive and (2) formal. Substantive theory is particular to a specific setting or group, and might focus on people’s experiences with, for example, illness, drug dealing, or aspects of police work. Conversely, formal theory is broader in its scope and is applicable to numerous substantive settings. For instance, Erving Goffman’s theory of impression management and identity work can be applied to a wide variety of social groups and people’s roles within—including priests, politicians, celebrities, people on welfare, and thieves. Whereas substantive theories may be generated around one particular group or setting, those developing more formal or abstract grounded theory would include data from multiple groups and/or contexts in order to establish generic social relevance. Regardless of whether one develops substantive or formal grounded theory, it is expected that grounded theory will build on existing conceptualizations as new instances of research are developed and earlier notions of grounded theory are assessed within this ever-increasing base.

Implications for Criminology Instead of attempting to logically deduce and determine internal and external forces that cause crime, analysts invoking a grounded theory approach focus on people’s interpretations of and experiences with deviance in the community. In this regard, grounded theorists would be attentive to numerous facets of the deviance-making process, including (1) how people are defining and designating deviance in the community, (2) how people experience deviant involvements, and (3) attempts to regulate instances of deviance (Prus & Grills, 2003). The ensuing theories generated from these inquiries would be grounded in the actual experiences of those who participate in deviance, both as targets and tacticians, perpetrators and victims. An example of a grounded theory approach to the

410

Grounded Theory

study of crime and deviance is Howard Becker’s study, “Becoming a Marihuana User.” In this article, Becker examines the social process through which people become marijuana users. Taking issue with studies that attribute marijuana use solely to predisposing conditions, Becker attends to the role of the social process in becoming a user, that is, how people come to define marijuana as an object to derive pleasure from. Constructing his theory from interview data, Becker found that people needed to experience three processes before they could use marijuana for pleasure. First, people had to learn the proper smoking technique in order to evoke physical sensations. Second, people had to learn to recognize those sensations and connect them with their use of the drug. Finally, Becker also found that defining the sensations as pleasurable was a “socially acquired taste” learned through interactions with fellow users (p. 240). Only those people who experience all of these processes will become committed marijuana users.

Conclusion Although grounded theory has received considerable attention from qualitative researchers since its introduction in 1967, the term grounded theory has often been used casually rather than in more sustained, analytically rigorous terms. Researchers frequently misunderstand grounded theory methods. This leads to many claims of grounded theory methods, while few actually use them, according to Charmaz. Part of the reason for this has been a general ambiguity associated with grounded theory methods. Given the pioneering nature of their work, Glaser and Strauss were reluctant to demarcate clear-cut procedures for conducting grounded theory. Instead, they offer general positions and guidelines to be approached and developed more fully through the efforts and resourcefulness of future researchers. However, this has resulted in grounded theory being taken down many divergent paths, according to Charmaz. A clear example of this is the collaborative work of Corbin and Strauss. While highly cited and influential in grounded theory research, Corbin and Strauss’s work moves away from the interpretivist, comparative base of Glaser and Strauss’s text toward an objectivist stance in seeking to determine causes and trace conditional paths of social actions.

This is especially evident in their conceptions of a conditional matrix and axial coding. The use of these frameworks in conducting grounded theory research shifts the emphasis from engaging in a reflective, comparative, emergent analysis to mechanically applying and verifying preconceived conceptual categories, thereby restricting the analytic-inductive process of the research. Despite the criticism of many grounded theory researchers, including Glaser, Strauss and Corbin’s 1990 text has become the preeminent guide to grounded theory for a generation of qualitative researchers due to its accessible style and clear set of procedures to doing their version of grounded theory (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007). Still, the more consequential impact of grounded theory has been to instill a conceptual and methodological rigor in qualitative research that was previously uncommon. This has given qualitative research more “scientific” credibility and made it more appealing to a new generation of researchers. Grounded theory also has a generic relevance and applicability to all aspects of human group life, as evidenced by its prevalent use, not just in sociology or criminology but in a wide array of disciplines and approaches. Arthur Evan McLuhan See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil; Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang; Turner; Ralph H.: Deviant Roles and the Social Construction of Behavior

References and Further Readings Becker, H. S. (1953). Becoming a marihuana user. American Journal of Sociology, 59, 235–242. Bryant, A., & Charmaz, K. (2007). Grounded theory research: Methods and practices. In A. Bryant & K. Charmaz (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of grounded theory (pp. 1–28). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (1990). Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. Qualitative Sociology, 13, 3–21. Glaser, B. G. (1992). Basics of grounded theory analysis. Mill Valley, CA: The Sociology Press.

Grounded Theory Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1965). Awareness of dying. Chicago: Aldine. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago: Aldine. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1968). Time for dying. Chicago: Aldine. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.

411

Prus, R., & Grills, S. (2003). The deviant mystique. Westport, CT: Praeger. Strauss, A. L. (1993). Continual permutations of action. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Strauss, A. L., & Corbin, J. M. (1990). Basics of qualitative research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Strauss, A. L., & Glaser, B. G. (1970). Anguish. Mill Valley, CA: The Sociology Press.

H Social Context One of the most important shifts in theoretical development in the field of criminology occurred in the 1970s as Freda Adler and Rita Simon focused their work on female offenders, a population that had historically received little theoretical attention. Their claims that the rate of female offending was sharply escalating received much attention and generated additional research on their claims. Both scholars linked rises in female offending to expansions in the liberation of women. However, Adler highlighted increases in violent offending and cited the role of “liberation” in producing more masculine traits in women, such as competitiveness and aggression, while Simon focused on increases in property and white-collar offenses (such as fraud and larceny) and linked this jump in female offending to the greater access provided by inclusion of women in the workforce. Historically, these works served to bring women squarely into theoretical conversations about causes of offending. Acknowledging that the role of women generally was peripheral in the development of traditional criminological theories, such early omissions provided the foundation of much research on gender and crime. In an early review of the literature, Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind identified two key questions that guide research on the role of gender in criminological theories: the generalizability problem and the gender-ratio question. The generalizability problem references the need to examine traditional theories of crime to determine

Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory Power-control theory was developed during a period that highlighted the neglect of women and girls in theories of delinquency and crime. Aimed to explain the gender gap in delinquency and potential changes in this gap, John Hagan and his colleagues generated a theoretical model that combines elements of class and power to identify how levels of patriarchy within households impact the differences in delinquency between daughters and sons. The theoretical model ultimately links parental supervision, particularly differential supervision of daughters and sons by mothers, to power differentials between parents. Subsequently, these supervision differences are linked to gender differences in perceptions of risk in the contemplation of delinquent acts and preferences for risktaking. Finally, these differences in risk perceptions and preferences generate the gender difference in delinquency. This entry identifies the contextual period in which power-control theory was developed and provides a summary of the structural underpinnings of the theory. Highlighted is the role played by the relational measure of class utilized in the measures of patriarchy employed by Hagan and his colleagues in tests of the theory. Criticisms of the theoretical model are described and key tests and advances of the theory are presented.

413

414

Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory

their ability to explain female, as well as male, criminality. The gender-ratio question, in contrast, highlights the common finding that women commit less crime than do men and the need to understand this phenomenon. Power-control theory is one of the first sociological theories offered to address the latter question. Power-control theory combines elements of stratification theories with components of control theories of crime to generate explanations for the gender difference in delinquency and to predict changes in this difference over time. Specifically, power-control theory posits that parents’ levels of power in their positions in the labor force translate into power-relations in the home (Hagan et al., 1985; Hagan et al., 1979). These power differentials are used to generate a class-based and powerbased measure of patriarchy against which family types are identified. Households with a balance of power between parents are described as less patriarchal in nature, while more patriarchal households are identified as those in which fathers have greater power than mothers. Power-control theory describes the gender gap in delinquency as being widest, with girls committing significantly fewer delinquent acts than boys, in households identified as more patriarchal. The gender gap is assumed to be smaller in less patriarchal households.

Foundations of the Theory Hagan et al. (1985, p. 1155) built the foundation for power-control theory with the understanding that the “presence of power” and “absence of control” differentially combine to create contexts that contribute to the presences and absence of the gender gap in delinquency. The element of power is derived from a neo-Marxian, relational measure of class that identifies classes through relations to authority in the public work sphere (Hagan, 1989). Expanding on more conventional applications of this construct that consider only the head of a household’s position, Hagan and his colleagues (1985, 1987) account for the positions of both parents in the workforce rather than solely focusing on the father’s standing. It is the recognition of the growing numbers of women working in the public sphere that provides the ability of the model to explain not only gender differences in delinquency but also changes in this gap.

Hagan and his colleagues reviewed how the roles of women changed in conjunction with economic periods. Prior to industrialization, the family unit comprised both consumption and production domains, yet with the rise of industrialization, these domains were separated. This separation coincided with changes in women’s roles, as women stayed home in the domestic labor and consumption sphere while men moved into the public sphere of work (Hagan et al., 1979, 1987). This shift, which gave men greater rewards and power in the public sphere, also generated changes in the power structure of families, as women were subjected to greater informal social controls. Such a social structure provides the foundation of families that are more patriarchal in nature. Subsequent advances in technology and more recent changes in the economic structure led to increased participation of women in the public sphere of labor. This movement, particularly when women gained employment in authority positions, produced shifts in the power-structures of families, promoting greater balances of power between parents and less patriarchal family forms.

The Power-Control Model Within the power-control model (Hagan, 1989), different forms of households, based on this classbased measure of patriarchy, are defined as existing along a continuum. The ideal form of more patriarchal households is described as one in which the father works in a position of authority and the mother either is not employed or is employed but in a position with no supervisory authority. Families in which the father is employed without authority and the mother is not employed also are considered more patriarchal in form, although they are not necessarily characterized as ideal types. Families with a greater balance of power, particularly with both mothers and fathers employed in positions of authority, represent the model form of a less patriarchal household (Hagan, 1989). In contrast, households with a balance of power between parents, both fathers and mothers are employed without authority or are unemployed, fall on the continuum close to less patriarchal households. The theoretical model is predicted to work differently across these two family types, primarily as a result of the differences in parenting

Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory

techniques that impact the controls levied over children within the families. Hagan and his colleagues assert that mothers are more likely to be the instruments of control than are fathers, while daughters are more likely than sons to be the objects of such control—an assumption derived from traditional control theory. The differences in control levels of sons and daughters are linked to the higher risk preferences and lower risk perceptions of boys compared to girls, which ultimately produce the gender gap in delinquency. Finally, these differences are expected to be most pronounced in more patriarchal families when compared to families that are less patriarchal in nature. In sum, in more patriarchal families, greater controls, primarily by mothers, of daughters than of sons, results in girls being socialized into more feminine roles within which they are less likely to take risks and have higher perceptions. Meanwhile, boys are encouraged to be bold and take risks. These differences are the ultimate source of the gender gap in delinquency. When mothers’ “power” status is improved in homes, it is associated with a reduction in the controls levied over daughters and more similarities in risk perceptions and preferences of daughters and sons. These increased similarities between boys and girls yield decreases in the gender gap in delinquency.

Criticisms of the Power-Control Model Several overarching criticisms have been made of the power-control model. Many concentrate on the conceptualization and measurement of patriarchy, the “power” element of the model. Others address the outcome measures of focus. Finally, concerns have been raised that salient variables have been omitted from the model. Class of Household and Patriarchy

The original classification of female-headed households has raised concerns in discussions of the measure of patriarchy. Such households originally were described as less patriarchal in form by Hagan and his colleagues, who cited the lack of a power imbalance potentially created with the presence of a father. Scholars have contended that because such households actually have fewer

415

resources, and are controlled by the state when it provides resources, they actually may more closely reflect more (not less) patriarchal households. Other household structures also are omitted in Hagan’s tests of power-control theory (1987; see also Hagan, 1989), such as those wherein mothers are employed with positions of authority and fathers are employed without authority or not employed, and those in which mothers are employed but have no authority and fathers are not employed. These family forms are considered unusual and atypical, and primarily are excluded from analyses because the number of such households is limited. Father-only households are eliminated from analyses on the same grounds. However, it is notable that the description of such households is limited, and the position of these households on the patriarchy continuum is a subject open to revision. Meanwhile, others argue that Hagan’s classification system is inadequate and inconsistent across different studies. Such researchers particularly are critical of the use of a relational, rather than gradational, class measure. Ultimately, Hagan has acknowledged that measurement of the concept of patriarchy has been limited, and further refinement is merited. Indeed, much of Hagan’s own work demonstrates a readiness to explore various forms of patriarchy. Common Forms of Delinquency

As with other criminological theories, it is necessary to note that power-control theory was devised to account for gender differences in “common” forms of delinquency, or offenses such as minor forms of theft, aggression or assault, and vandalism; more serious offenses, such murder or armed robbery, are not a focus. This is in part due to assumptions that there is variation in the extent to which those who commit crime do so rationally, considering risks and benefits in the contemplation of crime. Common delinquency is held to more likely to involve such calculations than are violent forms of criminal behavior. Furthermore, offenses that are sexual in nature are not considered by Hagan (1989), primarily because the model concerns gender differences in delinquency. Since sexual offenses are significantly less likely to occur in the female population, the model is not as applicable.

416

Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory

Absence of Salient Variables

Finally, several critics have noted that a number of salient variables, such as peer participation in delinquency, religious beliefs, and perceived threats of informal sanctions, were inappropriately omitted from the construction of the theoretical model. This particular criticism has served as a foundation for much of the research conducted on powercontrol theory through the years, as many tests of the theory have ultimately been geared at elaborating the power-control model by including other salient variables.

Tests and Elaborations of the Power-Control Model Research on power-control theory generally involves not merely replications of the model but also inclusion of additional variables and/or variations in the measurements of some of the model’s concepts. Support for the theory has been mixed; some aspects of the theory have garnered greater support than have others. The key theoretical variable, encompassed in the class-based measure of patriarchy, has been supported in many tests of the theory. However, support for this concept clearly hinges on its operationalization. Tests of the theory that utilized the relational measure of class as specified have garnered the most support for the theory, while tests that utilized a proxy or did not include a classbased measure of patriarchy generally have not yielded support for the theory. Further support has been found for the instrument-object hypotheses within the theory. However, taking findings from the numerous studies together, it is clear that the relationships between parental control and delinquent outcomes are likely more complex than the original powercontrol framework anticipated. Specifically, while the instrument-object hypotheses tend to be supported as expected in more patriarchal families, the relationships are more complex in families that are less patriarchal in nature. It is the relationship between fathers and sons in these families that is more likely to impact the gender gap in delinquency. Fathers increase their parental control, particularly over sons; this serves to decrease the delinquency of boys. In other words, it appears that the shift in the instrument-object relationship

that occurs in less patriarchal families has less to do with the impact of changes in mothering that coincide with the entry of women into more powerful positions in the labor force than it has to do with shifts in parenting by fathers. Research has been conducted on gender differences in perceptions of risk as well as risk preferences in the contemplation of delinquency. For example, Harold Grasmick et al. report a convergence in the gender gap in perceptions of risk over time, providing indirect support for power-control theory, while Brenda Blackwell’s elaborated powercontrol model that includes shame and embarrassment as additional forms of risk perceptions provided direct support for this element of the theory. Meanwhile, Grasmick et al.’s research yields support for the argument that gender differences in risk preference are produced in patriarchal families but are not found in less patriarchal families, and that these differences persist into adulthood. Finally, consistent with power-control theory, findings also indicate that there is a shift occurring in the prevalence of less, compared to more, patriarchal households. Hagan and Alberto Palloni posit that such a shift is occurring as a result of cultural and social changes, many of which have yielded greater participation of women in the public sphere of life. Grasmick et al. provide evidence that such a shift has indeed occurred over the last 30 years, with a larger proportion of less patriarchal households identified in later, compared to earlier, birth cohorts. It is important to note a further advance that has taken place in testing power-control theory, one that informs the contextual specification of the model rather than elaboration. Hagan (2004) and Blackwell and Mark Reed identified the need to test power-control theory using family-level data rather than data collected from individuals. By structuring data to allow for comparisons not only of parental-level patriarchy (which can be tapped with individual-level data), but also differences in risk preferences, perceptions, and delinquency between opposite sex siblings, these researchers more accurately tested the propositions of the theory, which specifically references betweensibling differences. In sum, many tests of the theory have yielded support for some or all of its elements. Supportive research generally involves tests that include a

Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory

measure of patriarchy defined in a manner consistent with early descriptions of the patriarchy concept. However, it should also be understood that most of these tests that lend credence to some or all of the theory also indicate that the model is underspecified. In other words, although there is support for the theory generally functioning as predicted, the amount of variance in the gender gap in delinquency that is explained by the model is small, indicating that continued elaboration of the model is justified.

Conclusion While support for power-control theory exists, clearly there is room for continued modification of the theoretical components and predictions. Future efforts should continue to refine the measure of patriarchy, with the goal of more accurately identifying how parents’ differential placement in the power-structures present in the public sphere of work translate into a power-structure at home. Such research should strive to improve our understanding of how such relationships then impact parenting, and how such differences impact parenting of daughters and sons. Future research also should continue to explore how the model can be further elaborated so that it can more fully account for the gender gap in crime and delinquency. Finally, continued specification, using families as the unit of analysis, would be useful in further elucidating the efficacy of the theory. Brenda Sims Blackwell See also Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime; Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency; Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

References and Further Readings Adler, F. (1975). Sisters in crime. New York: McGrawHill. Blackwell, B. S. (2000). Perceived sanction threats, sex, and crime: A test and elaboration of power-control theory. Criminology, 38, 439–488. Blackwell, B. S., & Piquero, A. R. (2005). Power-control and the gender-crime relationship: Does low self-control intervene? Journal of Criminal Justice, 33, 1–17.

417

Blackwell, B. S., & Reed, M. D. (2003). Power-control as a between and within family model: Reconsidering the unit of analysis. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 32, 385–400. Daly, K., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1988). Feminism and criminology. Justice Quarterly, 5, 497–538. Grasmick, H. G., Hagan, H., Blackwell, B. S., & Arneclev, B. (1996). Risk preferences and patriarchy: Extending power-control theory. Social Forces, 75, 177–199. Hagan, J. (1989). Structural criminology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hagan, J., Boehnke, K., & Merkens, H. (2004). Gender differences in capitalization processes and the delinquency of siblings in Toronto and Berlin. British Journal of Criminology, 44, 659–676. Hagan, J., Gillis, A. R., & Simpson, J. (1985). The class structure of gender and delinquency: Toward a powercontrol theory of common delinquent behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 90, 1151–1178. Hagan, J., Gillis, A. R., & Simpson, J. (1990). Clarifying and extending power-control theory. American Journal of Sociology, 95, 1024–1037. Hagan, J., & Palloni, A. (1988). Crimes as social events in the lifecourse: Reconceiving a criminological controversy. Criminology, 26, 87–100. Hagan, J., Simpson, J., & Gillis, A. R. (1979). The sexual stratification of social control: A gender-based perspective on crime and delinquency. British Journal of Sociology, 30, 25–38. Hagan, J., Simpson, J., & Gillis, A. R. (1987). Class in the household: A power-control theory of gender and delinquency. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 788–816. Hill, G. D., & Atkinson, M. P. (1988). Gender, familial control, and delinquency. Criminology, 26, 127–145. Jensen, G. F., & Thompson, K. (1990). What’s class got to do with it? A further examination of power-control theory. American Journal of Sociology, 95, 1009–1023. Leiber, M. J., & Wacker, M. E. E. (1997). A theoretical and empirical assessment of power-control theory and single-mother families. Youth and Society, 28, 317–350. Mack, K. Y., & Leiber, M. J. (2005). Race, gender, single-mother households, and delinquency. Youth & Society, 37, 115–144. Morash, M., & Chesney-Lind, M. (1991). A reformulation and partial test of the power-control theory of delinquency. Justice Quarterly, 8, 347–377. Simon, R. (1975). Women and crime. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

418

Hagan, John, and Holly Foster: Stress and Gendered Pathways to Delinquency

Hagan, John, and Holly Foster: Stress and Gendered Pathways to Delinquency Criminologists in the late 1800s and throughout much of the 1900s were primarily focused on explaining male criminality. Many reasoned that since male criminality was more prevalent, the focus of criminologists should be on examining male offending behavior. Theories formulated during this time attempted to explain male offending and were examined primarily using samples of males. However, the focus on male offending shifted during the 1970s. In the 1970s, the feminist movement was under way in the United States, and it ignited many criminologists to begin examining female criminality. Since the 1970s, several criminological theories have been developed to explain male and female offending with empirical examinations being conducted on samples of males and females. The theories introduced since the 1970s, for the most part, recognize that there may be both similarities and differences when explaining male and female criminality. This entry devotes discussion to John Hagan and Holly Foster’s gendered and age-graded sequential stress theory, its empirical support, and criticisms levied against it.

Theoretical Underpinnings Several theories furnish the foundation for the gender and age-graded sequential stress theory (e.g., strain and power-control theory). However, powercontrol theory provides the direct springboard for the formation of this theory. In 1985, Hagan, A. R. Gillis, and John Simpson introduced their power-control theory in an attempt to explain the differential rates of deviance with respect to gender and social class. These criminologists assert that positions held by parents in the workplace affect patriarchal attitudes in the home. The patriarchal attitudes result in different levels of control (e.g., supervision and punishment) that are placed on boys and girls in these homes. In turn, the differing levels of control play a role in whether the children within the home engage in deviance. Since greater levels of control are placed on girls in patriarchal homes, there are gender differences in delinquency

in these homes whereby boys are more likely than girls to be delinquent. Researchers who have empirically tested Hagan’s power control theory have found mixed support. The lack of strong empirical support for the theory may be why Hagan chose to broaden the theory into a gendered and age-graded sequential stress theory. With the broadened theory, Hagan suggests that juvenile offending behavior is rooted in stressors from developmental and social processes.

Conceptual Framework In 2003, Hagan and Foster proposed a gendered and age-graded sequential stress theory that integrates theoretical concepts from sociological theories of crime (i.e., strain), life-course theories (i.e., importance of examining the development of criminality, transitions in the life course), and the mental health literature (i.e., anger, depression, substance abuse). In formulating their theory, the researchers assert that quantitative longitudinal research overlooks theoretical and qualitative research that suggests that delinquency is a developmental phase. That is, researchers tend to cease their examination of behavior when delinquency occurs and view it as the final event of behavior. However, within criminology, delinquency has begun to be viewed as a mediating stage in the life course. Thus, Hagan and Foster assert that the precursors to delinquency should be investigated, that delinquency should be viewed as a transitional event, and that the emotions and/or behavioral outcomes following delinquent behavior should be also examined. The researchers suggest that delinquency may result from stresses that are structured by age and gender and have implications for adult outcomes. This perspective is not unique, as several researchers have asserted that gendered pathways into delinquency exist and that stressors such as strain can lead to involvement in delinquency. Female offenders are more likely to experience sexual abuse in the home, which is a key factor in their onset into criminality. As a result of this stressor, many females flee their homes and enter into the world of crime to support their escape from abuse. Many females become involved in prostitution or enter into the drug business to support themselves. Both males and females may become angry or frustrated because of their inability to achieve

Hagan, John, and Holly Foster: Stress and Gendered Pathways to Delinquency

goals in society (such as the accumulation of wealth). The perceived gap between their goals and the means to achieve the goals (e.g., lack of access to higher level education) cause many offenders to become strained and resort to crime to alleviate their strain. Several researchers have found that males and females respond differently to strains. Therefore, researchers should not expect that males and females will cope with strains and stressors in the same manner. Sung Joon Jang noted that African American females experience different strains and respond differently to strain than African American males. In this study, African American females were more likely to report strains related to physical health, interpersonal relations, and gender roles in the family, whereas African American males mentioned work or race as a source of their strain. Additionally, females were more likely to report higher levels of anger and depression and have different coping responses than their male counterparts. In terms of age, there are emotional stressors (e.g., anger, frustration) that occur during adolescence whereby involvement in delinquency is an age-graded response to the demands of the adult culture. The unique addition that Hagan and Foster contribute to the existing literature is that delinquency itself should be viewed as a stressor. Oftentimes, the focus of criminological research is on the life events or stressors that trigger a delinquent response (i.e., anger, depression, prior sexual abuse), but the researchers extend that view by positing that delinquency should also be viewed as a stressor that can impact subsequent emotions and behavioral outcomes. Findings from ethnographic research suggest that emotional distress can follow the commission of delinquent acts. In their research investigation of armed robbers, Richard Wright and Scott Decker found that many armed robbers became angrier and more frustrated after the commission of their crimes as they began to view themselves as being trapped in a cycle of offending with no means to exit their lifestyle by their own free will. Thus, failing to examine behaviors and emotions post delinquent acts may result in an incomplete understanding of offending. Drawing from several theoretical and research traditions, Hagan and Foster suggest (1) anger can lead to delinquency as an early part of a stress process, (2) delinquency can be a source of distress

419

due to the responses it elicits from others, and (3) subsequent stages of the stress process may be gender-specific where females internalize feelings (e.g., depression) and males externalize feelings (e.g., drinking and drug use).

Empirical Support Since the gender and age-graded sequential stress theory is relatively new within the field of criminology, very little empirical research has been conducted on it. To date, there has been only one empirical evaluation of the theory. Using secondary data from the first two waves (i.e., time 1: 1994–1995; and time 2: 1996) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) containing a final sample size of 11,506 youths, Hagan and Foster examined their agegraded sequential stress theory. The first stage of data collection for the Add Health consisted of administering the survey to juveniles in 80 high schools across the nation. The second stage of data collection included a random sample of students in grades 7 through 11 who completed an in-home interview (an interview was also conducted with their parents). The data were collected at two time points and the reference period for the measured items was 12 months. The Add Health data include measures of anger (parent-assessment), violent (e.g., threaten someone with a weapon, hurt someone) and non-violent delinquency (e.g., paint graffiti, run away from home), depression (19-item scale), and alcohol problems (e.g., got in trouble with parents for drinking or problems at school due to drinking). Overall, the researchers found support for their theory. Consistent with previous studies, anger often follows stress from social and economic situations as well as stressful family circumstances (i.e., less educated parents, single-parent or blended families). No significant differences were found in regard to anger when gender was examined. Both males and females experience anger at similar levels when facing stress from economic and family circumstances. The researchers also found that when anger levels increased, involvement in non-violent and violent delinquency increased. Consistent with previous research, males were more likely to engage in delinquency, and the researchers found that Hispanic and African American youths were more

420

Hagan, John, and Holly Foster: Stress and Gendered Pathways to Delinquency

likely to be involved in violent delinquency. Additionally, anger is a source of depression for adolescent boys and girls, with depression being slightly more common among adolescent girls. The impact of anger on depression is mediated, in part, by involvement in delinquency for both genders. Results from the researchers’ analysis indicate that anger leads to drinking problems among males but not for females. Also, involvement in delinquency plays a mediating role between anger and drinking for males. Thus, delinquency is the connecting link between anger and subsequent depression and drinking for females and males. Females are more likely to internalize their response to delinquency, while males are more likely to externalize their response to delinquency. The findings suggest that there is a cumulative and gendered nature of downward trajectories in the life course.

Critique While initial support has been found for gendered and age-graded sequential stress theory, there are several criticisms that could be levied against the theory and its sole empirical evaluation. First, the theory does not consider the role of bio-social influences. For instance, Terrie Moffitt asserts that, for some offenders, there is a biological underpinning to an individual’s behavior that can be exacerbated by poor interactions with parents. Hagan and Foster do not consider the role of biology and how it could impact both how one perceives strains or how one may respond to stressors. Second, although Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi assert that parents play a role in the development of low self-control, Hagan and Foster do not mention the role of parents in shaping behavior. Instead, the theorists focus on how stressful family circumstances can contribute to the development of anger. Yet, this idea needs to be flushed out. In their empirical examination, the researchers examine stressful family circumstances by using measures such as less-educated parents and family status (single-parent, blended family). However, the theorists fail to articulate, in their explanation of their theory, the rationale for why those individuals with less-educated parents would be more likely to be angry or why those from single-parent families would be more likely to experience anger or strain. Third, to date, there has been

only one empirical test of this theory. More research needs to be conducted to determine if the posited causal relationships that the theorists propose, and found support for, are also found in subsequent research investigations. Finally, Hagan and Foster critique quantitative research for neglecting qualitative work, but, in their empirical evaluation, they fail to incorporate any qualitative components into their study. Thus, they miss an opportunity to explore why those with less-educated parents are more likely to experience anger and engage in delinquency. Additionally, they also miss an opportunity to explore the process through which females begin to internalize responses to delinquency while males externalize theirs. Elaine Gunnison See also Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert S. Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime; ChesneyLind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory; Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

References and Further Readings Hagan, J., & Foster, H. (2003). S/He’s a rebel: Toward a sequential stress theory of delinquency and gendered pathways to disadvantage in emerging adulthood. Social Forces, 82(1), 53–86. Hagan, J., Gillis, A. R., & Simpson, J. (1985). The class structure of gender and delinquency: Toward a power-control theory of common delinquent behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 90, 1151–1178. Hagan, J., McCarthy, B., & Foster, H. (2002). A gendered theory of delinquency and despair in the life course. Acta Sociologica, 45, 37–46. Jang, S. J. (2007). Gender differences in strain, negative emotions, and coping behaviors: A general strain theory approach. Justice Quarterly, 24, 523–553. Moffitt. T. E. (1993). Life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Wright, R. T., & Decker, S. H. (1997). Armed robbers in action: Stickups and street culture. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency Mean Streets is an award-winning book by John Hagan and Bill McCarthy that integrates a number of criminological theories to explain the criminal behavior of young people who live on the streets. Hagan and McCarthy assimilate and extend seemingly disparate criminological perspectives such as control, strain, differential association, and labeling theories into a comprehensive model and cast them under the umbrella of social capital theory. This integrative theoretical development enables one to understand how the background and developmental experiences of street youths, along with foreground factors associated with the street itself, lead to crime.

An Integrated Theory The Mean Streets book emerged during a historical period when criminological theory had become focused on background and developmental explanations of crime and had all but deserted explanations that focused on adverse situational conditions like living in extreme poverty. This theoretical trend coincided with the methodological development of the self-report survey that shifted the focus of data gathering toward samples of school-based youths living at home who were less likely to experience extreme social and economic situations or to be involved in serious forms of criminal activity. Mean Streets evolved as a challenge to this theoretical and methodological trend and shifted the focus to examine the adverse social experiences of those in extreme circumstances at the margins of society to more fully understand the etiology of crime. The task of the work was to explore theoretically how negative background and developmental experiences combine with situational conditions of adversity to stimulate participation in serious illegal activities.

The Integrated Theoretical Model To explain the process of how background and developmental and situational experiences of street youths lead to crime, Hagan and McCarthy

421

integrate and extend a number of criminological perspectives. First, assertions from Robert Agnew’s version of strain theory and Travis Hirschi’s control theory are brought together. Drawing from strain theory, the model outlines that people respond to frustrating, painful, punishing, aversive environments with criminal behavior. From this perspective, youths in a range of adverse background and foreground situations are viewed as being pushed into crime by strain. Incorporated into the integrated model from control theory is the notion that those who lack attachment to conventional others, as well as commitment to and involvement in conventional activities, will be more likely to engage in crime. From this perspective youths can be seen as free to commit crime because of the lack of social controls they may experience in either background or foreground situations. This integration of the strain and control perspectives, therefore, allows youths to be pushed into crime at the same time that the release from controls frees them to commit crime. The integration of these two theories can be applied to understand how background factors lead youths to the street and then extended to contextualize how situational experiences can lead to crime. More specifically, the model begins with the argument that adverse economic circumstances create economic and psychological strains in the home. These economic and psychological strains lead to family disruptions like separation and divorce, and increase the likelihood that parents will utilize coercive control and inconsistent methods of discipline. Coercive control is viewed to generate strain and inconsistent discipline leads to low social control. The sources of strain and low social control in the family are then linked to the lack of involvement in, or commitment to, school as well as potential conflict with school personnel. The failure to become involved in and committed to an important conventional activity like school leads to low social control and conflict with teachers generates further strain. The presence of strain and lack of social control at home and in school increases a youth’s probability of taking to the street. The street is viewed as an aversive environment containing a number of potential sources of strain including homelessness, hunger, and unemployment that pressure youths into crime. The street also distances youths from the social control of

422

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency

family, school, and employment, freeing them to engage in crime. The lack of social control and the presence of strain on the street have the strongest direct effects on crime. The lack of social control and strain stemming from poor economic backgrounds, family experiences, and school experiences also lead to crime. The effects of these background factors on crime, however, are more indirect through the way they influence youths to take to the street where they are exposed to the adverse situational experiences. The next step in the theoretical development is the integration of Edwin Sutherland’s differential association perspective. The broad idea that criminal behavior is learned through connections with others who violate the law is incorporated into the model. From the differential association perspective, these connections provide exposure to attitudes supportive of breaking the law and provide access to the skills needed to undertake certain offenses. These ideas are extended in Hagan and McCarthy’s model to include the concepts of criminal capital and criminal embeddeness. Embeddedness refers to the extent to which one is involved in relationships within social networks where trust and expectations are established. Becoming embedded in social networks with others who are proficient in crime (criminal embeddedness) increases the opportunity to acquire the skills, knowledge, definitions and beliefs (criminal capital) that promote and facilitate crime. Theoretically, being on the street increases the opportunity for criminal embeddedness to occur and criminal capital to be acquired. These are seen as vital foreground factors, along with the strain and social control variables, associated with situational adversity in explaining crime on the street. The final theory integrated into the model is a labeling perspective. Starting from the central idea in most labeling perspectives that sanctions promote further criminal conduct, Hagan and McCarthy outline that people with certain backgrounds are more likely to respond to punishment with criminal behavior. Drawing from the “new sanction theories,” the model delineates that physical and sexual abuse can generate shame and rage for those who experience it. The labeling component of the model suggests that it is youths with this unresolved shame and rage who will respond to criminal sanctions with increased offending.

Thus, the overall theoretical model that Hagan and McCarthy present links strain and control as background factors that lead to the street where adverse situational variables associated with new contexts of strain and weak social control lead to crime. The street also exposes youths to differential association, criminal embeddedness, and criminal capital, which also increase crime. Finally, street life exposes youths to criminal sanctions, which when applied to those with shame-producing backgrounds, lead to an amplification of street crime. Hagan and McCarthy complete their integration by assimilating the four theories into a social capital perspective. This perspective presumes that “people acquire at birth and accumulate through their lives unequal shares of capital that incrementally alter and determine their life chances” (p. 228). In this version, social capital centers on the manner in which people fail or succeed in socially coordinating their efforts to reach cultural goals. Social capital stems from social networks or the “social structured relations” between people, within families, and in larger groups like schools, neighborhoods, and communities. These social networks create knowledge, information channels, expectations, obligations, norms, and sanctions that assist and make social action possible. People vary “in their access to social capital and therefore adapt themselves to existing, continuing, and changing accumulations of social capital in the circumstances that they inherit and inhabit” (p. 230). In this integrated umbrella model, street youths are seen to have restricted social capital. Their social capital is limited by their families’ economic marginalization (strain theory), low levels of social control (social control theory), and high levels of coercion (strain theory). Their limited social capital is further undermined by their alienation from education (social control theory) and conflict with school personnel (strain theory). Together, these family and educational experiences serve to undermine the acquisition of knowledge, information, and norms; undercut the development of expectations and obligations; and destroy and close off access to legitimate channels that can come through the family and education system. Moving to the street can be seen to corrode social capital further. On the street youths become

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency

isolated from economic (strain theory) and social resources (social control theory), and the potential sources of conventional social capital that go along with them. Instead, street youths adapt to the environments with which they are presented, immersing themselves into criminal networks that provide “criminal capital” or skills and information that allow them to take advantage of criminal opportunities to survive in adverse situations (differential association theory). The emdeddedness in these criminal networks and the criminal justice responses to their behavior (labeling theory) reduces further their ability to access conventional social capital and succeed in legitimate spheres.

Empirical Support To develop and examine the theoretical model, Hagan and McCarthy conducted research over a 10-year period gathering quantitative and qualitative data from homeless street youths in two Canadian cities across a number of points in time as well as from a control group of school-based youths. The results in Mean Streets provide support for the theoretical model. The findings suggest that families experiencing unemployment and other economic difficulties were more likely to be disrupted by divorce or separation. The economic pressures associated with unemployment and the parenting stresses associated with disruption meant these families were more at risk to utilize coercive, volatile, and inconsistent methods of discipline in the home. In turn, male youths from fractured families headed by unemployed parents who experienced explosive inconsistent discipline were more likely to take to the streets. These damaging family environments also undermined educational activities and led to conflicts with educational authorities, further increasing youths’ probabilities of transition to street life. The adverse situations of the street, including homelessness, unemployment, and hunger, were related to offenses like theft of food, serious theft, and prostitution. These situational factors mediated the impact of the background factors that lead youths to the street. The empirical findings also revealed that the different policies toward street youths adopted in different cities influenced the availability of criminal opportunities and patterns of offending. Restricted access to social welfare resources and

423

conventional social capital increased the availability of criminal opportunities, or chances to make money illegally on the street, and these opportunities were directly related to offending. These criminal opportunities, however, as well as the involvement in crime, were also more likely to lead to police intervention. The greater youths’ exposure to criminal networks, the more able they were to take advantage of the criminal opportunities. The criminal networks exposed the youths to tutors and mentors who provided the skills, information, and support that allowed them to exploit criminal opportunities and successfully undertake crime. The tutelage and mentorship street youths received was often found in “street families,” groups formed on the street among youths spending time together searching for food, panhandling for money, and looking for physical protection. Criminal justice sanctions in response to criminal behaviors stemming from shame associated with abusive backgrounds activated further criminal behavior. The combinations of sexual abuse and street charges, and physical abuse by female parents and street charges, interacted to create further criminal behavior in a process of “street crime amplification.” The findings also revealed how participation in employment assists in decreasing criminal participation and increasing conventional social capital. The time commitment required of employment, the access to non-street contacts, the acquisition of job skills, and establishment of employment histories created experiences for street youths that were dissonant from their street and illegal activities. Youths able to secure even marginal low-wage employment spend less time with street friends, panhandling, searching for food and shelter, using drugs, and engaging in crime. The embeddedness in street crime networks begins to decline and employment serves as a turning point in changing these youths’ trajectories toward a life off the street. Stephen W. Baron See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

424

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime

References and Further Readings Hagan, J., & McCarthy, B. (1997). Mean streets: Youth crime and homelessness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy B., & Hagan J. (1998). Uncertainty, cooperation, and crime: Understanding the decision to co-offend. Social Forces, 77, 155–176. McCarthy B., & Hagan J. (2001). When crime pays: Capital, competence, and criminal success. Social Forces, 79, 1035–1060.

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime Social capital theory aims to articulate an understanding of street crime that includes links among prior criminal activity, networks at home and on the street, and tutelage. John Hagan and Bill McCarthy (1997a) argue that embeddedness in criminal networks and the subsequent acquisition of criminal capital are important aspects of getting into crime, in much the same way that similar processes are involved in getting a job and achieving occupational success in the conventional world of work. Social capital theory draws on sociological studies of social mobility and the life course, while integrating criminological lineages of differential association and strain theories. The most eloquent statement of Hagan and McCarthy’s social capital approach to crime is contained in their book Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness, though the authors outline and develop social capital as applied to both crime and victimization in numerous journal articles (Hagan et al., 1995; Hagan & McCarthy, 1998; McCarthy & Hagan, 1995, 2001; McCarthy et al., 2002) and book chapters (McCarthy & Hagan, 1997b). Hagan and McCarthy’s theoretical development of social capital as applied to crime can most clearly be described by tracing (1) the criminological landscape in the late 1990s when the theory was developed, (2) the key theoretical lineages that shaped the theory, (3) the elements of social capital, and (4) the application of social capital theory to crime and victimization.

Background In 1968, Gary Becker introduced criminologists to a neoclassical economic perspective on crime. Central to this perspective was a rational choice approach to decision making that assumed that people’s choice to offend using the same principles of cost-benefit analysis they use when opting to engage in legal behaviors (Becker, 1968). Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s self-control theory also emphasized rational calculations toward the short-term immediate gains of crime, based in part on a lack of self control, impulsivity, and weak social bonds. Toward the end of the 20th century, scholarship on crime increasingly embraced derivations of these ideas in their depictions of crime as the “product of utilitarian calculations, individual failings, and resistance to social and self-control” (McCarthy & Hagan, 1995, p. 87). Advocates of these approaches were dismissive of the claim that one learns criminal behaviors through associations with criminals and instruction in criminal activities. Furthermore, many scholars maintained that the majority of criminal acts are unsophisticated behaviors that do not require special expertise. In sharp contrast, McCarthy and Hagan (1995, 1998) criticized rational choice and self-control theories as utilitarian approaches to crime and called for a more sociological view of crime. They envisioned crime as an activity fostered through social relationships and one that required mentorship and support. McCarthy and Hagan argued “In our view, even street crimes tend not to be the asocial, unplanned, unskilled activities that recent sociological, psychological, and economic theories imply” (1995, p. 67). They also sought to develop a theory of crime that was less deterministic. The result, a social capital approach to crime, recognizes explicitly an individual’s agency in making decisions. As McCarthy (2002, p. 438) observes, “explanations that view people as actively involved in transforming their relationships into social capital and their experiences into human capital (conventional or criminal) are more compelling that those that suggest that people simply respond to associations and events.” To accomplish this theoretical advancement, Hagan and McCarthy revisited the classic criminology works of Edwin Sutherland and integrated more contemporary debates on social capital, drawn largely from the field of immigration and social mobility.

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime

Theoretical Linkages Hagan and McCarthy’s social capital perspective on crime draws ideas of social organization and tutelage from Sutherland’s classic works on homelessness and crime. In his early work, Twenty Thousand Homeless Men with Harvey Locke, Sutherland paid close attention to the differential social organization that fosters learning processes that encourage crime. Although Sutherland devoted attention to the homeless in his subsequent work, The Professional Thief, he emphasized that structural conditions such as homelessness do not by themselves cause crime. According to Sutherland, the processes through which crime is cultivated involve four key elements: (1) affiliation with delinquents in close personal groups, (2) communication with these individuals about deviant attitudes, (3) tutelage in and mastery of criminal skills, and (4) exposure to and adoption of definitions that legitimate law violation. It is here that Hagan and McCarthy draw a linkage between Sutherland’s classic differential association theory and contemporary theories of embeddedness and social capital, more typically applied to immigration and social mobility studies. Hagan and McCarthy (1998) argue that the process that Sutherland calls tutelage forms a bridge between Mark Granovetter’s notion of social embeddedness and James Coleman’s conception of social capital. According to Granovetter (1985), people are embedded in networks of social relations. Their behaviors are influenced by the people in these networks and the information shared among network members. Sutherland’s differential association theory of criminal behavior also emphasizes criminal behavior as learned through connections with people who violate the law. These “criminal” contacts provide a forum in which people learn techniques as well as motives, rationalizations, and attitudes that facilitate crime. Granovetter also highlights social structure in facilitating action, and he adds that embeddedness in social structure holds further influence through building trust, expectations, and social norms. These ideas are further elaborated by Coleman, who notes that social embeddedness is a resource that constitutes a valuable form of social capital. According to Coleman, social capital resembles other types of capital in that it is a resource that facilitates purposeful action. Yet social capital is

425

unique. Unlike financial or human capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations among individuals. Embeddedness in tutelage relationships with those involved in crime offers social capital in the form of information channels that provide access to skills and knowledge about crime in the same way that contacts in more conventional lines of work supply job opportunities and businessrelated knowledge (McCarthy & Hagan, 1995).

Extending Social Capital to Homelessness and Crime Social capital comprises two interrelated components: relationships and intangible resources of “trust, reciprocity, information, commitments, and solidarity” (McCarthy et al., 2002, p. 833). Hagan and McCarthy assume both components are important and that relationships are established first, while resources flow from these relations. They note that people vary in their access to social capital, and that individuals must continually adapt to changing networks and opportunities that characterize the circumstances in which they live. Parents who are privileged within secure and supportive social networks may endow their children with forms of capital that increase their likelihood of success in school and later life. In less advantaged community and family settings, parents who lack capital (social, human, financial, or cultural) are hindered in their capacity to provide their children with opportunities. The street youths that Hagan and McCarthy studied disproportionately came from families with diminished social capital. These youths left disadvantaged situations to enter life on the street, where they must adapt to new conditions of poverty, crime, and marginalization. McCarthy and Hagan’s research reveals that adverse experiences such as life on the street and homelessness lead to an embeddedness in criminal street networks and exposure to tutors who transmit criminal skills and attitudes that facilitate involvement in crime.

Criminal Success and Protection From Victimization Hagan and McCarthy extend social capital theory beyond homelessness and entry to crime to explain criminal success. They argue that whereas

426

Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime

conventional human and social capital are key to legal prosperity, illegal success is more likely to be influenced by criminal human and social capital— that is, by the acquisition of knowledge and skills tailored to crime and by associations with criminals who provide information and training (McCarthy & Hagan, 2001, 2002). Their findings reveal connections between individual characteristics (e.g., specialization, willingness to collaborate, desire for wealth, risk-taking, and competence) and criminal human and social capital. These connections help explain how offenders succeed through illegal enterprises in settings where legal opportunities are restricted (McCarthy & Hagan, 2001). Hagan and McCarthy’s exploration of social capital also extends to criminal victimization. Several scholars have noted social capital’s potential protective capacity (Rosenfeld et al., 2001; Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999). Hagan and McCarthy’s work breaks new ground by examining what types of youth relationships provide the social capital resources often supplied by “capable guardians” (McCarthy et al., 2002, p. 840). Hagan and McCarthy observed that many youths establish street relationships in which they adopt familial names and identities. Some relationships, like those in fictive street families, may offer social capital resources characteristic of more conventional relations—including trust, solidarity and reciprocity—that encourage people to protect each other (McCarthy et al., 2002). However, not all homeless youths belong to fictive street families, and many youths develop relationships that differ from street families. Hagan and McCarthy use the term street group relationships to refer to these associations. These relationships include friendships based on a particular style of music, dress, or other cultural markers, as well as those that emerge as a result of compatible personalities or shared family histories. These other street-group relations offer more limited social capital resources than do fictive street families and, therefore, provide less protection from street life (McCarthy et al., 2002). Hagan and McCarthy’s interviews with homeless youths in two major cities (Vancouver and Toronto, Canada) indicate that fictive street-family relationships increase the support homeless youths receive in their search for shelter, food, and income, as well

as significantly reduce victimization; non-family street-group associations fail to provide comparable benefits.

Conclusion Social capital theory provides important insights in the variable nature of relationships, the resources they produce, and the outcomes for crime and victimization. More concretely, social capital theory offers a useful means for considering the pathways by which youths end up living on the street and how criminal opportunities are seeded and protective measures against victimization engendered. The perspective is unique in its emphasis on the relations among people, valuable intangible resources, and the agency of individuals involved (McCarthy et al., 2002). Importantly, the theory is compatible with several sociological traditions in the study of crime. Social capital theory revitalizes interest in Sutherland’s differential association theory’s conception of tutelage, as well Robert Merton’s insight that strains and opportunities derive from social and economic sources (Hagan & McCarthy, 1997b). Social capital theory also blends nicely with life course perspectives by drawing attention to the ways in which social capital builds, is conserved, or declines over the life course. As such, social capital theory encourages scholars to pay attention to the longer term development of capital accumulations and the consequences for crime (Hagan & McCarthy, 1997b, p. 137). Since the early 1990s, a growing body of work has demonstrated the utility of social capital theory for understanding crime by exploring the ways in which conventional social capital discourages offending, while criminal social capital facilitates it. Researchers have explored social capital and crime across a range of offenders and offenses, including youths’ criminal career trajectories, white-collar offenders, gangs, sex offenders, homicide, and violent crime more generally. Furthermore, social capital theorizing has been extended from the individual-level to the community-level. Recent work has explored how social capital impacts criminal justice policies, how justice policies shape community social capital and crime, and how crime itself influences community social capital. Hagan and McCarthy’s social capital theory has

Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime

offered a richly complex understanding of crime, one that has been embraced among sociological studies of crime. Fiona M. Kay See also Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

References and Further Readings Becker, G. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76, 169–217. Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S120. Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 481–510. Hagan, J., & McCarthy, B. (with Parker, P., & Climenhage, J.). (1997a). Mean streets: Youth crime and homelessness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hagan, J., & McCarthy B. (1997b). Anomie, social capital and street criminology. In N. Passas & R. Agnew (Eds.), The future of anomie theory (pp. 125–141). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hagan, J., & McCarthy, B. (1998). La théorie du capital et le renouveau du paradigm des tensions et des opportunités en criminologie sociologique [The theory of capital and the renewal of strain and opportunity paradigms in sociological criminology]. Sociologie et societies [Sociology and Societies], 30, 145–158. Hagan, J., Merkens, H., & Boehnke, K. (1995). Delinquency and disdain: Social capital and the control of right-wing extremism among East and West Berlin youth. American Journal of Sociology, 100, 1028–1052. McCarthy, B. (2002). New economies of sociological criminology. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 417–442. McCarthy, B., & Hagan, J. (1995). Getting into street crime: The structure and process of criminal embeddedness. Social Science Research, 24, 63–95. McCarthy, B., & Hagan, J. (2001). When crime pays: Capital, competence, and criminal success. Social Forces, 79, 1035–1059.

427

McCarthy, B., Hagan, J., & Martin, M. J. (2002). In and out of harm’s way: Violent victimization and the social capital of fictive street families. Criminology, 40, 831–866. Rosenfeld, R., Messner, S. F., & Baumer, E. P. (2001). Social capital and homicide. Social Forces, 80, 283–309. Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1999). Beyond social capital: Spatial dynamics of collective efficacy for children. American Sociological Review, 64, 633–660. Sutherland, E. (1937). The professional thief, by a professional thief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutherland, E., & Locke, J. (1936). Twenty thousand homeless men: A study of unemployed men in the Chicago shelters. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime Robert D. Hare is a forensic psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia (Department of Psychology, Forensic Psychology). In addition, he is the president of Darkstone Research Group, which is a research and consulting firm. He is most well-known for research on psychopathy. This entry provides an overview of Hare’s contributions to the study of psychopathy, with a focus on his research aimed at understanding the nature, measurement, and application of the construct of psychopathy.

Psychopathy Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by specific interpersonal, affective, and behavioral features. Interpersonally, psychopathic individuals are manipulative, conning, and deceitful. Affectively, there is marked absence of remorse (for wrongdoings) and a general inability to experience emotions. In terms of behavior, psychopathy is characterized by impulsivity, irresponsibility, a history of antisocial behavior, and criminal versatility. In large part, this conceptualization of psychopathy is based on Hare’s research aimed at operationalizing the construct (Hare, 2003). Hare drew heavily from Hervey Cleckley’s clinical

428

Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime

observations. After years of research and refinement, Hare created a structured assessment of psychopathy: The Psychopathy Checklist—Revised. The Psychopathy Checklists

Hare is most well-known for his efforts at operationalizing the construct of psychopathy. Specifically, he developed the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R). The PCL-R is a 20-item measure that assesses four facets of psychopathy. One facet is labeled interpersonal, and includes traits that assess the manipulative, conning, and deceitful interpersonal styles exhibited by psychopathic individuals. The second facet is referred to as the affective component and taps into the callous, unfeeling, and remorseless emotional life experienced by psychopathic individuals. These two facets form what has traditionally been referred to as factor 1 of psychopathy. The second factor also contains two, lower-order facets. The behavioral facet refers to the impulsive and irresponsible manner in which psychopathic individuals typically behave. The fourth facet, labeled antisocial, measures the early and persistent aggression, delinquent, and criminal behavior characteristic of psychopathic personality disorder. The purpose of the PCL-R is to measure the extent to which an individual possesses the traits and behaviors characteristic of psychopathy. For each of the 20 items, individuals can be scored as 0 (does not apply), 1 (applies to some extent), or 2 (definitely applies), resulting in a possible range of 0–40. The score is based on two sources: a review of file data (e.g., an individual’s prison records) and an in-depth interview. Although scores from the PCL-R are normally distributed (Hare, 2003), there are guidelines that have been developed to designate a clinical cutoff. Specifically, an individual who receives a score of 30 or more is deemed to be psychopathic. From a clinical standpoint, there needs to be a score at which a diagnosis can be made. Moreover, some research suggests that psychopathy is categorical, meaning that those scoring above a certain threshold (in this case, 30 or greater) are qualitatively distinct from those scoring under the threshold. However, other studies have failed to replicate this finding, which is consistent with how others view psychopathy as existing on a continuum.

The taxometric analyses aside, the PCL-R has demonstrated sound psychometric properties in several other domains. For example, Hare and Craig Neumann provide compelling evidence regarding the internal consistency of the 20 items (α ranges from .81 to .89). Despite the fact that clinical judgment is required to score the PCL-R, Hare and Neumann found that interrater reliabilities are quite high (ICCs range from .88 to .97). In addition, Hare’s 2003 research indicates that the factor structure of the PCL-R is stable. However, there is an ongoing debate of whether psychopathy is better represented by three or four factors. Because the PCL-R has shown such strong psychometric properties and has substantial clinical utility, it is considered to be the gold standard for measuring psychopathy. In addition to the PCL-R, several derivative measures have been developed. For example, the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL: SV) was created by S. D. Hart and colleagues as a screening instrument for psychopathy among forensic populations (e.g., civil psychiatric patients). The PCL: SV has 12 items, each scored 0, 1, or 2; the scoring is consistent with those discussed above for the PCL-R. Scores from 0 to 12 indicate psychopathy is not present, while scores ranging from 13 to 17 suggest psychopathy may be present. Scores of 18 or greater denote the likely presence of psychopathy. Research indicates that much of what is known about the psychometric properties of the PCL-R is generalizable to the PCL: SV. Another measure derived from the PCL-R is the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL: YV). As the name indicates, this measure was designed to assess psychopathic traits among adolescent populations (ages 13–17). In most respects, the PCL: YV is very similar to the PCL-R. For instance, it contains 20 items, each scored 0, 1, or 2. Furthermore, many of the items are identical across the two measures. There are some exceptions, however. In the PCL: YV, there is no item referring to “many short-term marital relationships” as is found in the PCL-R. Such an item is not be applicable to adolescents, and was replaced with the item “unstable interpersonal relationships” that ostensibly taps into a similar, albeit more age-appropriate indicator of psychopathy. Although there is substantial overlap in the items found on the PCL: YV and PCL-R, the manual

Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime

clearly articulates that all items should be considered in the context of the developmental period of the person being rated. Like the PCL: SV, the PCL: YV has demonstrated sound psychometric properties that are consistent with the PCL-R. For instance, Shayne Jones, Elizabeth Cauffman, Joshua Miller, and Edward Mulvey found that either a three- or four-factor model best fits the data, and these factor structures are similar to those noted among adults. It is important to point out that psychopathy is distinct from other disorders that share much in common with it. The most closely associated disorder is antisocial personality disorder (APD). However, APD and psychopathy are not the same. More specifically, APD focuses more so on observable behavior, whereas psychopathy requires an assessment of personality traits and behavior. Prevalence estimates also indicate these disorders are distinct. The prevalence of ADP in the general population is about 3 percent, while psychopathy is found among approximately 1 percent of the population. In forensic settings, both disorders are more prevalent. APD ranges from 50 to 80 percent, while psychopathy is found in 15 to 25 percent of such populations (Blair et al., 2005). Psychopathy and Antisocial Behavior

Psychopathy (as measured by Hare’s PCL instruments) is related to a wide variety of antisocial behaviors. A 2007 meta-analysis by A. M. R. Leistico et al. (covering 95 independent samples) provides an overview of this relationship. The authors found that the psychopathy total score was related to antisocial behavior, and demonstrated a moderate effect size (d = .55). When broken down into the two main components of psychopathy, factor 2 (which includes the behavioral and antisocial facets) was more strongly related to antisocial behavior (d = .60) than was factor 1 (d = .38), which comprises the interpersonal and affective facets of psychopathy. Moreover, these patterns were consistent across different antisocial outcomes: recidivism, institutional infractions, nonviolent offenses, and violent offenses. This study provides fairly impressive evidence that Hare’s PCL measures are related to antisocial behavior. Although the above meta-analysis included studies of youth samples (and found that neither

429

age nor the use of the PCL: YV moderated the effect sizes), John Edens and colleagues performed a meta-analysis in 2007 that examined the relations between PCL: YV scores and antisocial outcomes. Consistent with the above meta-analysis, they found that total PCL: YV scores were related to general (r = .24) and violent (r = .25) recidivism among adolescents. However, they failed to find that PCL: YV scores were predictive of sexual recidivism. Other researchers have focused on the relationship between psychopathy and aggression. Stephen Porter and Michael Woodworth have reviewed this literature and noted that this relationship exists among adult offender samples, children and adolescents, and civil psychiatric patients. Of particular interest, however, is the relationship between psychopathy and different types of aggression. Aggression can be subdivided into two related types. Proactive, or instrumental aggression, is goaldirected, initiated by the transgressor, and is used as a means to an end. Reactive aggression occurs as a response to a perceived threat or slight and can thus be view as more defensive (as opposed to the offensive nature of proactive aggression). Porter and Woodworth state that psychopathic individuals are prone to engage in both types of aggression, whereas non-psychopathic individuals are more likely to evince only reactive aggression. This conclusion supports the meta-analytic findings above in suggesting that the antisocial behavior of psychopathic individuals is more diffuse and severe. It is worth noting that the relationship between psychopathy and antisocial behavior is not based solely on North American samples. Hare, Danny Clark, Martin Grann, and David Thornton examined the research that spans beyond that conducted in the United States and Canada (where much of the research on psychopathy has been performed), including Sweden, England, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal. In each of these countries, psychopathy scores (using the PCL-R or PCL: SV) were related to a variety of antisocial outcomes, such as institutional infractions, violent recidivism, and poor treatment response. Thus, there is limited evidence suggesting that there is cross-cultural generalizability on the PCL measures, and these measures of psychopathy are related to antisocial outcomes. Another important correlate of psychopathy is poor treatment outcomes. Much of the perception

430

Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime

regarding the poor treatment response stems from a study conducted by Marnie Rice, Grant Harris, and Catherine Cormier. These researchers assessed recidivism among a group of mentally disordered offenders, some of whom received treatment (i.e., were involved in a therapeutic community) and others (who served as a matched control group) that did not. They found that individuals taking part in the therapeutic community and who were not psychopathic (based on PCL-R scores) were less likely to violently recidivate (compared to the non-psychopathic individuals in the control group). However, the therapeutic community participants who were psychopathic were more likely to violently recidivate (within 10.5 years after completion of the program) than the psychopathic individuals who did not receive treatment. Others have found that the clinical pessimism surrounding the inability to effectively treat psychopathy may be too strong. Randall Salekin performed a metaanalysis and concluded that treatment was successful for many psychopathic offenders. Jennifer Skeem, John Monahan, and Edward Mulvey reported that civil psychiatric patients who scored in the possible range on the PCL: SV (i.e., greater than 12), and who received intense treatment over an extended period of time, were less likely to engage in violence. Both of these studies, however, have been criticized on methodological grounds by Harris and Rice. They argue that there is no definitive evidence that psychopathy can be effectively treated. Furthermore, they suggest that treatment is unlikely to yield the desired outcomes (e.g., reduced antisocial behavior) because psychopathic individuals are not “broke” and there is nothing to “fix.” Instead, they suggest that psychopathic behavior is an evolutionarily adaptive strategy. Given the current state of knowledge, it remains to be seen whether there is any treatment program that might be successful in managing the antisocial behavior exhibited by psychopathic individuals.

Conclusion There has been an enormous interest in the construct of psychopathy for the past 30 years, and there is no doubt that Hare has been incredibly influential. His efforts at understanding the etiology, assessment, and forensic utility of psychopathy have not only helped shape the direction of research, but have also

provided invaluable insights into this disorder. Yet there remains much more to learn about psychopathy, and those efforts will surely be based at least in part on Hare’s contributions. For instance, more definitive conceptualizations and better measurement of psychopathy will likely include some components of Hare’s four-factor model as delineated in the PCL-R. Even those who disagree with Hare’s model will have to use it as a comparison. Moreover, the onus will be on those researchers to make a strong case, as so much evidence has accrued with respect to the PCL measures. In short, Hare’s legacy of being a pioneer in the study of psychopathy is cemented. His contributions have provided a solid foundation for other scholars to improve upon. As it true in science, despite all that we know, there will always be more to understand. It is the responsibility and obligation of other researchers to build on Hare’s work so that we may one day have a better understanding of psychopathy, and perhaps develop effective, efficient, and humane ways of preventing and treating this socially destructive disorder. Shayne Jones See also Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality; Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory; Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder; Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature; Yochelson, Samuel, and Stanton E. Samenow: The Criminal Personality

References and Further Readings Blair, J., Mitchell, D., & Blair, K. (2005). The psychopath: Emotion and brain. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cleckley, H. (1976). The mask of sanity (5th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Mosby. Cooke, D. J., Michie, C., Hart, S. D., & Clark, D. A. (2004). Reconstructing psychopathy: Clarifying the significance of antisocial behavior in the diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder. Journal of Personality Disorders, 18, 337–356. Edens, J. F., Campbell, J. S., & Weir, J. M. (2007). Youth psychopathy and criminal recidivism: A metaanalysis of the psychopathy checklist measures. Law and Human Behavior, 31, 53–75. Edens, J. F., Marcus, D. K., Lilienfeld, S. O., & Poythress, N. G., Jr. (2006). Psychopathic, not

Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter psychopath: Taxometric evidence for the dimensional structure of psychopathy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 115, 131–144. Forth, A. E., Kosson, D. S., & Hare, R. D. (2003). Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Youth version. North Tonawanda, NY: Multi-Health Systems Inc. Hare, R. D. (1993). Without conscience: The disturbing world of the psychopaths among us. New York: Pocket. Hare, R. D. (2003). Hare Psychopathy Checklist— revised (2nd ed.). North Tonawanda, NY: MultiHealth Systems. Hare, R. D., Clark, D., Grann, M., & Thorton, D. (2000). Psychopathy and the predictive validity of the PCL-R: An international perspective. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 18, 623–645. Hare, R. D., & Neumann, C. S. (2006). The PCL-R assessment of psychopathy. In C. J. Patrick (Ed.), Handbook of psychopathy (pp. 58–88). New York: Guilford. Harris, G. T., & Rice, M. E. (2006). Treatment of psychopathy: A review of empirical findings. In C. J. Patrick (Ed.), Handbook of psychopathy (pp. 555–572). New York: Guilford. Harris, G. T., Rice, M. E., & Quinsey, V. L. (1994). Psychopathy as a taxon: Evidence that psychopaths are a discrete class. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 387–397. Hart, S. D., Cox, D. N., & Hare, R. D. (1995). Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening version (PCL: SV). Toronto, ON: Multi-Health Systems. Jones, S., Cauffman, E., Miller, J. D., & Mulvey, E. (2006). Investigating different factor structures of the Psychopathy Checklist—Youth Version: Confirmatory factor analytic findings. Psychological Assessment, 18, 33–48. Leistico, A. M. R., Salekin, R. T., DeCoster, J., & Rogers, E. R. (2007). A large-scale meta-analysis relating the Hare measures of psychopathy to antisocial conduct. Law and Human Behavior, 32, 28–45. Millon, T., Simonsen, E., Birket-Smith, M., & Davis, R. D. (1998). Psychopathy: Antisocial, criminal, and violent Behavior. New York: Guilford. Neumann, C. S., Vitacco, M. J., Hare, R. D., & Wupperman, P. (2005). Reconstruing the “reconstruction” of psychopathy: A comment on Cooke, Michie, Hart, and Clark. Journal of Personality Disorders, 19, 624–640. Patrick, C. J. (2006). Handbook of psychopathy. New York: Guilford. Porter, S., & Woodworth. M. (2006). Psychopathy and aggression. In C. J. Patrick (Ed.), Handbook of psychopathy (pp. 481–494). New York: Guilford.

431

Rice, M. E., Harris, G. T., & Cormier, C. A. (1992). An evaluation of a maximum security therapeutic community for psychopaths and other mentally disordered offenders. Law and Human Behavior, 16, 399–412. Salekin, R. T. (2002). Psychopathy and therapeutic pessimism: Clinical lore or clinical reality? Clinical Psychology Review, 22, 79–112. Skeem, J. L., Monahan, J., & Mulvey, E. P. (2002). Psychopathy, treatment involvement, and subsequent violence among civil psychiatric patients. Law and Human Behavior, 26, 577–603.

Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter Francis Galton is credited for having initiated the nature versus nurture debate more than one century ago. In short, the controversy consists of whether who we are and what we become are determined by what we inherit from our parents or by what we learn from social experiences. While Galton believed strongly that inherited intelligence explained why some people became prominent government officials, business leaders, and scientists, the debate over whether nature or nurture is paramount to success continues to this day. The nature versus nurture debate has expanded far beyond issues related to why some people rise to social prominence and has challenged our understanding of adolescent behavior. Prior to the 20th century, children were seen as resilient and it was commonly believed that there was not much parents could do to shape how their children turned out. It was fate that determined success or failure in adulthood. But the 20th century ushered in the notion that parents were sources of negative and positive influences on children’s behavior and their future. Studying how parents socialize their children was thought to be the best way to understand adolescent behavior and why they grew up to achieve different levels of success. But this perspective, which is referred to by Judith Rich Harris as the “nurture assumption,” was challenged when, in 1995, Harris published an article in Psychological Review that asserted that parental influence on children was exaggerated. In that now-famous article, Harris

432

Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter

asserted that it was not how parents nurtured their children that affected their behavior or how they turned out. Rather, it was the teens with whom they identified and from whom they learned how to act that were instrumental to understanding adolescent behavior. In 1998, Harris published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do to more fully articulate her controversial prospective that she called group socialization theory.

The Historical Background to the Group Socialization Theory Group socialization theory was proposed as a replacement to the nurture assumption, which was rooted in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and in the principles of behaviorism promulgated especially by B. F. Skinner. Freud contended that the psychological problems suffered by adults can be traced back to how they were treated by their parents while they were still children. Interestingly, even behaviorism, which was proposed as an alternative to psychoanalysis, started with the assumption that the events of childhood—particularly those involving parents—are fundamental to understanding how children behave and how they turn out as adults. Behaviorists believe that children are impressionable and easily influenced through rewards and punishments, and it is therefore the environment in which they are raised—not the genes they were given by their parents—that determines their destinies. Research conducted from the psychoanalytic and behaviorist perspectives does not try to ascertain whether there are parental influences on children’s behavior. Rather, this research focuses on how parents’ child-rearing practices ultimately affect their children’s development. If parents do a good job, they provide their children with the tools necessary to be happy, smart, well-adjusted, and self-confident; as such, these children are prepared to make positive contributions to society as adults. But if parents fail to prepare their children for adulthood, the consequences could be dire. Not only will parents know that they played a part in their children’s failures, but they also will suffer shame and public ridicule for parenting children who do not meet society’s standards. And sometimes the consequences can be even more serious

because parent liability laws place the parents at the center of blame for their children’s delinquency, potentially resulting in the imposition of fines or even incarceration. But how does one account for the language skills of children whose parents are deaf and unable to teach them a verbal language? Or immigrant parents who taught their native language to their children only to find that they have—in a relatively short period of time—adopted the language of their peers, with only the slightest trace of an accent? Perhaps the roles of parents in the lives of their children are not what psychoanalytic theory or behaviorism portrays. This is not to suggest that parents do not play an important role in their children’s development. On the contrary, Harris recognizes the importance of parents in the socialization process. Parents are typically the first to teach their children a language, the first to teach how to establish and maintain relationships, and the first to teach the importance of following social norms. But Harris contends that these early experiences do not have long-term effects. Harris’s group socialization theory posits that past experiences do not determine behaviors during adulthood. What children learn from their parents at home may not be relevant to situations outside the home.

Group Socialization Theory Group socialization theory is based on three propositions. First, parents have little or no influence to shape their children’s personalities. Parents and children have similar personalities because they share genes and typically belong to similar cultures or subcultures. Second, children are socialized by experiences outside the home. It is through these experiences that personalities are shaped, and these experiences are shared with one’s peers. Third, behavior patterns and emotions are not generalizable across social contexts. Similar behaviors are the consequence of a genetic predisposition to act in a particular way. How one behaves with parents or siblings is likely to be very different than how one acts with peers. Therefore, parental relationships matter when children are at home. Relationships with peers matter when children are away from home. It is outside of the social context of the home that children learn to act like others who are like

Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter

themselves—that is, in their own social category or reference group. They are not supposed to act like their parents. Most socialization involves willing participation in same-sex and same-age groups. Children willingly enter these groups because they want to “fit in.” Therefore, socialization is something kids do to themselves and for themselves in group settings. It is not something that is imposed on children by adults. On the contrary, socialization is the process by which children adapt their behavior to the behaviors expected by others in the same social category. Group socialization theory asserts that the influence of peers is so strong that even if parents were switched, children would become the same adults so long as the social contexts of school and neighborhood were to remain the same. Parents teach their children important life skills that they bring with them when they enter society. But if the language their parents taught them is not the language of their peers, then children will adopt their peers’ language. The same is true if other aspects of culture are to conflict. The peer group’s culture will always win out over the culture taught by parents.

433

likely to run afoul with the law. It is these adolescents who are likely to be raised in neighborhoods that subscribe to middle-class norms. But moving to another neighborhood may not be enough. Being a member of a group is not the only way that group norms are influential. Even children who are not participating in group activities may still look to the group as a reference group. Therefore, the desire to be similar to those in the same social category may be enough to result in the adoption of the group’s norms. Harris (2009, p. 4) asserts, “The nurture assumption is not a truism; it is not even a universally acknowledged truth. It is a product of our culture—a cherished cultural myth.” Parents are not to blame for the behavior of their children. Children are socialized by their peers and delinquency is mostly a group activity that reflects group norms. Delinquency for most kids is temporary and situational. All in all, Harris believes that most children who participate in delinquency are generally good kids who will eventually mature out of their delinquency and become law-abiding adults.

Group Socialization Theory Today Group Socialization Theory and Delinquency Why do some teens smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, steal cars, and commit assaults while others do not? Teens create their own cultures that define behavioral norms and, although the culture to which they subscribe may have certain elements that are consistent with that of their parents’ culture, what is retained and what is rejected is up to the discretion of teens. It is not surprising, therefore, that children who associate with delinquent peers are also more likely to participate in delinquent acts. The same is true of children who live in neighborhoods that have high levels of delinquency, for it is within those neighborhoods that peer groups are formed and children conform to the norms of their peers. Group socialization theory contends that there may be ways for parents to effectively intervene in the lives of children who are living delinquent lifestyles. For example, parents could go to extreme measures to interfere with delinquent peer relationships, such as selling their homes and moving into a middle-class neighborhood. Teenagers who belong to middle-class (or higher) families are less

More than a decade has passed since The Nurture Assumption first appeared in print. The revised and updated version, published in February 2009, presents additional evidence in support of group socialization theory. Harris also clarifies complex concepts and controversial principles of her theory. She admits that there is still considerable resistance to group socialization theory in academe. Many psychologists still hold on to the principles of the nurture assumption, even though they “have not yet proven . . . that parents have a strong influence” on the behavior of their children (Harris, 2009, p. xx). There is evidence that the public is beginning to accept the role that heredity plays in human behavior, and criminological research is using group socialization theory in order to better understand genetic and social influences on human social behavior. Michael P. Brown See also Freudian Theory; Peers and Delinquency; Spergel, Irving A.: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures; Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature; Wilson,

434

Haynie, Dana L.: Contexts of Risk

James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature; Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory

References and Further Readings Freud, S. (1949). An outline of psychoanalysis. New York: Norton. Galton, F. (1874). English men of science: Their nature and nurture. London: Frank Cass. Galton, F. (1973). Inquiries into human faculty and its development. New York: AMS Press. (Original work published 1883) Harris, J. R. (1995). Where is the child’s environment? A group socialization theory of development. Psychological Review, 102, 458–489. Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do. New York: Free Press. Harris, J. R. (2006). No two alike: Human nature and human individuality. New York: W. W. Norton. Harris, J. R. (2009). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do (2nd rev. ed.). New York: Free Press. Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. New York: Vintage. Wasserman, D., & Wachbroit, R. (Eds.). (2001). Genetics and criminal behavior. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

explanations of female offending as a result of feminist perspectives, and Dana L. Haynie’s 2003 “Contexts of Risk” appears particularly timely. Haynie’s work appeared at a time when criminologists were increasingly open to the idea that social environments may determine whether biological predispositions toward criminality result in actual criminal behavior. In essence, the classic “nature versus nurture” debate was answered with a response of “both.” While prior research by Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt had established a link between pubertal timing and female delinquency, Haynie was specifically interested in exploring the role the social environment might play in explaining that relationship. First, she wanted to determine whether differential treatment by parents might explain any behavioral differences between more developed and less developed daughters. Second, she explored whether more developed girls find themselves in friendship circles where delinquency was more likely when compared to the friendship circles of their less developed peers. While the roles of parents and friends had been suggested as possible explanations of the puberty/delinquency link by previous researchers, Haynie was the first to empirically test these hypotheses. A brief review of the foundations of Haynie’s work precedes an in-depth presentation of the work itself.

Background

Haynie, Dana L.: Contexts of Risk For much of the modern era of criminology, biological explanations of crime had been associated with pseudoscientific “research” epitomized by Cesare Lombroso and William Sheldon. Both Lombroso and Sheldon believed that biological characteristics of humans could differentiate “born criminals” from law-abiding citizens. As this deterministic understanding of human behavior was rejected, so too were biological theories of criminology. However, as scientists gained a deeper understanding of the interaction between genes and environment in the latter part of the 20th century, biosocial theories of criminology enjoyed a modern-day resurgence. Combine this resurgence with the increasing attention given to

Haynie’s research builds on three existing hypotheses about the nature of the relationship between puberty and female juvenile delinquency. Hakan Stattin and David Magnusson’s stressful-change hypothesis argues that puberty and its associated changes cause family and friends to react differently to the girl. This differential treatment creates stress for the adolescent that, in turn, increases the likelihood of delinquency. Haynie associates this hypothesis with measures of absolute levels of pubertal development as opposed to measures of pubertal development relative to peers. In contrast, the early timing hypothesis (Haynie, 2003, p. 357) argues that girls who experience puberty before their peers are at an increased risk of participating in delinquency. This risk stems from the visual cues that separate early developers from later developers, according to Stattin and Magnusson, and inhibit the formation of prosocial

Haynie, Dana L.: Contexts of Risk

peer groups and healthy self-esteem. Girls who develop early relative to their peers may face peer expectations for their behavior that are based on their physical appearance instead of their actual age. These age-inappropriate expectations can lead to an increased opportunity to participate in delinquency. Haynie associates this hypothesis with measures of pubertal development relative to the development of a girl’s peers. The final hypothesis grows out of the life-course perspective on criminal behavior. Moffitt argues that early pubertal development creates a situation in which girls are physically similar to adult women but are still treated as children. As such, girls who develop early relative to their peers may see delinquency as a way to “bridge the maturity gap” (Haynie, 2003, p. 358) between their physical appearance and the childlike restrictions placed on their behavior by others. Haynie associates this hypothesis with relative levels of pubertal development as well. However, she argues that all three hypotheses suggest that parents and peers will mediate the relationship between puberty and adolescent female delinquency. Previous researchers had provided a number of ideas about how the parent-child relationship might help explain the link between puberty and delinquency for girls. Some argued that puberty may increase the level of conflict between girls and their parents as parents attempt to control their daughters’ increasingly obvious sexual maturity and entry into the dating pool. Others argued that parents tend to extend more adult-like autonomy to their more developed daughters. This increase in freedom and decrease in parental monitoring open the door for easier participation in delinquency. While these ideas about the possible link between female puberty, parenting, and delinquency already existed, the empirical testing remained. Similarly, prior to Haynie’s work there were many theories about how friends may help explain the link between female puberty and delinquency. Moffitt et al. had found some evidence that females who had more male friends were more likely to be delinquent than their more female-centric peers. Others had found a link between having older friends or being involved in a romantic relationship and an increased risk of delinquency for females. If early or more developed girls are more likely to have more male friends, older friends, or

435

be in a romantic relationship, then peer relationships might help explain the link between puberty and delinquency. All of these ideas are consistent with social learning theory’s argument that delinquency is learned through association with other delinquents. While previous research had largely relied on a subject’s assessment of the behavior of his or her peers, Haynie was able to examine these friends’ self-reported behavior thanks to her use of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data.

The Empirical Test Haynie used two waves of the Add Health data to test the various hypotheses concerning the link between puberty and female delinquency. She explored three different types of delinquency: party deviance, minor delinquency, and major delinquency. Party deviance consisted largely of status offenses: drinking alcohol, skipping school, lying to parents, smoking cigarettes and marijuana, and other forms of disorderly conduct. Minor delinquency consisted of property crimes that were more serious than party deviance but less serious than the remaining category. Major delinquency was measured by participation in a variety of serious property and violent crimes: robbery, drug sales, assaults, gang activity, and assaults with a weapon. Not surprisingly, girls reported declining frequency of participation with increasing seriousness of offense. In terms of pubertal development, Haynie used two different measures: absolute development and relative development. She included three aspects of the parent-child relationship as well: “trust, autonomy, and conflict” (p. 367). Trust was measured using parent responses, while the level of autonomy and conflict were based on the responses of the girls. The special strength of Haynie’s research is her ability to explore the friendship networks of these girls without relying on each girl’s perceptions of their friends’ behavior. She measured the delinquency and college aspirations of each girl’s friends using the responses of the friends. She also explored the composition of each girl’s friendship network in terms of proportion of male friends and proportion of older friends. Finally, a variety of measures of attachment to friends and an indicator of involvement in romantic relationships were included.

436

Haynie, Dana L.: Contexts of Risk

Haynie found that regardless of how puberty was measured, there was a positive association between girl’s pubertal development and participation in party deviance. Somewhat surprisingly, this link was not explained by the early or more developed girls having friendship networks that were composed of more males and older friends than their less developed peers. However, the proportion of deviant friends did help explain some of the connection between puberty and delinquency. As social learning theory would suggest, girls whose friendship networks contained more friends who reported delinquent behavior were more likely to participate in party deviance. The results also indicated that girls who were actively dating or spent more time with friends relative to other girls were also more likely to report party deviance. The parent-child relationship also played a critical role in explaining the link between puberty and female delinquency. Girls whose parents reported having greater amounts of trust in their child were less likely to participate in party deviance. Greater autonomy and conflict with parents were associated with an increased likelihood of party deviance. Once Haynie included both the parent and friendship elements, the link between puberty and party deviance disappeared. This suggests that these elements mediate the relationship between pubertal development and this particular kind of deviance. Moving up the scale of seriousness, Haynie found that the connection between puberty and minor delinquency was not as strong as the connection between puberty and party deviance. While parenting or friendship elements were equally capable of explaining the tie between relative pubertal development and minor delinquency, both were required to explain the link between absolute development and minor delinquency. As with party deviance, there was no evidence that the proportion of male friends or older friends had any effect on minor delinquency. The three elements of the parent-child relationship, romantic relationships, time spent with friends, and the proportion of deviant friends was again important in explaining the link between puberty and minor delinquency. However, a new factor appeared that was not important for party deviance. Girls who had more friends that expected to go to college were less likely to report engaging in minor delinquency than girls who had more friends without such expectations.

Haynie’s final models explored the link between puberty and involvement in serious delinquency. Similar to the findings for minor delinquency, either parent-child relationship factors or friendship factors were equally capable of explaining the link between relative pubertal development and serious delinquency. However, both sets of factors were required to explain the link between absolute pubertal development and serious delinquency. Interestingly, the effect of parent conflict is stronger and the effect of autonomy is weaker for serious delinquency than for either minor delinquency or party deviance. As with the other types of delinquency, there was no indication that having more male friends or older friends increased the likelihood of serious delinquency. Notably, the effect of friends’ college aspirations and the extent of peer involvement in delinquency showed stronger effects for serious delinquency than for either party deviance or minor delinquency.

Conclusion Ultimately, Haynie’s work showed that the link between female pubertal development and involvement in delinquency could be largely explained using elements of the parent-child relationship and friendship networks. The tie between pubertal development and delinquency was strongest for the least serious form of delinquency, party deviance. Since party deviance occurs in the company of peers, the importance of delinquent peers and involvement in romantic relationships is easily understandable. Haynie believed that these party environments gave the more developed girls opportunities to “try on adult-like behaviors” (p. 386) that seemed appropriate for their increasingly adult-like bodies. The parent-child relationship was also critical for explaining the link between puberty and delinquency for girls. It was particularly important in the case of serious delinquency. However, Haynie’s research is unable to determine which comes first: does a conflict riddled parent-child relationship lead to serious delinquency or does serious delinquency lead to a poor parent-child relationship? Similar limitations were noted for peer delinquency involvement, dating relationships, and other characteristics of the adolescent. Regardless of these time order limitations, Haynie’s research clearly demonstrated that the

Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency

relationship between puberty and female delinquency can be explained by exploring the social contexts of female adolescents. Girls who develop early relative to their peers or early in an absolute sense find themselves in peer and parental contexts that differ markedly from those of their on-time or late developing peers. This differential social context increases the opportunities to participate in delinquency and ultimately leads to an increased likelihood of delinquent behavior. Ultimately, Haynie concludes that biology itself, in the form of pubertal timing, does not directly lead to delinquency. Instead, the effect of biology operates through the social environment of the adolescents. The long-term implications of early pubertal development for females are still being debated. Some, like Moffitt, argue that dabbling in delinquency in adolescence is normal and that most will cease involvement in delinquency in adulthood. This would eventually eliminate any long-term differences based on timing of puberty. However, others, like Stattin and Magnusson, fear there are long-term consequences for early puberty and its associated early involvement in delinquency. These detrimental effects may include lower educational attainment and less prestigious jobs for early developers relative to late developers. Sarah Browning See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1985). Deviant behavior: A social learning approach (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Akers, R. L., Krohn, M. D., Lanza-Kaduce, L., & Radosevich, M. (1979). Social learning and deviant behavior: A specific test of a general theory. American Sociological Review, 44, 636–655. Armour, S., & Haynie, D. (2007). Adolescent sexual debut and later delinquency. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36, 141–152. Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T. E. (1991). Individual differences are accentuated during periods of social change: The sample case of girls at puberty. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 157–168.

437

Cernkovich, S. A., & Giordano, P. C. (1987). Family relationships and delinquency. Criminology, 25, 295–321. Chesney-Lind, M., & Shelden, R. G. (1997). Girls, delinquency, and juvenile justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Haynie, D. L. (2003). Contexts of risk? Explaining the link between girls’ pubertal development and their delinquency involvement. Social Forces, 82, 355–397. Magnusson, D. (1985). Implications of an interactional paradigm of research on human development. International Journal of Behavioral Deviance, 8, 115–137. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and lifepersistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Moffitt, T. E., Rutter, M., & Silva, P. (2001). Sex differences in antisocial behavior: Conduct disorder, delinquency, and violence in the Dunedin longitudinal study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sampson, R., & Laub, J. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stattin, H., & Magnusson, D. (1990). Pubertal maturation in female development: Vol. 2. Paths through life. Hillside, NJ: Erlbaum.

Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency Historically, there has been a dearth of theoretical explanations for female offending and even less for female violent delinquency. Most traditional theories were implicitly thought to apply to females, even though most were never tested on women or girls. When women and/or girls were included, the focus of research was on differences across genders in non-violent offending (e.g., power-control theory) (Hagan et al., 1985). The advent of feminism and feminist scholars increased interest in female offending in general, and, for Karen Heimer and Stacy De Coster, in violent delinquency in particular. Heimer and De Coster’s theory integrates differential association theory with feminist theories at both structural and cultural levels to explain intragender and intergender variations in violent offending.

438

Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency

The foundation of Heimer and De Coster’s theory is Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory. Those who can visualize the acceptability of crime under certain circumstances hold beliefs that are favorable toward law violations as opposed to those who deny the acceptability of crime under any circumstances. Sutherland maintains that the variation in these beliefs across structural variables is due to differential social organization. Differential social organization filters down to individuallevel behavior through differential association. Differential association is a process through which individuals receive cultural messages from significant groups in their lives regarding either favorable or unfavorable definitions of law violation. Individuals’ positions in society (e.g., race, gender, socioeconomic status) condition the learning of these definitions, according to Sutherland. Heimer’s (1997) extension of differential association demonstrated that socioeconomic status influences the opportunities for and learning of violent definitions both directly and indirectly for males’ involvement in violent delinquency. Heimer and De Coster propose similar conditioning effects due to gender and how it is communicated through both structural and cultural variables. One of the core assumptions of their theory is that these conditioning effects are more indirect for girls than for boys, thus resulting in different levels of engagement in violent delinquency. Heimer and De Coster incorporate what they term “cultural outcomes” and “cultural processes” (p. 281). These outcomes include both violent and gender definitions, while the processes involve family, peers, and violent histories.

Cultural Outcomes: Violent and Gender Definitions In the gender-neutral assumptions of differential association theory, when definitions favorable to violent delinquency outweigh or outnumber those unfavorable to violence, girls and boys will be more likely to engage in violent delinquency. The original differential association theory must be modified to explain why girls, in general, violently offend to such a lesser extent than boys do. According to Heimer and De Coster, this gap involves the magnitude of those definitions learned by boys and girls; boys most likely learn more favorable definitions than girls do, resulting in a greater extent of violent

offending. Why girls learn or accept lower levels of violent definitions than boys is addressed in the second cultural outcome, gender definitions. Heimer and De Coster see patriarchy, the societal structure that ensures male privilege and dominance in culture, as the link between violent definitions and gender definitions. In a patriarchal culture, what it means to be feminine and masculine is rooted in adherence to specific gender definitions. To be feminine is to be nurturing, passive, intuitive, and in need of protection due to an inherent emotional and physical weakness in comparison to men. To be masculine, then, is to be the opposite: selfsufficient, rational, physically strong, and aggressive (Belknap, 2001; Heimer & De Coster, 1999). Adherence to these gender definitions has consequences for social interaction in society both within and across genders. To be feminine would be the antithesis of engaging in violent delinquency. Therefore, girls who accept these gender definitions to a greater extent would be less likely to act out violently than either boys or girls who do not fully accept or adhere to these definitions (Heimer, 1995, 1997; Heimer & De Coster, 1999).

Cultural Processes: Parents, Bonding, Peers, and History Gender definitions influence the direct and indirect cultural processes through which violent definitions are learned. The first of these cultural processes are parental controls and emotional bonding. Parental controls, according to Heimer and De Coster, are those aspects of family involving supervision and discipline, while emotional bonding refers to the emotional attachment of a juvenile to family. Heimer and De Coster argue that parental control has a direct effect on delinquency for boys and emotional bonding has an indirect effect on delinquency for girls. Families foster the development of masculinity (e.g., aggression) in boys through various forms of supervision and discipline, while families foster the development of femininity (e.g., passivity) in girls through emphasis on the emotional attachment to the family. This has a direct effect on the learning of violent definitions for boys because it either fosters or restricts opportunities. However, this process has an indirect effect on the learning of violent definitions for girls because it creates a certain level of anxiety and potential disappointment

Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency

of family members that competes with violent definitions (Heimer & De Coster, 1999). One of the hallmarks of differential association theory is the influence of peers who have favorable views of law violations on the subsequent delinquency of juveniles. Heimer and De Coster hypothesize that peer influence, too, is a gendered experience. First, in accordance with prior studies on gender and peer associations, boys and girls bond with peers through different processes. Boys bond through aggressive actions and rule-breaking, while girls bond by sharing secrets and feelings. These different forms of peer bonding combine with the different cultural processes (parental controls—direct; emotional—indirect) to increase opportunities for boys to learn violent definitions and reduced opportunities for girls. This alone could account for part of the difference in violent delinquency across genders. However, Heimer and De Coster also posit that, given the nature of male peer associations compared to female peer associations, similar numbers of negative peers would still result in a greater likelihood of boys to learn definitions favorable to violent delinquency. The final cultural process concerns a history of violent delinquency. Using various techniques of neutralization, juveniles who have engaged in violent delinquency can rationalize their behavior thus increasing the likelihood that they will continue to accept violent definitions and further engage in violent delinquency (Sykes & Matza, 1957). Once violent behavior becomes routine, long-term violence is more likely. Heimer and De Coster posit that this possibility exists for both boys and girls; however, the combination of cultural outcomes and the other cultural processes reduces the likelihood of prior violent delinquency for girls, and subsequently future violent delinquency, compared to boys.

The Influence of Structural Position on Outcomes and Processes Heimer and De Coster argue that structural positions, such as socioeconomic status (SES), also influence both directly and indirectly the learning of violent definitions, resulting in differing levels of violent delinquency both within and across genders. Indirectly, structural position can impact violent delinquency through cultural processes. For example,

439

low-SES may decrease parental supervision, increase negative discipline (e.g., corporal punishment), and also decrease emotional attachment. Similarly, juveniles from low-SES families may be more inclined to form negative peer associations and have more exposure to violence. All of these situations, according to Heimer and De Coster, indirectly increase the likelihood of learning violent definitions. Juveniles from low-SES families have fewer legitimate means of meeting their needs and wants, thus directly increasing the likelihood of accepting illegitimate means of achieving those desires. Structural positions can also work through gender definitions to indirectly affect the learning of violent definitions, resulting in a gender gap in violent delinquency. If low SES decreases supervision and increases punitive discipline, the increased opportunities to learn violent definitions will differentially impact boys due to the direct effect of parental controls on them. Additionally, decreased emotional attachment among low-SES families will differentially impact girls’ learning of violent definitions due to its direct effect on girls. Structural position has a similar influence on peer associations and violent histories. If low SES increases the likelihood of juveniles to associate with negative peers and bonding among male peers emphasizes aggressive actions, opportunities for learning violent definitions will be differentially increased for boys as opposed to girls. If low-SES families are more likely to adhere to traditional gender roles and those roles de-emphasize the use of violence by girls, then structural positions will indirectly reduce violent delinquency among girls as opposed to boys (Heimer & De Coster, 1999).

Conclusion Heimer and De Coster modified differential association theory to coincide with findings from feminist research and created an integrated theory explaining variation in violent delinquency both within and across genders. Their theory demonstrated that feminist theories can expand the understanding of violent delinquency for both boys and girls and has influenced subsequent work by Heimer and De Coster, Ellen Cohn and Kathryn Modecki, and Wesley Younts. Lisa Growette Bostaph

440

Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control

See also Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending; Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum, and Ross L. Matsueda: Gender and Reflected Appraisals; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

References and Further Readings Belknap, J. (2001). The invisible woman: Gender, crime, and justice (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Cohn, E. S., & Modecki, K. L. (2007). Gender differences in predicting delinquent behavior: Do individual differences matter? Social Behavior and Personality, 35, 359–374. Hagan, J., Gillis, A. R., & Simpson, J. (1985). The class structure of gender and delinquency: Toward a powercontrol theory of common delinquent behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 90, 1151–1178. Heimer, K. (1995). Gender, race, and the pathways to delinquency: An interactionist analysis. In J. Hagan & R. D. Peterson (Eds.), Crime and inequality (pp. 140–173). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heimer, K. (1997). Socioeconomic status, subcultural definitions, and violent delinquency. Social Forces, 75, 799–833. Heimer, K., & De Coster, S. (1999). The gendering of violent delinquency. Criminology, 37, 277–312. Messerschmidt, J. W. (1986). Capitalism, patriarchy, and crime: Toward a socialist feminist criminology. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664–670. Younts, W. C. (2008). Status, endorsement, and the legitimacy of deviance. Social Forces, 87, 561–591.

Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control The 1990s was a prolific era for the development of criminological theory. During this period, a host of new or revitalized theories was developed. Theoretical development during the 1990s was also influenced

by the call of theoretical integration as a way to move the field of criminology forward. However, critics of theoretical integration have noted the tendency of theorists to integrate disparate variables into a causal model rather than integrating propositions into a general theory or simply renaming theoretical concepts instead of reconceptualizing them within a larger theoretical framework. One theory that was crafted during the 1990s and represented an effort at integrating theoretical concepts into a general theory based on the framework of symbolic interactionism was Karen Heimer and Ross Matsueda’s differential social control theory. Heimer and Matsueda’s theory sought to demonstrate how social interaction serves as an important locus of control of crime and delinquency. According to the theory, the specific mechanism affecting crime and delinquency is role-taking, or the process of placing oneself into the position of others and appraising the situation from their standpoint (Mead, 1934). The theory also specifies that role-taking is linked to the broader social organization through the concepts of generalized others, role commitments, and reference groups. Differential social control theory is an extension of an earlier work undertaken by Matsueda, namely, his symbolic interactionist theory of the self and delinquency. Matsueda’s previous work aimed at renewing interests in interactionist theory of delinquency and is rooted in symbolic interactionism and the labeling tradition (see Lemert, 1951). In particular, drawing from the notion that an individual’s self is a reflection of appraisals made by significant others embodied in symbolic interactionism and the idea of “deviance amplification” espoused by the labeling perspective, Matsueda’s theory posits that delinquent behavior is in part influenced by one’s reflected appraisals of self as a “rule violator,” which are in turn affected by the actual appraisals made by significant others such as parents and teachers. However, by focusing exclusively on the effects of the self as reflected appraisals, Matsueda’s symbolic interactionist theory of the self and delinquency consequently ignores “other features of an interactionist conception of social control relevant to delinquency and fails to draw on research in structural symbolic interactionism that links interactions to social organization” (Heimer & Matsueda, 1994, p. 366). These shortcomings were addressed in differential social control theory.

Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control

Differential social control theory extended Matsueda’s interactionist theory by reconceptualizing reflected appraisal as one component of role-taking and specifying that role-taking is being conditioned by the broader social organization in which it is embedded. An extended discussion of differential social control theory is presented below. Before describing Heimer and Matsueda’s theory, however, a discussion is presented of symbolic interactionism, the foundation upon which differential social control theory is built.

Symbolic Interactionism Symbolic interactionism is a school of thought formed in the late 19th century based on the writings by Charles S. Pierce, William James, and John Dewey. The intellectual foundation of symbolic interactionism is attributed to the writings by George Herbert Mead. While Mead is regarded as the founder of symbolic interactionism, it is Herbert Blumer, one of Mead’s students, who serves as a key source for this perspective. The main focus in symbolic interactionism is to uncover the meanings that people assign to actions and events as well as how such meanings are constructed. Meanings are presupposed to derive from social interactions, through a process of communication using language or symbols. Specifically, humans relate to each other through “significant symbols,” which are language or gestures that trigger the same response in the communicator as it does in the person receiving it. Accordingly, the use of significant symbols evokes a set of meanings that not only enable one thing to represent something else but also stipulate a course of action that is to be followed (Mead, 1934). One of the most important meanings in symbolic interactionism is the meaning people give to themselves, their self-concept. An individual’s selfconcept is shaped by his or her interaction with others and is a “reflected appraisal,” or the reflection of the attitudes by significant others of the person. Further, to symbolic interactionists, to have a self is to have the capacity to observe, respond to, and direct one’s own behavior. Thus, the self is perceived as reflexive and constitutes an organization of distinguishable self-conceptions

441

with each tied to specific situations, roles, and relationships. An individual’s self consists of two components: the “me” and the “I.” The “me” represents the portion of the self that conforms to societal norms and attitudes, while the “I” is made up of impulses, some of which are socially conditioned. Further, while an individual internalizes the attitudes and norms of his community (the “me”), the individual also reacts to these attitudes (the “I”). Since the “I” contains an element of unpredictability or novelty, the response of the “I” can never be predicted perfectly by the “me.” Symbolic interactionism also specifies that within social interactions, the mechanism by which individuals influence each other is role taking. Role taking occurs when individuals place themselves into the position of others and appraise the situation from their standpoint. Role taking enables individuals to define the situation that they are in and to coordinate their lines of action with the actions of others. When individuals take the role of “others,” they learn to take the role of not only specific significant others such as mother, father, or teacher, but also the role of an organized group, community or society (this is known as the “generalized other”). To summarize, the main emphasis in symbolic interactionism is the exchange of meanings communicated through social interaction. Symbolic interactionists are interested in the interplay between interaction and an individual’s self-concept; to them, individuals’ self-concept along with their cognitive processes, values, and attitudes are all salient predictors of behaviors.

Differential Social Control Theory In differential social control theory, Heimer and Matsueda utilize symbolic interactionism to demonstrate that role-taking is the mechanism whereby social control becomes self-control. According to the theory, during the course of everyday activities, whenever a problematic situation arises or when a line of action is interrupted by a physical or social barrier, individuals engage in role-taking or view themselves from the standpoint of others to find a response that fits their conception of themselves and that is

442

Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control

appropriate for the situation. In particular, when a problematic situation arises, the “me,” which consists of a plan of action, anticipates reactions of others to the plan, and a view of the individual’s self from the standpoint of others is called up to solve the problem. The plan of action is then assessed by the “I,” with a positive reaction leading to the transformation of the plan into overt behavior and a negative reaction resulting in its rejection and the elicitation of another “me.” This process continues until the problem is solved or the interaction is abandoned. Once the problem is solved, the “me” is incorporated into the individual’s self to be called up in future interactions. Since the norms, rules, and expectations of the community or society enter the individual’s behavior when he or she takes the role of the generalized other, role-taking is the process whereby social control becomes self-control. Role-taking is also a process that occurs in the present but involves applying past experiences to anticipate future consequences (Mead, 1934). Accordingly, delinquent behavior constitutes specific direction of ongoing behaviors. Further, the likelihood of delinquent behavior occurring depends on the contributions of each interactant to the direction of such behavior. These contributions, in turn, are affected by factors such as the individual’s stable view of the self as either a delinquent or a conformist from the standpoint of others (i.e., reflected appraisals), attitudes and motives about delinquency, prior experience with delinquency, and anticipated reactions of others toward delinquency (Matsueda & Heimer, 1997). Taking the above together, differential social control posits that role-taking is the most proximate cause of crime and encompasses five major processes: reflected appraisals, holding antisocial attitudes, anticipating disapproval of deviant acts by family and/or friends, associating with delinquent peers, and delinquent histories. The first process, reflected appraisals, concerns whether individuals believe that others view them as deviant. It is noteworthy that reflected appraisals of self as deviant are the backbone of role-taking. When individuals perceive that others think of them as deviant, problematic situations are more likely to be resolved with crime.

The second process of role-taking is related to individuals’ antisocial attitudes. Similar to reflected appraisals, antisocial attitudes are central to the role-taking process as attitudes are “predispositions or plans to act” (Heimer & Matsueda, 1994, p. 367). Differential social control theory claims that holding antisocial attitudes increases the likelihood of criminal resolutions to problematic situations. The third process of role-taking refers to individuals’ anticipated reaction to deviant acts by friends and/or family. At the heart of role-taking is the issue of expected consequences of different possible lines of action. In particular, individuals “consider the consequences of such reactions for self-image, extrinsic rewards, and group membership,” and the more negative the anticipated reactions to a delinquent behavior, the lower the likelihood of delinquent lines of action (Heimer & Matsueda, 1994, p. 367). The fourth process of role-taking has to do with whether individuals associate with deviant peers. According to the theory, associating with deviant peers increases the likelihood of crime both directly and indirectly. Indirectly associating with deviant peers increases the likelihood of crime and delinquency as the deviant peer group serves as a generalized other, even when they are not present. Directly, deviant peers present criminal opportunities that may have gone unrecognized in their absence. Finally, the last process of role-taking is associated with whether individuals have repeatedly solved problematic situations using delinquent behavior. The theory posits that prior experience with delinquency is a salient predictor of future delinquency as “delinquent behavior can occur in the absence of reflective thought, via habitual or scripted responses established through previous experiences” (Heimer & Matsueda, 1994, p. 368, emphasis in the original). In addition to role-taking, differential social control theory posits that role commitment and social location are more distal causes of crime. Roles or social categories (e.g., teacher, mother, student) inform us of the obligations and expectations associated with a particular social status in a particular situation. On the other hand, role commitment entails the cost of giving up meaningful relationships with others—and the greater the cost of jeopardizing a role, the greater the

Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control

commitment to such role. Accordingly, commitment to a specific role in an organized group will increase the likelihood of that group serving as the generalized other in problematic situation. That is, through role-taking, “the organization of the group enters the cognition and behavior of individuals as they locate their positions within the group and adjust their conduct according to group expectations (and) norms” (Heimer & Matsueda, 1994, p. 368). Hence, factors like attachment and commitment to prosocial institutions such as family, school, and employment all affect the likelihood of criminal behavior indirectly via role taking. Differential social control theory also stipulates that prior criminal conduct affects crime both directly and indirectly through role commitment and role-taking. That is, prior criminality reduces the likelihood of prosocial role commitments (e.g., attachment to family, commitment to school) and increases the likelihood of deviant role-taking (e.g., developing a deviant self-image, delinquent attitudes). The theory also specifies structural variables such as social class, family structure, residential area, and neighborhood characteristics affect crime by structuring communication channels and reference groups (significant others and the generalized other) which in turn influence the process of role-taking.

Conclusion Differential social control theory represents Heimer and Matsueda’s effort at addressing the criticisms charged against theoretical integration by integrating existing theoretical concepts into the framework of symbolic interactionism. In particular, they elaborated the symbolic interactionist component that underlies several criminological theories, most notably, labeling and differential association theories, to specify that the specific mechanism affecting crime and delinquency is role-taking. In addition to providing a persuasive explanation of crime and delinquency, differential social control theory has also offered interesting accounts to several “criminological facts” (such as gender differences in delinquency, relationship between age and crime, gender/race inequality and crime) that other more popular criminological theories have trouble explaining.

443

Indeed, differential social control theory has the potential of furthering our understanding of crime and criminals. However, given that the theory has not been tested extensively, more empirical tests and perhaps further development of the theory are warranted as the knowledge and results generated from such efforts could potentially help explain the macro and micro processes of crime and delinquency. Fawn T. Ngo See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil; Turner, Ralph H.: Deviant Roles and the Social Construction of Behavior

References and Further Readings Barak, G. (1998). Integrating criminologies. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Dewey, J. (1962). Individualism: Old and new. New York: Capricorn. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heimer, K. (1995). Gender, race, and the pathways to delinquency. In J. Hagan & R. D. Peterson (Eds.), Crime and inequality (pp. 141–174). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heimer, K. (1996). Gender, interaction, and delinquency: Testing a theory of differential social control. Social Psychology Quarterly, 59, 39–61. Heimer, K., & Matsueda, R. L. (1994). Role-taking, role commitment, and delinquency: A theory of differential social control. American Sociological Review, 59, 365–390. Hirschi, T. (1989). Exploring alternatives to integrated theory. In S. F. Messner, M. D. Krohn, & A. E. Liska (Eds.), Theoretical integration in the study of deviance and crime (pp. 37–49). Albany: SUNY Press. James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York: Longmans Green.

444

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve

Lemert, E. (1951). Social pathology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Matsueda, R. L. (1992). Reflected appraisals, parental labeling, and delinquency: Specifying a symbolic interactionist theory. American Journal of Sociology, 97, 1577–1611. Matsueda, R. L., & Heimer, K. (1997). A symbolic interactionist theory of role-transitions, rolecommitments, and delinquency. In T. P. Thornberry (Ed.), Developmental theories of crime and delinquency (pp. 163–213). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, M., & Stryker, S. (1970). Deviance, selves and others. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. Shalin, D. N. (1991). The pragmatic origins of symbolic interactionism and the crisis of classical science. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 12, 226–251. Stryker, S. (1968). Identity salience and role performance: The relevance of symbolic interactionist theory for family research. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 30, 558–564.

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published a controversial book called The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life that resulted in a blizzard of both bouquets and brickbats. In the 1990s, critiquing the book became a minor cottage industry for liberal academics. The data on which the analyses were done and conclusions made came from a large national longitudinal study conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). NLSY participants are males and females of all races/ ethnicities (initial n = 12,686) and have been interviewed regularly since 1979, but for the analyses in the book, Herrnstein and Murray limited their sample to whites. The main point of the book is that IQ is the overall best predictor that we have of a host of

social outcomes such as job and school performance, income level, unwed motherhood, welfare dependency, civility, and criminal behavior. Herrnstein and Murray also make the point that IQ tests are not biased against any race or class of people, and that intelligence is strongly heritable (genes explain much of the variance in IQ among individuals). The last two points are settled science according to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Intelligence (Neisser et al., 1995) which was convened to provide a report on the “knowns and unknowns” of intelligence after publication of The Bell Curve. The first part of the book is devoted to an overview of the concept and measurement of IQ, to demonstrating that that the United States is becoming increasingly stratified by intelligence, and to describing the resulting emergence of what Herrnstein and Murray called the cognitive elite. These are individuals who, because of their high intelligence, end up in the best schools and colleges, in the best professions, and in the most powerful political positions in society. Because the United States is a meritocracy based on competition, elite social status is achieved by intelligence and effort rather than ascribed by accident of birth. It is a central tenet of population genetics that the more equal the environment (in this case meaning that the meritocratic competition is open to all) the more the outcome of the competition will depend on the genes of the competitors. Although this tenet is unassailable on scientific ground, it was galling to Herrnstein and Murray’s critics. Part three (chapters 13–17), however, generated the most controversy because it deals with IQ and race. Had Herrnstein and Murray left this section out of their book, it would have been much less controversial outside of the halls of academia, but they likely would not have sold as many books (more than 500,000). Herrnstein and Murray claim that they are “agnostic” on the origins of the consistent 15-point IQ gap between whites and blacks (and the even larger one between Asians and blacks), but they do imply that both genes and environment are probably involved. Because African Americans are greatly over-represented among individuals arrested for crimes, particularly violent crimes, and because Herrnstein and Murray implicate low IQ as a risk factor for

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve

crime, the IQ gap is of theoretical importance to criminology.

IQ and Criminal Behavior As perhaps the characteristic that most distinguishes humans from other animals, intelligence has long been considered a major correlate of criminal behavior. Early criminologists tended to assume that low intelligence (often called “feeblemindedness” by them) hampered a person’s ability to calculate the ratio of pleasures and pains involved in criminal activity, and that it signaled the inability to learn and to appreciate moral norms. However, low intelligence became unpopular as an explanation for criminal behavior after criminology was wrenched away from psychology by the new science of sociology. IQ testing itself fell into disrepute when it was reported that 37 percent of white and 89 percent of black draftees in World War I received a diagnosis of feeblemindedness based on IQ tests then used (Vold & Bernard, 1986). This suggested that about half of the American male population was feebleminded, an obviously absurd conclusion. This work precipitated the “cultural bias” criticism of  mental tests, which along with the assumed eugenic implications of IQ testing following World War II, led to the virtual disappearance of intelligence from the criminological literature from the 1930s to  the 1970s. But even during this period, a number of wellknown studies continued to demonstrate a negative relationship between IQ  and offending. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s study of 500 institutionalized delinquents; Marvin Wolfgang, Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin’s Philadelphia birth cohort study; the Joan and William McCord Cambridge‑ Somerville Youth Study; and D. J. West and David Farrington’s longitudinal study of  London boys all found the IQ gap between offenders and nonoffenders to be between 9 and 14 points. Hirschi and Hindelang’s influential “revisionist” paper on IQ and delinquency signaled a resurgence of interest in the link between IQ and criminal behavior. Although this work was criticized by a number of criminologists, others supported Hirschi and Hindelang, claiming that IQ may have been operating all along as a “silent partner in standard sociological explanations” (Hernnstein, 1989, p. 48). This renewal of interest

445

produced an increase in IQ studies, and more recent reviews of hundreds of studies find the IQ/ crime relationship to be ubiquitous and robust. Part two, chapter 11, simply titled Crime, is the section most pertinent to readers of this encyclopedia. Herrnstein and Murray begin by quoting the statement made by juvenile delinquents to Officer Krupke in West Side Story that they are “depraved on account of we’re deprived,” and go on to remark that the delinquents showed “an astute grasp of the poles of criminological theory: the psychological and the sociological” (p. 237). The sociological pole emphasizes structural factors such as poverty and unemployment, while the psychological pole emphasizes individual traits that may account for these things such as intelligence and conscientiousness. The difference in emphases may explain why sociologists were the most enthusiastic hurlers of brickbats at Herrnstein and Murray and why those most likely to present them with bouquets were psychologists. Herrnstein and Murray acknowledge that the majority of low-IQ individuals do not commit crimes and that the large increases in crime between the 1960s and 1990s obviously cannot be attributed to changes in intelligence, “but rather must be blamed on other factors, which may have put people of low cognitive ability at greater risk than before” (p. 251). In other words, low cognitive ability is a risk factor differentially expressed in different social environments. In times when most families were intact, when there was a higher level of moral conformity, and when entry into the workforce demanded much less academic preparation, people with below-average IQs were more insulated by informal social control mechanisms from antisocial behavior. In more modern times, low-IQ individuals from single-parent homes, living in social environments in which morality is diminished, and in a society becoming increasingly complex, find it more difficult to obtain employment and are thus less socially restrained. The NLSY data analyzed by Herrnstein and Murray found that 93 percent of the males (recall that Herrnstein and Murray purposely limited their analyses to whites) in the sample who had ever been interviewed in a correctional facility had IQs in the bottom half of the IQ distribution, and that 62 percent ever interviewed in jail or prison were from the bottom 20 percent in intelligence

446

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve

(IQ ≤ 87) compared with 2 percent from the top 20 percent (IQ ≥ 113); a ratio of 31:1 (p. 376). Herrnstein and Murray present many other similar ratios between the top and bottom 20 percent of the IQ distribution in chapter 16, all of which are related to criminal behavior. These include poverty (9.5:1), welfare dependency (11:1), male able-bodied unemployment (16:1), dropping out of high school (66:1), and unwed motherhood (17:1). Herrnstein and Murray state that IQ may be related to crime and delinquency more strongly than suggested by a simple comparison of mean IQ levels of offenders and nonoffenders, usually resulting in an 8-point difference. Offenders’ IQs are typically compared with  the general population mean IQ of 100. It is often forgotten that the general population includes a number of offenders, as well as individuals with such low IQs that they are largely incapable of committing crimes. Thus, the difference in IQ between offenders and normally functioning nonoffenders (the mean of which is probably around 103–105) is likely to be greater than usually reported (Herrnstein, 1989). A related problem is that many  IQ studies are conducted with delinquents rather than with adult criminals.  Criminologists know that almost all teenage boys commit some act which could get them into trouble with the law, and also that most  delinquents do not become adult criminals (Moffitt, 1993). Criminals who offend most frequently and most seriously tend to begin prior to puberty and to continue long after the typical  delinquent has desisted from offending. Delinquents who desist in early adulthood have accrued enough social capital to allow them to do so, much of that by virtue of their cognitive abilities. It has been pointed out that the IQ difference between nonoffenders and adolescent-onset offenders is typically only  one IQ point, but the same comparison with life-course persistent offenders yielded a 17-point difference (Gatzke-Kopp et al, 2002; Moffitt, 1993). Simple arithmetic tells us that pooling these two very  different delinquent groups (adolescent-onset and life-course persistent) hides the magnitude of the IQ difference between nonoffenders and the most persistent and serious offenders in our midst, and thus the true strength of the relationship between IQ and criminality. Herrnstein and Murray point out that the IQ gap between offenders and nonoffenders is typically

larger for verbal than for performance IQ (p. 710). This is consistent with David Wechsler’s statement: “The most outstanding feature of the sociopath’s test profile is the systematic high score on the performance as opposed to the verbal part of the scale” (p. 176). The concept of intellectual imbalance, although not well-known among sociological criminologists, is popular among correctional psychologists. A person’s IQ score is rendered in terms of his or her full-scale IQ. Full-scale IQ is the average score obtained by summing scores on verbal (V) and performance (P) IQ and then dividing by two. Most people have V and P scores that closely match, with a population average of 100 on each subscale. People who have either V or P subscale scores significantly in excess of the other (V>P or P>V) are considered intellectually imbalanced. Correlating full-scale IQ with offending is problematic because, as Herrnstein and Murray point out, offenders are almost always found to have significantly lower verbal IQ, but not lower performance IQ, than nonoffenders. Remarking on the relationship between P>V imbalance and delinquency, Laurence Miller states: “This PIQ>VIQ relationship was found across studies, despite variations in age, sex, race, setting, and form of the Wechsler scale administered, as well in differences in criteria for delinquency” (p. 120). In the general population of American males, it has been estimated that 18 percent are V>P imbalanced, 66 percent are balanced (V=P), and 16 percent are P>V imbalanced. A discrepancy of 12 points or more is considered a significant imbalance at the .01 level (Kaufman, 1976). Researchers consistently find that V>P imbalanced individuals are significantly underrepresented in criminal and delinquent populations, and that P>V individuals are significantly overrepresented. V>P boys are underrepresented in delinquent populations by a factor of about 2.6, and P>V boys are overrepresented by a factor of about 2.2. Thus, P>V boys are about five times more likely to appear in delinquent groups than are V>P boys (Walsh, 2003). A V>P profile would appear to be a major predictor of prosocial behavior, especially among adults given the R. Barnett et al.’s data, which show that only 0.9 percent of prison inmates had such a profile compared to the 18 percent of the general male population. Using full-scale IQ to assess the role of cognitive ability in explaining criminal behavior

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve

provides another example of how researchers can arrive at an incomplete picture of the nature of the relationship. Herrnstein and Murray address the objection that perhaps normal- and high-IQ people are just as likely to break the law as low-IQ people, but only the less intelligent offenders are caught. If this is the case, low IQ is related to criminal offending only insofar as it leads to a greater probability of detection. Herrnstein and Murray admit that this idea has intuitive appeal and must at least be occasionally true, but they failed to find support for it. They state that given the millions of offenders who pass through the system and whose IQs are known, “there is barely enough crime left unaccounted for to permit such a population’s [a population of above-average IQ offenders] existence” (p. 243). Another argument against the differential detection hypothesis is that the relationship between delinquency and crime is also found in self-report studies, although it is less robust than is found in studies based on official statistics. One review relevant to this issue found that 81 (89 percent) studies based on official statistics reported significant negative relationships between IQ and delinquency, while10 reported nonsignificant findings; the corresponding figures for self-report studies were 14 (77.7 percent) and 4, respectively (Ellis & Walsh, 2000). Terrie Moffitt and Phil Silva designed an elegant test of the differential detection hypothesis based on a large birth cohort of New Zealand males born in 1972–1973. Subjects were asked to selfreport delinquent activity which was then compared with official police records. This resulted in three distinct groups: (1) self-reported delinquents with a police record, (2) self-reported delinquents with no police record, and (3) nondelinquents as assessed both by self-reports and police records. Comparing IQ scores among the groups, Moffitt and Silva found that the full-scale, verbal, and performance IQ means of groups 1 and 2 did not significantly differ from one another, meaning that undetected delinquents were no brighter than their less fortunate peers who were detected. Both groups, however, had significantly lower full-scale and VIQ means, but not lower PIQ means, than nondelinquents. The nature of the sample (a large cohort), and the ability to match self-reports with official records makes these findings compelling.

447

In summary, Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve was controversial because of its discussion of race and intelligence and because of its conservative policy recommendations (a discussion of either is beyond the purpose of this entry), not because of its discussion of the relationship between IQ and criminal behavior. There are many more powerful risk factors for criminal behavior other than IQ, such as low self-control, low empathy, and high negative affect and high levels of sensation-seeking/ risk-taking, although IQ is related to all these factors. Herrnstein and Murray included criminal behavior in their analysis only as another of many examples of social risk factors that accompany low cognitive ability in a world that increasingly demands high intelligence for successful adaptation. Anthony Walsh See also Cognitive Theories of Crime; Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory; Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature

References and Further Readings Barnett, R., Zimmer, L., & McCormack, J. (1989). P>V sign and personality profiles. Journal of Correctional and Social Psychiatry, 35, 18–20. Ellis, L., & Walsh, A. (2000). Criminology: A global perspective. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Ellis, L., & Walsh, A. (2003). Crime, delinquency and intelligence: A review of the worldwide literature. In H. Nyborg (Ed.), The scientific study of general intelligence: A tribute to Arthur Jensen (pp. 343–365). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. Flynn, J. (2007). What is intelligence? Beyond the Flynn effect. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gatzke-Kopp, L., Raine, A., Loeber, R., StouthamerLoeber, M., & Steinhauer, S. (2002). Serious delinquent behavior, sensation seeking, and electrodermal arousal. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 30, 477–486. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. T. (1950). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herrnstein, R. (1989). Biology and crime (National Institute of Justice Crime File, NCJ 97216). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Herrnstein, R., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press.

448

Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory

Hirschi, T., & Hindelang, M. (1977). Intelligence and delinquency: A revisionist view. American Sociological Review, 42, 571–587. Kaufman, A. (1976). Verbal-performance IQ discrepancies on the WISC-R. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 44, 739–744. Miller, L. (1987). Neuropsychology of the aggressive psychopath: An integrative review. Aggressive Behavior, 13, 119–140. Moffitt, T. (1993). Adolescent-limited and life-coursepersistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Moffitt, T., & Silva, P. (1988). IQ and delinquency: A test of the differential detection hypothesis. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97, 330–333. Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard, T., Boykin, A., Brody, N., Ceci, S., et al. (1995). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns: Report of a task force established by the board of scientific affairs of the American Psychological Association. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Stattin, H., & Klackenberg-Larsson (1993). Early language and intelligence development and their relationship to future criminal behavior. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 102, 369–378. Vold, G. B., & Bernard, T. J. (1986). Theoretical criminology (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Walsh, A. (2003). Intelligence and antisocial behavior. In A. Walsh & L. Ellis (Eds.), Biosocial criminology: Challenging environmentalism’s supremacy (pp. 105–124). Huntington, NY: Nova Science. Wechsler, D. (1958). The measurement and appraisal of adult intelligence. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. West, D. J., & Farrington, D. P. (1973). Who becomes delinquent? Second report of the Cambridge study in delinquent development. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Wolfgang, M., Figlio, R., & Sellin, T. (1972). Delinquency in a birth cohort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory Crime statistics in the United States have historically been based primarily upon data collected by

police agencies. However, beginning in the 1960s, nationwide victimization surveys were conducted. With victimization surveys, representative samples of the general population are asked whether they have been the victims of any crimes. If a respondent indicates that he or she has been the victim of a crime, the individual is asked a series of follow-up questions about the victimization, such as the time the incident occurred, where the incident occurred, and whether the victim knew the offender. Thus, with the advent of victimization surveys in the 1960s, criminologists had a new source of data to explore. In 1978, Michael J. Hindelang, Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo utilized data from victimization surveys as the basis of their book titled Victims of Personal Crime: An Empirical Foundation for a Theory of Personal Victimization. In this book, Hindelang et al. presented and analyzed data from the National Crime Survey (NCS). Specifically, they used data that were collected in 1972 from surveys in eight cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Newark, Portland (Oregon), and St. Louis. Using these data, the authors examined characteristics that were associated with the risks of being a victim of a personal crime (i.e., rape, robbery, assault, and personal larceny). They found that several demographic characteristics were associated with a high likelihood of being a victim of a personal crime including age, marital status, employment status, and sex. Specifically, they discovered that younger people were more likely to be victimized than older people; people who were, divorced, separated, or never married were more likely to be victimized than married people; and males were more likely to be victimized than females. Findings such as these led Hindelang et al. to wonder why some people are more likely to be victims of violent crime than others. As a result, they proposed a theoretical model to explain their finding that there were variations in the risks of victimization across social groups. They referred to this model as the lifestyle/exposure model, although it is often referred to today as just lifestyle theory. Lifestyle theory is important because it was one of the first systematic theories of criminal victimization; most other theories focused on explaining criminal offending rather than criminal victimization.

Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory

The main premise behind the lifestyle/exposure theory is that differences in risks of victimization are associated with differences in lifestyles. Hindelang et al. define lifestyle as “routine daily activities, both vocational activities (work, school, keeping house, etc.) and leisure activities” (p. 241). Thus, according to the lifestyle/exposure model, an individual’s behavior is important in predicting his or her risk of victimization.

Antecedents of Lifestyle Hindelang et al.’s theoretical model lays out both the antecedents of lifestyle and the mechanisms that connect lifestyle with victimization. The antecedents of lifestyle include role expectations and structural constraints. Demographic characteristics are theorized to influence both role expectations and structural constraints. Role expectations refer to “cultural norms that are associated with achieved and ascribed statuses of individuals and that define preferred and anticipated behaviors” (Hindelang et al., 1978, p. 242). Hindelang et al. point out that role expectations vary considerably depending upon demographic factors such as age, marital status, income, and sex. For instance, what is expected of a child versus an adult is very different, as is what is expected of a married versus unmarried person. As Hindelang et al. point out, married people are generally expected to spend more time at home than unmarried people and to lead a more “settled” life (p. 242). Structural constraints refer to “limitations on behavioral options that result from the particular arrangement existing within various institutional orders, such as the economic, familial, educational, and legal orders” (Hindelang et al., 1978, p. 242). As with role expectations, structural constraints are influenced by demographic characteristics such as age, sex, race, income, marital status, education, and occupation. For example, a person’s economic situation may limit his or her options in terms of where to live, what modes of transportation he or she may use, and his or her accessibility to educational opportunities. Hindelang et al. hypothesize that people adapt to role expectations and structural constraints by developing skills and attitudes. These adaptations take place on both the individual and group levels.

449

As Hindelang et al. explain, “each person learns skills and attitudes that allow him or her to operate with some individuality within the constraints imposed by role expectations and social structure” (p. 244). An example that is particularly relevant to Hindelang et al.’s focus on personal victimization is the attitudes and beliefs about crime that people develop in adapting to role expectations and structural constraints. These attitudes and beliefs are influenced by demographic factors such as age. For example, as people get older, they often experience an increase in fear of crime. Hindelang et al. further point out that the attitudes and beliefs that people develop are frequently integrated into the routine activities of the individual, often as limitations on behavior. Examples of routine activities include working outside of the house, going to school, and housekeeping. It is these daily activities that comprise Hindelang et al.’s notion of lifestyle.

Lifestyle As explained above, according to Hindelang et al.’s lifestyle/exposure model, differences in lifestyle are due to differences in role expectations, structural constraints, and adaptations. Hindelang et al. further explain that “variations in lifestyles are related differentially to probabilities of being in particular places at particular times and coming into contact with persons who have particular characteristics” (p. 245). Lifestyle, then, affects exposure to risk and associations with other people, which in turn are related to the likelihood of experiencing a personal victimization. For example, consider the routine daily activities of a young, single unemployed male versus those of a middleaged married woman who works in a professional occupation. The differences in each individual’s routine daily activities affect the individual’s exposure to risky situations and, in turn, their likelihood of becoming a victim of a personal crime. As this example suggests, demographic factors (e.g., age, sex, marital status, family income) play an important role in affecting a person’s lifestyle. To further illustrate the influence of lifestyle, Hindelang et al. argue that younger people are more likely than older people to spend time away from the home, as are males compared to females, and single people compared to married people. In

450

Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory

addition, consider the example noted above about how older people often experience increases in fear of crime. This increased fear of crime may cause an individual to limit his or her activities and contact with strangers. In other words, the increased fear of crime affects the individual’s lifestyle and thus exposure to others. This example illustrates the importance of exposure. According to the lifestyle/ exposure model, lifestyle affects the likelihood of personal victimization primarily through variation in exposure to risk. Further, according to Hindelang et al.’s lifestyle/ exposure model, the main link between lifestyle and exposure to a high risk of victimization is direct. However, there is also another link: an indirect link between lifestyle and exposure which operates through associations. “Associations refer to more or less sustained personal relationships among individuals that evolve as a result of similar lifestyles and hence similar interests shared by these individuals” (Hindelang et al., 1978, p. 245). Hindelang et al. point out that individuals spend much of their time with people who have similar lifestyles.

Propositions In further explaining their theory, Hindelang et al. outlined a set of eight interdependent propositions that they argued were consistent with victimization and police data. These propositions delineate the fundamental principles of the lifestyle/exposure model and suggest directions for future research. The first proposition is that the likelihood of being the victim of a personal crime is directly correlated with the amount of time that an individual spends in public places, such as streets and parks and especially in public places at night. The second proposition states that the likelihood of being in public places, especially at night, fluctuates according to a person’s lifestyle. For example, Hindelang et al. argued that males and single people were more likely to spend a larger amount of time outside of the home than their counterparts. The third proposition asserts that “social contacts and interactions occur disproportionately among individuals who share similar lifestyles” (p. 255) while the fourth proposition states that an individual’s likelihood of being the victim of a personal crime depends upon the extent to which he

or she shares demographic characteristics with offenders. The fifth proposition asserts that the amount of time that an individual spends among nonfamily members depends upon his or her lifestyle. The sixth proposition states that the likelihood of being the victim of a personal crime, particularly personal theft, increases in relation to the amount of time that an individual spends among nonfamily members. Proposition seven asserts that “variations in lifestyle are associated with variations in the ability of individuals to isolate themselves from persons with offender characteristics” (p. 262). The final proposition states that “variations in lifestyle are associated with variations in the convenience, the desirability, and vincibility of the person as a target for personal victimizations” (p. 264).

Reassessing Lifestyle Theory In 1987, Garofalo published a book chapter in Positive Criminology titled “Reassessing the Lifestyle Model of Criminal Victimization.” In this chapter, Garofalo had four main pursuits. The first was to briefly review the lifestyle model and the routine activity approach. He noted the similarities between the two perspectives including the fact that neither tries to explain the motivation of offenders. Instead, criminal motivation is taken as a given in both models. Garofalo also argued that there are no substantive differences between lifestyle/exposure and routine activity theories. Second, Garofalo reviewed some research findings on lifestyle theory, noting that a number of studies, using a variety of methods, have found support for lifestyle theory. Third, Garofalo suggested a revised lifestyle model. He observed that the revised model could be applied to “directcontact predatory violations,” thus covering more types of crimes than just the personal crimes explained by the original lifestyle model. He also made some other modifications to the original model, including adding reactions to crime as a factor that influences exposure and associations. Finally, Garofalo addressed some criticisms that had been leveled at lifestyle theory, including the argument that it lacks policy relevance. In response to this criticism, he argued that both role expectations and structural constraints, two key elements

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

of lifestyle theory, are influenced by public policies. For example, policies such as tax deductions for married couples influence the percentage of households that consist of single people living alone, while policies such as mandatory school attendance and minimum age restrictions for employment allow less interaction between people of different age groups.

Conclusion As noted above, Hindelang et al.’s lifestyle/exposure model was an important contribution to the field of criminology because it was one of the first theories to focus on victimization rather than offending. The lifestyle/exposure model is still valuable in the fields of criminology and victimology today as it is often used in conjunction with routine activity theory to explain why some people are more likely to be victims of crimes than others. Shannon A. Santana See also Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization

References and Further Readings Garofalo, J. (1987). Reassessing the lifestyle model of criminal victimization. In M. R. Gottfredson & T. Hirschi (Eds.), Positive criminology (pp. 23–42). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hindelang, M. J. (1981). Sociological aspects of criminal victimization. American Sociological Review, 7, 107–128. Hindelang, M. J., Gottfredson, M. R., & Garofalo, J. (1978). Victims of personal crime: An empirical foundation for a theory of personal victimization. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. Maxfield, M. G. (1987). Lifestyle and routine activity theories of crime: Empirical studies of victimization, delinquency, and offender decision-making. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 3, 275–282. Meier, R. F., & Miethe, T. D. (1993). Understanding theories of criminal victimization. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 17, pp. 459–499). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, M. B. (1999). Lifestyles, routine activities, and residential burglary victimization. Journal of Crime and Justice, 22, 27–56.

451

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory Social control theory was first expounded in its modern form by Travis Hirschi in his 1969 book Causes of Delinquency, which is one of the most heavily cited works in the field of criminology. Subjected to hundreds of empirical tests, social control theory is one of the most widely validated explanations of criminal and delinquent behavior. More than 40 years after its publication, it is still widely cited and tested. It continues to be tested in doctoral dissertation, and many of its key elements continue to be included in integrated theories of crime and in empirical inquiries, both in the United States and abroad. Although the theory is not without its critics, it would be difficult to overstate the influence of Hirschi’s social control theory on the field of criminology. The fundamental question addressed with social control theory can be traced back to the work of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, and later the classical criminologists Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria, assumed that human nature is fundamentally asocial or selfish. This natural pursuit of self-interest will often result in people committing criminal, delinquent, and deviant behavior, because such behavior often results in quick and easy gratification of desires. For example, stealing something one wants is generally a quicker and easier way of obtaining it than is working for the money to buy it. We are not by nature inclined to consider the potentially negative effects of our behavior on others, nor are we inclined to care what those effects are. For control theory, then, crime is simply the result of the individual’s rational calculation. In the absence of obvious negative consequences to the individual, crime is the most logical way to obtain desires. Because crime comes naturally and can fulfill universal desires, Hirschi rejected the question, “Why do they do it?” in favor of the question, “Why don’t we do it?” (1969, p. 34). This approach placed control theory in opposition to the most popular theories at the time, strain theory and cultural deviance theory, and throughout Causes of Delinquency Hirschi contrasted control theory with these other approaches. Hirschi’s answer to the question, “Why don’t we do it?” is that people who are highly socially

452

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

integrated, or have a strong bond to society, are less willing than those with a weaker bond to risk the negative consequences that might follow criminal behavior. The most important of these negative consequences for control theory are informal punishments rather than the formal punishments that are meted out by the criminal justice system. For example, if we commit crime, we risk facing the disapproval of those whose opinions we value, such as our parents, friends, or spouses. Hirschi (1969) refers collectively to the informal mechanisms of social control as the social bond, which comprises four interrelated elements presented below.

The Elements of the Social Bond The first element of the social bond, attachment, refers to the individual’s level of sensitivity to the opinions of others. To the extent that individuals are emotionally attached to others, such as parents, friends, teachers, and so on, they will be concerned about others’ opinions of them, and they will therefore be less likely to commit crime for fear of losing the respect and affection of others. Hirschi (1969, p. 18) quoted Durkheim as stating, “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings.” Put differently, if we are not tied to a society or members of that society, we are not bound by the rules of that society, and we are free to act in accordance with our own selfinterest, which often leads us to commit crime. The second element of the social bond outlined by Hirschi is commitment to conventional goals, such as educational or occupational goals. People with occupational or educational goals for the future will be reluctant to risk losing the chance to achieve those goals. Engaging in delinquent behavior, of course, entails such a risk if the person’s behavior comes to the attention of law enforcement officials, school authorities, and so on. It is difficult to attend medical school, for example, if one is in prison. To the extent that an individual holds conventional goals, then, he or she will be less likely to commit crime. Although Hirschi’s theory was designed specifically to explain delinquent behavior, commitment can also refer to resources one has accumulated over time and can thus be applied to adults as well. As Hirschi notes, if one has spent years acquiring a good reputation or a well-paying job, one will be

less likely to engage in behaviors that could ruin that reputation or cost one his or her job. The third element of the social bond is involvement, or the extent to which the individual’s time is consumed by conventional activities. Involvement is perhaps the most “common sense” part of social control theory. The logic is simply that there are only so many hours in a day, and if a great deal of time is spent in activities like schoolwork, sports, hobbies, or a job, there is no time left for delinquency. As the old saying goes, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” The final element of the social bond is belief in conventional norms. Hirschi argued that there is variation in the extent to which people believe in the moral validity of laws and norms, so some individuals regard the norms of society with more reverence than do others. To the extent that an individual believes in the moral validity of norms, he or she will be less likely to deviate from them. Hirschi was careful to differentiate his arguments about variation in belief in the conventional validity of the law from claims made by Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory and Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s neutralization theory. Sutherland and other cultural deviance theorists argue that some groups hold norms or values that differ fundamentally from those of the conventional society, and Sykes and Matza argue that potential delinquents must “neutralize” or rationalize their beliefs that crime is wrong before they will commit crime. In contrast to these ideas, Hirschi argued that human societies are characterized by a single moral order, and discounted the idea that there are groups that positively value crime. Social control theory holds that delinquents violate rules that they believe in, but that those who do violate these rules tend not to believe as strongly as nondelinquents that they should follow the rules of society. Just as members of the same church vary in their level of religiosity, then, members of the same society vary in belief. It is important to note that the elements of the social bond are interrelated. As Hirschi put it, “In general, the more closely a person is tied to conventional society in any of these ways, the more closely he is likely to be tied in the other ways” (1969, p. 27). Although many studies that set out to test social control theory look at separate effects of each element of the bond, social control theory is at

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

root a general theory of social integration, and the empirical relationships between elements of the bond are well documented. Thus, any discussion of the effects of a single element of the social bond on delinquency should be considered a partial test of the theory rather than a test of the theory as a whole.

The Empirical Research One aspect of Hirschi’s book Causes of Delinquency that made it unique at the time was that he both set forth the theory and empirically tested its central claims. He also contrasted those claims with those of the leading theories of the time, cultural deviance and strain theories. His findings and subsequent research on the theory are discussed below. The data that Hirschi used for his initial test of the theory were collected from a sample of 4,077 students drawn from 11 junior and senior high schools in the Richmond, California, area in 1964. Although the sample included white and black boys and girls, most of Hirschi’s empirical tests used only the white boys in his sample. Unless otherwise noted, Hirschi’s findings discussed below refer only to white boys. Attachment to Parents

Hirschi’s test of the attachment hypothesis focused on the child’s attachment to parents as being particularly important in reducing the likelihood of delinquency. His original test examined three dimensions of attachment to parents: virtual supervision, intimacy of communication with parents, and affectional identification. Hirschi argued that virtual supervision, or the extent to which parents keep track of the child’s whereabouts and companions, should be negatively related to the child’s delinquency because this increased the extent to which the parent was “psychologically present” for the child when he or she was faced with a temptation to commit delinquent acts. For the same reason, the child’s intimacy of communication with parents, representing how often the parent and child discussed matters of some importance, was expected to be negatively related to delinquency. A third measure of attachment to parents, affectional identification of the child with the parent, referred to whether the child wanted to be the kind of person represented by his or her

453

father and/or mother. Hirschi hypothesized that youths who were more likely to want to be like their father or their mother would be less likely to engage in delinquency because they valued their parents’ opinions of them more highly. On all three counts, Hirschi found strong support for the attachment hypothesis. Children who perceived their parents as aware of their activities, who had higher levels of communication with parents, and who reported greater affectional identification with parents were substantially less likely to report delinquency. Additional analyses showed that these findings held for both black and white boys, and for children of all social class backgrounds. In subsequent research, the predicted relationship between attachment to parents and delinquency has been the most frequently tested hypothesis derived from social control theory. This relationship has also received a great deal of empirical support. This finding holds with a variety of different ways of measuring attachment to parents. For example, some studies measure attachment with a single indicator of how well the respondent gets along with his or her parents, others incorporate a number of dimensions of attachment as outlined by Hirschi, and still others combine attachment to parents, peers, and the school in a single measure. The negative relationship between attachment to parents and crime or delinquency has also been obtained in a wide variety of samples selected at different historical periods, including the Gluecks’ sample of white males collected in the United States in the 1930s, data collected in the Netherlands from boys in four different ethnic groups in the 1990s, and a sample of male and female high school students in Ankara, Turkey, in 2001. In short, virtually all studies that test Hirschi’s hypothesis find the predicted negative relationship between attachment to parents and delinquency. Attachment to School

While acknowledging the overlap between a youth’s attachment to the school and his or her commitment to education and involvement in school-related activities, Hirschi conceptualized attachment to school as an analytically separate element of the social bond. In general, youths who

454

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

are more attached to school have a greater concern for losing the respect of teachers and other school personnel. Hirschi measured attachment to the school with measures of academic ability and performance, how much the student reported liking school, concern for teachers’ opinions, and acceptance of the school’s authority to set rules for behavior. Hirschi argued that students higher in academic ability will perform better in school, will experience the rewards associated with good performance, and will tend to like school more than those who do not do well in school. Those who like school and care what their teachers think of them should accord greater legitimacy to the school’s authority and, in turn, should be less likely to be delinquent. Hirschi’s findings supported all of these predictions. While the effects of academic ability were weaker compared to the effects of the other variables, all were related to delinquency in the expected direction. For example, boys who reported that they liked school were substantially less likely to report delinquency than those who did not like school, and boys with good grades were also less likely to report delinquency than those with worse grades. Hirschi also found that delinquent boys seemed rather indifferent to the school rather than antagonistic toward school, which cast doubt on explanations of delinquency suggesting that the school engenders rebellion or feelings of hostility. Other researchers testing Hirschi’s hypothesis regarding attachment to the school have often reconceptualized this variable. Most commonly, some aspects of attachment to school are considered to be elements of commitment to conventional goals and/or involvement in school-related activities such as homework, and in some cases attachment to school is viewed as one aspect of overall attachment to others. Most research analyzing the effect of attachment to the school on delinquency— using variables such as liking school, having higher academic ability, being concerned about teachers’ opinions, perceptions of teachers’ interest, and overall positive attitudes toward school—finds that youths who are more attached to school are less likely to be delinquent, consistent with Hirschi’s predictions. Overall, then, the weight of the evidence shows fairly clearly that delinquents are not strongly bonded to the school, and this finding is

one of the least disputed in the criminological literature. Attachment to Friends

Hirschi began his discussion of the role of friends in producing or inhibiting delinquency by noting that the connection between friends’ delinquency and the individual’s delinquency was already well established in the literature. His analysis of the Richmond data showed the same relationship: Boys with delinquent friends, as measured by police contacts or by reports of teachers’ opinions of these friends, were more likely to be delinquent. The key issue for social control theory, however, is the nature of the causal mechanism involved in this relationship. Cultural deviance theories, and to some extent strain theories, posit an important causal role of delinquent peers: Delinquent peer groups are seen as very close-knit groups that teach delinquent norms and values to their members. Control theory, in contrast, holds that belonging to delinquent peer groups is a result rather than a cause of delinquency, or that the relationship between delinquent peers and delinquency is spurious due to the common effects of a low stake in conformity. The latter argument is seen in the old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” meaning that people who are already similar in certain ways will tend to come together as friends, but that they do not necessarily influence each other’s behavior after they become friends. Control theory is also at odds with the image of the delinquent group or gang as solidary and as capable of exerting great influence over its members. Rather, control theory holds that members of delinquent groups tend to have only weak bonds to each other and to have weak bonds in other respects as well (e.g., to parents and school). Hirschi first examined the relationship between attachment to friends and other elements of the social bond. Hirschi found that youths who were attached to their parents and who were committed to education were more likely to be attached to their peers as well. Hirschi concluded from these findings that a high level of attachment to peers is not likely to produce the kinds of attitudes that tend to increase the likelihood of delinquency, in that both attachment to parents and

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

achievement motivation are negatively associated with delinquency. The direct relationship between attachment to peers and delinquency was assessed using measures of affectional identification with friends, respect for best friends’ opinions about important matters, and two measures of delinquency. These tests again supported the predictions of the theory, in that boys with stronger bonds to their friends were less likely to have self-reported delinquent acts and were less likely to perceive themselves as delinquent. Further, being attached even to delinquent friends seemed to reduce the individual’s level of delinquency. This finding was at odds with differential association theory, which predicts that the effect of delinquent friends on the individual’s delinquency would be stronger when the individual’s level of attachment to them was higher. Hirschi conducted further analyses to assess the relative merits of social control and differential association theories. The two key findings to emerge from these analyses were (1) boys with stronger social bonds were less likely to have delinquent friends, and (2) the stronger the stake in conformity, the lower the correlation between delinquent friends and delinquency. Thus, despite the finding that having more delinquent friends was correlated with higher levels of delinquency, Hirschi found that the strength of other social bonds reduced both the likelihood of having delinquent friends and the relationship between delinquent friends and delinquency. He concluded from these findings that the likelihood of having delinquent friends is largely dependent on a selfselection process, where similar boys who are already likely to engage in delinquency come together as friends, rather than friends having a bad influence on one another. Hirschi’s findings of a negative relationship between attachment to peers and delinquency have been perhaps the least often replicated of any of his findings. Contrary to Hirschi’s predictions, a number of studies show that attachment to friends is weakly but positively related to delinquent behavior. Other studies find no relationship between attachment to friends and delinquency. Peggy Giordano, Stephen Cernkovich, and M. D. Pugh’s study of the nature of youths’ friendships and delinquent behavior found that in many respects,

455

delinquents’ friendships were similar to those of nondelinquents or of less serious delinquents. However, they also found that delinquents were more likely than nondelinquents to report higher levels of conflict, jealousy, and competition with friends, which provides some support for the control theory characterization of delinquents’ friendships. Another in-depth study of friendships among adult drug users by Denise Kandel and Mark Davies obtained similar findings, in that the overall patterns of friendship were similar between drug users and nonusers. The nature of delinquents’ and nondelinquents’ friendships and the reasons for the relationship between delinquent friends and delinquency remain controversial issues in criminology, particularly in debates between proponents of control theories and cultural deviance theories (Warr, 2002). Commitment to Conventional Lines of Action

Hirschi focused on two aspects of commitment to goals likely to be particularly relevant for the explanation of delinquency—commitment to educational and occupational goals. Hirschi’s tests of the commitment hypotheses focused on the competing predictions made by social control theory and strain theory. For strain theory, boys with high aspirations for occupational success but who have limited ability to achieve those goals will experience frustration, and may turn to delinquency as a way to achieve their goals illegally. For social control theory, however, boys with high aspirations should be less likely to be delinquent because of their commitment to achieving their goals. Hirschi found that a measure of educational aspirations was negatively associated with delinquency, and that this relationship held for both white and black boys. Contrary to the predictions of strain theory, high aspirations are not conducive to delinquency, even among boys who would find it more difficult to successfully achieve these goals: blacks in the mid-1960s. An analysis of the African American boys in the sample showed that those who perceived their occupational chances as being limited by racial discrimination despite their selfassessed ability to achieve these goals were not more likely to be delinquent than those who perceived high ability and no potential blockage to goal achievement.

456

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

Overall, then, Hirschi’s findings provided strong support for the notion that those who desire to achieve some occupational or educational goal, and those who are actively working toward their goals, are less likely to be delinquent. Hirschi concluded that the strain theory image of the delinquent as a striver with frustrated ambitions is false, and that the control theory portrayal of the delinquent as one with little investment in either present or future endeavors is more consistent with the data. Most studies examining the relationship between commitment to conventional goals and delinquency have found evidence in support of Hirschi’s predictions; those who have high aspirations and who work hard in school are less likely to be delinquent. Commitment has typically been measured with indicators of occupational and educational aspirations, education-related variables like the perceived importance of getting good grades, and working hard in school. Overall, there is a great deal of support for Hirschi’s predictions about the relationship between commitment and delinquency, and at the same time there is little support for the strain theory claim that frustrated aspirations are an important cause of delinquency. Involvement in Conventional Activities

Ironically, the least controversial hypothesis derived from social control theory was the only hypothesis that was resoundingly disproved by Hirschi’s analysis. The “virtually tautological” idea that boys who spend more time in conventional activities will simply be too busy to commit crime was not supported by the data (Hirschi, 1969, p. 190). Measures of time spent in sports, hobbies, watching television, reading, working around the house, and working at paid jobs were not associated with delinquency. The exception to this overall pattern was that boys who spent more time on homework were less likely to be delinquent—likely because more time spent on homework indicates a stronger commitment to conventional goals. Hirschi explained the overall lack of support for his involvement hypothesis by pointing out that most delinquent acts require very little time to complete. In fact, some of the boys who scored highest on the delinquency scale had probably spent only a few hours actively engaged in delinquency during the past year.

Despite Hirschi’s failure to find support for his hypothesis that involvement in conventional activities is negatively associated with delinquency, some subsequent research has supported the hypothesis. Researchers have found relationships between deviance and free time, feelings of boredom, involvement in sports and youth clubs, and involvement in school-based activities. In contrast, some studies find no relationship between delinquency and extracurricular activities at school, community activities, hobbies and recreational activities, and even involvement with school work. Given the number of different measures of involvement cited in the literature and the mixed findings noted above, it is difficult to make any generalizations about the empirical status of this element of the social bond. One problem with the concept of involvement, noted by Hirschi, is that different types of conventional activities are likely to be selected by people who differ in other elements of the social bond. For example, one would expect youths who are more attached to their parents to score higher on measures of involvement in conventional activities likely to be carried out in the presence of parents, such as watching television or working around the house. In this case, the time spent in the activity itself may not be sufficient to reduce the opportunity for delinquency, but the fact that the child engages in these activities cannot necessarily be said to be irrelevant to delinquency causation. It is also possible that some conventional activities provide youths with greater opportunities to be delinquent by bringing them together with other youths in settings that may not be well supervised by adults. Belief

To test the hypothesis of a negative relationship between belief in conventional norms and delinquency, Hirschi analyzed the relationship between a variety of attitudes toward delinquency and the legal system and delinquent behavior. He found that boys reporting respect for the police were less likely to be delinquent, and that there was a strong relationship between reporting that “it is alright to get around the law if you can get away with it” and delinquency. Further evidence in support of Hirschi’s predictions was found in the negative relationship between respect for the legal system and achievement

Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory

orientation, intimacy of communication with father, and liking school. Hirschi concluded that lack of respect for the legal system was the result of overall weak social bonds, and that both belief itself and the other elements of the social bond influenced the likelihood of delinquency. The notion that belief in conventional morality decreases the likelihood of crime has gained very widespread support in tests of control theory. Despite these virtually undisputed findings, the element of belief in control theory is not without controversy. The issue is contentious on both theoretical and empirical grounds. On the theoretical level, control theory holds that one’s belief in conventional morality can be weak or strong, while cultural deviance and learning theories claim that norms favorable to law violation lead to crime or delinquency. Thus control theory argues that a lack of social integration is likely to be associated with weak belief in conventional morality and delinquency, while cultural deviance theories hold that integration into deviant groups should be associated with norms promoting deviance, and with deviant behavior. These distinctions between the two theories have been extensively questioned and debated by proponents of the two theoretical traditions, with control theorists arguing that the cultural deviance position on the issue is logically untenable and cultural theorists arguing that control theorists misinterpret cultural and learning theories on these issues. Empirically, perhaps the major problem in testing predictions derived from control and cultural deviance theories is that “definitions favorable to violation of law” (Sutherland, 1939) have not been clearly distinguished from a low level of belief in conventional morality (Costello, 1997).

Conclusion Overall, social control theory’s major predictions have received substantial empirical support. It is probably safe to say that control theory has uncovered several clear facts of delinquency: Delinquent youths have lower levels of attachment to parents and school, and lower levels of commitment to conventional goals. Delinquent youths are not academically oriented, nor are they actively striving to achieve long-term goals. Delinquents also tend to have a low level of belief in the moral validity of

457

laws and norms, so that youths with attitudes more tolerant of crime are more likely to engage in criminal behavior. The hypotheses that have received less support are those dealing with attachment to friends and involvement in conventional activities. In particular, the support for Hirschi’s prediction of a negative association between attachment to friends and delinquency is scant, with most studies finding either no relationship or a weak positive relationship between the two variables. The relationship between involvement in conventional activities and delinquency has been documented in some studies, but a good number of studies find either no relationship or a positive relationship between these variables, leading us to conclude that this is still an open question. Social control theory has successfully pointed out specific elements of the social bond important in delinquency causation, but it is perhaps better thought of as a general theory pointing to the lack of social integration as the major cause of crime and delinquency. As Hirschi put it, “Behavior is a function of one’s connection to society. Those inside society are controlled by it; those outside society are free to follow their own impulses” (Hirschi, 2002, p. xiv). This fundamental idea was carried over into Hirschi’s later work with Michael Gottfredson in A General Theory of Crime, and has been tremendously influential in our understanding of the causes of crime and delinquency. Barbara J. Costello See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency; Prenatal Influences and Crime; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Stinchcombe, Arthur L.: Rebellion in a High School

References and Further Readings Costello, B. J. (1997). On the logical adequacy of cultural deviance theories. Theoretical Criminology, 1, 403–428. Giordano, P. C., Cernkovich, S. A., & Pugh, M. D. (1986). Friendships and delinquency. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 1170–1202.

458

Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal

Glueck, S. & Glueck, E. (1950). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. New York: The Commonwealth Fund. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirschi, T. (2002). The craft of criminology: Selected papers. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Kandel, D., & Davies, M. (1991). Friendship networks, intimacy, and illicit drug use in young adulthood: A comparison of two competing theories. Criminology, 29, 441–469. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1939). Principles of criminology (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott. Warr, M. (2002). Companions in crime: The social aspects of criminal conduct. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal Earnest A. Hooton was an American anthropologist best known for his anthropometric studies in criminology in the 1930s in the tradition established by Cesare Lombroso and the so-called Positivist School in criminology in Italy in the 1870s. Hooton was originally trained to be a scholar of classics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, writing a dissertation on Roman art. His career as an anthropologist began while he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, eventually earning a Diploma in Anthropology in 1913. He joined Harvard University soon afterwards and remained there till his death in 1954. Lombroso’s theory of evolutionary atavism and innate, hereditary criminal traits was published in 1876 as a monograph titled L’uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man). This formed the core of the Positivist School of criminology based on the emergent sciences of anthropometry, anthropology, and biology. Lombroso’s protégés Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo extended the polemic against the claims of classical jurisprudence regarding free will

and criminal behavior exemplified by the works of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. They posited the existence of “born criminals” marked by their physical deformities, mental disability, and lack of moral judgment, and they invoked the need for preemptive punishment of these individuals in order to defend the society. However, a study of convicts in British prisons titled The English Convict by Albert Goring challenged some of the core assumptions of Lombroso’s theory. While Goring’s study did find some influence of certain biological factors including height and weight among the sample, he did not find any consistent pattern of existence of physiological stigmas that characterized the “criminal type” according to Lombroso. Goring criticized Lombroso’s perspective as being tainted by preconceived notions about criminality and as failing to acknowledge that most criminals are not all that different from “normal” human beings regardless of the severity of their crimes (Hooton, 1939a). This study dealt a serious blow to the central claims of criminal anthropology, and one of the central premises of Hooton’s work was an effort to reassert its relevance in the criminological discourse. Hooton was highly critical of the sociological and psychological perspectives in contemporary criminology while making the case for the anthropological perspective on criminal behavior. In his assessment of sociological analyses of crime, he argued that environmental influences might be necessary but not sufficient in determining the potential of criminal behavior. He was equally skeptical of the psychological approach. He asserted that the diagnosis of “mental defects” as the key explanatory factor is a highly speculative process and hence lacking in scientific objectivity (1939a, p. 5). He also argued that the prevalent ideology of individuation in the criminal justice system—that is, the focus on the unique characteristics and circumstances of every individual delinquent—is counterproductive. He contended that it obscures the role of biological, psychological, and environmental factors that are common among a vast number of inmates in the penitentiaries of the nation. He proposed that it is important to study these factors, especially the question of heredity, in order to make up for the woeful lack of scientific knowledge in conventional criminology.

Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal

In the process of delineating the specifics of his own anthropometric perspective, he provided a critical assessment of the existing literature of criminal anthropology. While Hooton applauded Lombroso’s pioneering contributions, he criticized the methodology adopted by Lombroso and his followers. Hooton argued that Lombroso studied a very small sample of convicted criminals, which was inadequate to be a scientifically valid representative of the population from which it was drawn, and that Lombroso’s method of selecting this sample also did not have the rigor requisite of any reliable statistical procedure. Lombroso’s decision to study convicted criminals alone, without constructing a control group of noncriminal individuals, made his conclusions lacking in scientific validity. Most importantly, Lombroso did not have at his disposal the analytical tools of modern statistics developed after his time by Karl Pearson and other biometricians that would have allowed for measuring correlation between disparate variables. Hooton was even more critical of Goring’s study. In his opinion, the study was marred by a strong prejudice against the substantive claims made by Lombroso though he admired the relatively sophisticated statistical procedures used by Goring. However, despite the apparent rigor of Goring’s statistical methods, Hooton asserted that the study distorts the data and draws invalid conclusions. It also suffered from conceptual confusions, evident by its failure, for example, to discern the demographic differences between samples drawn from a heterogeneous population (Hooton, 1939a). Based on his massive study of convicts in American penitentiaries, Hooton published two books, The American Criminal and Crime and the Man, in 1939. Hooton wanted to study the criminal population in all its diversity rather than Lombroso’s rather simple approach of identifying physical stigma among a very small and nonrandom sample of prisoners. The total number of people examined by the study exceeded 17,000, including the civilian control group of 3,203 people. Hooton collaborated with Winfred Oberholser, the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases. Initially, the study began in Massachusetts, but over time it expanded to include samples from Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Missouri. In The American Criminal,

459

he analyzed the data gathered from the 4,212 native-born Caucasian criminals from these states. The data collected by Hooton and his assistants were divided into four broad categories of physical measurement, morphological observations, psychological data, and sociological observations. The physical measurements comprised 20 subcategories, including careful measures of weights, heights, heads, chests, faces, and ears of the sample groups. The morphological observations included records of skin color, hair, eyebrow, nose, lips, chin, palate, neck, forehead, eyebrows, cheek, and so on. Sociological observations included data on age, sex, occupation, religion, nature of the offense, education, race, marital status, and prior conviction records. Additionally, available medical records of the prisoners were examined for evidence of any disease or pathology. He defined a criminal as a person convicted of an antisocial act that is punishable by internment in a penal institution. Race was defined not by skin color, but by hereditary “physical type” such as “old American mountain stock” (Hooton, 1939a). Similarly, nationality was defined as physical types of immigrant groups from different nations in Europe, and ethnicity was defined on the basis of cultural and regional differences among the American population. The analysis of the relative importance of biological factors rested on a comparison between the prisoners and the “check sample” of civilian population while controlling for the sociological factors such as race, ethnicity, and nationality. While Hooton noted that there is no evidence of the presence of physical stigmata that Lombroso claimed to be the mark of the criminal type, almost all his anthropometric measurements apparently demonstrated the existence of significant constitutional difference between civilian and the criminal groups. Among many other features, the criminal group was markedly inferior to the civilian group in stature, weight, biacromial breadth, cranial circumference, nose height, ear length, and upper facial height. Also, criminals of different offense groups, such as robbers, thieves, and rapists, showed similar or identical deviation from the civilian check group. For example, rapists were the shortest among all the offenders and greatly inferior to all the offenders in all measurements except minimum frontal diameter—characteristics that

460

Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal

they shared with other sex offenders. First-degree murderers on average were more comparable in height to the civilian group, but they had broader jaws, and relatively narrower, longer, and lower heads. Hooton argued that the evidence overwhelmingly underline the criminogenic importance of heritable constitutional traits. However, there was evidence that sociological factors—such as broken homes, delinquent parents or associates—do play a role when combined with those constitutional traits. Therefore, Hooton (1939a, p. 308) noted that the combination of physiological and social factors needs to be taken into account in any criminological study. Even so, emphasizing the importance of primal nature of humans, he asserted that the problem of crime could only be solved through a eugenic program that controlled individuals with these constitutional inferiorities. There were not, he maintained, any rehabilitative measures for these innate defects. Although some of his more deterministic sentiments regarding heredity and behavior may appear to be tinged with racial prejudice, his writings provide a far more complex formulation of the question of race. He asserted that a racial group is defined by common anatomical features and ancestry, and it needs to be separated from groups based on a common language, national origin, or religious beliefs. In his opinion, however, centuries of intermixture between races had rendered race into merely an anthropological abstraction rather than a “pure” social group (Hooton, 1926). Therefore classification of races are nothing more than attempts to differentiate between approximate physical features (such as color of skin or hair), and these only have very limited hypotheses about heredity. He said that while it is logically possible that physical races may differ in psychological characteristics or intellectual capabilities, scientists have not found any evidence thereof. Thus, it is scientifically impossible to assign ranks of superiority to racial groups (Hooton, 1936). Intellectual capacity and predisposition to crime are individual rather than group characteristics, and all races have their share of criminals and productive citizens. It is scientifically not possible to find a preponderance of either virtue or vice among a single race. Therefore, a scientific eugenic program should only limit itself to prevention of breeding of the mentally unfit individuals and encourage breeding

between people from healthy stock without targeting a specific race. Hooton’s research effort was enormous in its scope and complexity, but many contemporary scholars were not convinced by his theoretical claims and methodological procedures. One of the most stringent criticisms of Hooton’s theory came from Robert Merton and Montague Francis AshleyMontagu. They dissected Hooton’s methodology in general and statistical inferences in particular and found them to be lacking scientific validity. They argued that the central claim that these morphological differences constitute organic inferiority was not supported by reason or evidence. The index of biological factors may have demonstrated statistically significant differences between criminals and his control group, but Hooton provided little reasoning as to why and how these disparate factors shape human behavior. Statistically significant differences may exist between two samples drawn from different universes, and these may well be caused by environmental or other causes, rather than “inherited deficiency” as per Hooton’s claim (Merton & Ashley-Montagu, 1940). Similarly, Edwin Sutherland argued that Hooton’s claim that physiological differences between the criminal and civilian sample are indicators of the constitutional inferiority of criminals was unsubstantiated, and in spite of the ambitious nature of the project it does not make a significant contribution to the study of criminal behavior. Saran Ghatak See also Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism; Goring, Charles: The English Convict; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

References and Further Readings Barkan, E. (1993). The retreat of scientific racism: The changing concept of race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hooton, E. A. (1926). Methods of racial analysis. Science, 63(1621), 75–81. Hooton, E. A. (1936). Plain statements about race. Science, 83(2161), 511–513.

Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency Hooton, E. A. (1939a). The American criminal: An anthropological study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hooton, E. A. (1939b). Crime and the man. New York: Greenwood Press. Merton, R. K., & Ashley-Montagu, M. F. (1940). Crime and the anthropologist. American Anthropologist, 42(3), 384–408. Rafter, N. H. (1997). Creating born criminals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rafter, N. H. (2004). Earnest A. Hooton and the biological tradition in American criminology. Criminology, 42, 735–771. Sutherland, E. H. (1939). The American criminal: An anthropological study. V01.1: The native white criminal of native parentage. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 29(6), 911–914.

Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency Normative ambiguity is a social-structural theory addressing the cause of gang violence. Specifically, gang violence is an outcome of the tension that results from youths trying to balance a conventional value system with that of the value system resulting from a life involved in a street gang. According to Ruth Horowitz and Gary Schwartz, normative ambiguity is the result of restrictions imposed by the larger society on youths’ aspirations, thereby preventing them from attaining their goals. The fact that gang delinquency and, more specifically, male gang violence is the result of an offense of honor rather than some trivial gang squabble demonstrates the conflict that exists and the role ambiguity gang members experience. Horowitz and Schwartz developed the theory of normative ambiguity as a means to explain gang violence in the Chicano community of an urban center or city. Their work examines the social context in which gang violence occurs and outlines the theory and role of normative ambiguity in the production of violence as gang members struggle with two antithetical codes of conduct: conventional norms of interpersonal etiquette versus the honorbound response of violence expected from one’s gang. Early theories on gang violence suggested

461

that violence was the result of a conflict-oriented gang culture in which members resorted to violence to prove their worth in the gang and the need to ensure the gang’s ultimate survival (territory building and the recruitment of members). Rather, Horowitz and Schwartz suggest that the social context in which gang violence occurs results from the normative ambiguity produced as gang members struggle to resolve the impugnation of their honor. To explain these concepts more clearly, this entry details the definition of normative ambiguity, how it differs from and has evolved out of more traditional explanations of gang violence, the way in which it explains gang violence by Latino gangs in the Chicano community, and the method by which Horowitz and Schwartz develop their theory. Specifically, Horowitz and Schwartz furnish a theory of male gang violence and an exploratory study of what causes that violence to erupt.

The Definition of Gang Violence According to Horowitz and Schwartz, a physical altercation among peers must satisfy three conditions to be defined as gang violence. First, in any face-to face encounter between male peers, at least one of the parties must feel as if the behavior of the other party or parties endangers his safety or impugns his dignity. When an individual’s honor is impugned, the aggrieved party may assume the role of the aggressor. If not, then he may assume the role of the victim. Second, the aggrieved party must respond in a manner where his words, gestures, and actions demonstrate a willingness to resort to physical injury or altercation. Third, the aggrieved party must account for his conduct in terms of his status as a gang member. In short, gang violence is not defined as such unless the provocative incident can become the basis for a collectively held grievance by the gang as a whole. The absence of any one of these conditions would mean that an incident would not be considered gang violence. Horowitz and Schwartz contend that gang ideology is simplistic. It defines an offense to an immediate member of the group as an offense against the group. However, an offense against those not considered core members of the group, or those on the group’s periphery, will not elicit such a reaction. And without such a reaction, the action is not considered gang violence. Additionally,

462

Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency

gang organization is “rudimentary” (Horowitz & Schwartz, 1974, p. 239). Few officers in the gang collect dues. The allocations of dues are unstructured; no formal guidelines exist. Groups are principally stratified by age, and gang solidarity is based on ethnicity, friendship, and a common stake in the outcome of gang activities. Initially, it was thought that gang violence was infrequent and not severe in the inner city (Miller, 1966). However, Horowitz and Schwartz find this no longer holds true. They suggest that due to the increase in the number of violent gun incidents, gangs rely on guns to defend themselves against other groups. In their study, they report that a number of members of their group had been shot and there were a steady number of deaths related to this violence.

Theories of Gang Violence: An Offense Against Honor Horowitz and Schwartz suggest that gang members subscribe to a code of personal honor based on interpersonal etiquette and the members’ ability to command deferential respect from others like themselves. Any breach of this code is interpreted as an insult to their manhood and justifies a violent response. These researchers draw from the works of James Short and Fred Strodtbeck on self-esteem, John Loftland on social defacement and disgrace, Hans Toch on self-image promoters and defenders, Julian Pitt-Rivers on contests of honor, and Erving Goffman on honor and one’s personal territory of self to demonstrate the profound effect that violating one’s honor or the perceived violation of one’s honor has on the precipitation of a violent incident. Thus, gang violence is a response to perceived threats to the actor’s self-esteem. Horowitz and Schwartz contend that a perceived attack on self-esteem arises from the interpretation of the intentions of others. When a person’s dignity is perceived to be threatened, this constitutes an interpersonal attack on that person’s character and a direct threat to one’s physical safety thus worthy of a response. According to Horowitz and Schwartz, in an honor-based subculture this sort of provocation causes a gang member to feel vulnerable, leading them to confrontation. Loftland suggested that when others cast a gang member in a depreciated role or in a derogatory

light, this leads to a “drastic reduction in self-esteem,” thereby supposedly reflecting a weak character. In this circumstance, the youth feels the necessity to defend himself, thus proving his worthiness through retaliation and acts of violence. Toch adds that doubts of self-efficacy and the feeling of public humiliation trigger heightened anger and distrust, so much so that violence is perceived to be the only solution. Moreover, Toch suggests that violence is used not just as a response to a threat of self-esteem—as a self-image defender— but can be employed to promote a person’s selfesteem and image. Individuals who “habitually precipitate” in violent situations do so to bolster, if not demand, the deference of others. In this case, they are proving their worthiness of respect. PittRivers further argues that honor sensitizes individuals to so-called violations of their person. Violations are interpreted as derogatory images of self, and violence is seen as a way of responding and resolving these perceived violations. Lastly, Goffman adds to this the idea that the defense of a person’s self-image, much like a physical territory, is a necessity to preserve social dignity. Any violation constitutes a violation of personal space. It is an intrusion on the personal territory of the self, and therefore the defense of self is necessary in order to command a deference of respect. Taken together, these studies help define what Horowitz and Schwartz call normative ambiguity. Accordingly, normative ambiguity emerges when an individual’s self-esteem is depreciated by another and this leads to a perceived threat to his or her honor, which is then internalized and seen as a violation of the actor’s personal space or physical territory. Horowitz and Schwartz develop these concepts to explain why violent incidents do not result from a mere threat to a youth’s standing among his peers, but rather from a decreased self-esteem that is embedded in the gang’s code of personal honor.

Normative Ambiguity and Its Role in Gang Violence Horowitz and Schwartz argue that “violence is triggered by the normative framework within which people attempt to resolve interpersonal difficulties” (p. 241). Normative ambiguity does not refer to the norms for proper interpersonal conduct. Nor does it suggest that these young men do

Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency

463

not understand what constitutes proper behavior. Differing from earlier theories on gang culture and violence, violence is not a foregone conclusion assumed in situations where one needs to prove one’s worth so to achieve higher status in the gang. It also cannot be traced, as proposed by Short and Strodtbeck, to youths’ lack of “the verbal and interpersonal skills that constitute social competence in our society” (Horowitz & Schwartz, 1974, p. 250). Rather, normative ambiguity addresses the cause of gang violence. Specifically, gang violence is an outcome of the interpersonal conflict that exists when reconciling the contradiction between codes for conduct. It is the tension that results from one trying to balance a conventional value system with that of the value system resulting from a life involved in a street gang. More specifically, normative ambiguity links the fluctuation or conflict between conventional and violent behavior as a response to a perceived threat of disrespect or threat to honor. Horowitz and Schwartz suggest that the majority of the gang members they questioned refused to commit themselves to one value system wholeheartedly. Rather, whether to invoke the norms of the gang versus the norms of conventional society was situationally based. Therefore, violence is not a foregone conclusion of a perceived threat to honor. The conventional response falls into the category of what Goffman calls impression management. Impression management “implies that the actor [or gang member] maintains enough distance from the on-going course of action to deflect any imputation of unworthiness [or disrespect to honor] away from himself and back on the objective properties of the situation [blame the circumstance]” (Horowitz & Schwartz, 1974, p. 242). Violent behavior, or gang violence, is a symbolic expression of the contradiction between one’s aspirations and the restrictions imposed by the larger society on one’s aspirations, thereby preventing individuals from attaining their goals. It is the strain or frustration from trying to achieve the American Dream when the path to the American Dream has been blocked.

conflict that arises when a gang member’s honor is disrespected. The resulting disrespect causes the individual to break from the conventional normative response, responding instead in a manner that would value criminal and violent behavior. The purpose of their theory was to refute the notions that all gangs operate in the same manner and under the same structure and that all gangs resort to violence when their deference of respect is impugned. They suggest that Chicano gangs experience conflict or normative ambiguity as they drift between a conventional value system and a system that values criminal and violent behavior. Horowitz and Schwartz suggest that when one gang member is disrespected by a rival gang member, the individual experiences normative ambiguity as he decides what course of action to take. In Chicano gangs, these feeling of normative ambiguity only arose when their honor was offended. When it was offended, gang members resorted to violence. There were situations where gang members chose convention over conflict. Horowitz and Schwartz undertook a preliminary test of this theory using a sample of 50 episodes of intergang violence. The researchers’ data consisted of first-hand observations of violent incidents and of accounts of incidents as reported by those who participated in them. A total of 31 males were included in the sample and reported incidents. Their ages ranged from 16 to 20. The results of their study suggest that 8 gang members seemed to organize their lives to revolve around a conventional adult career, 8 gang members were fully committed to street life, and the remaining 15 were unsure in their commitment to one value system or the other. They experienced normative ambiguity because they had not wholeheartedly bought into the value system of the gang. Moreover, the results of their study suggested that the most important indicator of a gang member’s commitment to a conventional adult career is his attitude toward going to jail. The fear of jail affected the degree of commitment to conventional values, with those more fearful of jail having a greater commitment to conventional values.

Theory and Empirical Work

Conclusion

The theory of normative ambiguity states that gang violence is the result of the interpersonal

Normative ambiguity is a state of conflict or tension that gang members experience when they have

464

Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency

had their honor impugned and yet they have not wholeheartedly bought into the gang value system. Violent incidents do not result from a mere threat to a youth’s standing among his peers, but rather from a decreased self-esteem that is embedded in a gang’s code of personal honor. When a youth’s personal honor is offended, violence may result. Initial theories of gang violence explained violence in terms of threats to one’s standing among their peers; however, as Horowitz and Schwartz demonstrated, the Chicano gangs in their study did not immediately resort to violence when offended, but were likely to resort to violence only when their honor had been disrespected. Only those totally committed to street life were apt to respond to any disrespect with violence. However, those who were committed to conventional adult life and those unsure as to their commitment to conventional values were less likely to respond with violence and more likely to diffuse the situation explaining it as the result of circumstance. Alexander Drayer See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect; Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift; Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency;

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio; Peers and Delinquency; Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes

References and Further Readings Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: W. W. Norton. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public. New York: Harper & Row. Horowitz, R., & Schwartz, G. (1974). Honor, normative ambiguity and gang violence. American Sociological Review, 39, 238–251. Loftland, J. (1969). Deviance and identity. New York: Prentice Hall. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New York: Wiley. Miller, W. (1966). Violent crimes in city gangs. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 364, 96–112. Pitt-River, J. (1966). Honor and social status. In J. Peristiany (Ed.), Honor and shame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Short, J., & Strodtbeck, F. (1965). Group process and gang delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Toch, H. (1969). Violent men. Chicago: Aldine.

I Incarceration

and

criminal behavior of individual offenders (Warren, 2008). Since such a massive number of people are incarcerated, it is imperative to understand how this sanction impacts an individual’s future criminal behavior. This entry discusses this limited body of research in three sections. First, the three competing perspectives that have been utilized to explain the effect of imprisonment on future criminal behavior are presented. Of these perspectives, one, specific deterrence, argues imprisonment will lead to a reduction in an offender’s criminal behavior, while the other two, the “schools of crime” and labeling perspectives, contend that imprisonment has an iatrogenic effect on offenders. Second, the extent to which released state and federal prisoners are rearrested, reconvicted, and/or re-imprisoned after release is discussed. This research shows that recidivism is quite high among releasees reaching rates well above 60 percent. Third, the findings from the existing empirical research analyzing the association between imprisonment and recidivism are also presented. This empirical research can be classified into three distinct categories. First, many studies have compared similar individuals sentenced to custodial sanctions versus non-custodial sanctions and their subsequent criminal behavior. Second, analyses have been conducted to assess the impact that serving a longer versus shorter sentence in prison has on recidivism. And third, researchers have investigated the effect that serving time in a prison with harsher versus less harsh prison conditions has on post-release criminal behavior. Findings from each of the three categories of empirical research are discussed in order to gain a thorough

Recidivism

From 1930 to 1972, the United States experienced a relatively stable incarceration rate that hovered between 93 and 137 inmates per 100,000 individuals in the population (Blumstein & Beck, 1999). However, since the early 1970s, the United States has been in an era of mass incarceration, with currently more than 1.6 million Americans serving time in a state or federal prison (West & Sabol, 2009). If one adds to this the more than 785,000 individuals incarcerated in local jails, the number of people currently behind bars is a staggering 2.3 million people with the figure rising each successive year (Minton & Sabol, 2009). This sanction has become so pronounced that since 1972, there has been an unprecedented 600 percent increase in the number of individuals locked up, with more people currently incarcerated than working at both McDonald’s and WalMart combined worldwide (Nellis & King, 2009; Pager, 2007). Notably, this massive explosion in the inmate population has been a uniquely American phenomenon making the United States the largest incarcerator in the world with an imprisonment rate of 760 per 100,000 population (World Prison Brief, 2008). In light of this expansion, various scholars have sought to explain this massive increase in the use of incarceration in the United States. However, even though one in every 99.1 adults is currently behind bars, much less research has been done on the impact that incarceration has on the post-release 465

466

Incarceration and Recidivism

understanding of the effect that imprisonment has on an individual’s criminal behavior after release.

Perspectives on Imprisonment Scholars have long theorized about the impact of imprisonment on recidivism. Some have argued that serving time in a prison exacts a cost that the individual does not wish to endure in the future and will consequently lead to a suppression of criminal behavior. These commentators, often economists, posit that prisons have a specific deterrent effect on the subsequent criminal behavior of offenders. However, other scholars have suggested that prisons are not a deterrent and, in fact, have a criminogenic effect on offenders, increasing their chance of criminal behavior after release. One group of theorists offering this criminogenic perspective has postulated that prisons foster criminal behavior because prison is a place where individuals learn from and associate with other criminals. This group conceives prisons as “schools of crime.” Another set of scholars have proposed that imprisonment is criminogenic because serving time in prison stigmatizes an individual which leads to further criminal behavior due the disruption of conventional bonds to society and associations with others who are similarly stigmatized. The term “prisoner” is seen as a label that has detrimental impacts on the future of the prisoner, which can create circumstances that makes crime highly likely for the individual. Each of these perspectives is discussed as follows. Specific Deterrence

Deterrence theorists see individuals as rational beings who weigh the costs and benefits of crime. The theory argues that when the costs of crime (e.g., prison) outweigh the benefits of the criminal act, the individual will not engage in the behavior. Thus, individuals are seen as weighing serving time in prison and the benefit of the criminal act when deciding whether or not to engage in crime. Three factors are especially relevant in this cost-benefit analysis: the severity, certainty, and celerity of the punishment. The impact of imprisonment is most closely related to the severity element of deterrence. Prisons are seen as being one of the most severe sanctions that the criminal justice system can impose on an individual, second only to capital

punishment. Imprisonment inflicts both direct and indirect harms on individuals, such as the loss of freedom, employment, and relationships as well as many psychological harms. Also any factors that make prison life even harder, such as serving more time or being housed in an institution with very harsh conditions, amplifies the perceived costs of future punishment for an individual. Therefore, according to deterrence theorists, the prison experience, with all its hardships, likely makes the costs of crime outweigh any benefits, which leads to a suppression future criminal behavior. Schools of Crime

In contrast to deterrence theorists, there is a widely supported belief that prisons are criminogenic and serve as a criminal learning environment for offenders. Much research has shown that prisons are often marked with an oppositional subculture that supports criminal behavior, with both importation and deprivation theorists making this argument. Importation theorists have postulated that prisoners bring or “import” into the institution the same set of criminal values and beliefs that led them to crime in the first place. This view has become especially salient in recent times with the influx of street gangs now behind prison walls. Deprivation theorists, on the other hand, have argued that the oppositional subculture is formed as an adaptation to deprivations of the harsh prison environment. When individuals come to the institution, they are faced with the “pains of imprisonment”—loss of liberty, autonomy, goods and services, heterosexual relations, and security—and adapt to this by forming a subculture that is opposed conventional society. Regardless of whether this oppositional subculture forms in response to importation or deprivation, as offenders come into the institution, they are exposed to this subculture and begin to internalize these pro-­criminal values and beliefs, learn criminal rationalizations, techniques, and skills, and are reinforced by their fellow inmates. Inmates, thus, become prisonized, which increases the likelihood of future criminal behavior once released. Labeling Theory

The third perspective of imprisonment, labeling theory, also sees prisons as having a criminogenic

Incarceration and Recidivism

effect on future criminal behavior. Labeling theorists posit that imprisonment can lead to subsequent criminal behavior in two ways. First, labeling and stigmatizing offenders as criminal can cause them to adopt a criminal identity. Thus, offenders begin to view themselves as criminal and act accordingly. This is often referred to as the selffulfilling prophecy. While in prison, the offender is treated as a criminal for a long period of time, which gives ample opportunity for them to adopt and internalize this image of themselves and act in accordance with this criminal self-identity. Second, labeling theorists argue that the label “prisoner” is extremely stigmatizing and knifes off many conventional opportunities available to offenders. Once a person is “marked” as a convict, people begin to view this person as suspicious and untrustworthy. Thus, prosocial friends and family often no longer associate with the individual, leaving the person to associate with other antisocial individuals. Also, it becomes very difficult for these individuals to obtain work as many employers are reluctant to hire ex-convicts. Faced with a lack of prosocial associates and employment, these individuals often find themselves in highly criminogenic situations.

Recidivism After Release To determine the impact of incarceration on crime, many scholars have focused on the recidivism rates of those who are released after a period of incarceration. The majority of offenders do return to the community, with 95 percent of all state prisoners being released from prison, according to Timothy Hughes and James Q. Wilson. Thus, it is imperative to understand the impact that serving time in prison has on subsequent criminal behavior. It has long been established that the recidivism rate of offenders being released from prison is exceptionally high. In fact, in a study of 272,111 former state inmates released in 1994, Patrick Langan and David Levin found that within 3 years of release, 67.5 percent of the prisoners were rearrested for a new offense, 46.9 percent were reconvicted for a new crime, and 25.4 percent were resentenced to prison. The rate of recidivism is even more shocking when examining reoffending within 6 months of release, with roughly 30 percent of the prisoners being rearrested in that time frame. These releasees accounted for 4.7 percent of all arrests for serious crimes between 1994

467

and 1997, and 8.4 percent of homicides in the 3 years following their release. Consequently, as the research shows, two-thirds of people being released from state prisons are returning to crime, with many engaging in serious criminal behavior. Although less striking than those of state prisoners, the recidivism rates of offenders released from federal prisons also are high. William Sabol, William Adams, Barbara Parthasarathy, and Yan Yuan found that 16 percent of federal prisoners released between 1986 and 1994 returned to prison within 3 years. Just as with state prisoners, federal prisoners quickly recidivate after release. Of the more than 33,000 offenders returning to prison, 54 percent did so within 1 year of release. Notably, Sabol and his colleagues also found those who spent more time in prison (5 or more years) were significantly more likely to return to prison than those who spent less time in prison (less than 5 years). This shows that more time in prison is associated with increased recidivism.

Imprisonment and Subsequent Criminal Behavior As evidenced by the high recidivism rates of both state and federal prisoners, the idea that imprisonment substantially reduces the amount of crime committed by offenders is questionable. However, one must be careful in interpreting the high rate of recidivism as evidence that prisons are completely ineffective. Just examining the recidivism rates of released prisoners does not provide any information about the crime that would have been committed if the offender had not been in prison. It also does not allow for a comparison of the recidivism rates of those sentenced to non-custodial sentences. Thus, it is imperative that studies assess similar individuals who have been sentenced to custodial versus non-custodial sanctions, similar individuals who have been sentenced to more time versus less time, and similar individuals who have been sentenced to harsher versus less harsh prisons to determine the true effect of imprisonment on crime. Custodial Versus Non-Custodial Sentences

Four reviews of the existing literature on the effects of custodial sanctions versus non-custodial sanctions have been conducted in recent years. Each

468

Incarceration and Recidivism

review has generally found that custodial sanctions are more criminogenic than or have similar effects on recidivism as non-custodial sanctions, thus showing more support for the criminogenic effect of prisons than for the deterrent effect of prison. In 2000, Paul Gendreau, Claire Goggin, Francis T. Cullen, and Don Andrews conducted one of the first meta-analyses on the effects of custodial versus non-custodial sanctions. This meta-analysis was expanded in 2002 by Paula Smith, Claire Goggin, and Paul Gendreau. In both systematic reviews, the authors found that incarceration was associated with a 7 percent increase in recidivism when compared to community sanctions; however, this effect was reduced to 0 when weighting for sample size. Even more telling, in the Smith et al. meta-analysis, it was discovered that when the sample was restricted to only studies with a strong quality of design, the criminogenic effect of a custodial sanction was even stronger, with incarceration associated with an 11 percent increase in recidivism. Four years later, Patrice Villettaz, Martin Killias, and Isabel Zoder conducted a third review examining the effect of custodial versus non-custodial sanctions on recidivism. They found, in 41 percent of the comparisons, non-custodial sanctions were associated with lower recidivism; in 7 percent of the comparisons, custodial sanctions were associated with lower recidivism; and in 52 percent of comparisons, no significant differences between custodial and non-custodial sanctions in recidivism were found. Overall, the review found prisons had either a criminogenic or null effect on recidivism. Finally, Daniel Nagin, Francis T. Cullen, and Cheryl Lero Jonson found results consistent with the other reviews. Examining 48 studies (6 experimental/quasi-experimental, 11 matching, and 31 regression-based studies), incarceration was found to have either a null or slight criminogenic effect on recidivism. Therefore, across four reviews of the literature, little evidence has been found for a specific deterrent effect of prisons. Instead, the research has shown that incarceration generally has either a slight criminogenic or null effect on recidivism when compared to non-custodial sanctions. More Time Versus Less Time in Prison

Just as the research on custodial versus noncustodial sanctions found no specific deterrent

effect, the research on serving more versus less time in prison also shows a criminogenic effect of prison. There are currently three reviews of the literature focusing on the effect of time served and recidivism. Gendreau et al. and Smith et al. found that serving more time is associated with a 3 percent increase in recidivism when compared to those serving less time in prison. Nagin et al. also found no support for the specific deterrent effect of serving a longer sentence. Reviewing two experimental and 17 non-experimental studies, Nagin et al. found that serving more time had either a null effect or a slight criminogenic effect on recidivism with no studies showing a deterrent effect. Thus, there is no support in the three major reviews of the literature for the specific deterrence argument calling for longer sentences. Harsher Versus Less Harsh Prison Conditions

There is also little support of the specific deterrence argument that harsh prison conditions lead to lower recidivism rates. Using a sample of federal prisoners, M. Keith Chen and Jesse Shapiro found that inmates placed in higher security levels do not have lower levels of recidivism than those placed in lower security levels. In fact, they discovered that being housed in a higher security level was associated with either an increase in recidivism or no difference when compared to those housed in lower security levels. Thus, once again the existing research has found no deterrent effect of prisons.

Conclusion In the past 40 years, incarceration has become an increasingly used sanction. With more than 2.3 million people currently behind bars on any given day in this country, it is imperative that policymakers and scholars understand the long-lasting implications of this practice. Although, in theory, prisons have the possibility of reducing recidivism, the extant research has shown this is not the case. Rather, prisons, as they are currently being run, are contributing to the very problem that they are attempting to solve. It is crucial for policymakers to move away from deterrence-oriented sanctions and embrace more therapeutic sanctions that have empirically shown to have a suppression effect on recidivism. Until these more effective sanctions are

Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

implemented, there is little hope that incarceration will have a deterrent effect on crime. Cheryl Lero Jonson See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention; Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory; Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory; Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory; Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison

References and Further Readings Blumstein, A., & Beck, A. J. (1999). Population growth in U.S. prisons, 1980–1996. In M. Tonry & J. Petersilia (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research—Prisons (Vol. 26, pp. 17–62). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chen, M. K., & Shapiro, J. M. (2003). Do harsher prison conditions reduce recidivism? A discontinuity-based approach. American Law and Economic Review, 9, 1–29. Clemmer, D. (1940). The prison community. New York: Christopher. Gendreau, P., Goggin, C., Cullen, F. T., & Andrews, D. A. (2000, May). The effects of community sanctions and incarceration on recidivism. Forum on Corrections Research, 12, 10–13. Hughes, T., & Wilson, D. J. (2003). Reentry trends in the United States: Inmates returning to the community after serving time in prison. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. Irwin, J. (1980). Prisons in turmoil. Boston: Little, Brown. Irwin, J. (2005). The warehouse prison: Disposal of the new dangerous class. Los Angeles: Roxbury Press. Irwin, J., & Cressey, D. R. (1962). Thieves, convicts and the inmate subculture. Social Problems, 10(2), 142–155. Langan, P. A., & Levin, D. J. (2002). Recidivism of prisoners released in 1994. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social pathology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Maurer, M. (1999). Race to incarcerate. New York: New Press. Minton, T. D., & Sabol, W. J. (2009). Jail inmates at midyear 2008: Statistical tables. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. Nagin, D. S. (1998). Criminal deterrence research at the outset of the twenty-first century. In M. Tonry (Ed.),

469

Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 23, pp. 1–42). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nagin, D. S., Cullen, F. T., & Jonson, C. L. (2009). Imprisonment and reoffending. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 38, pp. 115–200). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nellis, A., & King, R. S. (2009). No exit: The expanding use of life sentences in America. Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project. Pager, D. (2007). Marked: Race, crime, and finding work in an era of mass incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pyle, D. J. (1995). Cutting the costs of crime: The economics of crime and criminal justice. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Sabol, W. J., Adams, W. P., Parthasarathy, B., & Yuan, Y. (2000). Offenders returning to federal prison, 1986–97. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. Smith, P., Goggin, C., & Gendreau, P. (2002). The effects of prison sentences and intermediate sanctions on recidivism: General effects and individual differences (User report 2002–01). Ottawa: Solicitor General Canada. Sykes, G. M. (1958). Society of captives: A study of a maximum security prison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warren, J. (2008). One in 100: Behind bars in America. Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts. West, H. C., & Sabol, W. J. (2009). Prison inmates at midyear 2008: Statistical tables. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. World prison brief. (2008). London: King’s College London, International Centre for Prison Studies. Villettaz, P., Killias, M., & Zoder, I. (2006). The effects of custodial vs. noncustodial sentences on re-offending: A systematic review of the state of knowledge. Philadelphia: Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group.

Individual Differences White-Collar Crime

and

White-collar crime traditionally has not been an issue that has interested biologists or psychologists. Rather, it has served as a sociological battering ram with which to falsify conventional wisdoms such as the link between crime and poverty, low social class, youth, impulsivity, bad

470

Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

genes, and so on. The search for individual differences between “criminals” and “the rest of us” that characterized 19th- and early-20th-century criminology was never applied to white-collar criminals because people of respectability and high social status were not the imprisoned social deviants whose persistent misconduct had to be explained. Similarly, in the more recent criminal careers literature, late onset and non-violent offenders have been neglected. Longitudinal studies tend to start at age 8 to 10 and to end before major white-collar crime opportunities present themselves. Where fraud has been included in such studies—for example in Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s general theory of crime—the focus has been not on elite managers (few of whom are convicted) but on high-frequency deceivers (like credit card fraudsters) who demonstrate some of the same personality traits that characterize other “mainstream” delinquents. It might be fruitful to examine the links between impulsivity, the culture of masculinity, and highrisk economically harmful decisions taken by stock and derivatives market traders rather than by street market traders, as well as by senior banking executives in search of those short-term performance-related bonuses that will move them from millionaire to billionaire. However, little such research has been done, and senior bankers may well be less accessible than market traders to cortisol/testosterone measurement (Coates & Herbert, 2008; Levi, 1994). A focus on differences between individuals in the propensity to commit crime may lead us to neglect situational influences on criminality. One of the differences from “normal” offenses (other than, arguably, in a more punctuated way, domestic violence) is the sheer length of time taken for some white-collar and corporate offenses to unfold. Thus, in 2008 (originally, 1981) Michael Levi examined bankruptcy (and other) frauds in terms of a threefold typology: first, pre-planned frauds, in which the business scheme is set up from the start as a way of defrauding victims (businesses, public sector and/or individuals); second, intermediate frauds, in which people started out obeying the law but consciously turned to fraud later; and third, slippery-slope frauds, in which deceptions spiraled, often in the context of trying—however absurdly and overoptimistically—to rescue an

essentially insolvent business or set of businesses, escalating losses to creditors. In short, motivation to defraud is a heterogeneous rather than a single phenomenon. One aspect upon which Edwin Sutherland and his followers focused was on the learned attitudes to the situational morality of business conduct—later described as techniques of neutralization by sociologists and as cognitive dissonance by psychologists. The motivational constructs (or, to the more skeptical, ex post facto rationalizations) used by fraudsters have been a consistent theme since Donald Cressey’s classic study of embezzlement, in which he argued that people became embezzlers if and only if they had non-shareable problems, saw embezzlement as a solution to those problems, and found ways of reconciling the commission of embezzlement with their view of themselves as respectable people.

Personality Differences Versus Learning to Commit Fraud It is not clear whether there is any personality difference between fraudsters and others, as argued by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, who see fraudsters as an identifiable subset of psychopaths, or whether fraud results more from differential socialization into particular cultures or subcultures, as Sutherland and many sociologists who followed thought. The latter “fraud is normal” (at least in particular occupational settings) view overpredicts the actual incidence of fraud among those with opportunities to commit it, whereas the “fraudsters are psychopaths” view underestimates the prevalence of deception in the general population by focusing on high-frequency fraudsters. Both models have difficulty in accounting for change in general levels of fraud between societies, over time, and—for individuals—over the life course. The foci on personality attributes and on differential association may not be mutually exclusive; indeed it seems unlikely that fraud is fully explicable in either framework alone. Babiak and Hare do not argue that psychopaths find their outlets only in fraud or in other crimes. There are normally licit occupations where the desire to persuade others for one’s own advantage can often be gratified. Sometimes, as with the “mis-selling” of genuine financial services products (as opposed to fictitious

Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

ones or those whose price has been grossly manipulated), previously law-abiding “psychopaths” may cross the line into fraud. This can happen due to changes in personal circumstances, including economic and/or domestic crises. Psychiatrists long held that there was a category of “creative psychopaths” who were successful liars, though why they became this way was unexplained. Some psycho-biologists consider that such persons can be identified from questionnaires and brain scans, though the conventional wisdom of behaviorist psychologists, such as Hans Eysenck, was that fraudsters were psychologically normal because their tradecraft demanded it. Narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders are described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), and their differences from psychopathy are outlined by Babiak and Hare. Narcissistic personality disorder involves an excessive need for admiration, a sense of superiority and entitlement, and a lack of empathy. But it does not necessarily require the lifestyle and antisocial features of psychopathy, which is the extreme along a continuum of interpersonal and affective features, including egocentricity, deceptiveness, shallow emotions, and lack of empathy. So on this model, individual differences result from personality that is molded both by heredity and environment, within a context of different situational opportunities (Duffield & Grabosky, 2001). Like most of the embezzlers studied by Gwynn Nettler—critiquing Cressey—the pre-planned bankruptcy fraudsters interviewed in Levi’s 2008 study knew what they were doing and that what they were doing was against the criminal law. By and large, they did not seem unduly troubled morally by this, having quite cynical views about the morality of ordinary business. The social worlds they inhabited constituted either other professional criminals or people who knew little about the “true” nature of their business. People are unlikely to live where they work, especially in metropolitan areas, so the scope for fudging “true” work identities is even greater. Notwithstanding, it is important to note that the most serious, but not the most commonly committed, frauds are committed not by vanishing swindlers using false personal names and/or intentionally short-term corporate names. Rather, they are undertaken by senior executives using their own names, manipulating—with the

471

knowing, willfully blind, or unwitting assistance of their professional advisers—the exchange values of insubstantial financial instruments while hoping to enjoy long executive careers with multiple corporate partners. Stanton Wheeler argues that the reasons for engaging in criminal activities may not lie with greed or financial gain but rather with the fear of losing what one has already attained. Individuals in the middle or upper classes have invested much time and effort into conventional society, and when things start to go astray, they will hold onto what they have already worked so hard to attain. Therefore, fear of falling may be more important than the fear of failing in explaining involvement in intermediate or slippery-slope white-collar crime. The sense of entitlement, combined with confidence in impunity, is important in accounting for the clear abuse of corporate facilities (jets, hotels, and restaurants) for private benefit by senior executives. What the effects of prosecutions for the latter offenses may be on general deterrence remain unknown.

Criminal Careers and White-Collar Crimes Given the decision to offend, what forms of whitecollar crime constitute a rational choice depends on the confidence, skills and contact set of any given individual offender. The presence or absence of crime networks known to and trusted by the willing offender makes a difference to the ability to commit major crimes for gain, an issue often neglected in individualized explanations of involvement in crime. Choice of crime type might also be affected by age. Unlike younger offenders, those in their 50s and older might not be attracted toward the technological challenges of cyber-activities, and the age gap might apply to choice of co-offenders as it does to other features of contemporary life. This is a general proposition about the relationship between age and risk-taking/innovation. KPMG examined 360 company fraud cases which the forensic departments of KPMG in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have investigated over recent years, whether or not prosecuted. The willingness of clients to hire KPMG means that such frauds are more likely to be serious in impact and involve senior personnel. The patterns are similar across geographical regions. The typical fraudster is aged between 36 and 55, and by the

472

Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

time the fraud begins, he (85 percent are male) has usually been employed by the company for 6 or more years. He typically works in the finance department and commits the fraud single-handedly. In 86 percent of cases, he is at management level; and in two thirds of cases he is a member of senior management. Over half commit 20 or more frauds, usually over some years. Indeed, whereas the media tend to focus on fraud/white-collar crimes by organized outsiders, the majority of big cases appear to be committed by insiders, sometimes colluding with outsiders. White-collar offenders appear to start crime later (average age 35), and the average age of last arrest for repeat white-collar offenders in David Weisburd and Elin Waring’s 2001 study of convicted U.S. federal offenders was 43, at least a third later than the average for most “ordinary” property offenders; white-collar offenders had longer criminal careers also (Piquero & Weisburd, 2009). Some of the offenders continued into their 70s, as did some British offenders (Levi, 2008). Michael Benson and Nicole Leeper Piquero argue that this is best understood as punctuated situationally dependent offending, in which some traditional offending similar to other offenders occurs in late adolescence, and then white-collar crime develops later in life when most people have given up crime altogether. The opportunity to offend may not become available to the individual until after he or she has obtained a certain occupational position; and the motivation may be activated only if the individual experiences some crisis in his or her personal or occupational life.

Conclusion White-collar crimes (as defined in U.S. federal statutes) are a broad category, ranging from credit card and insurance frauds that most people could commit, to insider trading and price-fixing that require significant positions of trust and socioeconomic status. White-collar criminals are a heterogeneous group in terms of their backgrounds, their involvement with “mainstream” offenders, their consciousness of transgressing social as well as legal norms, and the levels of social disapproval their offenses elicit. Weisburd and Waring usefully distinguish between occasional “crime as an aberration” offenders, intermittent “opportunity seekers,”

and chronic “stereotypical criminals”; and Piquero and Weisburd note that a focus on the propensity to commit crime is valuable only for the last category. The general invisibility and non-prosecution of frauds make comparisons between offenders and non-offenders perilous, but it is clear that some offenders are exceptionally low in empathy, conscience, and “shameability.” We now have a reasonable understanding of both motivational and situational pathways into (though not out of) fraud, but we do not yet have a full explanation of why some people commit white-collar crimes and others, similarly placed, do not. Michael Levi See also Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending; Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime; Croall, Hazel: Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Babiak, P., & Hare, R. (2007). Snakes in suits: When psychopaths go to work. New York: HarperCollins. Coates, J., & Herbert, J. (2008). Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 105, 6167–6172. Cressey, D. (1953). Other people’s money. New York: Free Press. Duffield, G., & Grabosky, P. (2001). The psychology of fraud (Trends and Issues No. 199). Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Available from http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/8/2/D/%7B82DFF 3FE-8766-4087-A91B-688EDC200A3C%7Dti199.pdf Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. KPMG (2007). Profile of a fraudster. London: Author. Levi, M. (1994). Masculinities and white-collar crime. In T. Newburn & B. Stanko (Eds.), Just boys doing business (pp. 234–252). London: Routledge. Levi, M. (2008). The phantom capitalists: The organization and control of long-firm fraud (2nd ed.). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Nettler, G. (1974). Embezzlement without problems. British Journal of Criminology, 14, 70–77. Piquero, N. L., & Benson, M. (2004). White-Collar crime and criminal careers: Specifying a trajectory of

Inequality and Crime punctuated situational offending. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 20, 148–165. Piquero, N. L., & Weisburd, D. (2009). Developmental trajectories of white-collar crime. In S. Simpson & D. Weisburd (Eds.), The criminology of white-collar crime (pp. 153–174). New York: Springer. Shover, N., & Hochstetler, A. (2006). Choosing whitecollar crime. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weisburd, D., Waring, E., & Chayet, E. (2001). WhiteCollar crime and criminal careers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weisburd, D., Wheeler, S., & Waring, E. (1991). Crimes of the middle classes: White-Collar offenders in the federal courts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wheeler, S. (1992). The problem of white collar crime motivation. In K. Schlegel & D. Weisburd (Eds.), White collar crime reconsidered (pp. 108–123). Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Inequality

and

Crime

A recurrent theme in the macro-level criminology literature suggests that crime rates vary directly with the extent of social inequality. In fact, both classic and contemporary crime scholars proffer the thesis that inequality in income, employment, and education are predictive of crime. Generally speaking, theories of the nexus between inequality and crime can be sorted into two groups. The first group consists of theories that envision social inequality as a salient cause of criminal behavior. In contrast, the second group argues that social inequality affects the definition of crime and the application of criminal justice mechanisms.

Inequality and Criminal Behavior Relative Deprivation Theory

The most prominent inequality-crime argument is the relative deprivation thesis. This argument suggests that criminal behavior is motivated by a feeling of injustice that individuals experience when they become aware that others are more economically advantaged. Relative deprivation is thus a social-psychological construct that arises from a subjective perception of inequity. Because individuals who exhibit little objective economic need can perceive that they have less than others, the relative

473

deprivation explanation can be applied to criminality at lower as well as upper ends of the economic distribution. Despite its conceptualization in socialpsychological terms, relative deprivation has appeared most prominently in macro-level, or community, research on crime. Thus, scholars have argued that relative deprivation is a mechanism by which economic inequality affects crime rates in aggregate units such as states, counties, cities, or neighborhoods. Overall, research evidence is mixed when it comes to the hypothesis that greater overall income inequality is predictive of higher crime rates. The basic relative deprivation theory was extended in 1982 by Judith and Peter Blau who argued that not all manifestations of economic inequality are likely to produce “relative deprivation.” While certain types of inequality will be perceived as legitimate, others will be considered bluntly unjust. For example, inequities that result from differences in natural talent, personal ambition, and individual hard work are typically viewed as normative and expected in our merit-based society. However, when inequities have their basis in ascribed statuses that are beyond an individual’s control, such as race, they are likely to be perceived as illegitimate. Based on this logic, Blau and Blau proposed that between-race economic inequality will produce diffuse alienation, frustration, and hostility, which will result in higher violent crime rates. To date, research findings regarding this ascribed inequality thesis are rather equivocal. The Blaus’ ascribed inequality argument implies that members of an economically subordinate racial or ethnic group (e.g., blacks) will judge their economic situation relative to that of an economically advantaged racial or ethnic group (e.g., whites). But some scholars have questioned whether that logic is valid. Drawing from reference-group theory, Miles Harer and Darrell Steffensmeier argue that individuals are most likely to evaluate their own economic situation relative to others with whom they share salient personal or social characteristics, such as race. Consequently, they posited that within-race economic inequality should be a major driver of relative deprivation and increased crime rates. Harer and Steffensmeier’s empirical findings indicate support for the within-race argument among whites, but not blacks. Subsequent research yields some support for the within-race inequality argument, but findings are not uniformly consistent.

474

Inequality and Crime

Strain Theory

The notion that social inequality is a key component in the genesis of criminal motivation is also a component of Robert Merton’s anomie/strain theory. However, Merton suggests that criminal motivation arises in response to a confluence of two factors: (1) a culture with widely shared monetary success goals and (2) a social structure that provides unequal access to conventional opportunities for attaining those goals. More specifically, Merton contends that the American Dream of monetary success is a goal by which everyone in the United States is judged. This expectation creates pressure for achievement that can either ignite the pursuit of success through conventional means (e.g., education and a good job) or spark the pursuit of success through unconventional means (e.g., theft or fraud). The determining factor is whether the existing social structure provides all individuals with sufficient access to the socially approved (legal) means of obtaining the goal of monetary wealth. According to Merton, the highly stratified class structure in the United States is problematic because it only provides open access to important conventional opportunities (e.g., quality education, business con­nec­tions) to members of the upper and middle classes, but severely restricts access to those in the lower class. Therefore, because members of the lower class want the success goals but lack the conventional opportunities to achieve them, they must find an alternative way to handle the strain of the success goals. Merton argued that they adapt to this strain through innovation. That is, they often employ criminal means of achieving the goal of monetary success. Marxist Theory

The idea that economic inequality helps generate criminal behavior is also implied in Marxist perspectives on crime. Although many of these arguments focus more attention on how the dominant social class uses the criminal justice system as a tool to maintain its power, they also generally imply that the capitalist economic system is a central factor in the production of criminal behavior. One early example is the work of Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger. In Criminality and Economic Conditions, Bonger argued that because socialism involved a collective experience of prosperity and hardship, it fostered humans’ natural altruistic tendencies and forged a sense of community. As a result, individuals

in socialist societies were more apt to look out for, and less likely to cause harm to, one another. However, Bonger believed that with the development of capitalism, the spirit of altruism and community was replaced by a spirit of egoism and demoralization. He argued that capitalism produces insatiable greed, ambition, and excessive competition, which heighten inequality, erode civilized social behavior, and lead to various types of crime. Critics have argued that Marxist theories are too simplistic in their notion that capitalism is the main cause of crime. In response to this criticism, neo-Marxist and other radical criminologists developed more elaborate theories that attempt to show how capitalism and inequality affect crime through variables that are prominent in mainstream criminological perspectives.

Inequality, Crime Definitions, and Law Enforcement In addition to the literature linking inequality to criminal behavior, there also is a significant body of scholarship concerned with the impact of inequality on the definition and enforcement of the criminal law. This latter body of work is heavily influenced by conflict and Marxist perspectives. These perspectives are quite diverse in their details, but they also contain a number of overlapping themes. First, these perspectives generally view conflict, rather than consensus, as the fundamental structural feature of society. Second, they contend that society is made up of multiple social groups whose norms, values, and interests are contradictory. Third, these perspectives suggest that “crime” gets defined by the competitive struggle between these social groups, with laws generally reflecting the norms, values, and interests of the predominant group. Finally, these perspectives claim that the criminal law is actively used by the dominant social group as a tool by which they control subordinate groups and maintain their own advantaged position within society. One of the early examples of conflict criminology is evident in the culture conflict theory of Thorsten Sellin, who saw modern society as comprising many groups with different cultures and conduct norms. Since the conduct norms of different social groups often conflict, Sellin suggested that individuals may violate the conduct norms of one group simply by conforming to the conduct norms of the group to which they belonged. For

Inequality and Crime

instance, by following traditional conduct norms of their home country, new immigrants often violate prevailing conduct norms of established social groups in the United States. Subsequent theorists furthered conflict theory by arguing that criminal behavior sometimes was a purposeful violation of the dominant group’s conduct norms. George Vold, for example, suggested that members of subordinate social groups sometimes commit crime as an intentional expression of their dissatisfaction with the existing power structure in society. This argument suggests that crime has much in common with protests and social movements because it is politically motivated— even revolutionary—behavior designed to create change in the existing status quo of society. Vold’s conflict theory also implies that the definition of crime and of criminals is ultimately dependent on who wins the political/revolutionary struggle. The group that wins gets to create the laws and will undoubtedly criminalize behaviors that are common to opposing social groups. Richard Quinney’s theory of the social reality of crime makes even more explicit the basic conflict theory propositions about how inequality affects criminal definitions and the enforcement of the criminal law. Simply put, he asserts that the most powerful segments of society define as crime any behaviors that come into conflict with their interests. Moreover, these same powerful segments of society will apply criminal definitions in a discriminatory way so that their interests are protected or advanced. Thus, it follows that the poor and powerless sectors of society are most likely to end up on the wrong side of the law. And when they do, they are likely to face severe consequences at virtually every stage of the criminal justice system. In contrast, when members of the upper class engage in illegal behavior, they may be able to completely sidestep criminal charges or at the very least, are able to avoid incarceration or other severe criminal sanctions. In sum, Quinney’s theory implies that social inequality shapes the creation and application of the criminal law, which in turn works to perpetuate and perhaps magnify existing inequities. Discrimination in Law Enforcement

Based on the arguments posed by conflict and Marxist criminologists, scholars have sought to

475

answer the question of whether the law does, in fact, function to the benefit of a dominant upper class and to the detriment of a powerless lower class. One line of this work has examined whether the criminal deeds of those who own or control the means of economic production are relatively immune from criminal prosecution. Findings from multiple studies generally support this hypothesis. A considerable body of research also has examined whether racial minorities are treated unfairly at various stages of criminal justice system processing. Drawing inspiration from the above perspectives along with H. M. Blalock’s work on minority-group relations, this latter line of work posits a theory of racial threat, which contends that the white elite use the criminal law as a tool to protect their dominant position and to limit the power of racial minority groups. Overall, evidence indicates that racial bias in criminal justice outcomes (e.g., arrest, detention, incarceration, sentencing) is contextual rather than systematic. This means that bias occurs in some but not all criminal justice decisions, jurisdictions, states, or regions of the country (Walker et al., 2007). One area where important evidence of racial bias has been reported is in capital murder cases. For instance, a recent study by Ray Paternoster and Robert Brame indicates that black defendants who kill white victims are more likely to receive a death sentence than similar cases not involving this racial combination.

Conclusion There is little doubt that both criminal behavior and the operation of the criminal justice system are associated with social inequality. Gaining an awareness of this inequality-crime connection was an important step in the process of building scientific understanding of the genesis and purpose of crime in society. A next step in that process involves formulating and testing theories that attempt to explain why and how inequality impacts crime. Criminologists have made good progress in that regard with multiple theories and research studies articulating plausible mechanisms that link social inequality to higher crime rates. Yet, extant theory and research is far from definitive at this point in time. Additional refinement of both theory and research on the inequalitycrime nexus is warranted and this area should

476

Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism

remain a fertile ground in criminology for the foreseeable future. Graham C. Ousey See also Blau, Judith R., and Peter M. Blau: Inequality and Crime; Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime; Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear; Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

References and Further Readings Blalock, H. M. (1967). Toward a theory of minoritygroup relations. New York: Wiley. Blau, J. R., & Blau, P. M. (1982). The cost of inequality: Metropolitan structure and violent crime. American Sociological Review, 47, 114–129. Bonger, W. (1916). Criminality and economic conditions. Boston: Little, Brown. Harer, M. D., & Steffensmeier, D. (1992). The different effects of economic inequality on black and white rates of violence. Social Forces, 70, 1035–1054. Hipp, J. (2007). Income inequality, race, and place: Does the distribution of race and class within neighborhoods affect crime rates? Criminology, 45, 665–696. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Paternoster, R., & Brame, R. (2008). Reassessing race disparities in Maryland capital cases. Criminology, 4, 971–1008. Quinney, R. (1970). The social reality of crime. Boston: Little, Brown. Reiman, J. (2007). The rich get richer and the poor get prison: Ideology, class and criminal justice (8th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Sellin, T. (1938). Cultural conflict and crime. New York: Social Science Research Council. Vold, G. B. (1958). Theoretical criminology. New York: Oxford University Press. Walker, S., Spohn, C., & DeLone, M. (2007). The color of justice: Race, ethnicity and crime in America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism Prior to the early 1800s, insanity was commonly viewed as the by-product of both weak intellect

and free will. Physicians who subscribed to the Classical School of criminology simply did not see insanity as a disease. With the emergence of the Positivist School, this perception began to change. Positivism provided the foundation for an empirical examination of insanity as well as evidence that insanity was the result of pathology. The impact of positivist ideas on the study of insanity is vital to a discussion of criminology. Positivist tenets led to the birth of evidence-based ideas and practices, which have resulted in the development of the theories discussed in this encyclopedia. The Positivist School of criminology was officially conceived in 1876, with Italian Cesare Lombroso’s publication of The Criminal Man. Lombroso earned the prestigious title “father of positive criminology” by ingeniously applying the scientific method to the study of criminals. Lombroso’s use of control groups and statistical comparison was virtually unheard of in criminological research prior to his time. As the Positivist School of criminology gained favor over the Classical School, “social needs replaced legal standards, science replaced moral responsibility and free will, treatment replaced punishment, and concern shifted from the offense to the offender” (Jeffery & Jeffery, 1975, p. 687). In addition to calling for the use of the scientific method to gather and analyze data in an objective manner, positivism stressed determinism over free will and recognized the influence of environmental factors on criminal behavior. Specifically, positivists such as Lombroso contended that the impetus for criminal behavior resided outside of the control of the individual, the focus of research should be on the offender rather than the offense, and that, due to the absence of free will, treatment should take precedence over punishment. In short, as J. Robert Lilly and colleagues explain, positivism introduced the concept of a multifactor explanation of crime that included both biological and social variables.

Early American Positivism and Insanity Although the origins of the Positivist School of criminology are most often attributed to Lombroso, the seeds of positivism were planted prior to his birth. In the United States, early-19th-century

Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism

positivist notions were utilized to address the issue of insanity. Benjamin Rush—a physician— was instrumental in reframing insanity as a disease rather than a sin or a symptom of demonic possession. Rush, who is better known as the founder of American psychiatry, posited that insanity was a disease of the brain. Just like any other disease, he believed insanity to have causes, exhibit symptoms, and be amenable to treatment. He set forth a plethora of potential causes for insanity, including the following: brain injuries and abnormalities, malnourishment, excessive alcohol consumption and sexual activity, use of certain narcotics, exposure to extreme climates, and intense study. Rush also introduced the concept of predisposition to insanity by way of heredity. The symptoms of insanity were believed to be the same as those for a fever. He recommended a number of remedies for insanity, including purging, bloodletting, consuming healthy foods, reducing alcohol consumption, exercising, receiving counseling, listening to music, and reading. One of Rush’s most heralded contributions to the scientific study of insanity was the idea of the brain being divided into nine faculties or capacities, which included understanding, will, conscience, memory, sense of God, and the moral faculty. He contended that the impairment of one or more of these faculties could lead to insanity, which he defined as a “departure of the mind in its perceptions, judgments, and reasonings, from its natural and habitual order, accompanied with corresponding actions” (Rush, 1812, p. 11). Rush differentiated between partial insanity and affective insanity. He described partial insanity as being a temporary condition that included various types of melancholy. Total insanity, also known as affective insanity, stressed the importance of emotions on pathologies of the mind. Furthermore, Rush is credited with being the first researcher to set forth the phenomena which describe those who are contemporarily labeled “psychopath.”

The Emergence of Moral Insanity Prior to Rush’s work, American physicians generally attributed insanity to deranged reason. According to Norman Dain and Eric Carlson, once

477

medical doctors embraced the idea that individuals could retain their intellect while at the same time suffering from impaired will and emotion, the concept of moral insanity emerged (p. 795). French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel defined moral insanity as a distorted and corrupt state of mind that might lead to appalling, undeterrable, and remorseless criminal behaviors (Rafter, 2008). The idea of moral insanity was readily accepted by progressive American psychiatrists for several reasons. First, many psychiatrists were interested in the impact of feelings, attitudes, and will on human behavior. Second, the related science of phrenology was wildly popular at the time. Third, the concept attracted those who were interested in the legal implications of mental illness. Finally, the newly conceived argument against a direct relationship between the moral and intellectual faculties warranted exploration.

From Moral Insanity to Degeneration During the mid-1800s, the concept of moral insanity was incorporated into a theoretical model of insanity. Bénédict Morel’s degeneration theory characterized moral insanity as being a form of deterioration that resulted in an impairment of social sense, which according to Heidi Rimke and Alan Hunt led to a failure to respect the rights of others and a lack of both shame and remorse for violating the moral code. Having roots in Lombroso’s ideas regarding the born criminal, the theory contended that a number of individual and social pathologies, including insanity and crime, could be attributed to a biologically based affliction. Borrowing from the concept of moral insanity, degeneration theory holds that insanity can exist without a deficit in reasoning. This idea lives on in the contemporary description of a psychopath—an individual who lacks proper judgment, is unable to feel remorse, and routinely blames others for her or her behavior. The positivist notion of determinism was incorporated within degeneration theory’s attempt to explain the persistence of insanity within families. Thus, the examination of an individual’s symptoms was not sufficient. In order to understand whether or not an individual was predestined to a life of crime or conventionality, it was necessary to scrutinize symptoms in the context of family life histories

478

Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism

(Rimke & Hunt, 2002). In addition to being heritable, degeneration was considered progressive (Jalava, 2006). In other words, insanity was believed to worsen over successive familial generations.

Positivism Attacked and Defended Although positivist ideas began to flourish as Lombroso’s findings made their way from Europe to the United States, they were met with reproach by a group of moralistic psychiatrists in the second half of the 19th century. Physician John P. Gray waged war against both the doctrine of moral insanity and degeneration theory. Gray’s opposition to the concept of moral insanity hinged on the idea that individuals should be held completely responsible for their behavior as long as their reason remained intact. Recall that Rush had presented the idea that one’s emotional faculties could be impaired independently of one’s intellect. Gray refused to accept this idea, claiming that it was impossible for the immortal mind to be diseased independently of the body. In addition to railing against the notion of moral insanity, Gray vehemently opposed the theory of degeneration. According to Robert Waldinger, Gray took issue with the idea that brain dysfunction is both heritable and progressive because both ideas negate the concept of free will. In sum, Gray posited that humans were free to choose between right and wrong, the mind was immoral and thus immutable, and that intellect must be used to keep passions in check. Despite Gray’s moralistic ideals, he did offer support for the use of science in that he advocated for the microscopic study of brains during the time that he worked in American insane asylums (Spiegel & Kavaler, 2006). Although Gray’s camp took a tough stance against positivism as it related to insanity, psychiatrists such as Charles Nichols and Isaac Ray stepped forward to defend moral insanity and degeneration theory. Nichols supported the notion that insanity could originate from factors other than pure organic disease (Spiegel & Kavaler, 2006). According to Ray, Gray’s most contentious adversary, insanity was best defined not as an act of God, but rather as a disease of the brain that implicated the same pathological tenets as other diseases. Specifically, the disease of insanity involved the processes of incubation, development,

and termination—those processes that other diseases inflicted upon their hosts. Furthermore, Ray believed that both affective and intellectual faculties were impacted by insanity. In other words, insanity affected both the ability to reason as well as the expression of emotions. Similar to Rush, Ray set forth both causes and cures for insanity. Ray contended that insanity stems from influences such as problems during pregnancy, disease and injury of the cerebrum, malnourishment, excessive or insufficient mental exercise, and excessive use of drugs and alcohol. Also like Rush, Ray posited that insanity was amenable to treatment, including bleeding, bathing, and medications.

Conclusion The proliferation of positivist ideas had a tremendous impact on beliefs surrounding the concept of insanity. As a result of an emphasis on scientific methodology and determinism, positivism led many early-19th-century physicians to the conclusion that insanity was a disease rather than a choice or solely a result of impaired reason. In addition, positivism promoted a multifactor explanation of the causes of insanity, citing both nature and nurture as having a hand in its manifestation. Although the moralist camp fought against these notions, the idea of insanity as a disease gained acceptance and survived a wave of vehement attacks. Thanks to positivism and those who embraced its tenets, insanity can be studied in an empirical manner. Sherry Tillinghast See also Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Phrenology

References and Further Readings Cullen, F. T., & Gilbert, K. E. (1982). Reaffirming rehabilitation. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Dain, N., & Carlson, E. T. (1962). Moral insanity in the United States 1835–1866. American Journal of Psychiatry, 118, 795–801. Jalava, J. (2006). The modern degenerate—nineteenthcentury degeneration theory and modern psychopathy research. Theory and Psychology, 16, 416–432. Jeffery, C. R., & Jeffery, I. A. (1975). Psychosurgery and behavior modification: Legal control techniques versus behavior control techniques. American Behavioral Scientist, 18, 685–722.

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime Lilly, J. R., Cullen, F. T., & Ball, R. A. (2007). Criminological theory: Context and consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Paternoster, R., & Bachman, R. (2001). Explaining criminals and crime: Essays in contemporary criminological theory. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Rafter, N. (2008). The criminal brain: Understanding biological theories of crime. New York: New York University Press. Ray, I. (1962). A treatise on the medical jurisprudence of insanity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Rimke, H., & Hunt, A. (2002). From sinners to degenerates: The medicalization of morality in the 19th century. History of the Human Sciences, 15, 59–88. Rush, B. (1812). Medical inquiries and observations upon the diseases of the mind. Philadelphia: Kimber and Richardson. Spiegel, A. D., & Kavaler, F. (2006). The differing views on insanity of two nineteenth century psychiatrists. Journal of Community Health, 31, 430–451. Waldinger, R. J. (1979). Sleep of reason: John P. Gray and the challenge of moral insanity. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 34, 163–179. Werlinder, H. (1978). Psychopathy: A history of the concepts: Analysis of the origin and development of concepts in psychopathology. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell.

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime A wide range of theories have been applied to the understanding of white-collar crime since Edwin H. Sutherland first introduced the concept in 1939. Some of these theoretical initiatives are addressed elsewhere in this encyclopedia. Arguably the simplest, most direct explanation for whitecollar crime is captured by a single word: greed. At the other end of the spectrum, there are complex, multidimensional integrated theories of white-collar crime. This entry addresses these integrated theories of white-collar crime. An integrated theory of white-collar crime attempts to explain such crime by bringing together several different theories or by invoking multiple levels of analysis, or both. The number of different theories or levels, and the formality with which the relationship between the theories or variables on

479

different levels of analysis is posited, varies. Most of the attempts to explain crime, including white-collar crime, are not integrated theories, and some of the most widely discussed criminological theories are best described as one-dimensional. Some such theories, as general theories, claim to explain both conventional forms of crime and white-collar crime. A one-dimensional general theory of crime, which can be empirically tested, has considerable appeal to many criminologists. It is compatible with the view that criminologists should function as social scientists, and should provide clear, useful answers to the enduring question of why crime occurs, and what can be done about it. But proponents of integrated theories of white-collar crime—especially in its corporate form—hold that such crime is complex, and that as theorists our principal objective should be to put forth theories that advance us toward a sophisticated understanding of such crime. Furthermore, one-dimensional general theories of crime, as applied to white-collar crime, promote limited and ineffective policy responses to such crime, as opposed to the multidimensional policies and practices that might have a real impact.

On Integrated Theories of Crime The promotion of integrated theories of crime is not an especially new development within criminology, but interest in such approaches has increased in recent years. Gregg Barak has produced what is arguably the most comprehensive survey of integrated ap­­proaches to understanding crime and its control, as well as a collection of readings of some of the key contributions to the literature on this topic. He has called for the integration of not only levels of analysis, and foci of analysis (e.g., from offender to victim), but also of different theoretical approaches. In his view, the dominant modernist form of analysis should take into account important insights from postmodern criminological approaches that challenge some core assumptions of modernist approaches and address how understandings of crime are constituted. The widely adopted practice of pitting different theories against each other is regarded as largely pointless, insofar as different theories tend to address different portions of the variances in crime. Altogether, the ultimate challenge is to produce integrativereintegrative approaches to social control that link

480

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime

the problem of crime with larger problems in the political economy, and point us in the direction of the structural transformations necessary for addressing crime—including white-collar crime—in fundamental ways. Matthew Robinson has identified the principal dimensions or levels that should be part of an integrated theory of crime as cell (e.g., genes); organ (e.g., a brain injury); organism (e.g., self-control); group (e.g., social learning); community (e.g., social control); organization (e.g., labeling); and society (e.g., anomie). One can add to this listing—which is in any case not necessarily exhaustive—global context (e.g., neoliberal policies). Verification or falsification of a theory becomes ever more complex with each additional dimension or level of analysis. Even with the application of sophisticated multiple regression formulas, it is far from clear that the daunting methodological challenges can be overcome. But it is also far from self-evident that a theory’s compatibility with the requirements of a scientific model is the only valid criteria for assessing its value. Integrated theories of white-collar crime are not necessarily developed within the positivistic tradition, lending themselves to straightforward verification and falsification. But the one-dimensional theories that are more easily testable all too often fail to capture many salient dimensions of whitecollar crime. In particular, in the case of white-collar crime, criminologists are interested in understanding the behavior of organizations and not simply individuals, and integrated theories are especially appropriate for realizing this objective.

Issues of Definition All theories of crime must adopt some definition of crime, and must also take a position on whether crime is best studied and understood as a broad phenomenon, or in terms of specific types of crime. Many criminological theories explicitly or implicitly have adopted relatively narrow—often legalistic—definitions of crime. Since the legalistic definitions lend themselves most readily to measurement, they are especially attractive to those promoting some form of positivistic theory. Interactionist, conflict, radical, and critical criminological theories have focused upon the social and political processes of how crime is defined. In the realm of white-collar crime scholarship, from the

outset and to this day, the optimal way of defining such crime has been a matter of debate and of some confusion. An integrated theory of white-collar crime incorporates an account of how particular forms of white-collar crime come to be defined. Integrated theories of white-collar crime tend to transcend narrow, legalistic approaches to defining such crime. The position adopted here is that one should acknowledge that the term white-collar crime is used in quite different ways, and for different purposes, but broadly refers to illegal or unethical acts that involve violations of trust and are committed by individuals or organizations with a respectable status, within a legitimate occupational, professional, or business context, for personal or organizational gain.

Levels of Analysis A number of students of white-collar crime have attempted to develop integrated theories of such crime that incorporate insights from different theoretical traditions and account for white-collar crime on several different levels. Diane Vaughan, who has contributed landmark studies of organizational deviance to the white-collar crime literature on the Revco Medicaid fraud case and on the Challenger explosion case, has been a leading proponent of the application of macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of analysis. The macro-level is exemplified by the competitive and regulatory environment fostered by the political economy, the meso-level by the attributes and cultural values of organizations, and the micro-level by individual decision making and action. In Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior: Social Structure and Corporate Mis­ conduct, Vaughan applied an integrated model to the understanding of organizational lawbreaking, taking into account the competitive environment, external norms, organization structures, goals, processes, regulatory failure, and individual decisions, but the articulation of an integrated theory of white-collar crime was not the core focus of this book. Vaughan (2007) believes that the need to apply integrated, multilevel approaches to the understanding of corporate wrongdoing and organizational deviance is now widely accepted. White-collar crime scholars, with their inevitable attention to the meso-level of theoretical explanation (that pertaining to organizations), are regarded as especially

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime

well suited to assume the lead in working out and applying integrated theories of lawbreaking.

Coleman’s Integrated Theory James William Coleman was a student of Donald Cressey, who in turn was a student of Edwin H. Sutherland. He is the author of a pioneering whitecollar crime textbook, The Criminal Elite: Understanding White Collar Crime, and has also made significant contributions to the understanding of anti-trust law enforcement. Coleman’s “Toward an Integrated Theory of White-Collar Crime,” published in 1987 in the American Journal of Sociology, was an influential attempt to advance white-collar crime theorizing past one-dimensional theories. His integrated theory centers on the coincidence of appropriate motivation and opportunity. A culture generates motives for lawbreaking when it emphasizes ‘‘possessive individualism,’’ competition, and materialism; justifies rationalizations; and removes unified restraining influences. A built-in structure of opportunity renders white-collar crime both less vulnerable to legal controls and sanctions (due to the disproportionate power of elites in the formulation and administration of the law) and open to a variety of attractive possibilities for disregarding or violating the laws that do exist. In the private sector, the attractiveness of illicit opportunities increases as profitability declines; the organizational rhetoric of condemning illegal activity comes into conflict with the conditions (diffusion of responsibility, deniability, and lack of authentic objections) that promote such activity. Various factors, including the structure of opportunity, the nature of financial reimbursement, and the occupational subculture, can render some occupations more conducive to illegality than others. Accordingly, white-collar crime is most pervasive in societies that have a culture of competition, in organizations that are financially pressured, and in occupations with special opportunities and subcultural values that promote illegality. Notably, John Braithwaite (1988) put forth a critique of Coleman’s integrated theory of whitecollar crime at the time that it was published. Braithwaite contended that Coleman’s theory relied too much upon data from countries with capitalist political economies. For Braithwaite, the “performance pressures” in communist systems—he had the Soviet system in mind, and was writing at the

481

tail end period of its existence—can also produce powerful incentives for managers to engage in white-collar crime. Managers in such systems often have to meet ambitious quotas, even if they are not specifically under pressure to produce profits. And in capitalist systems as well motivations other than the profit motive arise. Braithwaite’s reformulation of Coleman’s integrated theory posits that whitecollar crime tends to occur when people with responsibility are under pressure to perform, illegitimate opportunities are more structurally available, and there is a specific absence of pressure to use only legitimate means to achieve outcomes. For Braithwaite, the conventional model of capitalism that privileges profit above all other considerations is not the only possible model for such a system. A republican model of capitalism—or socialism, for that matter—could privilege cultural values that inhibit rather than promote the commission of white-collar crime.

Braithwaite’s Integrated Theory Braithwaite has developed his own integrated theory of crime, including white-collar crime, with his Crime, Shame and Reintegration, the seminal contribution in this realm. Braithwaite is arguably the most versatile, wide-ranging and prolific criminologist of our time. His integrative theory draws upon two traditions: structural Marxist theory (first articulated by Dutch criminologist Willem A. Bonger), which links both white-collar and conventional crime with the promotion of egoism in capitalist societies; and differential association theory (first developed by Sutherland), which holds that both white-collar and conventional crime are learned relative to differential opportunity. Accordingly, nations with high levels of in­equality of wealth and power will have high rates of both white-collar and conventional crime because they produce a broad range of illegitimate opportunities that are more rewarding than legal opportunities. Organizational crime specifically is a response to relatively more attractive illegitimate opportunities and the subcultural value system that rationalizes taking advantage of them. For Braithwaite, the theoretical challenge is to construct a ‘‘tipping point’’ explanation that predicts when a stake in noncompliance outbalances a stake in conformity with the law. His critical tipping factor is differential

482

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime

shaming: Conduct tips in the direction that avoids the more potent shaming (disapproval), whether it comes from within the organization or from the state. Involvement in white-collar criminal conduct can then be understood as a function of relative vulnerability to shaming; crime flourishes in organizations that shield members from shaming and pressure them to produce and is controlled in organizations that take proactive measures to expose law violators to shame. Braithwaite accordingly regarded differential shaming as the missing link integrating two contradictory traditions (subcultural and control). In some of his subsequent work—notably Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation—Braithwaite applies a version of his integrated theory to various forms of white-collar crime, as well as forms of harm ranging from juvenile delinquency to threats against world peace, with the promotion of restorative justice and responsive regulation as key concepts.

Alternative Versions of Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime Various integrated theories of crime have been developed, and at least some of these have been applied to explaining white-collar crime. Some of these integrated theories were originally developed to account for conventional forms of crime and delinquency, and only subsequently applied to the case of white-collar crime. Other integrated theories were directly inspired by attention to major forms of white-collar crime, especially corporate crime. At least some of the integrated theories applied to white-collar crime have been developed by criminologists who fall essentially within the framework of mainstream criminology; other integrated theories of white-collar crime have been developed by criminologists who specifically identify with a critical, progressive, or radical approach. Several of these integrated theoretical approaches to white-collar crime are discussed in the text that follows, but it should be noted that this review is selective rather than exhaustive. Tittle’s Control Balance Theory and White-Collar Crime

Charles Tittle’s control balance theory of crime has been characterized as both a general theory and

an integrated theory. Tittle has specifically rejected one-dimensional theories of crime and deviance. As an integrated theory of crime, control balance theory takes into account four principal variables: the predisposition to commit crime, the provocation to commit crime, the opportunity to commit crime, and the constraint against committing crime. Initial tests of this theory examined its empirical status relative to conventional forms of crime and deviance. But Tittle has suggested that it applies to exploitative corporate crime, insofar as those with a surplus of control perceive benefits from exercising that control in ways that enhance corporate profits (e.g., illegal dumping of toxic wastes or anti-competitive practices) with little likelihood of being held accountable or suffering adverse consequences. In 2006, Nicole Leeper Piquero and Alex Piquero reported that their findings from a study using hypothetical scenarios or vignettes supported the proposition that those with control surpluses are more likely to display exploitative intentions than those with control deficits. Although these authors concede many limitations of their study, it does seem to suggest that a desire for control in relation to other variables in Tittle’s theory may provide at least a partial explanation for some forms of corporate crime. Hagan’s Power-Control Theory and White-Collar Crime

In Structural Criminology, John Hagan set forth a power-control theory of delinquency, integrating macro-level structural dimensions of the mal-­ distribution of power in the political economy and the workplace with micro-level social actor dimensions of the extent to which males and females are subject to parental control. Males are less subject to parental control than females, and more likely to engage in delinquent behavior. In a rare study of white-collar delinquency—specifically, illegal copying of audio albums, videos, and computer software—Hagan and a colleague, Fiona Kay, found that the presence of power, a positive orientation toward risk-taking, and the absence of control (parental, in this case) are correlated with such delinquency. Males from the employer class (i.e., males with a parent who was a business owner) were found to be somewhat more likely than others (e.g., females from the employee class) to engage in illegal copying. Various methodological limitations

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime

and factors such as subjects’ access to copying equipment and knowledge of how to operate it are confounding factors in such a study. Tombs and Whyte’s Integrated Political Economy Theory of Safety Crime

Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte are prominent British students of crimes of the powerful. In their book Safety Crimes they set forth a detailed exploration of an especially consequential form of crime— fatalities, injuries, and illnesses that arise out of unsafe workplace conditions—but a form of crime largely neglected by criminology as a field. By some estimates, 2 million people worldwide die each year as a result of workplace conditions and circumstances, to say nothing of millions more seriously injured or afflicted with debilitating illness. Tombs and Whyte’s integrated political economic theory of safety (corporate) crime advances the claim that such crime is best understood as a function of macro-level factors, including the organization of the political economy, the social environment, the structure of the market, and the state of the regulatory apparatus; meso-level factors, including the organizational structure, internal decision-making patterns, and the character of the organizational culture; and micro-level factors, including the types of personalities recruited for particular corporate positions and the nature of interpersonal dynamics within the work-group. Put another way, safety crimes are a function of worker vulnerability to victimization, the nature of management, inter-organizational factors, law and regulation, and the unequal distribution of power. A sophisticated understanding of safety crimes requires moving beyond criminology to engage with relevant work in a range of disciplines, including political science, economics, and organization theory. Surely such an integrated theoretical approach takes us closer to the complex reality of safety crime in the real world than a one-dimensional theory focused on low selfcontrol or differential association. Michalowski and Kramer’s Integrated Theoretical Approach to State-Corporate Crime and Crimes of States

State-corporate crime has come to be recognized over the past 20 years or so as a significant

483

form of white-collar crime, not wholly captured by the traditional categories of such crime. Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer, who first introduced this concept, have set forth an integrated theoretical model of state-corporate crime. This model calls for attention to three basic levels of analysis: institutional environment, organizational, and interactional. The catalysts for action, at each level of analysis, are motivation, opportunity, and control. State-corporate crime arises in relation to pressure for goal attainment, the availability of illegitimate means, and the absence of effective restraints or social controls. Kramer and his former student, David Kauzlarich, adapted this framework (with some modifications) for their analysis of “crimes of the American nuclear state.” Another former student of Kramer’s, Dawn Rothe—and her colleague Christopher Mullins—then used this model as a basic point of departure for their analyses of the International Criminal Court, and the wide range of violations of international criminal law that have occurred in post-colonial African states. They have further expanded and revised this theoretical model with refinements of the core concepts of opportunity and controls, and the addition of the international level of analysis. These criminologists all recognize that large-scale, complex state-corporate crimes, and crimes of states, can only be properly understood through the application of integrated, multilevel theoretical approaches. Gregg Barak (2009), in promoting the application of an integrated approach to supranational crime, stresses the growing importance of the global political economy for understanding such crime. Although the criminological study of supranational crime is in its infancy, it seems likely that in the years ahead increasingly sophisticated versions of integrated theories of crime will be developed in relation to this type of crime, and its control.

A Multilateral, Integrated Theoretical Approach in the Recent Era Some key themes that unite integrated theories of white-collar crime, or can be generated out of such theories, are here delineated. First, such theories explicitly or implicitly recognize that white-collar crime takes many different forms. A coherent approach to the understanding of white-collar

484

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime

crime must then begin with the construction of a typology. A typological approach can obscure the endless complexity of some manifestations of white-collar crime, but such an approach nevertheless has advantages that outweigh its drawbacks. The typology developed by David O. Friedrichs differentiates between core types of white-collar crime (corporate crime and occupational crime), cognate types (governmental crime, including crimes of states and political white-collar crime), and hybrid or marginal types (state-corporate crime, crimes of globalization, finance crime, enterprise crime, contrepreneurial crime, technocrime, and avocational crime). It follows that no single theory can explain the broad range of white-collar crimes in a sophisticated way. Different forms of white-collar crime require different theoretical approaches. All general theories of crime—from Sutherland’s differential association to Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s low self-control—are vastly over-simplified, and point us away from a sophisticated understanding of white-collar crime. The especially complex forms of white-collar crime, such as the savings and loan debacle, corporate scandals (e.g., the Enron case), and the subprime mortgage market collapse, require complex, multilevel, integrated theoretical approaches. But all types of white-collar crime are best understood by the application of integrated theories taking multiple levels of factors, from motivation to opportunity, into account. Furthermore, in a rapidly changing world, sophisticated integrated theories of white-collar crime—and other forms of crime as well—must take into account an evolving context, including but not limited to the introduction of postmodern dimensions into a modern world, and the broader diffusion of globalization and its consequences. An integrated theoretical approach is here applied to one recent manifestation large-scale, complex white-collar crimes: the many levels of fraud involved in the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.

The Subprime Mortgage Market Frauds: An Integrated Theoretical Approach The disintegration of the subprime mortgage market in the United States, beginning about 2006, led to millions of homeowners going into foreclosure on their homes or facing the prospect of

foreclosure, the collapse of one major investment banking firm and huge losses for others, the state of jeopardy in which the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (the giant mortgage servicing corporations) found themselves in, billions of dollars of losses for investors, American taxpayers on the hook for possibly billions more in bailout costs, and the financial system itself in a situation of serious crisis. Various forms of fraud, or forms of white-collar crime, are found at the center of the subprime mortgage crisis. An application of a sophisticated integrated theory of the subprime mortgage market frauds has the following elements. First, on the structural (macro) level, a capitalist political economy has as a core characteristic the relentless pursuit of profit, and a constant search for new markets. In the case of mortgages, the historically underserved subprime market—made of potential borrowers with subpar incomes and credit histories—was just such a market, since by the mid-1990s the profit potential of the prime mortgage market was diminishing. Domestic investors were clamoring for new opportunities to enrich themselves, and trillions of dollars of foreign money was being invested in American securities. In terms of law and the regulatory environment, this period was characterized by a potent commitment to deregulation, lawmakers and top-level regulators (including the Federal Reserve) resisted the imposition of more oversight and tougher standards that might inhibit a booming housing market, and the regulatory entities were somewhat fragmented in terms of their jurisdiction. Rating agencies that were supposed to objectively assess the valuations of mortgage-based securities were beset by conflicts of interest. In terms of cultural forces, the optimism that is a potent force in American culture persuaded people on many levels that housing prices would rise indefinitely. Proponents of ideological laissez-faire values were a dominant force as well. Celebration of home-owning as the epitome of the American Dream was invoked with the idea that it should be extended as far as possible, even to people of very modest income and unstable job histories; and some commentators came to believe that a culture of deceit and cheating increasingly trumped commitments to integrity. On the organizational (meso) level, there is the uncoupling of mortgage originators from mortgage

Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime

holders—that is, those who made the original mortgage loans quickly sold them to investment banks, instead of holding onto them and having to insure that they were paid off. The reward structure on both the level of mortgage loan origination and the packaging of mortgage securities were criminogenic insofar as getting loans out or packaging loans into securities was richly rewarded, not the long-term likelihood of the mortgage loan being paid off. Automated underwriting software for mortgage loans glossed over traditional criteria for evaluating mortgage loan risk. And the increasingly complex securities packaging thousands of mortgages to be sold to investors were not well understood, even by top executives of the investment banks that sold them. On the dramaturgic (meso) level, and in terms of the social construction of reality, mortgage lenders and investment banks successfully conveyed an image of ultra-respectability, and were accorded a high level of trust by both lenders and investors, and by regulators and the media that might have challenged some of their questionable policies and practices. Deceptive appearances were pervasive on many different levels. On the individualistic (micro) level those at the center of the frauds were sometimes afflicted with egocentric, overly optimistic, narcissistic, entitlement-oriented and excessive risk-taking personality attributes, as well as flaws of character in terms of integrity. At least some proportion of those involved made rational calculations in terms of the likely benefits of engaging in fraud. The specific degree of willful fraudulent intent on the part of all the involved parties, from low-income borrowers to investment bank CEOs, surely varied, from consciously fraudulent conduct to selfdeception to outright victimization by other parties. On the lowest level, borrowers ranged from the purely unsophisticated, naïve victims to those who knowingly engaged in crooked misrepresentations of their finances. The victims of the frauds involved in the collapse of the subprime mortgage market are many, and include borrowers contending with foreclosure on their homes, neighborhoods with deteriorating home values due to multiple foreclosures, investors (individual and institutional) who purchased mortgage-based securities, employees of failed investment banks, would-be borrowers now

485

contending with a tight credit market, and taxpayers who were on the line for at least some of the bailout commitments the government felt compelled to make. The first order of victims were disproportionately the naïve, lower-income mortgage borrowers who were duped into taking loans they did not understand and could not afford, who were saddled with escalating interest payments, dubious fees, and prepayment penalties, and who faced the nightmare of losing their home and whatever equity they had in the home. The primary beneficiaries were CEOs and top executives of major mortgage lending companies and investment banks who earned tens of millions in salaries, bonuses, and stock options, little if any of which was returned when the fraudulent representations at the core of the subprime mortgage industry were exposed. Is the preceding integrated theoretical application to a particular form of white-collar crime, fraud in relation to the subprime mortgage market, empirically testable? Can the specific relationships between the many variables, on many different levels, be specified? The challenges on both counts are immense, and arguably insurmountable. Does it follow, then, that such an integrated theory is not tenable? The true test of this form of application of an integrated theory of white-collar crime is this: Does it provide us with a richer, truer, more sophisticated understanding of subprime mortgage fraud than some conventional, one-dimensional theory? Is such a complex fraud really better explained and understood as a function of low self-control and poor parenting?

Conclusion The integrated theories of white-collar crime addressed in this entry encounter resistance or rejection from many criminologists due in particular to the fact that they are often difficult if not impossible to test, and therefore not “useful.” But to privilege the criteria of the usefulness of a criminological theory over its consonance with the complexities of human behavior and social existence seems unwarranted. One has the suspicion that at least some criminologists are attracted to the more one-dimensional theories that lend themselves to more straightforward empirical testing because such theoretical approaches contribute to getting

486

Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory

published and advancing one’s career. Integrated theories of white-collar crime may not lend themselves easily to such testing, but there is much evidence in many different forms that they provide us with a fuller and more sophisticated understanding of forms of crime that incorporate many complex— and sometimes contradictory—dimensions. David O. Friedrichs See also Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Scandals; Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime; Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Barak, G. (1998). Integrating criminologies. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Barak, G. (Ed.). (1998). Integrative criminology. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Barak, G. (2009) Criminology: An integrated approach. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Braithwaite, J. (1988). White-collar crime, competition, and capitalism: Comment on Coleman. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 627–632. Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame, and reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Braithwaite, J. (2002). Restorative justice and responsive regulation. New York: Oxford University Press. Coleman, J. W. (1987). Toward an integrated theory of white-collar crime. American Journal of Sociology, 93, 406–439. Coleman, J. W. (1992). The theory of white-collar crime: From Sutherland to the 1990s. In K. Schlegel & D. Weisburd (Eds.), White-collar crime reconsidered. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Coleman, J. W. (2006). The criminal elite: The sociology of white-collar crime (6th ed.). New York: Worth. Friedrichs, D. O. (2004). Enron et al.: Paradigmatic white collar crime cases for the new century. Critical Criminology, 12, 113–132. Friedrichs, D. O. (2007). White-collar crime in a postmodern, globalized world. In H. N. Pontell & G. Geis (Eds.), International handbook of white-collar and corporate crime (pp. 163–184). New York: Springer. Friedrichs, D.O. (2010) Trusted criminals: White collar crime in contemporary society (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. Hagan, J. (1988). Structural criminology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Hagan, J., & Kay, F. (1990). Gender and delinquency in white-collar families: A power-control perspective. Crime & Delinquency, 36, 391–407. Kauzlarich, D., & Kramer, R. C. (1998). Crimes of the American nuclear state. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Michalowski, R. J., & Kramer, R. C. (Eds.). (2006). State-corporate crime. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mullins, C. W., & Rothe, D. L. (2008). Blood, power, and bedlam: Violations of international criminal law in post-colonial Africa. New York: Peter Lang. Piquero, N. L., & Piquero, A. R. (2006). Control balance and exploitative corporate crime. Criminology, 44, 397–430. Pontell, H., & Geis, G. (Eds.). (2007). International handbook of white-collar and corporate crime. New York: Springer. Robinson, M. B. (2004). Why crime? An integrated systems theory of antisocial behavior. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Rothe, D. L., & Mullins, C. W. (2006). The International Criminal Court: Symbolic gestures and the generation of global social control. Ann Arbor, MI: Lexington Books. Schlegel, K., & Weisburd, D. (Eds.). (1992). White-collar crime reconsidered. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Tittle, C. R. (1995). Control balance. Boulder, CO: Westview. Tombs, S., & Whyte, D. (2007). Safety crimes. Portland, OR: Willan. Vaughan, D. (1983). Controlling unlawful organizational behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vaughan, D. (2007). Beyond macro- and micro-levels of analysis, organizations and the cultural fix. In H. Pontell & G. Geis (Eds.), International handbook of white-collar and corporate crime (pp. 3–24). New York: Springer.

Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory Early scholarly studies of prisons noted that there was not just a formal organization inside prisons, but an informal organization that included a distinct inmate subculture. Theorists first proposed the deprivation model, which contended that inmate behavior stemmed from the conditions of

Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory

confinement. In response to this theory, John Irwin and Donald R. Cressey set forth an alternative explanation—the importation model. This model suggests that inmate behavior is a reflection of attitudes and behaviors already possessed by offenders when they enter prison. In this entry, the deprivation model is first presented as a prelude to a more extensive discussion of the importation model. In addition, research supporting the importation model is presented.

Deprivation Model In The Society of Captives, Gresham Sykes detailed the nature of the prison subculture, arguing that the content of the subculture was an adaptation to the painful conditions inherent in prison life. Sykes discussed five distinct pains or deprivations experienced by men who had been incarcerated. They include the deprivation of liberty, the deprivation of goods and services, the deprivation of heterosexual relationships, the deprivation of security, and the deprivation of autonomy. Sykes contended that inmate subcultures were formed in response to these unique deprivations of imprisonment—that is, as way of coping with and attempting to alleviate the pains of imprisonment. Some of the argot roles presented by Sykes, such as the “rat” and “punks,” are still common terms understood and utilized within prisons today. The contribution of Sykes is simple—the unique environment of the prison itself has a direct influence on inmate culture and behavior. This major theory of prison subcultures became known as the deprivation model.

The Importation Model In their article “Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Subculture,” Irwin and Cressey question Sykes’s deprivation model. Together, the authors developed a competing theory of imprisonment known as the importation model. This model challenges the idea that inmate behaviors are merely shaped or changed due to the new “society” in which they must now live. All inmates who enter prison have a unique personal history that is brought into prison with them. Just as most travelers bring their luggage with them on vacation (as opposed to buying all new clothes upon arrival), inmates bring their own set of “baggage” into prison. Irwin and

487

Cressey contend that inmates arrive in prison with their own distinct set of beliefs, behaviors and experiences. It is these personal characteristics that will influence their adjustment to prison life. Irwin and Cressey categorize inmates into three main groups: the thief subculture, the convict subculture, and the legitimate subculture. They refer to the “thief” and “convict” as deviant subcultures. Inmates who are committed to a criminal lifestyle are categorized into the thief subculture. These inmates could be referred to as career criminals. They are not committed to prison life, but understand that prison is a real consequence of their criminal lifestyle. In other words, prison is merely a hazard of the job, albeit a very inconvenient one. According to the authors, thieves are committed to crime so their “reference groups” are located both inside and outside prison. That is, they have friends/associates inside prison and in their home/neighborhood when they leave prison. They also use the same “code” (e.g., don’t talk to the police) inside prison as they would on the streets. When thieves enter the prison they want their time to go as smoothly as possible. They want “a prison life containing the best possible combination of a maximum amount of leisure time and a maximum number of privileges” (Irwin & Cressey, 1962, p. 150). They will take jobs that require little effort and will allow them to continue their criminal enterprise while in prison. For example, thieves will find an easy job with limited hours such as working in the kitchen. They can eat well and have extra leisure time. Again, thieves are not interested in becoming immersed in the prison culture itself. In terms of recidivism, thieves will undoubtedly recidivate since their criminal pursuits will continue once released from prison. The second subculture described by Irwin and Cressey is the convict subculture. The convicts often have a history of long periods of incarceration and also being imprisoned in juvenile institutions. Unlike the thief subculture, convicts have their primary reference groups inside the prison. Due to their lengthy periods of incarceration, their friends, acquaintances, and associates reside inside the prison. “The central value of the subculture is utilitarianism, and the most manipulative and most utilitarian individuals win the available wealth and such positions of influence as might exist” (Irwin & Cressey, 1962, p. 147). Thus, status in prison is

488

Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory

essential for a member of the convict subculture. Convicts will attempt to secure jobs in prison that allow them to exert the greatest power and influence over other inmates. They aspire to influence and manipulate the daily operation of the prison. For example, Irwin and Cressey describe a convict who worked in a dental office in the prison. In­­mates were required to “pay” the convict in cigarettes in order to have their name placed on a list to be seen by the dentist. This is one example of how convicts attempt to exert power over other inmates while simultaneously controlling the “wealth” in prisons (i.e., cigarettes). Unlike the thief who may work in the kitchen to keep a full stomach, the convict will take this job to steal food and sell it to others for profit. The recidivism rates are purported to be quite high for convicts since prison is the only life they know and thus have made it their “home.” The final subculture described by Irwin and Cressey is the only nondeviant subculture. The legitimate subculture bears little resemblance to the thief and convict subcultures. First, these inmates are not oriented toward a criminal lifestyle. These individuals can best be described as situational offenders. This subculture includes the person who has an extra glass of wine and kills someone while driving home or the person who steals from an employer to pay mounting medical bills, or the person who writes fraudulent prescriptions to feed a longstanding addiction to painkillers. They have all committed a serious crime and have received a prison term, but they are not committed to a life of crime. While in prison, these inmates tend to isolate themselves. Unlike thieves and convicts, they have positive, prosocial reference groups both inside and outside prison. Inside the prison, they are more likely to engage in treatment programs and are unlikely to cause problems for the prison staff. They also maintain ties with individuals in their home community. Thus, members of the legitimate subculture have brought their prosocial, anticriminal values with them into the prison environment. Although they committed a crime, their orientation is to be law-abiding so this behavior is reflected inside prison.

Empirical Tests Following the development of Irwin and Cressey’s importation model, a plethora of tests ensued. The

model was tested both independently and as a comparison to Sykes’s deprivation model. Researchers measured inmate adjustment to the prison environment in terms of drug use during incarceration, perpetration of violent acts within prisons, and accruement of prison disciplinary tickets. The most commonly tested importation variables included age, race, and offense type until researchers such as Liqun Cao, Jihong Zao, and Steve Van Dine expanded the list to include factors such as sex, level of education, employment status, marital status, history of substance abuse, history of mental illness, juvenile and adult incarceration experience, number of violent offenses, and location of commitment. Research has produced a great deal of support for the importation model. As far as drug use is concerned, Charles Thomas discovered that prisoners who had used drugs prior to their incarceration were more likely to view themselves as criminals and display oppositional behaviors during their terms of confinement. In addition, Shanhe Jiang and Marianne Fisher-Girolando found that inmates who reported frequent use of alcohol and drugs prior to imprisonment were involved in more violent acts while incarcerated. Tests of the importation model have demonstrated that age and race are robust predictors of who will be involved in prison violence. Black inmates engage in higher rates of in-prison violence than inmates of other races. This evidence supports the model in that blacks commit more acts of violence in larger society and are thus expected to import violent behaviors into the prison environment. Along the same lines, those who engage in violent acts in prison tend to be around the same age as those who commonly commit the same crimes in the community—late teens to early twenties. Therefore, Jon Sorensen et al.’s finding that young black inmates were more likely to be involved in assaultive behavior than other inmates lends credence to the importation model. In addition to age and race being predictive of inmate violence, prior history of violence, prior gang involvement, marital status, and parenthood have all been found to influence an inmate’s likelihood to commit violent acts in prison. Specifically, inmates who have a history of engaging in violence outside of prison are more likely to commit acts of institutional violence. Also, inmates who are

Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory

involved in outside gang activities are more likely to perpetrate violent infractions while in prison. Finally, the factors of being divorced and of having children increase the likelihood that male inmates will be involved in prison violence. An inmate’s accruement of disciplinary tickets is a good indication of adjustment to prison life. Cao et al.’s examination of the factors that impact the nature and number of disciplinary tickets incurred by inmates demonstrated that importation variables such as age, sex, race, level of education, and martial status are far better predictors of the accumulation of tickets than deprivation model variables. One of the most recent tests of the importation model focused on the impact of quality of life prior to incarceration on the adjustment to prison life. Specifically, Mandeep Dhami et al. discovered that prisoners’ quality of life prior to confinement was more predictive of their emotional state while in prison than was the deprivation predictor, length of time served. Additionally, those with a poor quality of life prior to imprisonment were more likely to engage in acts of misconduct while incarcerated than were those with a good quality of life prior to their confinement. Both of these findings support the idea that adjustment to incarceration is impacted by prior circumstances. When viewed in their entirety, tests of importation indicate that the model is a robust predictor of inmate adjustment. When imprisoned, convicts do not leave behind their age; race; marital and employment status; fatherhood; prior histories of drug use, gang activity, and violence; and pre-imprisonment quality of life. To the contrary, these factors are imported into institutions where they impact the manner in which inmates adjust to and cope with life in prison. Although the conditions of confinement are far from insignificant, it is important to note that they act in concert with the imported characteristics of prisoners. Together, what individuals bring with them and the prison environment interact to produce either conventional or deviant adjustments to institutionalization.

Conclusion Although nearly five decades old, the importation model continues to be a viable paradigm for

489

explaining the behavior of inmates. The model contends that inmate behavior is not only a function of institutional conditions but also a result of factors that are imported into correctional settings by offenders. As illustrated in this entry, contemporary research has consistently demonstrated support for the importation model. Melissa M. Moon and Sherry Tillinghast See also Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison; Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory; Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison

References and Further Readings Cao, L., Zhao, J., & Van Dine, S. (1997). Prison disciplinary tickets: A test of the deprivation and importation models. Journal of Criminal Justice, 25, 103–113. Dhami, M. K., Ayton, P., & Loewenstein, G. (2007). Adaptation to imprisonment: Indigenous or imported? Criminal Justice and Behavior, 34, 1085–1100. Griffin, M. L., & Hepburn, J. R. (2006). The effect of gang affiliation on violent misconduct among inmates during the early years of confinement. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 33, 419–448. Harer, M. D., & Steffensmeier, D. J. (1996). Race and prison violence. Criminology, 34, 323–355. Irwin, J., (1980). Prisons in turmoil. Boston: Little, Brown. Irwin, J. (2005). The warehouse prison: Disposal of the new dangerous class. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Irwin, J., & Cressey, D. R. (1962). Thieves, convicts and the inmate subculture. Social Problems, 10, 142–155. Jiang, S., & Fisher-Giorlando, M. (2002). Inmate misconduct: A test of the deprivation, importation, and situational models. Prison Journal, 82, 335–358. MacDonald, J. M. (1999). Violence and drug use in juvenile institutions. Journal of Criminal Justice, 27, 33–44. Sorensen, J., Wrinkle, R., & Gutierrez, A. (1998). Patterns of rule-violating behaviors and adjustment to incarceration among murderers. Prison Journal, 78, 222–231. Sykes, G. M. (1958). The society of captives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thomas, C. W. (1977). Theoretical perspectives on prisonization: A comparison of the importation and deprivation models. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 68, 135–145.

J portrays gangs as organized groups and their members as calculating, rational actors.

Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street

Groundbreaking Contributions

American gangs have been long identified as troublesome and socially undesirable elements of society. Negative perceptions of gangs permeate the consciousness of members of the public, government officials, and media outlets. As such, Martin Sanchez Jankowski attempted to improve public understanding of gangs by examining uncharted territory with Islands in the Street, which offers a contemporary ethnography of juvenile gangs and represents a considerable departure from previous explorations of gang behavior. Winning “best book” awards from the American Sociological Association in 1992 and the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1993, Jankowski predicted that gangs were groups with different social organizational patterns rather than disorganized elements of society, which was an uncommon approach to the subject matter. As part of a 10-year field study, Jankowski immersed himself in the environment of 37 urban street gangs of varying size, ethnic composition, and purpose. Using informal interviews and participant observations, he studied gangs from low-income communities in Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, and sought to understand the process of gang formation, the reasons certain gangs were able to succeed, and the circumstances surrounding gang failure. More specifically, his findings confirmed his initial suspicions about gang organization and contributed to a theory of gang behavior that

Islands in the Street offers a comprehensive analysis of urban street gangs on three distinct levels: (1) gang members as individuals, (2) gangs as organizations, and (3) the relationships between gangs and community systems (such as government and social agencies) (Branch, 1994). First, a result of Jankowski’s observation of individuals led to the development of a model of seven behavioral characteristics present in gang members. He applied the label “defiant individualist character” to those who display these seven attributes, which comprise a sense of competitiveness, mistrust or wariness, self-reliance, social isolation, having a survival instinct, having a Social Darwinist worldview, and exuding a defiant air. Jankowski contends that most individuals who enter into gangs and whose gang membership persists, demonstrate these personal dispositions. Furthermore, in observing the characteristics of individual members, Jankowski suggests that “members who join (and remain) in a gang behave differently depending on the type of leadership structure in operation” (p. 99). Pursuant to this observation, he established three cohesive structural typologies that govern the codes and rules of gang leadership and behavior: the vertical/ hierarchical structure, the horizontal/commission structure, and the influential structure. Each of these typologies addresses a different organizational 491

492

Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street

approach employed by gangs. And, according to Jankowski, if gangs are unable to collectively organize, they will cease to exist. Lastly, in his assessment of the dynamics between gangs and society, Jankowski reveals a complex relationship among gangs, communities, and local government agencies that is contrary to popular image, in that this connection is described as a working relationship that benefits the self-interest of all parties rather than as an unrelenting battle between these parties. For instance, Jankowski describes the relationship between gangs and the community as an understood social arrangement where gangs act as a neighborhood militia—a role that allows gangs to act as a protective agent and part of the community. Endeavoring to establish a greater understanding of gang members and gang-related activities, Jankowski presented a radically different and more tolerant perspective of gang behavior from that of his predecessors. Islands in the Street recognizes distinguished theorists who have provided meaningful contributions to current sociological thought on American gangs. Jankowski claims that some of the work of Frederick Thrasher, Walter Miller, and others presents the somewhat tautological argument that gangs are caused by poverty and that poverty exists because of gangs. Jankowski attempts to move beyond the reasoning of these early gang researchers by arguing that social organization exists within urban communities previously believed to be highly disorganized. And in an approach that represents a significant departure from existing sociological perspectives, he defines gangs as an alternative social order (Branch, 1994). In an attempt to improve prevailing sociological and criminological theory, Jankowski “argues for a type of rational choice theory” (Ehsan, 1991, p. 130). More specifically, he suggests that individual gang members are calculating and rational decision makers (portrayed as a dominant theme throughout the text) who actively choose to join gangs in the pursuit of self-interests. Because conventional opportunities for goal achievement and upward social mobility are significantly limited among disadvantaged young men in certain neighborhoods, he found that individuals rationally choose gang membership because of the greater social opportunities in those environments.

Moreover, “gang organization and activities cater to their [the gang members] defiant individualist characters” (Ehsan, 1991, p. 130). Thus, Jankowski argues that the gang is an organized social system, albeit an alternative form of social order, and that it comprises individuals who are acting rationally on behalf of their own self interest. Jankowski has also made significant contributions to ethnographic fieldwork. One unprecedented achievement of this study was the ability of Jankowski to penetrate the 37 various urban street gangs—the process of gaining access was arduous and often involved actions that have been suggested as ethically questionable (Anderson, 1993). In addition, it is a remarkable accomplishment to have been simultaneously studying groups so intensely that spanned so many different locales. One notable feature of Islands in the Street is that Jankowski’s findings are supported by numerous detailed quotations from active gang members gathered while embedded in these criminal groups. Jankowski indicates that all quotations within the text are perfect or near perfect, as a notebook and tape recorder were utilized to gather extensive information from interviews and observations. As such, his research accomplished an extraordinary undertaking that involved watching, interacting with, and participating in gang life that sometimes included altercations with rival gang members. His research pushed the boundary of what was considered to be acceptable ethnographical approach, and provided a comprehensive and meaningful illustration of gang behavior, organizational structure, and socialization process within community systems.

Criticisms While Islands in the Street has accomplished significant achievements that have furthered research and theory on urban street gangs, Jankowski’s findings are met with a number of methodological and ethical criticisms by the academic community. An initial shortcoming of this research is an insufficient explanation of the means by which the researcher gained access to gang subculture. According to James Anderson, Jankowski neglected to explain how he acquired admission into different gang subcultures and failed to fully describe how he developed interpersonal relationships with gang informants. More specifically, he does not

Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street

discuss differential treatment by gang members as he moved from gang subculture to gang subculture, nor does he describe the different personalities of gang informants. Consequently, the “reader is left with the impression that access [to the gang subculture] was obtained uniformly across all gangs in all parts of the country” and “that all of his experiences were the same” (Anderson, 1993, p. 52). A second limitation of this study is possible validity and reliability problems affecting certain findings. Jankowski explored a number of data sources in his research. Aside from interviews, he analyzed numerous television shows, videocassettes, and documentaries on gang life. Because multiple sources of information were used in this research, the validity of this study is uncertain. Also, Jankowski neglected to provide an example of the instruments employed to conduct interviews (e.g., sample questionnaires). Branch identifies Jankowski’s presentation of data as problematic, suggesting that it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to make interpretive conclusions, or to assess the validity and reliability of the research tools used to gather data. Because Jankowski selectively reported findings from interviews with gang members, Branch questions the choice to include certain excerpts from informant interviews and disregard others without explanation. Also, Jankowski failed to provide a sample of the research tools used to question individuals. These issues create complications for future ethnographers who attempt to replicate his work. Additionally, he chose to immerse himself in a known criminal group. His determination “to align himself so closely with the gangs . . . raises serious doubts about the validity of his research” (Anderson, 1993, p. 55). It also questions the ability of Jankowski to remain neutral or objective during the extensive period of time he engaged in participant observation fieldwork. Some methodologists argue that it is necessary to try to remain as impartial as possible when doing research as a participant-observer and that one should aim to prevent personal judgments and bias from affecting the investigation. Anderson suggests that Jankowski’s failure to remain impartial by observing and participating in gang behavior seriously challenges his ability to remain a neutral observer, and that this negatively influenced the validity of

493

his conclusions. In addition, Jankowski frequently justifies gang member participation in criminal activities and views individuals who choose to join gang life as victims of an oppressive culture that has blocked certain members from legitimate opportunities in society. Another criticism of Islands in the Street is that there are ethical problems with how Jankowski completed his ethnographic field research. More specifically, some have argued that it is unethical for Jankowski to have regularly observed criminal activities and yet not identify gang members for authorities or report gang victimizations. Although his decision to remain impartial helped facilitate access to gangs and, consequently, his engagement in this study, Jankowski’s decisions have been viewed as morally questionable and potentially blurring the accepted ethical boundaries usually adhered to in academic research.

Conclusion Islands in the Street is an innovative and landmark assessment of gang behavior, gang structure, and the interrelationships that exist between gangs and communities. While this work earned considerable praise for its empirical findings on gangs, its ethnographic contributions, and its furtherance of contemporary criminological theory, it has also faced substantial methodological and ethical criticisms from academe. Despite limitations to his work, Jankowski has provided an informative examination of urban street gangs in America, which has moved beyond the work of his predecessors and initiated a reassessment of the gang phenomenon. Kirsten Hutzell and Kelly Welch See also Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect; Gangs and the Underclass; Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency; Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization; Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing; Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes; Vigil, James Diego: Multiple Marginality Theory

References and Further Readings Anderson, J. F. (1993). Review essay: A methodological critique of islands in the street. Gang Journal, 1, 49–58.

494

Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

The publication of C. Ray Jeffery’s Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in 1971 ushered in a new way of looking at crime and how society should address criminal activity. In a very general sense, the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) model considers factors of the social and physical environment that open up opportunities for crime. Jeffery shifts the emphasis away from the criminal to the environment in which the offender operates. This is a major jump for criminology and criminological theory since the reigning orientation at the time was deterring and treating the individual who committed a criminal action. This entry considers the background and development of CPTED, as well as the changing view of CPTED found in Jeffery’s work.

and rehabilitation. The deterrence model focuses on the actions and efficiency of the agents of social control, particularly the police, courts, and corrections. The intent of these agents is to punish the offender after the crime has occurred with the hope that the individual will refrain from further offending in the future. The rehabilitation model relies on a wide range of theories for explaining why the individual offended. Sociological and psychological theories dominate these explanations. This model seeks to use these theories as the basis of interventions that will correct the individual’s behavior, again after the crime has taken place. The rehabilitation model also seeks to attack problems such as poverty, poor education, lack of employment, and mental illness. Many of the Great Society Reforms of the late 1960s sought to eliminate the problems of poverty, unemployment, and related issues. It was upon this backdrop that Jeffery and others developed the ideas underlying CPTED. He argued that the formal agents of social control were largely ineffective at deterring behavior and rehabilitating offenders. The work of Jane Jacobs contributed greatly to Jeffery and CPTED. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities published in 1961 focused on the problems of urban decay and the natural and social environments and how they contribute to crime and deviance. Jacobs viewed the modern urban environment, as well as many programs to change urban life, as anathema to a vibrant community that protects itself and residents who look out for one another. She included in her discussion the idea that the physical environment needs to enhance natural surveillance by those in the neighborhood as a means of making streets safe for legitimate users. A companion piece to this surveillance was the distinction between public and private space, and encouraging use of both types of space. This same argument is found in Elizabeth Wood’s evaluation of public housing in Chicago where she noted that safety is enhanced through resident surveillance and activity in the area. Both Jacobs and Wood promoted the role of the physical and social environment in crime.

Background

Jeffery and CPTED

Jeffery pointed out that there were two existing models for crime control. Those were deterrence

One of the most noteworthy features of Jeffery’s presentation of CPTED was its very strong emphasis

Branch, C. W. (1994). Gang bashing: Review of Islands in the Streets: Gangs and American urban society by Martin Sanchez Jankowski. New Ideas in Psychology, 12, 103–109. Ehsan, M. (1991). Book review: Islands in the street: Gangs and American urban society, by Martin Sanchez Jankowski. Critical Sociology, 19, 129–131. Jankowski, M. S. (1991). Islands in the street: Gangs and American urban society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jankowski, M. S. (2002). Representation, responsibility and reliability in participant-observation. In T. May (Ed.), Qualitative research in action (pp. 144–160). London: Sage. Jankowski, M. S. (2003). Gangs and social change. Theoretical Criminology, 7, 191–215. Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14, 5–19. Thrasher, F. (1928). The gang: A study of 1313 gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

on prevention. This is particularly important when one considers that existing methods of dealing with crime were reactionary. That is, the existing focus was on responding to crime and dealing with offenders after the crime had occurred. Jeffery’s work proposed that it was more important, and more effective, to do something before the offense in order to make certain it did not happen in the first place. The original publication of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in 1971 focused on preventing crime through environmental engineering. The emphasis was on future offending rather than past behavior (the target of existing systems of social control). Jeffery argued that criminal behavior, particularly potential future activity, is strongly influenced by the potential future consequences of the individual’s actions. It is possible to curtail offending by removing environmental cues that reinforce the offending behavior. A strong underlying influence to Jeffery’s work was the ideas of operant conditioning and the work of B. F. Skinner. Under this perspective, individuals make decisions based on the expected pleasure and pain that would come from different choices. Instances where the pleasure outweighs the potential pain would result in action. In reverse situations, where the expected pain is greater than the pleasure, the individual should refrain from participating in the behavior. The physical and social environments have great potential to determine the levels of pleasure and pain faced by the individual. Jeffery argues that it is possible to make alterations to the environment that will enhance conforming behavior and mitigate offending. Those changes are not limited to physical changes. Rather, Jeffery argues that increasing citizen involvement in community activities and surveillance, and increased proactive programs by the police and other agents of social control, hold great potential for the prevention of crime. While Jeffery’s book offered a new approach to understanding and addressing crime, it was not until his second edition that it gained widespread attention. The 1977 version of the book added a major discussion of the biological influences of behavior. The original work only mentioned biological influences in passing and never developed the ideas. Jeffery spent considerable time, however, in the second edition outlining the influence of the individual’s biological makeup on processing input

495

to behavior. Genetics, brain functioning, and the biological bases of behavior were key variables in the understanding of crime. Jeffery attempted to integrate biology into the social, psychological, and environmental views of crime and criminal behavior. This model utilizes systems logic rather than sequential logic. It denies or at least questions the logic of time-ordered causal reasoning. Instead, the model posits continuous interactive effects of organisms and environments that have reciprocal influences on one another, among all levels of analysis, from cell to society (including genetics, the brain, the individual, the group, the community, and so forth). The biological model became the basis for Jeffery’s revised CPTED. The change in Jeffery’s view of CPTED is largely due to the emerging literature in the 1970s dealing with biological functioning, brain activity, and the interaction between the social/physical world and the biology of the individual. In essence, the 1977 version brought the ideas of socio-biology (or biosociology) into focus. Where the original version received limited attention, the subsequent work raised a great deal of controversy. The fact that Jeffery shifted the focus away from the social and environmental factors alone to one where biological influences are important factors flew in the face of the sociological and psychological views that dominated in studies of crime. In Jeffery’s view, crime and behavior can only be truly understood if one looks at the interaction of the individual organism (the person) and the environment in which it operates. Jeffery argued for integrating heretofore separate theoretical approaches into a single system approach in which all of the various factors interact to form behavior. The most complete presentation of Jeffery’s CPTED model appears in his 1990 book, Criminology: An Interdisciplinary Approach. In this work Jeffery argues for fully integrating biological, social, psychological, and other disciplinary approaches into a single coherent model for understanding behavior and what can be done to prevent crime. This integrative model requires that researchers consider the biological functioning of the individual vis à vis the social and physical environment in which it operates. Jeffery argued that the outside physical and social environments can only influence behavior indirectly through the brain and its functioning. Unfortunately, this approach requires

496

Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

traditional criminology to integrate a body of knowledge—biology—with which it has little training or understanding. A logical consequence of this fact is that Jeffery’s crime prevention model receives relatively little attention today.

Practical Applications While Jeffery is credited with introducing the term crime prevention through environmental design and his work charted new territory for criminology, it had little immediate impact on theorizing or interventions. This would appear surprising when one considers the fact that CPTED became a major topic in the 1970s. This movement, however, was largely due to the work of Oscar Newman. In 1972, Newman published his book Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City. For Newman, defensible space seeks to create a physical expression of a social fabric which defends itself. The key components of defensible space are territoriality, natural surveillance, image, and milieu. Actions that create or change the physical environment in such a way as to maximize each of these elements should reduce or eliminate crime. Where Jeffery’s book was largely theoretical and lacked any specific examples of how to put the ideas to practical use, Newman’s work made very specific recommendations on what to change in the environment in order to combat crime. CPTED was implemented largely due to the work of Newman, rather than Jeffery. There are several possible reasons for this. First, as noted above, Jeffery failed to offer concrete examples of how to implement his ideas, while Newman offered numerous examples. Second, as an architect, Newman was writing for an audience that was more open to his ideas. This was probably due to the fact that defensible space was not a major departure from existing architectural ideas, as was Jeffery’s presentation to established criminological theory. Finally, Newman undertook an analysis of crime in housing projects that exhibited different physical design characteristics. In addition, the

government and private corporations funded several demonstration projects based on Newman’s ideas. These projects brought a great deal of attention to CPTED, only they were limited primarily to the influence of the physical environment/structure of communities. They did not incorporate the larger environmental ideas outlined in Jeffery’s work. The revision of Jeffery’s CPTED in 1977 moved his work further from the mainstream of criminology and immediate practical application. While his work has intriguing theoretical appeal and it broadens the realm of variables to be considered in criminology, the heavy orientation toward biological factors was even further removed from accepted practice and had limited applicability. Recent advances in medical sciences have furthered our ability to examine brain and bodily functions as they relate to behavior. In light of this, Jeffery’s ultimate discussion of CPTED has growing applicability to criminology and crime practice. Steven P. Lab See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory; Physical Environment and Crime

References and Further Readings Jacobs, J. (1961). The life and death of great American cities. New York: Random House. Jeffery, C. R. (1971). Crime prevention through environmental design. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Jeffery, C. R. (1977). Crime prevention through environmental design (2nd ed.). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Jeffery, C. R. (1990). Criminology: An interdisciplinary approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Newman, O. (1972). Defensible space: People and design in the violent city. New York: Macmillan. Wood, E. (1961). Housing design, a social theory. New York: Citizens’ Housing and Planning Counsel of New York.

K of crime has hindered the ability to understand the acceptance of evil by individuals. He contends that at the core of deviance are moral emotions such as humiliation, righteousness, and vengeance, and that with each of these, “the attraction that proves to be most fundamentally compelling is that of overcoming a personal challenge to moral—not to material—existence” (p. 9). Seductions of Crime delves deeply into the ways in which offenders interpret and assign meaning to what may appear to others as relatively unremarkable events. Katz seeks to better understand the distinct motivations and attractions for a wide range of crimes including homicide, property offenses, and robbery. His analysis is based on numerous sources of qualitative data including college students’ selfreports of property crime, ethnographic studies of active offenders, and examination of previously published research (e.g., research on robberies in Chicago conducted by Zimring & Zuehl, 1986). He proposes that while each type of crime requires a different set of conditions, each set includes: “1) a path of action-distinctive practical requirements of successfully committing the crime, 2) a line of interpretation-unique ways of understanding how one is and will be seen by others, and 3) an emotional process—seductions and compulsions that have special dynamics” (p. 9).

Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime Criminological theories have traditionally relied on a range of psychological and sociological factors as causes of criminal behavior. When Jack Katz published Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil in 1988, it represented a dramatic theoretical shift in the attempt to explain the phenomenon of crime. Katz argues that criminological theories tend to focus on the negative “background” of crime, such as an offender’s possible psychological problems or socioeconomic disadvantage. Such theories fail to consider the “foreground” of crime, which often holds symbolic and powerful meaning and defines the moments leading up to a criminal event in ways that may be significant to offenders and victims (Katz, 1988, p. 3). “As unattractive morally as crime may be,” observes Katz (1988, p. 10), “we must appreciate that there is genuine experiential creativity in it as well. We should then be able to see what are, for the subject, the authentic attractions of crime and we should then be able to explain variations in criminality beyond what can be accounted for by background factors.” Through a careful examination of the foreground, Katz helps the reader to better understand how people can be seduced into committing criminal and sometimes violent acts. Katz further challenges the idea that crime is motivated by the desire for material goods, arguing instead that the focus on materialism as a cause

Righteous Slaughter In Katz’s exploration of homicides, he asks the questions, “What is the killer trying to do in a typical homicide? How does he understand 497

498

Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime

himself, his victim, and the scene at the fatal moment? With what sense and in what sensuality is he compelled to act?” (p. 12). Katz identifies three major components to what he calls “righteous slaughter.” First, the potential killer must come to the realization that the victim is threatening some fundamental human principle, and that the circumstances require an ultimate showdown. Second, there is an emotional transformation in which humiliation is transformed into rage, which allows the individual to have a profound sense of connection with the core value at risk. Finally, the potential killer’s behavior must be organized in a way that respects and serves as a tribute to the perceived harm caused by the soon-to-be victim (p. 19). In their attempt to explain what may seem unexplainable, some people dismiss those who commit homicide as “sick” or “temporarily in­­ sane.” This perspective demonstrates a lack of understanding of the moral values that are at stake for the offender. Katz argues that heated or passionate moments can turn into homicidal events for an offender who interprets the situation as humiliating and otherwise inescapable. He further states, “Unable to sense how he or she can move with self-respect from the current situation, now, to any mundane-time relationship that might be reengaged, then, the would-be killer leaps at the possibility of embodying, through the practice of ‘righteous’ slaughter, some eternal, universal form of the Good” (p. 9). Katz explains that “the Good” refers to a basic, accepted moral value such as respecting parental authority, the sanctity of marriage, or defense of property rights. To further support the claim that homicide may represent defending the Good, Katz reminds the reader to examine the time and place of such crimes. Katz cites prior research that identified temporal patterns of homicide and found a disproportionate amount of homicides occur on the weekends. Most homicides also do not occur in locations likely to include high levels of stress such as the workplace. Rather, homicides tend to transpire in personal or informal settings, such as during sexual intimacy, resting at home, joking around with friends, or at a bar. Katz explains that the casual setting is significant for explaining homicide since such places represent the “last resort” for enjoyment and relaxation and, “If one cannot escape serious personal challenges then and there,

it may seem as if there were nowhere else to go” (p. 22).

Sneaky Thrills Katz argues that it is incorrect to assume that crimes are primarily caused by financial need or want. Even crimes traditionally thought of as having a strong material motivation (e.g., shoplifting) have more plausible and profound explanations. Individuals may commit theft despite the fact they have the financial means to purchase the desired items, and some even report that an object may produce the feeling of a romantic attraction. Katz further explains that the process of seduction is complex with distinct phases such as temptation and obsession. While some deviant acts are especially attractive because they are perceived as challenging, sneaky thrills possess the opposite quality. Individuals who commit sneaky thrills say part of the attraction to such an act is its ease rather than its difficulty. Further, Katz explains that a sneaky thrill is formed when someone: “1) tacitly generates the experience of being seduced to deviance, 2) reconquers her emotions in a concentration dedicated to the production of normal appearances, 3) and then appreciates the reverberating significance of her accomplishment in a euphoric thrill” (p. 53). Katz likens sneaky thrills to games, which are repeatable acts, done for the sole purpose of having fun, have clear sides, and have a winner and loser. Further, unlike many other types of crime, sneaky thrills such as shoplifting allow for breaks, including bringing merchandise into a dressing room and pausing to decide whether to follow through with the theft. Katz further demonstrates how sneaky thrills differ from professional shoplifting in offenders’ reactions to getting caught. While the professional thief accepts that getting arrested is part of the price of shoplifting, someone who commits a sneaky thrill may experience a sense of shock at getting caught and being treated as a “real criminal” (p. 66).

Doing Stickup While it is undeniable that robbers want and demand money, Katz explains that the act of robbery has complexities that may be overlooked.

Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime

499

One such example is the accepted recognition among offenders that the stickup man must not rely solely on physical force to effectively dominate the situation. Further, Katz contends that one does not start a criminal career by committing robberies, and cites autobiographical evidence which suggests that individuals may build up to the competency required of robbery through a series of muggings and purse snatchings. Also, unlike purse snatchings, stickups have other requirements, including a victim’s ability to recognize the “stickup man” as a criminal and the offender’s ability to initiate the interaction and maintain a “moral advantage” over the victim (p. 171). Another feature of robbery that makes it distinct from other crimes is the level of commitment to the crime. First, unlike some other offenses, stickups are “declared.” These declarations include simple phrases such as “This is a stickup,” or “Give it up,” which may be repeated to stress the significance of the situation. Such statements also provide the victim with a clear message of what the event is (e.g., robbery) and what it is not (e.g., rape). As stated by Katz, “more clearly than is the case in perhaps any other common crime, stickups become objectified in a definitive moment of commitment” (p. 176). Second, there is a quality of “irreversibility” to the crime of robbery. Katz explains that in contrast to criminals such as shoplifters, stickup men do not have the luxury of starting an offense and then deciding, partway through the offense, to abandon the endeavor, free of any culpability. Robbery is a crime in which the offender must remain steadfast throughout the execution of the offense. In addition to committing to the crime of robbery, there is a sense of dedication to violence and becoming a “hard man.” Katz defines hard man as “a person whose will, once manifested, must prevail, regardless of practical calculations of physical self-interest” (p. 187). Katz further explains that when robberies turn into homicides it is not generally a rational self-defense response or out of panic, but demonstrates a strong commitment of will.

of background characteristics. While it is largely accepted that a range of psychological, social, and environmental factors are associated with greater risks of deviant or criminal behavior, the focus on these issues has been at the expense of seeking more direct explanations for crime. Such background variables, while clearly important to consider, remain distant from the moment of a criminal act. The tendency of some social scientists to be advocates for broad social change to address background issues may have inadvertently contributed to the lack of emphasis on, and interest in, conducting research on the more immediate and situational factors surrounding a crime. Seductions of Crime provides a compelling reminder of the need to appreciate the significance of what occurs leading up to, and immediately before the commission of a crime. Katz’s work also illustrates the value of using multiple sources information, and is an important example of why social scientists should not limit themselves to only asking questions that can be answered using official or convenient data. Further, the reader is reminded that researchers should not be overly reliant on particular analytic techniques simply because they represent the latest trend in methodological sophistication. Such an emphasis will continue to restrict the knowledge of crime. The data required to thoroughly explore the questions Katz asks in Seductions of Crime are not obtainable through traditional sources or official records. It is clear that rich ethnographic research is needed to better comprehend what offenders think, feel, and experience at the stages before, during, and after committing a crime. Katz’s work takes the reader on an intense journey toward appreciating the powerful symbolic characteristics of crime, and how crimes can seem both sensible and seductive. As stated by Katz, (1988. p. vii), “A trip to ‘the other side’ does not have to be a permanent change in spiritual address.” The value in better understanding the phenomenon of crime should not be forgotten.

Conclusion

See also Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence; Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil

Criminological theorists have largely overlooked the significance of the foreground of crime in favor

Julie Kiernan Coon

500

Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime

References and Further Readings Cromwell, P. (2010). In their own words: Criminals on crime (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. New York: Basic Books. Presser, L. (2008). Been a heavy life: Stories of violent men. Urbana: University of Illinois. Zimring, F. E., & Zuehl, J. (1986). Victim injury and death in urban robbery: A Chicago study. Journal of Legal Studies, 15, 1–40.

Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime The study of female criminal offending was almost completely ignored for the first 200 years of criminological theorizing. Prior to the 1970s, only a few scholars had studied women offenders and tried to explain their behavior, often using their ideas about women in general to try to explain female criminality in particular. The “invisibility” of female offenders was partly because women were generally regarded as criminologically unimportant due to their relatively small numbers and/ or the lesser seriousness of their most common crimes (e.g., property offenses, prostitution). Indeed, some early theorists (such as Cesare Lombroso) did not consider prostitution to even be a real crime. Compared to the much more frequent, and often highly violent, crimes committed by men, women’s offending did not seem interesting to most scholars prior to the last quarter of the 20th century. Dorie Klein is best known in criminological theory for her pioneering feminist critique of the existing theoretical explanations of women’s crime in an article titled “The Etiology of Female Crime: A Review of the Literature,” which appeared in the journal Issues in Criminology in fall 1973. Klein’s article critically analyzes those few scholars who had contributed to the field’s perspective on women’s offending up to that point. Klein explained that she chose specific theorists because they were influential in the field or were “representative of the kinds of work being published” at the time (p. 325). In each case, Klein summarized how these authors attempted to

account for female crime, and then showed how these explanations focused primarily on individualized causes, as opposed to social causes, for women’s offending. Indeed, the existing explanations for women’s crime tended to be dominated by physiological or psychological factors. Such an individualized bio-psychological focus for explaining women’s crime was all the more remarkable given that the field of criminology had moved away from biological/psychological theories by the 1960s. Economic, social, and political explanations were rapidly becoming the preferred explanations for men’s crime. Klein asserted that all the authors she reviewed based their explanations for women’s crime on “implicit or explicit assumptions about the inherent nature of women,” a nature which Klein argued was viewed as “universal, rather than existing within a specific historical framework” (p. 325, emphasis in the original). In other words, these scholars depicted all females as behaving criminally for the same fundamental biological or emotional reasons, despite clear social class, economic privilege, or race/ethnicity differences among women. Indeed, women’s inherent nature was portrayed as essentially sexual. As Klein asserts, “Sexuality is seen as the root of female behavior and the problem of crime” (p. 326). In short, it was evident that, while male offenders were increasingly being viewed through social, economic, political, and critical lenses, female offenders were still largely relegated to the old cliché explanations of sex, hormones, and emotions.

The Biased Treatment of Women in Criminology The importance of Klein’s harsh critique of criminological theory in 1973 cannot be understated. In the 1970s, there was a slowly growing number of female scholars entering the field. However, they were often not welcomed, nor even taken seriously, by their male peers in the ranks of academia, never mind that scholarship on female offenders was often ignored. Criminology and criminal justice have traditionally been both male-dominated and androcentric (male-centered) disciplines. Their traditional and virtually unquestioned focus on male offenders (and, for that matter, male victims and male criminal justice employees) was perhaps

Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime

understandable, given the dominance of males in the official statistics about criminal offenders, victims, and system workers. Indeed, Klein opened her article by noting, as many writers have subsequently noted, that the study of women’s crime “has often ended up as a footnote to works on men that purport to be works on criminality in general” (p. 325). In much the same way as western medicine has mostly focused on sick people to understand disease and illness, criminology has until very recently focused on men as the most likely offenders, victims, and system workers. Almost no one had questioned why men were more criminogenic or victimized than women, or whether it might be useful to also know why people did not commit crimes. Upon examination, many theorists seemed to believe that they already knew why women did not commit as many crimes as did men, though today their ideas are largely viewed as steeped in traditional, conservative, and sexist ideologies.

The Pioneer Feminist Critiques of Criminological Theory Almost all writers today agree that there is just a handful of articles and books that heralded the new feminist challenges to criminological theory in the second half of the 20th century. By all accounts, the first of these was a 1967 article by Canadian scholar Marie-Andree Bertrand, which challenged the notion that the law provided sexual equality. A year later, and quite separately, an article by British scholar Frances Heidensohn questioned the reigning views of femininity and their relationship to women’s traditional low crime rate. At about this same time, two sociological studies on women in prison were published in America within a year of each other, the first by David Ward and Gene Kassebaum and the second by Rose Giallombardo. Though groundbreaking in their singular focus on female prisoners, both of these studies focused in large part on women’s homosexual relationships during incarceration and thus seemed to perpetuate many stereotypes about women offenders. It was only a few years later in 1973 that Klein published her feminist critique of the criminological literature independently and apparently unaware of these two precursors. Klein’s article focused on works which purported to explain women’s crime and created a small sensation in U.S. criminology

501

at the time. It has been reprinted frequently since then as a classic in the field. Other scholars focusing a new lens on women and crime followed in short succession. Within the next few years, the field fairly exploded with new works devoted to the study of women and crime. Certainly the most famous of these were Freda Adler’s Sisters in Crime and Rita Simon’s Women and Crime, both published in 1975. They garnered considerable news attention in the United States at the time. In 1976, English scholar Carol Smart published Women, Crime and Criminology, an extensive critique of the literature on women’s criminality and a call for a feminist criminology. Popular interest in women’s criminality is usually dated from these three books. However, it is clear that the ground had first been tilled by Klein’s article and its devastating analysis of the preexisting literature on the subject.

Klein’s Analysis of the Etiology of Female Crime Klein’s unapologetic attack on some of the key theorists in the field was probably regarded as shocking (and disrespectful) by those criminologists who had never thought to question the discipline’s male bias or antiquated view of women. However, for women criminologists just entering the field in the 1970s—and for some male sympathizers—her article was a breath of fresh air. Klein challenged the discipline to face its androcentrism in trying to explain crime, and she provided the kick start needed for a budding feminist revolution in criminology. She pointedly noted that all the writers she reviewed, though they differed in their theoretical orientations and offered a variety of solutions for female offending, eventually resorted to recommendations for individual adjustment on the part of the female offender. Never did these writers suggest that political, economic, or social change were implicated in the ills faced by real female offenders. Most of these scholars never even acknowledged that female offenders were then (as now) predominantly poor and minority. Instead, most referred to, and sometimes glowingly extolled, white middle-class standards for femininity. Indeed, Klein was the first feminist scholar to note that most theorists who had tackled the subject of female offending presumed “two

502

Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime

distinct classes of women: good women who are ‘normal’ noncriminals, and bad women who are criminals” (p. 325). Klein observed that this neat bifurcation of womanhood—which Clarice Feinman later described as the “Madonna-Whore Duality”—essentially allowed these scholars to assert “a moral position that often masquerades as a scientific distinction” (p. 325). Klein expended her most detailed analysis on the most prominent theorists who tackled the subject of women and crime. She began with a critique of Lombroso’s The Female Offender, which set forth a largely biological explanation of crime. Though Lombroso had previously advanced a theory of crime as the product of atavism (e.g., criminals as evolutionary throwbacks), women offenders did not actually fit his theory very well. Nonetheless, he asserted that female atavistic criminals were masculinized and often worse than male offenders. Klein then explains that W. I. Thomas, in his works on Sex and Society and The Unadjusted Girl, seemed to abandon such biological explanations by offering a theory of female delinquency as a “normal” reaction to social constraints. However, Klein notes that Thomas asserted that the solution for women unhappy with their social roles was to reform women’s attitudes, not change the restrictive roles assigned to women. Similarly, Sigmund Freud, in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, saw women as essentially inferior to men and behaving delinquently when they fought against their feminine roles and tried to act like men. Again, Klein asserts, Freud thought that women should be helped to adjust to their proper feminine social roles and responsibilities. Klein saw the work of Kingsley Davis, in his classic article “Prostitution,” as growing out of the work of Freud and Thomas but defining delinquent women as taking an illegal route to their feminine roles. In Klein’s analysis of Otto Pollak’s The Criminality of Women, she acknowledged that it clearly had had a huge impact on the subject. One of Pollak’s key contributions was the idea that women engaged in “masked” crime, made possible by their roles as housewives, domestics, teachers, and nurses. Thus, Pollak thought that the uneven crime statistics misrepresented the facts. Men and women committed crime equally, he thought, but women were more likely to successfully hide their offenses. Pollak also thought that women were the

lucky recipients of chivalry from the criminal justice system. While Klein acknowledged that there was some truth to these ideas, she rejected these explanations as fully accounting for the differences between male and female criminals. After all, chivalry is not generally extended to poor or minority offenders, who compose the bulk of those processed by the system. In the final analysis, Klein asserted, Pollak viewed criminal women as manipulative, treacherous, or mentally ill, whether they got away with their crimes or not. In the last section of her article, Klein noted that the contemporary writers of that period (she focused on works by Gisela Konopka; Clyde Vedder and Dora Somerville; and John Cowie, Valerie Cowie, and Eliot Slater) were apt to view women as offending or inadequate no matter what they did. For each of these scholars, Klein observed, “if they are violent, they are ‘masculine’ and suffering from chromosomal deficiencies, penis envy, or atavisms. If they conform, they are manipulative, sexually maladjusted and promiscuous” (p. 334). Against a male standard of “normality,” no woman was likely to measure up.

Conclusion Though criminology often dates its origins to the late 1700s and the writings of Cesare Beccaria, a review of the contents of modern criminological theory textbooks reveals that the majority of recognized theorists have been male scholars attempting to explain male crime. The recognition that women might bring different experiences, motives, and reactions to their offending (or victimization or employment) than do men came relatively late. The understanding of the implications of this neglect for the field of theoretical criminology— that a body of theory which only explained half of the human race was insufficient—came even later. Remarkably, Klein was still in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1970s when she became one of the first scholars to challenge this disciplinary gap, and to call for a critical reexamination of the ways theorists had described and explained women offenders. Her critical review of the works of theoretical leaders permitted readers to see through the implicit—and sometimes explicit—sexism of their views about women offenders. Klein’s article was an invitation

Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization

to reconsider everything we thought we knew at the time about why people commit crime. Christine E. Rasche See also Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime; Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman; Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender; Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology; Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl

References and Further Readings Adler, F. (1975). Sisters in crime: The rise of the new female criminal. New York: McGraw-Hill. Belknap, J. (2007). The invisible woman: Gender, crime, and justice (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Bertrand, M. A. (1967). The myth of sexual equality before the law. In Proceedings of the Fifth Research Conference on Delinquency and Criminality (pp. 129–161). Montreal: Quebec Society of Criminology. Cowie, J., Cowie, V. & Slater, E. (1968). Delinquency in girls. London: Heinemann. Davis, K. (1937). The sociology of prostitution. American Sociological Review, 2(5), 744–755. Einstadter, W. J., & Henry, S. (2006). Criminological theory (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Feinman, C. (1986). Women in the criminal justice system (2nd ed.). New York: Praeger. Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton. Giallombardo, R. (1966). Society of women: A study of a women’s prison. New York: Wiley. Heidensohn, F. M. (1968). The deviance of women: A critique and enquiry. British Journal of Sociology, 19, 160–175. Klein, D. (1973). The etiology of female crime: A review of the literature. Issues in Criminology, 8(2), 3–30. Reprinted in Jacoby, J. (Ed.). (2004). Classics of criminology (3rd ed., pp. 325–335). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Konopka, G. (1966). The adolescent girl in conflict. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lombroso, C. (1903). The female offender (W. Ferrero, Trans.). New York: Appleton. Morash, M. (2006). Understanding gender, crime and justice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pollak, O. (1950). The criminality of women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rafter, N. H. (Ed.). (2000). Encyclopedia of women and crime. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

503

Simon, R. (1975). Women and crime. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath. Thomas, W. I. (1907). Sex and society. Boston: Little, Brown. Thomas, W. I. (1923). The unadjusted girl. New York: Harper and Row. Vedder, C., & Somerville, D. (1970). The delinquent girl. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas. Vold, G. B., Bernard, T. J., & Snipes, J. B. (2002). Theoretical criminology (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press Ward, D., & Kassebaum, G. G. (1965). Women’s prison: Sex and social structure. Chicago: Aldine.

Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization Arguably, there is no topic in criminology as saturated with stereotypes and misinformation in the general public as the subject of gangs and gang activity. Gangs are frequently characterized in media reports as highly structured, hierarchically organized, tightly cohesive groups of individuals that overwhelm our neighborhoods and cities with drugs and violence. Rarely do these reports cha­llenge boilerplate depictions of gangs. How­ ever, stereotypical portrayals are at considerable odds with research findings from nearly a century of academic study on gangs and gang activity. In the experienced view of two gang researchers, Cheryl L. Maxson and Malcolm W. Klein, “The public image of gangs has been almost totally unaffected by research carried out during the past century” (2002, p. 244). This entry provides an overview of a structural typology of gangs. Introduced by preeminent gang scholars Klein and Maxson, this typology illustrates (and explains) considerable diversity and variation across gangs, and in so doing forcefully refutes a one-dimensional and superficial portrayal of gangs. This entry is divided into two main parts. In the first section, the issue of how to define the term gang is briefly reviewed. For a subject matter mired in so much definitional controversy, it is

504

Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization

inarguably necessary to begin here. The second section discusses Klein and Maxson’s structural typology of gangs and summarizes the various gang types they identify.

Gang Definitional Issues How does one define the term gang? This question has proved cumbersome for gang scholars for many decades. To date, efforts to achieve a standardized definition that is universally accepted and applied have been unsuccessful. Klein and Maxson advocate the use of the term street gang, which they define as “any durable, street-oriented youth group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of its group identity” (2006, p. 4). They note that their definition is intentionally parsimonious, representing a “consensus nominal definition . . . [resulting from] intense discussions among working groups of American and European gang researchers over a six-year period” (Klein, 2007, p. 18). Dissecting the definition further, Klein and Maxson state that their definition attaches some degree of permanence to the group—not the individuals themselves, who continuously join and leave the gang—giving it durability over time. Further, it underscores the fact that gangs operate largely in public places (i.e., street-oriented), comprising mostly but not exclusively juveniles and young adults. Purposefully absent in their definition are the usual characteristics, or “descriptors” as Klein and Maxson refer to them, of gangs: age, gender, ethnicity, territoriality, crime patterns and orientation, leadership, hierarchical and organized structure, gang names, clothing, tattoos, hand signs, and other symbols. Klein and Maxson argue these are “variables that help us capture variations across gangs, but they are not necessary definers of a street gang” (2006, p. 4). Also, their definition intentionally excludes other, more formal crime groups such as motorcycle gangs, prison gangs, hate or ideology groups, or other exclusively adult gangs. And importantly it also excludes informal delinquent youth groups—after all, most delinquency is group delinquency. One of the most debated issues in constructing a gang definition concerns whether to include criminal activity in the definition itself. The argument against inclusion says this effectively presents

a circular argument, or tautology—that is, the definition includes the very behavior that is to be studied. Klein and Maxson argue for the inclusion of illegal activity in the definition, and rebut the tautological claim by pointing out that gangs vary tremendously in their involvement in crime and violence. For Klein and Maxson, these are variables to be investigated, modeled, and explained. As explicated by Klein, “It’s not a matter of studying whether crime exists in the gang but how much is committed (and how it develops, how it differs, what effect it has on the members, and so on)” (1995, p. 26).

A Structural Typology of Gangs Four decades ago, Klein remarked that it is “abundantly clear that the gang does not exist; rather gangs come in a wide variety of forms” (1971, p. 80, emphasis in the original). Over the years gang researchers have constructed numerous typologies, the vast majority of which are oriented around behavioral components of gangs, most notably criminal behaviors. Common to these typologies are names such as “violent gangs,” “delinquent gangs,” “criminal gangs,” and “fighting gangs.” Klein and Maxson dispute the viability of these typologies because they fatally overlook a central and enduring finding in gang research: Gangs engage in cafeteria-style offending. That is, gangs engage in all sorts of different types of crimes; they do not specialize (with the exception of one type, discussed below) but instead have a very versatile criminal repertoire. Thefts, alcohol and drug use, fighting, graffiti, status offenses, and vandalism are much more common among the variety of crimes gang members commit, while violence and other serious crime occur much less frequently. For Klein and Maxson, it is this very point that leaves behavioralbased gang typologies flawed: “Given the absence of [crime] specialization, it is illogical to propose that gangs be delimited by any predominant crime pattern” (2006, p. 171). In contrast, Klein and Maxson advocate a typology based on a structural framework, or one that looks for patterns and clusters among descriptive characteristics common to all gangs: membership size, demographic composition, duration, subgrouping, age range in membership, territoriality, and, although not exclusively so, crime patterns. As

Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization

they note, “It is surprising how little attention has been paid to the variety of gang structures, particularly in reference to crime patterns that might be associated with different gang structures” (Maxson & Klein, 1995, p. 33). Using descriptive gang data gathered in the 1990s from a large-scale sample of police gang experts, Klein and Maxson developed a theoretical framework of gang structure and organization by utilizing an inductive reasoning approach for uncovering general patterns among their data observations (i.e., general principals developed from specific observations). The following summarizes the typical characteristics of each of the five gang types they identified and their prevalence across the country (see also Table 1). First, the traditional gang, as suggested by its name, is the oldest and exhibits characteristics probably most familiar to the general public. It has existed for at least 20 years—with some going back much further—and during that time has grown very large with hundreds of members and developed a more diversified structure than the other types. Typically, it has a wide age range of members from pre-teens into the 30s, has identifiable and ongoing subgroups (or cliques) within the gang, and is territorial in nature in that the gang identifies with a particular geographic area (e.g.,

505

turf, hood, barrio) claiming it as their own and defending it. With a long history and ongoing turf disputes, these gangs are most likely to have garnered considerable attention by law enforcement and the media. Previous academic research on gangs has almost exclusively covered these types of gangs. However, this type of gang was the second least prevalent in Klein and Maxson’s study. Second, the neotraditional gang, existing for less than a decade, has not developed fully into the traditional gang, but shares many of its characteristics. As in its larger counterpart, there is subgrouping within the gang by age (or sometimes neighborhood) and oftentimes but not necessarily a strong sense of territoriality. Whether this type of gang will eventually develop into a traditional gang will be determined by many factors. But given the above average number of members, it clearly poses the greatest potential over the other types to do so over time. This type was the second most common in Klein and Maxson’s study. Third, the compressed gang has been around only briefly—less than 10 years but maybe only for 1 or 2—containing a small number of members who are roughly the same age, thus little subgrouping is evident. No pattern is evident for territoriality; some of these gangs are territorial

Table 1   Characteristics and Prevalence of Klein and Maxson’s Five Gang Types Type

Subgroups

Size

Age Range

Duration

Territorial

Crime Versatility

Traditional

Yes

Large (> 100)

Wide (20-30 years)

Long (> 20 years)

Yes

Yes

Neotraditional

Yes

Medium-Large (> 50)

(no pattern)

Short (< 10 years)

Yes

Yes

Compressed

No

Small (< 50)

Narrow (< 10 years)

Short (< 10 years)

(no pattern)

Yes

Collective

No

Medium-Large (> 50)

Medium-Wide Medium (> 10 years) (10-15 years)

(no pattern)

Yes

Specialty

No

Small (< 50)

Narrow (< 10 years)

Yes

No

Short (< 10 years)

Source: Klein, M. W., & Maxson, C. L. (2006). Street gang patterns and policies. New York: Oxford University Press. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. www.oup.com.

506

Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization

and others are not. This type of gang was decidedly the most prevalent in Klein and Maxson’s study. Fourth, the collective gang is most like the compressed gang, but has existed for a longer time period (between 10 and 15 years) and, in so doing, has a wider age range and larger number of members. Conspicuously, however, this type of gang has not developed subgroups and thus remains a large, amorphous group with little internal structure. This type of gang was least prevalent in Klein and Maxson’s study, and was referred to by the authors as being more of a residual category of gangs that did not fit in the other gang types. Fifth, the specialty gang is likely to receive attention from published and broadcast media because it alone possesses one characteristic stereotypically attributed to all gangs: a cohesive and organized structure. The more organized nature of this type of gang is linked to its small number of members who are of similar age. Unlike all others, this type of gang is the exception to cafeteria-style offending patterns. They do tend to specialize in offending and are criminally focused in nature, and they are typically identified by it. Examples include drug gangs, burglary gangs, and car theft gangs. Klein and Maxson conducted a follow-up study 4 years afterward to determine the level of stability of these gangs—that is, whether they had transformed into other types or dissipated entirely. Their findings underscore a surprisingly high degree of change in form for the identified gangs. Overall, just one-third of the gangs retained their original form or type over the short time span, while almost half of them changed from one gang type to another. Most stable over time were traditional gangs and compressed gangs, with collective gangs being the most transitional; nearly all changed form. Perhaps even more striking is that the remainder (about one-fifth) of the gangs in the original study had become nonexistent. These gangs simply dissolved, disbanded, or otherwise became inactive in just a few short years.

Conclusion Klein and Maxson’s typology not only furthers our understanding of and appreciation for the variation across gangs in the United States, but it also

raises a new set of questions for research inquiry. Two topics of future research inquiry are clearly evident in their findings. First, most of the research knowledge of gangs is based on studies of traditional gangs, but these gangs are not the most prominent in the nation; in fact, they compose but a small percentage of the total. Naturally, for a broader understanding of gangs, much more research is needed on the two types—compressed and neotraditional—that are the most common. Second, given the high degree of transformation for gangs over time, there is a clear need for more longitudinal gang research at the group level of analysis, in contrast to the considerable amount of gang research on gang members at the individual level. Group processes and dynamics are unmistakably the least studied—and therefore least understood—aspect of the whole of gang research. Before one can meaningfully discuss and explain gangs and their activities—or develop successful responses—one first must be able to offer descriptive characteristics of them with some precision. As expressed by Maxson and Klein (1995, p. 34), “if gangs can be differentiated with respect to a few predominant structural types, then differential intervention and control practices may be developed (and presumably will thereby be more effective.” The gang typology put forth by these highly regarded gang scholars solidly advances the pursuit of that goal. Arlen Egley, Jr. See also Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Island in the Street; Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing; Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes; Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang

References and Further Readings Klein, M. W. (1971). Street gangs and street workers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Klein, M. W. (1995). The American street gang: Its nature, prevalence, and control. New York: Oxford University Press. Klein, M. W. (2004). Gang cop: The words and ways of officer Paco Domingo. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime Klein, M. W. (2007). Chasing after street gangs: A fortyyear journey. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Klein, M. W., & Maxson, C. L. (2006). Street gang patterns and policies. New York: Oxford University Press. Maxson, C. L., & Klein, M. W. (1995). Investigating gang structures. Journal of Gang Research, 3, 33–40. Maxson, C. L., & Klein, M. W. (2002). “Play groups” no longer. In M. J. Dear (Ed.), From Chicago to L.A.: Making sense of urban theory (pp. 239–266). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Spergel, I. A. (1995). The youth gang problem. New York: Oxford University Press. Starbuck, D., Howell, J. C., & Lindquist, D. J. (2001). Hybrid and other modern gangs (Juvenile Justice Bulletin, Youth Gang Series). Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency prevention. Weisel, D. L. (2002). The evolution of street gangs: An examination of form and variation. In W. L. Reed & S. H. Decker (Eds.), Responding to gangs: Evaluation and research (pp. 25–65). Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.

Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime Solomon Kobrin was a neighborhoods and crime scholar who worked in the tradition of the Chicago social ecology school. His work with Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay was important for furthering social disorganization theory, a key theory in the community crime literature during the 20th century. His theoretical developments expanded the cultural side of social disorganization theory while providing cogent critiques for the theory; his empirical work demonstrated a rare longitudinal perspective; and his applied work with the Chicago Area Project involved him deeply in his community. Social disorganization theory originally rested on two causal mechanisms: differential social organization (informal social control) and differential systems of values (cultural transmission). Although much contemporary social disorganization research focuses on the former mechanism, Kobrin’s theoretical contributions fall largely within the latter. Kobrin (1951) viewed delinquency in socially disorganized communities as

507

normative behavior within an alternative criminal value system. However, most juveniles in these communities were not “delinquent” or “nondelinquent,” but maintained ties to both worlds. As they aged, juveniles eventually developed closer ties to one value system than another, thus drawing them further into either conventional or criminal values. Kobrin (1951) saw this process operating differently in different types of neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods maintained a close integration between the conventional and criminal worlds— delinquency in these neighborhoods was systematic and structured. Since leaders of conventional community institutions also engaged in profitable illegal activities, they were able to model status achievement and teach this deviant culture to younger generations. Delinquency was integrated into the normative neighborhood social structure. Other neighborhoods, notably those impacted by radical demographic transitions, had no stable social structure (deviant or otherwise) that would provide upward mobility to juveniles. Adult criminality was thus decoupled from the juvenile social learning process, although juveniles still absorbed a general contempt for the law. Delinquency manifested itself “chaotically” in a “battle against all forms of constraint” (Kobrin, 1951, p. 659), demonstrating the tension between conventional and criminal cultures. While Kobrin contributed to the development of social disorganization theory, he also identified some of its shortcomings. Kobrin’s 1971 critique raised many issues that remain important in contemporary disorganization research, such as the measurement of “ability to solve communal problems” (analogous to collective efficacy). Turning the theory around, he observed that “social organization” is also hard to measure; homogeneity, for example, ostensibly a community strength, also describes ethnic and racial ghettos. Finally, he called attention to reciprocal effects. Disorganization may cause crime, but crime may also lead to disorganization. He returned to this theme in later research projects. The Chicago Area Project (CAP) was Shaw’s delinquency prevention policy intervention, which addressed specifically the integration and organization of the community. Kobrin directed the CAP for 18 years, attempting to strengthen its

508

Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory

constituent communities by aiding local members in organizing recreation activities, neighborhood action groups, and community welfare programs targeted at delinquents, gangs, and parolees. Juveniles enact delinquency within a neighborhood context and in relation to the individuals in their social world, reasoned Kobrin in 1959; accordingly, any remedy to the problem must occur within that context and incorporate the local population into its design and execution. The CAP programs were designed collaboratively to address community needs, yet function autonomously. While in “The Chicago Area Project: A 25-Year Assessment,” Kobrin personally attested to the fulfillment of the process goals of the CAP, an independent impact evaluation was never conducted. One of the last key research projects for Kobrin occurred after he moved to the University of Southern California and co-authored an important paper with Leo Schuerman studying the presence of delinquents in Los Angeles neighborhoods between 1950 and 1970. In contrast to much social disorganization research employing crosssectional data (a snapshot of a neighborhood at one point in time), this project focused on the neighborhood longitudinally, tracking change over time. By studying the dynamic neighborhood characteristics that affect the geographic distribution of adolescents, Schuerman and Kobrin were able to better understand how neighborhoods change. A second important contribution of the paper was its taxonomical approach. Schuerman and Kobrin developed a taxonomy breaking relatively disadvantaged neighborhoods into three types: (1) emerging (increased from low to moderate levels of delinquents over the study period), (2) transitional (moving from moderately high level of delinquents to an even higher level), (3) enduring (high level of delinquents throughout the study period). More recent studies have used even more sophisticated statistical approaches to categorize neighborhoods based on their change over time. Finally, recalling Kobrin’s 1971 critique, the paper addressed reverse causality: levels of crime in neighborhoods might change the neighborhood’s structural characteristics. For instance, they found that although low socio-economic status (SES) neighborhoods at the beginning of the decade had more delinquents residing in them by the end of the decade, neighborhoods with more

delinquents at the beginning of the decade had lower SES at the end of the decade. Furthermore, neighborhoods with more delinquents experienced an increase in minority residents by the end of the 1950s. Scholars continue to study these possible reciprocal effects in other settings. John R. Hipp and Aaron Roussell See also Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures

References and Further Readings Griffiths, E., & Chavez, J. M. (2004). Communities, street guns and homicide trajectories in Chicago, 1980–1995: Merging methods for examining homicide trends across space and time. Criminology, 42, 941–978. Kobrin, S. (1951). The conflict of values in delinquency areas. American Sociological Review, 16, 653–661. Kobrin, S. (1959). The Chicago Area Project: A 25-year assessment. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 322, 19–29. Kobrin, S. (1971). The formal logical properties of the Shaw-McKay delinquency theory. In H. L. Voss & D. M. Petersen (Eds.), Ecology, crime, and delinquency (pp. 101–132). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Liska, A. E., & Bellair, P. E. (1995). Violent-crime rates and racial composition: Convergence over time. American Journal of Sociology, 101(3), 578–610. Schuerman, L., & Kobrin, S. (1986). Community careers in crime. In A. J. Reiss, Jr. & M. Tonry (Eds.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 8, pp. 67–100). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1969). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas: A study of rates of delinquency in relation to differential characteristics of local communities in American cities (Rev. ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1942)

Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory Lawrence Kohlberg’s interest in moral decision making began with strong questions about why the German citizenry did not protest Nazi atrocities committed against Jewish and other minority

Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory

populations during the 1930s and 1940s. With colleagues at Harvard University, this inquiry later expanded to a body of research and theory on the broader realm of moral decision making, or individual perceptions of justice, responsibility, fairness, and right courses of actions. This work is most noted for conceptualizing moral decision making according to a series of developmental stages that evolve to varying degrees over the course of a lifetime. Kohlberg’s theory of moral development is consistent with both ego and cognitive psychology. With psychodynamic ego developmental psychologists (e.g., Jane Loevinger), Kohlberg shared the notion that the ego becomes more mature with age. With cognitive psychologists (e.g., Jean Piaget), his writings held that the structure of one’s reasoning or thought processes is fairly consistent across situations. Thus, if one type of moral decision (e.g., whether to steal) is viewed in self-serving, instrumental ways, other decisions will be justified in a similar manner. Piaget and Kohlberg also asserted that these cognitive templates (of sorts) changed with the evolution of one’s perspective-taking abilities. Piaget’s work, however, focused upon children, whereas Kohlberg’s developmental perspective extended across the life span. The development theorists mentioned above shared the following notions of stages of cognitive or ego development:

1. Development involves changes in cognitive structures or qualitative patterns of cognition. Structures also have been referred to as stages, levels, types, and so on; and they range in complexity from concrete (good or bad; black or white) to very complex reasoning patterns, where the decision maker may “walk around a situation,” seeing it from the perspective of others, trying to resolve it for the good of most individuals involved, or trying to understand what the decision would be absent any self-interest.



2. Development occurs through an invariant sequence of stages which is the same for all persons.



3. Development occurs along a continuum in which the structures become increasingly more differentiated and complex.



4. Stages are clustered wholes. The underlying logic used in forming perceptions and making

509

choices, in other words, appears to be similar across situations. Although the subject of the actual choices may differ, the structure of the cognitive processes is the same across situations.

5. Stages are hierarchical integrations. Individuals comprehend all stages below their functional level of moral judgment.



6. Development can cease at any point along a continuum of stages. Therefore, individuals differ from one another according to the complexity of their reasoning, and theoretically, a cross-section of the population would show a distribution of persons at all stages.

Stages of Moral Development Kohlberg’s theory of moral development dealt with a narrow component of ego and cognitive development, the hierarchical sequence of structures relating to moral decision making. On this continuum, there are three levels of reasoning: preconventional, conventional, and post-conventional. Each level comprises two stages. A brief overview of the stage characteristics follows. I. Pre-Conventional Reasoning

Stage 1. Moral decision making involves blind obedience to authority in order to avoid punishment, defer to power or prestige, avoid trouble, or obtain rewards. The interests of other individuals are not recognized. Stage 2. A “right” course of action at this stage is predicated upon such instrumental considerations as the avoidance of punishment and the furtherance of one’s own self-interests. The attainment of these objectives, however, engages one in exchanges and deals with other persons. Thus, others are important only in an instrumental sense, as parties to such a deal. II. Conventional Reasoning

Stage 3. Moral reasoning is internally motivated by loyalty to other people and by a desire to live up to what is expected by significant others. Reasoning at this stage reflects an application of the Golden Rule philosophy.

510

Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory

Stage 4. Decisions reflect a desire to maintain such social institutions as the family, the community, and the country as social systems. The roles and rules of these systems are important for their function in maintaining such systems. III. Post-Conventional Reasoning

Stage 5. Moral reasoning adheres to the utilitarian notion of a social contract or the need to weigh certain rights, values, and legal principles against the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Sometimes these considerations may override respect for laws and social conventions. Stage 6. Such ethical principles of justice as the right to life and respect for the dignity of other persons as ends rather than means are used to generate moral decisions. These principles are maintained to exist in a consistent and universal manner that is exclusive of laws or circumstances. Followers have changed these stages somewhat. James Rest developed a four-component model. John Gibbs, Arnold Goldstein, and Barry Glick utilized more simplified versions to better accommodate use of the theory in correctional environments.

Research Evidence A large body of research supporting the implications of the theory emerged during the late 1970s and 1980s. For example, the stages were found to be relevant to (1) one’s thought processes in deciding whether and under what circumstances police officers should use deadly force (Scharf et al., 1979); (2) disapproval of the Watergate conspirators (Candee, 1975); (3) justifications for capital punishment (Kohlberg & Elsenbein, 1981); (4) decisions regarding when to disobey the authority of a commanding officer (Candee, 1976). Theological scholars later explored the theory’s relevance to personal conceptualizations of faith and spirituality (Fowler, 1981; Marion, 2000). Most of these studies placed special focus on the higher stages of moral judgment, and found that individuals at the higher stages, usually stage 5, were more likely than those at lower stages to support actions which were more consistent with the rights and well-being of others. Moreover,

individuals assessed at higher stages tended to support such principled stances, even in situations that provided no incentive or perhaps even punished one for doing so. The relevance of moral development theory to the criminal acts of adult and juvenile offenders attended little to the behavior and cognitions of those at the higher stages of the moral development continuum. Across studies, offenders were typically found to be at least one stage lower in their moral reasoning than non-offenders. Juvenile delinquents were predominately found to be assessed at stage 2, or in a transition point between stages 2 and 3; as such their viewpoints were predominated by world views associated with egocentric perspective taking, exploitive relationships with others, and limited considerations for conventional norms. Research on a group of adult offenders ordered by courts to pay financial restitution to their victims found that many were assessed to be at lower stages of moral judgment. Even so, it also reported that the demarcation between those classified at stage 3 and above and those at lower stages was meaningful. Thus, individuals at stage 3 and higher were significantly more likely to value restitution as a vehicle of reparation; for this higher-staged group, restitution assuaged guilt and restored the ethical imbalance between victim and offender. When asked to define what their restitution meant to them, offenders classified at stages 1 and 2 tended to see it as “a deal,” one which brought them a lesser sentence; victims were seldom mentioned. Patricia Van Voorhis found that offenders assessed at higher stages were significantly more likely to successfully reimburse their victims. Implications of such findings appear to be highly relevant to restorative justice programs, according to Lois Presser and Van Voorhis. The relevance of stages 1 and 2 to long-standing definitions of psychopathy was observed by Joan McCord. As noted in the stage descriptions above, the pre-conventional level of moral judgment does not describe any internalized concern for others. Behaviors and thought processes reflect a very concrete and hedonistic perspective for rewards and punishments and a self-centered approach to “what’s in it for me.” These traits fit the psychopathic characteristics put forward by Hervey Cleckley, David Lykken, and others.

Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory

Current Application of Moral Development Theory Although the moral development perspective was supported by many empirical studies, the popularity of the theory was later supplanted by social learning, cognitive-behavioral, and neurological approaches to criminal behavior. Kohlberg and his associates maintained that development in moral reasoning occurred through exposure to environments that challenge existing ways of thinking, as when adherence to an ancient creed simply does not help us to cope with a new experience or when the well-reasoned challenge of another individual causes us to re-evaluate our definitions of events. This is not inconsistent with social learning theories that maintain that individuals learn by imitating and being reinforced or punished by others in social situations or being consistently parented by good role models with an understanding for role modeling, monitoring, and contingencies. More­ over, this learning process extends to the learning of cognitions and cognitive processes. Although more recent social learning and cognitive-­behavioral theorists might see thinking patterns as more malleable than Kohlberg, neurological and brain sciences would surely go far toward formulating alternative explanations for cognitive stability. The Kohlberg approach to moral reasoning was directly challenged by one of his associates, Carol Gilligan. In one of the earliest works of feminist psychology, Gilligan faulted Kohlberg and associates for a biased account of the moral development of females. Other works in psychology, medicine, sociology, and education have certainly been faulted for a similar shortcoming, but Gilligan most effectively called attention to the fact that Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, the stages of moral development, and all of the treatment implications that followed from it were based upon studies of boys and generalized to girls with little to no research support. She then showed in a study of university women that in contrast to men, women maintained a focus on relationships throughout the developmental continuum of three stages. The latter two, in particular, find women and girls very focused upon their relationships with others but in earlier stages caring and concern for others overshadows women’s sense of responsibility to themselves. By the final

511

stage, the self and responsibility to the self is reintegrated with responsibility and caring for others. According to Gilligan, women in this final stage of development were acutely focused on their relationships, but also recognize that they cannot be responsible or caring toward others without taking care of themselves. While one looks hard to find ongoing scholarship regarding moral development as a theory of crime causation, the same cannot be said for its use in correctional treatment. The Center for Moral Education at Harvard University formulated the Just Community approach during the early 1970s and applied it primarily to schoolchildren. Writings on moral development asserted that exposure to fair and participatory environments promoted moral development. For that reason, the Just Community interventions provided children exposure to the prosocial moral reasoning of others. Group discussions typically centered on a moral dilemma. The moral dilemmas may seem familiar. The lifeboat dilemma posed questions about what should be done when only a few passengers in an overcrowded lifeboat had any chance of surviving. The Heinz dilemma discussed the permissibility of stealing in order to save someone’s life. Facilitators carefully guided discussions so that individuals exchanged viewpoints with those at closely contiguous stages of moral reasoning. Dilemmas could also be structured to reflect actual dilemmas experienced by the group or descriptive of their school environment. The Just Community interventions were also implemented in prisons, such as the Connecticut Reformatory and the Niantic Connecticut State Farm for Women and the Florida Department of Youth Services. Modest reductions in recidivism were observed along with more positive reactions to the correctional environment compared to those indicated by members of various comparison groups. Measured changes in moral judgment stage, however, seldom surpassed one-half stage, a finding that caused one of the authors to opine that it is very difficult to change entrenched structures of reasoning. Far apart from the philosophical and psychological characteristics of how individuals at stage 5 might be superior to those at stage 4, the most important goal of the correctional Just Community interventions was to try to achieve growth from

512

Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory

stage 2, pre-conventional reasoning, to the conventional reasoning of at least stage 3. Stage 3 is important, because adherence to empathic orientations begin there, as does an internalized value system and a conscience (as opposed to an external locus of control). This goal continues in more recent applications of moral development theory to correctional interventions. Current applications of moral education use the moral discussion groups and the Kohlberg developmental theory in multimodal approaches, combined with other cognitivebehavioral or social learning components. For example, vestiges of the Just Community approaches are also seen in popular anger management programs. In Arnold Gold­stein’s Aggression Replacement Training (ART), for example, use of the moral dilemmas in discussion groups in conjunction with other approaches recognizes that the moral education groups add an important values-based component to the cognitive skills and cognitive restructuring programs. ART moves through a serious of exercises to develop social skills and skills for coping with anger-provoking stimuli, but relies on the moral development component to build prosocial values. Values are internalized and with individuals on a consistent basis. Learned behaviors and cognitions, on the other hand, are vulnerable to the competing rewards associated with criminal behavior. Goldstein and Glick contend that because crime is so rewarding, one might be more likely to use a new prosocial skill if it is supported by an internalized moral argument (or conscience).

Conclusion Kohlberg’s theory of moral development put forward a series of six stages describing a developmental sequence of reasoning patterns for moral decision making. Subsequent research found empirical correspondence between assessed stages of moral development and attitudes toward a variety of moral decisions, including support for capital punishment, police officers’ use of deadly force, attitudes toward restitution, decisions to refuse to obey the orders of a commanding officer, and others. Interest in offenders centered primarily on the juncture in the stage sequence that differentiates

those with evidence of an internalized locus of control (stage 3 and above) from more self-­ centered perspectives associated with an externalized locus of control. This interest forms the foundation for a number of popular cognitivebehavioral offender therapies, including ART (an anger management program) and Moral Recon­ ation Therapy. Both have shown treatment effects with the offender population. Ongoing interest in the theory’s ability to explain offender behavior appears to be waning. The theory appears to have been supplanted by other cognitivebehavioral and neurological perspectives. Patricia Van Voorhis See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A Personal, Interpersonal, and Community-Reinforcement (PIC-R) Perspective on Criminal Conduct; Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory; Cognitive Theories of Crime; Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime; Neurology and Crime; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Andrews, D. A., & Bonta, J. (2006). The psychology of criminal conduct (4th ed.). Newark, NJ: Anderson. Bandura, A. (1979). The social learning perspective: Mechanisms of aggression. In H. Toch (Ed.), Psychology of crime and criminal justice (pp. 198–236). New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston. Candee, D. (1975). The moral psychology of Watergate. Journal of Social Issues, 31, 183–192. Candee, D. (1976). Structure and choice in moral reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 1294–1304. Cleckley, H. (1976). The mask of sanity. St. Louis, MO: Mosby. Fowler, J. (1981). Stages of faith. New York: HarperCollins. Gilligan, C. (1986). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldstein, A., & Glick, B. (1998). Aggression replacement training: A comprehensive intervention for aggressive youth (Rev. ed.). Champaign, IL: Research Press.

Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency Hickey, J., & Scharf, P. (1980). Toward a just correctional system. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Jennings, W., Kilkenny, R., & Kohlberg, L. (1983). Moral development theory and practice for youthful and adult offenders. In W. Laufer & J. Day (Eds.), Personality theory, moral development (pp. 281–355). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Killen, M., & Smetana, J. (2006). Handbook of moral development. Hillsdale, NJ: Psychology Press. Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive developmental approach to socialization. In D. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory and research (pp. 347–480). Chicago: Rand McNally. Kohlberg, L., & Elsenbein, D. (1981). Capital punishment, moral development, and the constitution. In L. Kohlberg (Ed.), The philosophy of moral development (pp. 243–293). San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Kohlberg, L., Wasserman, E., & Richardson, N. (1975). The just community school: The theory and the Cambridge cluster school experiment. In L. Kohlberg (Ed.), Collected papers on moral development and moral education (Vol. 2, pp. 215–259). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Laufer, J., & Day, M. (1983). Personality theory, moral development and criminal behavior. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Loevinger, J. (1966). The meaning and measurement of ego development. American Psychologist, 21, 195–217. Lykken, D. (1995). The antisocial personalities. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Marion, J. (2000). Putting on the mind of Christ. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. McCord, J. (1983). The psychopath and moral development. In W. Laufer & J. Day (Eds.), Personality theory, moral development and criminal behavior (pp. 357–371). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Meichenbaum, D. (1977). Cognitive-behavioral modification: An integrative approach. New York: Plenum Press. Minzenberg, M., & Siever, L. (2006). Neurochemistry and pharmacology of psychopathy and related disorders. In C. Patrick (Ed.), Handbook of psychopathy (pp. 251–277). New York: Guilford. Patterson, G. (1982). A social learning approach: Coercive family process. Eugene, OR: Castalia. Piaget, J. (1948). The moral judgment of the child. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Presser, L., & Van Voorhis, P. (2002). Values and evaluation: Assessing processes and outcomes of restorative justice programs. Crime and Delinquency, 48, 162–188.

513

Raine, A. (1993). The psychopathology of crime: Criminal behavior as a clinical disorder. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Scharf, P., Linninger, R., & Marrero, D. (1979). The use of deadly force by police officers in a democratic society. In F. Meyer & R. Baker (Eds.), Determinants of law enforcement policies (pp. 87–98). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Sullivan, C., Grant, M., & Grant, D. (1957). The development of interpersonal maturity: An application to delinquency. Psychiatry, 20, 373–385. Van Voorhis, P. (1985). Restitution outcomes and probationers’ assessments of restitution: The effects of moral development. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 12, 259–287.

Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency Most classic criminology books outline an original theory of crime. Social Sources of Delinquency does not, but it maintains an important place in criminology for other reasons. Foremost, Ruth Rosner Kornhauser’s book provides a unique and controversial classification of the major sociological explanations of delinquency. Her categorization of theory is unique because of its basis in the assumptions made by theorists about human nature and social organization. Because these assumptions are not explicitly stated by theorists, Kornhauser distills “pure” models from various theoretical statements. Among other contributions, her insights about the elements of pure models helped pave the way for the rebirth of social disorganization theory in the 1980s. Kornhauser’s work is controversial in both substance and style. First, by introducing the term cultural deviance into the lexicon of criminological theory, Kornhauser helped to spark a rather contentious debate among criminological theorists. Adding fuel to this fire is Kornhauser’s writing style, which some consider provocative and sarcastic. Her mocking tone is most apparent in her fight against the view, prevalent in her time, that all cultural norms and values are relative. Social Sources of Delinquency is also a classic because it remains Kornhauser’s final theoretical statement. Kornhauser suffered a serious stroke

514

Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency

prior to the first publication of this book in 1978. Aside from a paperback version of Social Sources published in 1984, her medical condition precluded participation in further theoretical debate. Kornhauser died in 1995. Ironically, the organization of sociological theory outlined in her book may have had its greatest impact in the 1960s, prior to the book’s publication in 1978. There is little doubt that Kornhauser’s insights, contained in an unpublished manuscript titled “Theoretical Issues in the Sociological Study of Juvenile Delinquency,” helped provide the intellectual foundation for Travis Hirschi’s Causes of Delinquency. This now classic statement of his informal control theory opens with a chapter titled “Perspectives on Delinquency.” Here, Hirschi identifies three fundamental perspectives on delinquency that dominate sociological inquiry, citing Kornhauser’s paper frequently and using her language.

The Social Disorganization Model Kornhauser describes two opposing perspectives on crime: social disorganization and cultural deviance. Social disorganization models share three major assumptions: “man has a human nature, socialization can never be perfect, and cultural variability has some limits” (Kornhuaser, 1978, p. 38). Theorists in this tradition portray humans as hedonistic and utilitarian, and therefore difficult to socialize. Combined with the fact that some social disorganization (which interferes with socialization) is present in all societies, socialization is never perfect. The idea that cultural variability has limits is a central theme in the book. Kornhauser argues that all cultures share some basic common values, especially those that the criminal law protects. “The definition of a group—a number of people capable of concerted action for common ends—implies some consensus. No human group could come into existence, let alone survive, that tolerated uncontrolled theft, assault, or murder” (Kornhauser, 1978, p. 40, emphasis in the original). To Kornhauser, both social control theory and strain/anomie theory are variants of the social disorganization model. Strain models focus on how social disorganization facilitates pressures (i.e., strains) to engage in crime. In Robert Merton’s strain theory, the push toward delinquency originates from the

inability to legitimately achieve cultural values (e.g., the American Dream). Individuals are initially successfully socialized to strive for economic success through legitimate channels (work, education). American culture, however, stresses whether one achieves success more than how one achieves success. Additionally, American social structure is characterized by a lower class with limited opportunities to achieve financial success. This combination of blocked opportunities and a weak cultural emphasis on the use of legitimate means to achieve produces pressure to achieve at any cost. Control models assume that strain is relatively constant across people—everyone has unfulfilled wants. Since criminal means are often the quickest, easiest way to fulfill wants and needs, there is plenty of motivation to engage in crime. Instead, control models focus on why, given this motivation, individuals refrain from crime. The answer is that direct (e.g., parental supervision), indirect (e.g., social bonds), or internal (e.g., self-control) social controls prevent humans from fulfilling wants through criminal behavior. Kornhauser identifies Fredrick Thrasher as a pure control theorist. Accordingly, Thrasher’s 1927 study of gangs in Chicago is used to highlight elements of a pure control theory. Briefly, Thrasher contends that gangs arise where there are transitions, “occurring in slums characterized by physical deterioration, rapid succession of inhabitants, mobility, and disorganization; along economic and ecological boundaries; along political frontiers; during certain wars; on the high seas; and during adolescence, an interstitial period between childhood and maturity” (Kornhauser, 1978, p. 51). The common thread across such transitions is the weakening of social controls. Social disorganization, because it weakens social institutions, impedes social control. Modern theorists typically see strain and social control theories as much more different than alike. Hirschi (1969) insists that their underlying assumptions are very different. Strain theories imply that humans are “good” and will only be deviant when they are sufficiently motivated (strained). Social control theory implies that hedonistic and selfserving humans must continually be controlled so that they do not use delinquency to fulfill their wants. Kornhauser maintained both types of theories under the rubric of social disorganization, and

Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency

she distinguished them from what she called cultural deviance theories.

The Cultural Deviance Model The cultural deviance model appears to have been distilled primarily from the work of Edwin Sutherland (differential association theory) and Thorsten Sellin (culture conflict theory). The underlying assumptions of the cultural deviance model are the reverse of those listed for social disorganization: “man has no nature, socialization is perfectly successful, and cultural variability is unlimited” (Kornhauser, 1978, p. 34). The work of Sutherland and Sellin generally assert that delinquency results from adequate socialization to values that encourage delinquency rather than from inadequate socialization to values that discourage delinquency. Sellin’s culture conflict theory suggests that socialization to the norms of one’s culture may produce crime when those norms contradict a larger culture. Writing in the United States after a great period of immigration, his classic example is the Sicilian father in New Jersey who murders the youth who seduced his daughter. The father is surprised at his arrest because he was merely defending his family’s honor in Sicilian fashion. Conforming to the values of one culture brought him into conflict with another culture. Similarly, Sutherland refers to the “criminal tribes of India,” whose culture mandated crimes abhorred in the “legal” culture. To Kornhauser, these theories assume that there is unlimited cultural variability, especially as it relates to the definition of crime. Sutherland’s preference for differential social organization rather than social disorganization exemplifies this key difference in the perspectives. Disorganization suggests that common goals based on shared values, including the prevention of crimes, could not be realized. Differential social organization suggests that neighborhoods may be organized around different or competing values. Sutherland’s theory of differential association is used repeatedly as an example of a pure cultural deviance theory. Differential association predicts that individuals become delinquent when they are exposed to an excess of definitions unfavorable to the legal code, relative to definitions favorable to the legal code. “Definitions” include motivations

515

and rationales for engaging in crime. Kornhauser points out the underlying assumption here is that there is no discernable human nature. Humans are blank slates—their actions, motivations, wants, and needs are learned from their culture. To Kornhauser, cultural deviance theories also assume that socialization is perfect. This follows from the blank slate assumptions made about human nature and from the lack of discussion of the strength of the socialization process. In the examples of the criminal tribes of India and the Sicilian father, there is no sense that socialization to these groups would not be complete. The work of Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay illustrates Kornhauser’s logic and classification method. Shaw and McKay are typically considered the founders of social disorganization theory. Kornhauser argues that their theory is actually a mixed model that combines a pure social disorganization perspective with cultural deviance theory. Shaw and McKay contend that neighborhood social disorganization, caused by structural forces (e.g., population heterogeneity, poverty, physical decay), interferes with the ability to socialize residents. Additionally, they proposed that once crime becomes established in a geographic area, autonomous delinquent subcultures arise, which also contribute to high delinquency rates. Kornhauser believes that a theory that combines opposing assumptions is untenable. Therefore, she extracts a pure control model out of their theory by focusing only on how neighborhood disorganization harms processes of informal control. Although critical of Shaw and McKay, she saved her most fierce criticism for the subcultural theories of the 1950s and 1960s.

Theories of Subculture and Deadpan Sociology Several theories of delinquency emerged between 1950 and 1970 that sought to explain the existence and activities of gangs. The work of Albert Cohen and of Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin both emphasized how lower-class boys were motivated to alleviate the strain caused by their inability to achieve conventional success. In this paradigm, delinquent gangs were seen as subcultures where members were socialized to different norms and values. This socialization process allowed them to “achieve” new goals set forth by the gang.

516

Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape

Kornhauser believes that this image of gangs overstates their cohesion and socialization powers. Speaking to the model of Cloward and Ohlin, she notes, “In this variation, the delinquent gang structure is so completely integrated and possesses a culture so monolithic and compelling that it must surely be the envy of every other collectivity in the world” (1978, pp. 154–155). Kornhauser coined the term deadpan sociology to express her frustration with the power given to delinquent norms by subcultural theorists: Proponents of cultural deviance theory, under the banner of cultural and ethical relativism, are mainly responsible for establishing the tradition of deadpan sociology, in which the most malevolent acts, as well as the most petty and tawdry, are alike solemnly portrayed as the consequence of perfect socialization to sacrosanct subcultural values. Implied in this tradition is that, without being socialized by some criminal group, murderers and pickpockets, thugs and cat burglars and numbers runners could not imagine how to go about performing their various crimes, nor would they have any inclination to do so, these acts being horrid or grubby only from somebody else’s ethnocentric perspective. (pp. 160–161)

The Legacy of Social Sources Kornhauser’s concept of cultural deviance fostered a contentious debate between social control and social learning (the successor to differential association) theorists that burned well into the 1990s. Control theorists generally support the work of Kornhauser. Critics, however, believe that cultural deviance is a flawed concept that made a caricature out of Sutherland’s differential association. A less controversial legacy of the book is the contribution it made to the rebirth of social disorganization theory. Left for dead by the time of Social Sources’ publication, social disorganization theory was recast as a macro-level control theory in the 1980s, and revitalized with new empirical support in the 1990s. Kornhauser’s argument that all communities shared core values and her extraction of a pure model from the work of Shaw and McKay are evident in the work of those who rebuilt social disorganization theory. Jeff Maahs

See also Cohen, Albert K: Delinquent Boys; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory, Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Thrasher, Frederick H: The Gang

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1996). Is differential association/social learning cultural deviance theory? Criminology, 34, 229–247. Bursik, R. J. (1988). Social disorganization and theories of crime and delinquency: Problems and prospects. Criminology, 26, 519–543. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirschi, T. (1996). Theory without ideas: Reply to Akers. Criminology, 34, 249–256. Kornhauser, R. R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency: An appraisal of analytic models. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matsueda, R. L. (1997). “Cultural deviance theory”: The remarkable persistence of a flawed term. Theoretical Criminology, 1, 429–452. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2007). Crime and the American dream (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson. Sampson, R., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924.

Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape Mary P. Koss has been a major contributor to the empirical research and theoretical literature on rape victimization. First, Koss has devoted a large amount of research to identifying and understanding the sources of rape. This research has been both empirical and theoretical. Second, on top of being involved in numerous empirical studies, Koss has also developed and revised a survey instrument to better identify rape and other types of sexual victimization that subsequently has advanced the field of understanding sexual victimization. Furthermore, Koss introduced an innovative,

Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape

behaviorally descriptive definition of rape and other sexual behaviors to help remove ambiguity and resolve definitional problems that plagued past research in the field. In fact, Koss has provided comprehensive reviews of problems with rape victimization research and offers solutions to help combat these issues in future research. Finally, Koss revised previous versions of the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) to address past criticism and has provided future research agendas for additional research.

Sources of Rape In addition to the time Koss spent on the measurement and detection of rape, she has spent a large amount of time identifying and describing the sources of rape. While not a comprehensive review, this section reviews empirical and theoretical evidence presented by Koss on important contributors to the sources of rape. Identifying the sources of rape entails a complex understanding of several different dimensions. Research indicates that sexual aggression is linked to several internal factors such as heredity, attitudes, personality traits, physiology, learning, power, and gender scripts among other things. External factors have also been associated with the action or prevention of rape and sexually aggressive behaviors. These external factors include athletics, male peer groups, family, media influences, and the disregard of the seriousness of violence against women. Thus, one factor cannot adequately be described as the cause of rape and sexual aggression. Notably, several studies have examined the link between male-dominated activities such as athletics and fraternities and sexual aggression. Koss and John Gaines found that both athletic participation and level of alcohol use were related to sexual aggression. Fraternity participation was not found to be related to sexual aggression in this study. Alcohol use is suggested to be related to sexual aggression because it increases the likelihood of sexual expectations, misunderstanding of sexual intent, and rationalizes or justifies sexually aggressive behavior. Athletic participation can foster an environment that encourages domination and celebrates aggression. Athletes are also seen as more likely to hold rape supportive beliefs, as reported by Koss and Hobart Cleveland.

517

Sexual Experiences Survey In 1982, Koss and Cheryl Oros published an article introducing an instrument to measure the prevalence of rape victimization and other acts of sexual aggression. This instrument also sought to tap into the large number of unreported rape victimizations. Other potential sources of rape victimization statistics such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have often been criticized as vastly underestimating the true prevalence of rape. An instrument of this kind would seek to capture those victimizations that were not documented by other official sources of crime statistics. Koss argued that to advance the field of sexual victimization, a better understanding of the actual prevalence of rape needed to be obtained. The Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) consisted of 13 questions formatted with yes or no answers. Questions included in the survey were behaviorally specific and asked explicitly about sexual intercourse in terms of threat, coercion, and force. Additionally, question content ranged from the misinterpretation of sexual interest to directly asking if the participant had been raped. Koss tested the new instrument on a sample of college students. The results, as reported by Koss and Oros, showed that 6 percent of the women in the sample responded yes to the overt question about being raped and that 30 percent of women had experienced unwanted sexual contact.

Further Findings From the Sexual Experiences Survey In 1985, Koss and Christine Gidyz used a slightly differently worded version of the SES to test the validity and reliability of the instrument. In this study, a sample of college students was employed as the target interest group. The results from this study suggest the reliability and validity of the SES. In particular, women did not respond differently to the sexual victimization questions depending on how the survey was given. Men, however, were less likely to report any sexual aggression if the SES format was a personal interview. This study was important in showing the format or method in which the SES is given may affect prevalence outcomes. In 1987, Koss and colleagues published another empirical study using the SES on a different college

518

Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape

sample. Ten items were used from the SES to measure sexual aggression and were altered based on the gender of the participant to capture both victimization and perpetration. Prevalence rates were constructed based on the behavior the participant experienced since the age of 14. The results indicated that about 12 percent of women had experienced attempted rape while about 15 percent experienced completed rape since the age of 14. For males, the rates were based on reported perpetration. Since the age of 14, about 3 percent of males reported engaging in attempted rape while about 4 percent admitted to completed rape.

the participant directly if they have been raped. This wording could result in underreporting. Koss argues that the word rape contains many negative connotations and stigma that may cause the potential victim to shy away from the use of the word. Further, the victim may not know the definition of rape or that their experience would be categorized as rape under existing legal statutes. Koss asserts that many victims who have experienced unwanted intercourse with force do not define the experience as rape. To combat this problem, Koss suggests the use of behaviorally specific questions that describe the behavior to the individual so as to help reduce possible misinterpretation or stigma that could arise.

Problems With Estimating Rape Prevalence Koss has also critiqued several research methods designed to measure the incidence of rape. In her article “Detecting the Scope of Rape,” she argues that the level of rape, or its prevalence, that is reported is directly related to the method used to measure it. Specifically, some types of instruments are better at detecting rape than others. The variation in definitions used, type of screening employed, gate questions, behaviorally specific questions, question context, method, sample, and confidentiality are all stated to influence rape statistics.

Gate Questions

Gate questions are similar to screen questions, but are only single-item questions used to get at several different kinds of behaviors to be specified later in the survey. This type of cueing also has its disadvantages. Gate questions may not be able to adequately cue respondents into categorizing their experiences based on a single question. For example, a respondent may misunderstand the gate question and his or her subsequent victimization may go unreported.

Definitional Problems

Behaviorally Specific Questions

The FBI has defined rape as “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” This definition has been criticized on several accounts. First, the definition is vague and the word carnal is often seen as difficult to understand. Second, Koss argued that several sexual offenses are excluded from this definition. For example, rape of a male would not be included as the definition only specifies a female victim. More recently, definitions of rape have been modified by individual states and the federal government to address some of these issues.

Behaviorally specific questions have been seen as a vast improvement in the area of rape and sexual victimization research. These types of questions provide detailed scenarios or situations to the participant to try and correctly identify experiences. Behaviorally specific questions are preferred over simply asking participants if they have experienced a certain kind of sexual victimization (e.g., “Have you been raped?”). Specifically, these questions can provide detailed and explicit cues that can greatly improve the identification and correct categorization of rape and other kinds of sexual victimization. The respondents are more likely to report a sexual victimization, including a rape, on a survey if the victimization is described to them. On the SES, an example of a behaviorally specific question is: “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.)?” In short, this

Screening Questions

Screening questions are often used in interviews to help the participant recall incidents that are of importance to the subject of interest. The wording of these screening questions is said to affect the elicited response, especially with the sensitive subject of rape. For example, many interviewers simply ask

Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape

is one area of measurement that can help in the detection of rape instead of hindering it. Question Context

The context in which questions are asked can also affect the measurement of rape victimization. Context can provide a framework or lens which the participant uses to answer further questions. For example, if most of the questions on the survey have been about a subject other than sexual victimization, this can affect the recall of questions then targeted toward sexual victimization. Koss proposes solutions to this problem, including providing a separate section specifically for sexual victimization items and adding a unique introduction to the section to try and remove any carryover effects from past questions. Method

Researchers employ a number of different ways in which to collect data. These methods can include personal interviews, telephone interviews, online self-report surveys, and mail self-report surveys. Koss argues that because of the sensitive nature of questions about rape, certain methods may produce lower prevalence rates due to nonreporting. For example, people may be more likely to report a sexual victimization in a mail-in survey because they do not have to talk to someone whereas they would not report the victimization over the telephone. Some research suggests that telephone interviews produce the lowest rates of rape prevalence. Confidentiality

Finally, Koss emphasizes that confidentiality can have an impact on the reporting of rape victimization. If participants do not believe that their information will be kept private or the interviewer is trustworthy, lower prevalence rates could result. Further, if another person is present for the interview, this could also prevent the reporting of rape because the victimization may have been a secret or the perpetrator is present during the interview. Measurement Issues Summary

There are several methodological and measurement issues that plague rape research. These issues

519

include, but are not limited to, definitional problems, screening, gate questions, context, method, and confidentiality. All of these issues can influence the reporting of past sexual victimization experiences by survey respondents and thus can affect the prevalence rates that are generated from data collection. These issues in general, aside from behaviorally specific questions, tend to lower prevalence rates and arguably keep a large portion of rape victimizations undetected.

Sexual Experiences Survey Criticisms and Revisions Since its introduction in 1982, the SES has received several criticisms and has since been revised to address those criticisms. In this section, several of these criticisms are highlighted, including legal definitional issues, question wording, and question ambiguity. Next, the solutions offered by the revised SES, as presented by Koss and colleagues in 2007, are explored. Criticisms

One important criticism of the SES is that some of the questions about rape do not reflect legal definitions of rape or are outdated. For example, one of the questions asks the respondents if they were sexually victimized while intoxicated. Critics argue that this question, while categorized as rape by the SES, does not meet the legal definition of rape. More recently, the laws about intoxication and sexual victimization have been expanded to include incapacitated persons. The second main criticism of the SES involves wording on several questions. First, critics have argued that women are categorized as rape victims even when they do not acknowledged overtly that they have been raped. Second, several words in the SES are out of date or ambiguous. Examples of these issues with wording are the use of the term intercourse, how consent is defined, and problems differentiating between attempted rape and unwanted sexual contact. Another issue involves the use of only females as victims. Critics argue that this creates a heterosexual bias through using women as victims and men as perpetrators. Finally, the SES has been criticized for including people in rape prevalence statistics that do not meet the criterion for

520

Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape

legally defined rape. Koss, however, has argued that this criticism is invalid. A Revised Sexual Experiences Survey

Using the criticisms described above, Koss and her colleagues have since revised the SES to address these issues and further clarify the usefulness of the instrument. The first change made to the SES involved a change in the term intercourse. Specifically, in the revised version of the SES, the term intercourse was left out. It was replaced with behaviorally specific language referring to each unwanted sexual behavior and three types of penetration were separated into different questions. The next criticism the revised SES dealt with was consent. In the previous SES, consent was measured by asking the participant if the sexual act occurred when the person did not want it to. This statement was revised in the current version of the SES using the statement “without consent” so as to measure more directly if consent was given during a potential victimization. In past versions of the SES, only female victims were identified and males were only measured and categorized as perpetrators. Males were not identified as experiencing sexual victimization. In the revised version, gendered language was altered to allow for both male and female victimization reporting. Specifically, questions were tailored to identify sexual victimization occurring to both males and females using gender-neutral language. Participants who identified themselves as males were directed to skip questions that only applied to females and were asked about sexual victimization that they experienced. Past versions of the SES were heavily criticized for not adequately describing sexual coercion and contact as well as for failing to distinguish accurately between unwanted sexual contact and attempted rape. In the revised SES, two new questions were added to reflect negative coercion without force. Further, in the revised SES, the wording was modified to distinguish more clearly between sexual contact and attempted rape. Finally, revisions were made to the question referring to intercourse associated with intoxication. One item was used to measure this behavior and specifically asks participants if they were too drunk to stop the situation from happening.

The revised version of SES attempts to address past criticisms of earlier versions. In particular, issues with wording, definitions, and heterosexual bias were revised to remove issues with reporting and ambiguity. Ten questions compose the new version, with each question having several subparts to clarify and categorize behaviors and experiences. Overall, these revisions try to better describe and identify sexual victimizations and reduce misclassification and underreporting.

Conclusion Koss has been a major contributor to the empirical and theoretical research on rape and other forms of sexual victimization. Koss has identified and outlined a better understanding of the sources of rape and sexual victimization. Koss has also provided an instrument to assess and measure the prevalence of rape as well as revised this instrument to better reflect current research and address past criticisms. Further, Koss has identified weaknesses in other methods of measuring the prevalence of rape and provided possible alternatives for addressing theses issues. Finally, Koss has pioneered research methods using behaviorally specific questions for future research in the field of sexual victimization. Jamie A. Snyder See also Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Rape Myths and Violence Against Women; Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape; Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory

References and Further Readings Fisher, B. S., Cullen, F. T., & Turner, M. G. (2000). The sexual victimization of college women. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. Available from http://www.ncjrs.org/criminal_justice2000/vol_ 4/04g.pdf Hamby, S. L., & Koss, M. P. (2003). Shades of gray: A qualitative study of terms used in the measurement of sexual victimization. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 27, 243–255. Kalof, L. (1993). Rape-supportive attitudes and sexual victimization experiences of sorority and non-sorority women. Sex Roles, 29, 767–780.

Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character Koss, M. P. (1993). Detecting the scope of rape: A review of prevalence research methods. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 8, 198–222. Koss, M. P. (1993). Rape: Scope, impact, interventions, and public policy responses. American Psychologist, 48, 1062–1069. Koss, M. P., Abbey, A., Campbell, R., Cook, S., Norris, J., Testa, M., et al. (2007). Revising the SES: A collaborative process to improve assessment of sexual aggression and victimization. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 357–370. Koss, M. P., & Cleveland, H. H. (1996). Athletic participation, fraternity membership and date rape: The question remains—self-selection or different causal processes? Violence Against Women, 2, 180–190. Koss, M. P., Dinero, T. E., & Cerbel, C. A. (1988). Stranger and acquaintance rape. Are there differences in the victim’s experience? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 12, 1–24. Koss, M. P., & Gaines, J. A. (1993). The prediction of sexual aggression by alcohol use, athletic participation, and fraternity affiliation. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 8, 94–108. Koss, M. P., Gidycz, C. A., & Winiewski, N. (1987). The scope of rape: Incidence and prevalence of sexual aggression and victimization in a national sample of higher education students. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 55, 162–170. Koss, M. P., & Oros, C. J. (1982). Sexual experiences survey: A research instrument investigating sexual aggression and victimization. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 50, 455–457. Lackie, L., & De Man, A. F. (1997). Correlates of sexual aggression among male university students. Sex Roles, 37, 451–457. Testa, M., VanZile-Tamens, C., Livingston, J. A., & Koss, M. P. (2004). Assessing women’s experiences of sexual aggression using the sexual experiences survey: Evidence for validity and implications for research. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 28, 256–265.

Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character Ernst Kretschmer was an important historical figure in the development of criminological theory in America. Although his ideas are not generally accepted today, he holds a place of historical importance.

521

Over the years, criminology has involved the presentation and, at least the temporary, acceptance of various ideas which were later discarded as incorrect. Every academic discipline has its own branches of scientific dogma which have been later discredited. An obvious example of such circumstances is the flat-earth theory; there is no scientific doubt today that the earth is round. Criminology is no different. In this regard, criminal anthropology attempted to explain criminological tendencies through physical characteristics. The original major developer of this idea of criminology was Cesare Lombroso, who wrote The Criminal Man, which focused on physical atavistic characteristics as indicators of criminality. In criminology, there are two ideas that fall within the scope of criminal anthropology. During the late 1700s and the early 1800s, the theories of phrenology and physiognomy were popular. Phrenology held to the principle that a person’s criminality could be discovered by examining the aspects on a person’s head, such as bumps. The most well-known phrenologist was Franz Gall. Physiognomy presented the idea that a person’s criminality could be determined by observing the facial characteristics, such as a protruding brow, small noses, or large lips. Both of these theories are generally discredited today. In the history of criminology, an offshoot of the theory of physiognomy was constitutionalism, which was also known as a body-type theory of criminology. This theory has been frequently referred to as constitutional psychology. Constitu­ tion­­alism’s primary influence in the field of criminology began during the 1920s with one of the major proponents of constitutionalism: Ernst Kretschmer. Earnest Hooton, a Harvard University anthropologist during the 1930s, was also a major proponent of constitutionalism.

Background Kretschmer, born in 1888, was the son of a pastor. He initially studied philosophy but later switched to medicine at the University of Tubingen. He also studied medicine in Munich and Hamburg. After he completed his studies, he entered clinical psychiatric practice, the majority of it with the military. In 1918, he returned to the University of Tubingen to teach. In 1926, he went to the

522

Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character

University of Marburg as a professor of psychiatry and neurology. In 1959, he retired from his position as the Director of the Neurological Clinic at the University of Tubingen. Kretschmer was not considered to be a criminologist, per se. He was primarily considered to be a psychiatrist, focusing on diagnosis, therapy, pedagogy, ethics, and criminology. Kretschmer died in 1964. Although Kretschmer published a number of works, his classic study was Physique and Character, which was published in 1921. Physique and Character presents the major principles of Kretschmer’s ideas on constitutionalism concerning psychological and physical characteristics as the basis for a general theory of determining behavior based on physique and character as defined by personality traits and as used in criminological theory. A brief review of this famous work follows.

Measuring Bodies Kretschmer divided his work into two major sections: the first on the differing physiques, and the second on the differing temperaments associated with each type of physique. Concerning the differing physiques, Kretschmer stressed that his method had to be exact to meet the standards of medical science. In his attempts to accomplish this goal, he used calipers, tape measures, photographs, and drawings in his evaluations, as opposed to generalized observations. Kretschmer classified the body under the following categories: (1) face and skull, (2) physique, (3) body surface, (4) glands and intestines, (5) gross measurement. He further classified the temporal dates of certain bodily changes, such as the commencement of puberty, baldness, fatness, and abnormalities. He also included classifications of personality types and issues of heredity. Under the classification of face and skull, Kretschmer recorded the following information: general features of the face, to include the profile and outline; the color, size, and set of the eyes; the size and shape of the nose; the size and shape of the mouth; the size and shape of the ears; the size, shape, and color of the lips; the size and condition of the teeth; the size and shape of the jaw; the features of the cheekbones; the features of the chin; the features of the forehead; and the size and features of the cranium and the back of the head. Kretschmer thought that the face was the most

important factor because it was the part of the body that underwent the greatest degree of morphological change during life. Essentially, the face was the “visiting card” of an individual’s general constitution. Under the classification of physique, Kretschmer recorded the following information: subject’s posture, which he labeled poise; musculature appearance; fatness, which he labeled upholstery; head size; bone structure appearance; joint appearance; neck length and thickness; arm length and thickness; leg length, thickness, and appearance whether bowed or knock-kneed; hand size and appearance to include finger shape; foot size and appearance to include toe proportionality and flat-footedness and archness; shoulder width and appearance; chest size and appearance; stomach size and appearance; spine firmness and appearance; and pelvis appearance and development. Under the classification of body surface, Kretschmer recorded the following information: color, quality, and secretions of the skin; strength, visibility, and color of the blood vessels and veins to include the strength of the pulse; and the color, texture, and strength of the hair, not only on the head but on the various parts of the body. Under the classification of measurement, Kretschmer included body height, body circumference, the length of the arms and legs, and breadth of the shoulder and pelvis, the circumference and the diameters of the skull, the length of the face and nose, and the breadth of the face.

Body Types From his studies, Kretschmer presented three basic body types: asthenic, athletic, and pyknic. Kretschmer noted that the body types were less pronounced in females. The asthenic body type was characterized by a deficiency in thickness combined with an average unlessened length. The athletic body type was characterized by the strong development of the skeleton, musculature, and the skin. The pyknic body type was characterized by the pronounced peripheral development of the head, breast, and stomach, with a tendency to a distribution of fat around the middle and a graceful construction of the shoulders and the extremities. Each classification of body types was based on the measured averages of human bodies that Kretschmer

Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character

had accumulated. Of course, Kretschmer acknowledged a number of variants under each body type. Kretschmer also recognized that there were some bodies that did not fall within these three basic body types that fell markedly beyond the average or common description of them. Kretschmer named these bodies dysplastic body types. Directly related to the physique was the issue of the glands and the bowels. Kretschmer recognized that certain physical diseases have been associated with certain psychological diseases and he argued that the glands and their functioning have a direct effect on a person’s mentality. Further, he implied that such functioning also has an effect on the body type of individuals. However, his explanations on this aspect of the physique were not extensive.

Psychological Types As to psychological typing, Kretschmer recognized two basic psychological types: circular and schizophrene. Kretschmer thought that circular personality types fell within three general groups of traits: (1) sociable, good-natured, friendly, genial; (2) cheerful, humorous, jolly, hasty; and (3) quiet, calm, easily depressed, softhearted. The first group was considered to be the most common. In contrast, Kretschmer thought that schizophrene personality types fell within the following groups of traits: (1) unsociable, quiet, reserved, serious, (humorless), eccentric; (2) timid, shy, fine feelings, sensitive, nervous, excitable, fond of nature and books; and (3) pliable, kindly, honest, indifferent, dull-witted, silent. As before, the first group was statistically more common. It must be stressed that Kretschmer did not consider these groupings of traits to be indicators of health or pathology as might be inferred from them. Kretschmer noted that circular psychological types tended to suffer from the following psychological diseases: mania, depression, and hypomania. In contrast, schizophrenes tended to suffer from the following psychological diseases: catatonia, hebephrenia, dementia praecox, psychopathy, and degeneracy. However, Kretschmer firmly stated that physique was not directly clinically related to psychosis. Rather, physique was but a factor to be considered in the determination of psychosis. In fact, Kretschmer presented the following as fundamental to determining such a biological relationship:

523

(1) physique, (2) development of personality and temperament, (3) endogenous pathological condition psychosis/disease, and (4) heredity. In his studies, Kretschmer found a clear correlation between manic depressives (whom Kretschmer considered to be suffering from a dysfunctional condition common to the circular types) and the pyknic body type. He also found a clear correlation between schizophrenes and the asthenic and athletic body types and some dysplastics. He found a weak correlation between schizophrenes and the pyknic body type and between the circulars and the asthenic and athletic body types and dysplastics. During the course of his work, Kretschmer presented the terms schizothyme and cyclothyme to describe the circular and schizophrene personality types in an attempt to prevent bias. Kretschmer defined constitution as the totality of individual peculiarities which are a result of genetics or heredity. Constitution can be affected by many factors, which include genetics, disease, work, and nutrition. Character refers to the psychological factors that contribute to the development of a person’s temperament, which include bodily influences, psychic education, milieu, and experience. However, character does not include severe pathological mental disturbances. Kretschmer explained temperament of the two psychological types (cyclothymes and schizothymes) relative to four factors: (1) psycho-aesthesia (sensitivity/insensitivity to psychic stimulation) and mood coloring; (2) psychic tempo (acceleration/retardation of psychic processes); (3) psycho-motility (character of psychic activity); and (4) physique. Cyclothemes were found to be diathetic between happy and sad as to psycho-aesthesia and mood; wavy temperamental curve between mobile and comfortable as to psychic tempo; adequate to stimulus as to psycho-motility, and of the pyknic body type. Schizothymes were found to be psychaesthetic between being sensitive and cold as to psychoaesthesia and mood; jerky temperamental curve between stable and tenacious as to psychic-tempo; inadequate to stimulus as to psycho-motility; and of the asthenic, athletic, or dysplastic body types.

Conclusion Kretschmer found that cyclothymes tended to be people who throw themselves into the world and

524

Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime

present open, sociable, spirited, and kind-hearted natures. They are energetic and practical people who enjoy life. In contrast, Kretschmer found that the schizothymes tended to be people who constructed narrowly defined individual zones and operated in a world of dreams and principles set against the real world. They tended to be cold and indifferent to one’s fellow man. Among them are found an enormous number of defectives, to include eccentrics, idlers, egoists, and criminals. However, Kretschmer acknowledged that there were valuable schizothymes, which included sensitive enthusiasts, world-hostile idealists, witty ironists, philosophers, and heroic moralists. Kretschmer’s work was not primarily devoted to examining the criminal tendencies of certain bodily types based on their constitution. Indeed, there were few references to criminal behavior in his book. It was primarily a general psychological work on the relationship between body types and personality traits. However, Kretschmer did do a significant amount of work in criminology and his work formed the foundation for using constitutionalism as a basis for criminological theory. As such, Kretschmer and his work hold an important place in the history of criminological theory. William C. Plouffe, Jr. See also Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Mental Illness and Crime; Phrenology; Psychophysiology and Crime

References and Further Readings Enke, W. (1968). Ernst Kretschmer. In D. Sills (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences (Vol. 8, pp. 450–452). New York: Macmillan/Free Press. Gall, F. J. (1835). On the origin of the moral qualities and intellectual facilities of man and the conditions of their manifestation. Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon. Gould, S. (1996). The mismeasure of man. New York: W. W. Norton. Hooton, E. A. (1939). The American criminal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Kretschmer, E. (1970). Physique and character. New York: Cooper Square. (Original work published 1921) Lombroso, C. (1895). L’homme criminel. Felix, Italy: Alcan.

Lombroso, C., & Lombroso-Ferrero, G. (1911/1972). Criminal man, according to the classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York: Putnam. Rafter, N. (1992). Criminal anthropology in the United States. Criminology, 30, 525–545. Roebuck, J. (1967). Criminal typology: The legalistic, physical-constitutional-hereditary, psychologicalpsychiatric, and sociological approaches. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas. Rees, W. L. L. (1968). Psychology: Constitutional psychology. In D. Sills (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences (Vol. 13, pp. 66–76). New York: Macmillan/Free Press.

Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime Lauren J. Krivo and Ruth D. Peterson tested and developed William Julius Wilson’s 1987 theory of concentrated disadvantage by analyzing the effects of different levels of neighborhood disadvantage variables, such as poverty and the percentage of female-headed households, on the violent and nonviolent crime rates in Columbus, Ohio. They found that regardless of neighborhood racial composition, census tracts with extreme levels of each of the disadvantage variables experience notably higher violent crime rates than census tracts with high or low levels of disadvantage. Their results support Wilson’s theory and indicate that criminological theory needs to consider the level of disadvantage— rather than its mere presence—in order to properly understand neighborhood violent crime.

Wilson’s Theory of Concentrated Disadvantage In the late 1980s, Wilson, a sociologist, drew attention to the social-structural changes that were taking place within the inner cities of America’s major metropolitan areas. Wilson argued that the steady waning of manufacturing jobs throughout the 1960s and 1970s deprived low-skill workers of the opportunity to make a living wage, which increased levels of unemployment and poverty—the increase in poverty, in turn, prompted middle-class families to move out of the inner cities in favor of settling in the suburbs. These social-structural changes

Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime

effectively concentrated poverty and disadvantage within the inner city and gave rise to an “underclass” of low-skilled residents who lack job skills, are engaged in crime, and experience long-term poverty and welfare dependency (Wilson, 1987, p. 8). Wilson’s theory emphasizes two key points that criminologists have not always analyzed with sufficient attention. First, Wilson argues that it is the concentration of poverty and disadvantage in the inner cities that generates notably high levels of negative social outcomes, such as crime. Second, although Wilson emphasizes the disproportionate degree to which African Americans have suffered from these social structural changes, his theory is not race-specific. He argues that any two inner-city communities that suffer comparable levels of disadvantage should experience comparable levels of crime and social disorganization. The complicating factor that gives the appearance of race differences in crime levels between communities is the fact that poor whites and poor blacks do not live in communities characterized by comparable levels of disadvantage; rather, poor blacks overwhelmingly live in communities of concentrated disadvantage, while the vast majority of poor whites live in communities with socioeconomic diversity (Sampson & Wilson, 1995). That is, poor blacks disproportionately suffer the concentration of disadvantage that Wilson identifies as being so detrimental to community well-being. Although these features of Wilson’s theory were key components of his argument, criminologists were slow to test the nuances of concentrated disadvantage. By the mid-1990s, Krivo and Peterson noted that criminologists had largely failed to assess “whether disadvantaged neighborhoods have unusually high rates of crime compared to neighborhoods with relatively moderate or low levels of disadvantage” (p. 620). Similarly, criminologists also had failed to examine “whether the link between extreme disadvantage and crime is similar for Black and White communities” (p. 620). Krivo and Peterson set out to address these gaps in the research literature on community disadvantage and crime.

Krivo and Peterson’s Study of Extreme Disadvantage Consistent with Wilson’s theory, Krivo and Peterson hypothesized that extremely disadvantaged

525

communities have especially high levels of crime compared to less disadvantaged communities. They also hypothesized that the relationship between extreme disadvantage and crime should be uniform across neighborhoods populated primarily by black or white residents. To test these hypotheses, they analyzed census tracts from the city of Columbus, Ohio, using data from the 1990 U.S. Census. They specifically chose Columbus because it is one of the few cities in America that contains predominantly black and white neighborhoods of comparable levels of disadvantage, allowing them to test their racial invariance hypothesis. As dependent variables, Krivo and Peterson analyzed the property (burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft) and violent (homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) crime rates in Columbus using official data on reported victimizations from the Columbus Police Department. The authors’ key independent variables are census tract-level measures of the poverty rate, the percentage of female-headed families, the percentage of adult males who are unemployed or not in the labor force, and the percentage of adults employed in professional or managerial occupations. The authors created measures to identify census tracts that experienced low, high, or extreme levels of each of these independent variables. For example, Krivo and Peterson categorized tracts with less than 20 percent of families in poverty as low, 20 percent to 39 percent as high, and more than 40 percent as extreme; they made similar divisions for each of the other disadvantage independent variables. Finally, the authors controlled for the rental occupancy and vacancy rates in each tract as measures of community instability as well as the percentages of the population that are male or ages 15 through 24, each of which are shown to be positively associated with aggregate crime rates in the criminological literature. Krivo and Peterson analyzed a separate model for each disadvantage variable and lastly combined all four of the variables into an overall index of concentrated disadvantage in order to overcome multicollinearity amongst the key independent variables. In their analysis, Krivo and Peterson found that the relationships between the disadvantage variables and the property crime rate are inconsistent with their first hypothesis. Across all separate indicators of disadvantage, as well as the combined

526

Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime

index, high- and extreme-disadvantage census tracts experience more property crime than lowdisadvantage tracts. However, the differences in the property crime rates between high- and extremedisadvantage tracts are not very large. For example, the property crime rate in communities with extreme poverty rates is only about 3.9 percent higher than the property crime rate in high poverty rate communities. They concluded that these analyses are inconsistent with Wilson’s theory; extreme concentration of disadvantage (regardless of the specific indicator used) does not appear to create notably high levels of property crime. On the other hand, Krivo and Peterson found that the differences in violent crime rates between extreme- and high-disadvantage communities are of substantially higher magnitudes than the differences in violent crime rates between high- and lowdisadvantage communities. For example, the violent victimization rate was about 5.7 victimizations per 1,000 people in neighborhoods of high poverty, while the rate in extreme poverty neighborhoods was about 17.4 per 1,000. In other words, the violent crime rate in extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods is about three times the violent crime rate in neighborhoods with “merely” high poverty rates. On the whole, then, Krivo and Peterson concluded that the extreme concentration of disadvantage does appear to create notably high levels of violent crime, consistent with Wilson’s theory. Having established the relationships between extreme disadvantage and crime, Krivo and Peterson proceeded to analyze whether these relationships are invariant across predominantly white and black communities. To test their second hypothesis, the authors tested the interaction between each of the disadvantage variables with variables that identify tracts in which more than 70 percent of the residents are either black or white. They found that the relationships indicated by their first analyses are replicated when the tracts are disaggregated by racial composition. That is, extreme levels of disadvantage produce exceptionally high levels of violent but not property crime in both predominantly white and black tracts. However, none of the race interaction terms are statistically significant. While black communities do experience higher levels of violent crime than white communities, this discrepancy is not due to black neighborhoods being more strongly

affected by extreme disadvantage. In fact, Krivo and Peterson found that “Black-White gaps in violent crime within each disadvantage category tend to be smaller than within-race differences in violence across levels of disadvantage” (p. 634). That is, an individual is more likely to be violently victimized in an extremely disadvantaged white neighborhood than she is in a black neighborhood characterized by “merely” high or low levels of disadvantage.

Limitations and Contributions Ultimately, Krivo and Peterson’s study is more descriptive than explanatory. Their study does not establish that extreme disadvantage causes notably high violent crime rates. Their inability to elucidate the underlying causal processes stems, in part, from the fact that they were unable to disentangle temporal order. Due to the cross-sectional nature of their data, they cannot rule out the possibility that crime causes the characteristics of disadvantage in a neighborhood. Additionally, Krivo and Peterson acknowledge that they were unable to control for measures of local institutional support like churches, schools, and recreation centers. Wilson posits that such community institutional supports build social capital and can help mitigate the deleterious effects of concentrated disadvantage. It is possible that the coefficients of their analyses might be different if such controls were included. Despite these limitations, Krivo and Peterson make a substantial contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of crime and neighborhood disadvantage. They provide substantial support for the key suppositions of Wilson, and they draw attention to his postulates of concentration effects and racial invariance that had been comparatively overlooked. Their findings suggest that poverty and other indicators of disadvantage should not be analyzed as unitary constructs; the level of disadvantage matters as much as its presence in a neighborhood. Finally, their study was one of the first to examine the racial invariance hypothesis with data that allowed for a full comparison of ecologically and structurally similar communities that contained between-community variation on race. Kevin H. Wozniak

Krohn, Marvin D.: Networks and Crime See also Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture; Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged; Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory

References and Further Readings Bernard, T. J. (1990). Angry aggression among the “truly disadvantaged.” Criminology, 28, 73–96. De Coster, S., Heimer, K., & Wittrock, S. M. (2006). Neighborhood disadvantage, social capital, street context, and youth violence. The Sociological Quarterly, 47, 723–753. Krivo, L. J., & Peterson, R. D. (1996). Extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods and urban crime. Social Forces, 75, 619–650. Peterson, R. D., & Krivo, L. J. (2005). Macrostructural analyses of race, ethnicity, and violent crime: Recent lessons and new directions for research. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 331–356. Sampson, R. J., & Wilson, W. J. (1995). Toward a theory of race, crime, and urban inequality. In J. Hagan & R. D. Peterson (Eds.), Crime and inequality (pp. 37–54). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Vintage.

Krohn, Marvin D.: Networks and Crime Marvin D. Krohn began to develop his theory of the relationship between social networks, deviance, and crime in 1980. His work builds on Travis Hirschi’s social bonding theory and sought to explain conformity as a result of social constraint. Hirschi posited that attachment to others, commitment to institutions, belief in conventional values and norms, and involvement in society are network ties that constrain behavior and prevent deviation from social norms. While Hirschi stated that the weakening or severing of any of these

527

network ties lessens constraint and leads to deviant behavior, Krohn sought to identify which elements are the strongest predictor of delinquency and whether the effects of social constraint were different for males than females.

Conceptual Framework According to Krohn’s theory of delinquent behavior, the degree to which an individual is incorporated into a social network indicates how much social constraint that person experiences. Increased involvement in a complex social network increases conformity to social norms, whereas less involvement allows for behavior that deviates from the accepted norms. The theory is anchored in a Durkheimian approach, focusing on the integration of individuals into a conventional social order through social network ties and institutions. The basis of Krohn’s theory is the idea that participation in social networks constrains behavior, and that the maintenance and continuance of those network connections require that one exhibit a certain kind of socially acceptable behavior. Krohn noted additionally that what constitutes “conventional” or “deviant” behavior can vary among different kinds of social networks. Most individuals are involved in networks that hold the beliefs, values, and norms of the larger, more conventional society. However, some groups hold beliefs and norms that are considered by the larger society to be deviant; therefore, deviant behavior in such factions would actually be conformist within that particular group. Thus, the nature of constraint on individuals who are part of a particular social network depends upon the values and norms of that group and what is required to preserve those network ties. Networks formed around official school activities, for example, will have norms that constrain toward conventional behavior, while the norms of networks revolving around deviance will constrain toward nonconventional behavior. The multiplexity of one’s network also determines the extent to which behavior is constrained. Multiplexity refers to each network connection, collectively referred to as foci, that an individual may have in more than one context. For example, one may both work and attend religious services with another particular individual. The more an individual’s social networks overlap within different

528

Krohn, Marvin D.: Networks and Crime

contexts, the more their behavior is constrained by those networks; behavior in one context may be recalled by others and will affect them in another network context. Additionally, individuals involved in multiplex networks have more difficulty withdrawing from particular groups because that may have adverse affects on them in another context that contains overlapping foci. Therefore, the more multiplex one’s network is, the more behavioral constraint that individual will experience and the less deviant behavior the person will exhibit because of his or her complex networks of commitment and attachment to institutions and individuals. Another characteristic of networks that influences behavioral constraint is density. Network density refers to the personal connections between each individual in a given network. Impersonal networks would have low network density, as few people know each other personally. However, when each individual in a network knows and has a direct relationship with every other person, then the network is said to have reached maximum density. The more dense a network is, the more likely it is that an individual’s behavior will be noticed and critiqued by many people. Therefore, Krohn states that as network density increases, the level of constraint on the individual increases and the likelihood of deviant behavior diminishes.

Applications Krohn theorizes that the variability of crime rates in different geographical locations, in particular those which tend to be high in urban areas, can be explained using this theory. Individuals who live in urbanized areas are less likely to have more multiplex or dense networks due to the sheer size of the population. As foci become more numerous in larger populations, it is increasingly difficult to personally know each individual. Therefore, network ties are weaker in urban areas, and individuals are less constrained by the networks in which they are involved, allowing more room for deviant behavior. Additionally, urban areas tend to have a higher rate of residential turnover because of the larger number of renters who tend to reside in a unit for a shorter period of time than homeowners. This decreases network density as people are moving in and out of neighborhoods more frequently, making

it difficult for individuals to meet and get to know each other. Urban areas also have a much larger number of multiple unit residential buildings, increasing the area’s residential density while at the same time decreasing network density, as it is difficult for everyone to know each other when there are such a large number of people in a given area. Thus, the higher resident turnover rate and larger number of residents in an urban area would lead to weakened social networks and heightened potential for deviant behavior. An individual’s socioeconomic status and what Krohn refers to as the area status, or general socioeconomic makeup, of the neighborhood in which one lives, also affect multiplexity and density of networks. Krohn theorizes that neighborhoods composed largely of residents of lower socioeconomic status exhibit higher crime rates because of the increased proportion of multiunit residential buildings and higher residential turnover rate, thus lower overall network density in the area, than middle-status or upper-status neighborhoods. How­ ever, Krohn posits that an increase in institutions in low-status neighborhoods that create additional commitment networks, such as religious or community organizations, lower the rate of deviant behavior because they lessen the negative effect of network density that a large population experiences. Because lower-status individuals often have less access to time and economic, educational, or informational resources, it is more difficult for them and their children to become incorporated into voluntary social activities and institutions, such as parent-teacher associations or extracurricular activities. Therefore, networks and friendships of lower-status individuals and their children are less likely to be multiplex, given that they participate in fewer organizations, increasing their likelihood of delinquent or deviant behavior. However, Krohn also posits that lower-status individuals who live in areas with a larger middle-status or upper-status population are more likely to be a part of those networks. Since middle-status and upper-status individuals are more often involved in organizations and activities, lower-status individuals in those areas are also more likely to become incorporated into such environments. Therefore, their social networks become more multiplex, increasing constraint and decreasing propensity for deviant behavior.

Krohn, Marvin D.: Networks and Crime

Empirical Support The theory of the effects of social networks on crime and deviant behavior has been successfully tested in many studies by Krohn, his colleagues, and others. Krohn’s initial study, conducted with James L. Massey in 1980, measured the effects of Hirschi’s social bonding theory (commitment to institutions, attachment to individuals, and belief in conventional values and norms) on minor and serious drug use and other deviant behavior in order to identify the networks that constrain and control individuals’ behavior most. A sample was taken of 3,065 children in grades 7 through 12 in Midwestern states and self-reported data were collected in survey form. The results showed that weak networks are related to more variance in minor drug or alcohol use and minor delinquent behavior than more serious delinquent behavior and drug use, most likely because minor delinquency precedes more serious delinquent behavior and by that point conventional networks are typically already weak. Additionally, the study found that commitment to institutions, organizations, and structured activities have the strongest negative effects on minor delinquent behavior and serious drug abuse and delinquency, while beliefs (especially in obedience to the law) have the strongest negative effects on minor drug and alcohol use. While attachment was consistently the weakest predictor of deviant behavior, the child’s attachment to the mother was a more powerful predictor than attachment to the father. This is plausible because mothers are likely to spend more time supervising their children, giving them more influence over constraint. Attachment to individuals also proved to be stronger for males while commitment to institutions was stronger for females. Krohn later expanded on the original study with Mary Zielinski and, again, Massey. Using similar methods, this time 1,435 ninth- through twelfthgrade respondents in a Midwestern city, they studied the effects of children’s social networks on the incidence of cigarette smoking. The respondents reported their frequency (from never to daily) of cigarette use, as well as their usual activities and with whom they participate. The results concluded that there is a significant relationship between children who jointly participate in more activities with friends (more multiplex social networks), such as

529

athletic or school activities, and less cigarette smoking. An even stronger relationship was found for children who participate in the same activities with their parents, decreasing their incidence of smoking. Finally, participating in any particular activity with both parents and friends had the strongest negative effect on cigarette use, demonstrating that increased multiplexity creates increased constraint. Comparable findings were reached in a similar study by Susan T. Ennett and Karl E. Bauman. Finally, a study conducted by Krohn, Susan B. Stern, Terence P. Thornberry, and Sung Joon Jang—using data from the Rochester Youth Development Study, and based on interviews with 987 seventh- and eighth-grade students and their caregivers—sought to distinguish the link between parents’ control and guidance mechanisms and delinquent behavior in children. The study found that parents who set clear rules, monitor their child’s behavior, and use consistent and appropriate discipline are more easily able to control deviant behavior, and parents who use open communication are more easily able to reinforce prosocial, conventional behavior. Attachment and involvement between children and their parents were shown to be significantly negatively related to the involvement in delinquent and deviant behavior. These studies, as well as others, have shown that attachment to and involvement in social networks are negatively correlated with deviant behavior. The more complex, or multiplex, and dense those networks are, the stronger the force of constraint is on the individuals incorporated into those groups. Thus, as network ties are weakened or lost, one experiences less constraint, allowing room for deviant behavior. Elizabeth A. Miller See also Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime; Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency; Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency; Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures; Systemic Model of Social Disorganization

References and Further Readings Krohn, M. D. (1986). The web of conformity: A network approach to the explanation of delinquent behavior. Social Problems, 33, S81–S93.

530

Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

Krohn, M. D., & Massey, J. L. (1980). Social control and delinquent behavior: An examination of the elements of social bond. Sociological Quarterly, 21, 529–544. Krohn, M. D., Massey, J. L., & Zielinski, M. (1988). Role overlap, network multiplicity, and adolescent deviant behavior. Social Psychology Quarterly, 51, 346–356. Krohn, M. D., Stern, S. B., Thornberry, T. P., & Jang, S. J. (1990). Family processes and initiation of delinquency and drug use: The impact of parent and adolescent perceptions. Albany, NY: Rochester Youth Development Study, Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center, University at Albany.

Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment Since the late 1960s, the United States has experienced an unprecedented growth in its prison population. The United States now leads the world with the highest incarceration rate, imprisoning approximately one in every 100 persons of its population (The Pew Center on the States, 2008). Women are not exempt from this incarceration boom. The numbers of women entering into the correctional system continue to grow at a faster rate than the numbers of men. For example, between 1996 and 2006, the numbers of women admitted to state and federal prisons increased by 61 percent where­ ­as the increase for men was 36 percent (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997, 2006). The influx of women into the correctional system has prompted scholars such as Candice Kruttschnitt and Rose­ mary Gartner to investigate the uniqueness of female prisoners’ needs, disadvantages, and ways of adapting to imprisonment. Many have assumed that men and women adapt to prison environments in similar manners. However, research has found women and men’s responses to prison differ. To explore this further, Kruttschnitt and Gartner built upon past research in order to explain women’s adaptation to prison by addressing two related, but distinct, issues. First, they wished to know whether theoretical models that explained the adaptation of male inmates to prison also explained female inmate

adaptation. To assess this possibility, they examined two traditional inmate adaptation models: the deprivation and related situational-functionalist model, and the importation model. These models were developed by studying male subjects without attention given to female inmate adaptation. Second, they wished to discover whether changes in penological philosophies affected women inmates’ adaptation and how they serve their sentences, or “do time.” To address this question, they examined two correctional institutions that occupy distinct places in California’s penological history (Kruttschnitt & Gartner, 2005). One institution, the California Institute for Women (CIW), was built during a time when the rehabilitation model was the dominant philosophy. The other, newer institution, Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW), was constructed during the recent, more punitive penological era. The consolidation of these traditional models of inmate adaptation and examination of the effect of different penological philosophies on institutional environments allowed Kruttschnitt and Gartner to propose a more integrated theory of how women adapted to prison.

Theoretical Framework Until the 1940s, the study of penology predominately focused on the prison as a potential reform mechanism for offenders. Even though scholars studied the regimes of the penitentiary and reformatory movement, very little attention was paid to the inmate social world. From the 1940s to the 1960s, penologists in America began a new inquiry into the American prison, specifically exploring the way in which prisons shape the behavior of those incarcerated. Especially apparent was the development of a distinct inmate subculture, an adaptation that appeared to be a product of living in a prison setting. However, much debate centered on how this adaptive inmate subculture appeared. Two theoretical models emerged in middle of the 20th century that sought to explain how inmates adapted to prison environments. Gresham Sykes developed deprivation (sometimes referred to as functionalist) theory after studying inmates at the New Jersey State Prison. His work, The Society of Captives, provides insight into how the deprivations experienced in prison form the foundation of the prison social order. Sykes proposed that prison

Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

was both psychologically and physically depriving. Since the “pains of imprisonment” were experienced inside the prison, the origin of adaptation did not reside in the outside world, but inside the prison walls. Put plainly, individual characteristics and experiences prior to prison had no influence on inmate adaptation. The institutional environment produced the prisoner adaptive roles. This resulted in a unique inmate subculture that originated within the prison, and any adaptive behaviors are a reaction and adaptation to the prison environment. The collective adaptation to these deprivations generated an inmate subculture that is characterized by solidarity and an adherence to the inmate code. Similarly, the situational version of the functionalist (deprivation) model holds that the nature of inmates’ responses will depend on the characteristics of the correctional institution, such as the nature of the disciplinary regime, size and physical layout, or organizational objectives of the institution. Kruttschnitt and Gartner propose that penological philosophies leave their physical mark on institutional environments. Institutions that were constructed during a time when rehabilitation was the primary goal of corrections should have a distinct effect on inmate adaptation. One of the main objectives of these institutions was to foster rehabilitation and individualized treatment. Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon refer to this rehabilitative paradigm as the old penology. The old penology was concerned with individuals, guilt, responsibility, obligation, and the diagnosis and treatment of individual offenders. Institutions built during the more recent punitive penal era have a very different orientation. Feeley and Simon have referred to these recent punitive criminal justice practices as the new penology. The new penology shifts focus away from the individual and is concerned with identifying, classifying, and managing dangerous groups of people. Feeley and Simon propose that this new penology has generated a greater reliance on imprisonment, especially short-term detention, which is not intended to rehabilitate, reintegrate, or retrain, but to use as an aggregate risk assessment and to manage dangerous groups of individuals. Due to the shift of the goals of corrections in the last half of the 20th century, Kruttschnitt and Gartner propose that these two distinct penological

531

philosophies, and their subsequent influence on the prison environment, would become evident in the different ways women adapt to prison. When Sykes first set forth his deprivation theory, it was not met without criticism. How could pre-prison experiences not influence how an individual adapts to prison? In 1962, John Irwin and Donald Cressey presented a counterargument to Sykes’s thesis. These scholars assumed the inmate subculture resulted from offender characteristics and experiences prior to incarceration; hence, individual characteristics and pre-prison experiences were the key components that influenced the development of social relationships within the walls of the prison. Instead of characterizing the prison as a social system organized around common values or the inmate code, Irwin and Cressey argued that the prison was composed of multiple subcultures that rival each other with respect to values and norms. The prison subculture was made of different types of men who brought their behavior, personalities, beliefs, and subcultures into prison, and the prison culture therefore reflected these characteristics. According to Irwin and Cressey, the prison subculture is not an artifact of the prison system (deprivations) but of the types and characteristics of people put into prison. The prison subculture was “imported” into the prison from the outside; therefore, individual characteristics such as race, age, or socioeconomic status affected how an inmate adapts to prison. Kruttschnitt and Gartner also adopted this model to explain women’s adaptation to prison. They believed women’s pre-prison experiences must have some bearing on how they responded to prison life. Kruttschnitt and Gartner thus employed a synthesis of situational functionalist and importation models to study intragender variation in responses to incarceration. They wished to explore “who women prisoners are, in light of the experiences and characteristics they brought with them into prison, and how they react to specific disciplinary regimes” (Kruttschnitt et al., 2000, p. 685). Through inmate interviews, they collected demographic and social data on the women inmates at the two prisons. These interviews allowed them to assess which pre-prison characteristics and experiences affected responses to prison. Their study of two different institutions in California allowed

532

Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

them to determine how different penological philosophies, and their subsequent effect on the institutions themselves, may affect how women adapt to prison. To address these issues, they used data collected at the CIW in the early 1960s, supplemented with their own research at CIW and VSPW in the late 1990s. This method allowed them to compare women’s prison experiences at two critical times of women’s imprisonment: the height of the rehabilitative movement (1960s) and the height of the “get tough/new penology” movement (1990s).

The Integrated Theoretical Model Kruttschnitt and Gartner set out to discover whether integrating the traditional models of inmate adaptation explained how women inmates adapted to prison. In order to do this, they conceptualized women’s adaptation, or doing time, by reviewing questions in their survey that addressed the women’s attitudes and behaviors toward other prisoners, the staff, and the institution itself (Krittschnitt & Gartner, 2005). The researchers then selected questions they thought would be valid indicators of how prisoners approach doing their time in the context of these relationships. Then they examined how women’s life experiences and current prison setting affected these responses to incarceration. Women’s Pre-Prison Characteristics and Experiences

Using the importation framework, Kruttschnitt and Gartner examined whether differences among women based on race, social class, age, and history of physical or sexual abuse were reflected in differences in the ways they adapted to prison. They found evidence that provided some support for importation theory: Some individual characteristics and pre-prison experiences influenced how women adapted to prison and how they related to other inmates and staff. Thus, women’s social class, age, and histories of physical abuse shaped the nature and extent of how they adjusted to prison. For example, women who were socially and financially disadvantaged tended to adapt to prison better than their middle-class counterparts. Younger women (under 30 years old) tended to have a wide

range of reactions to their imprisonment, from liking the prison to declaring that doing time was “real hard” (Kruttschnitt et al., 2000). Conversely, older women (30 and older) seemed more comfortable with prison life, other inmates, and informal prison codes. Women who had histories of abuse related how their abuse histories affected how they interacted with correctional staff and how the prison experience caused them to feel much like they did when they were in an abusive relationship. For many inmates who had been abused, the manner in which correctional officers treated them and the loss of identity and control in prison made them relive how they were treated by abusive partners in their lives. This caused them to have negative attitudes toward prison. As for other demographic characteristics, Kruttschnitt et al. discovered that women’s racial backgrounds did not appear to have a major influence on their prison adaptation. Institutional Variations

Kruttschnitt and Gartner also wanted to discover whether the situational functionalist model explained how women responded to prison. According to this model, the important factor that affected how inmates adapted is the nature of the prison in which they were incarcerated (Kruttschnitt et al., 2000). By looking at two women’s prisons in California at different time-periods, Kruttschnitt and Gartner took advantage of a natural experiment. This analysis would allow them to examine how two prisons that were built during two very different times in our country’s penological history affected inmate adaptation. Kruttschnitt and Gartner (2005) wished to know what women’s experiences in prison could tell us about the practices of punishment over time and in different institutional contexts. Kruttschnitt et al. examined whether there were distinct institutional differences in regards to relationships among inmates and relationships between inmates and staff. Relationships between inmates varied between the two prisons. Women at the newer VSPW were much more likely to avoid friendships than women at the older CIW. Women at VSPW, despite their different individual characteristics and pre-prison experiences, tended to adapt to prison by psychologically, and sometimes physically, isolating themselves from other inmates. In contrast, women

Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

at CIW were more likely to refer to some of their relationships with other inmates in positive terms, oftentimes referring to them as “friends.” Another difference was women at VSPW were less likely to receive guidance from other inmates. For example, at CIW, women serving long sentences or “lifers” were viewed as more active and supportive of others. At VSPW, however, lifers were not seen as a source of support. Lifers here were viewed as not caring about those around them because they were going to spend the rest of their life in prison (Kruttschnitt et al., 2000). Compared to CIW, women at VSPW were more isolated, distrustful of others, and lacked supportive relationships with other inmates. Differences were also observed in the relationships between inmates and staff at these two prisons. Not surprisingly, virtually all the inmates complained about the staff, but most also noted that some staff did their jobs well while others did not. Of the women who expressed largely positive views about staff, most were serving time at CIW. Conversely, most of the women who expressed largely negative attitudes about staff were serving time at VSPW. A majority of the inmates at VSPW gave example after example of what they viewed as arbitrary restrictions, inhumane treatment, and abuse from staff. Staff members were viewed not only as not caring about inmates but also as being actively hostile toward them (Kruttschnitt et al., 2000). It is clear that the type of institution affected how inmates related to each other and to staff.

Conclusion Kruttschnitt and Gartner’s research in two women’s prisons in California give support to their integrated theoretical model of women inmate adaptation. Data collected at CIW in the 1960s supplemented with interviews with women serving time at CIW and VSPW in the 1990s suggest support for the predictions of both the importation and the situational functionalist models of adaptation to prison. Put simply, pre-prison characteristics and experiences, as well as the characteristics of the institution in which women were incarcerated, influence how they do time. However, the extent to which pre-prison experiences influenced inmate adaptation depended upon the institution. There was evidence of an interaction effect between

533

pre-prison experiences and institutional environments. At CIW, the older prison that retained some elements of the rehabilitation model, women’s adjustment to imprisonment was influenced by their individual characteristics. At VSPW, the newer institution built under the new penology, individual characteristics were less influential and women’s adaptations were more homogenous. These findings point to a more complicated explanation of women’s responses to imprisonment: It is not simply gender that may affect their adaptation, but more complex interactions between individual factors and the prison environment that influence their adjustment to prison. Krista S. Gehring See also Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison; Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory; Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory

References and Further Readings Berk, B. (1966). Organizational goals and inmate organization. American Journal of Sociology, 71, 522–534. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1998). Prisoners in 1997. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2007). Prisoners in 2006. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Feeley, M., & Simon, J. (1992). The new penology: Notes on the emerging strategy of corrections and its implications. Criminology, 30, 449–474. Giallombardo, R. (1966). Society of women: A study of a women’s prison. New York: Wiley. Grusky, O. (1959). Organizational goals and the behavior of informal leaders. American Journal of Sociology, 65, 59–67. Irwin, J., & Cressey, D. R. (1962). Thieves, convicts and the inmate culture. Social Problems, 10, 142–155. Kruttschnitt, C., & Gartner, R. (2003). Women’s imprisonment. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 30, pp. 1–81). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kruttschnitt, C., & Gartner, R. (2005). Marking time in the golden state: Women’s imprisonment in California. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kruttschnitt, C., Gartner, R., & Miller, A. (2000). Doing her own time? Women’s responses to prison in the

534

Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

context of the old and new penology. Criminology, 38, 681–717. The Pew Center on the States. (2008). One in 100: Behind bars in America in 2008. Washington, DC: Public Safety Performance Project. Street, D., Vinter, R., & Perrow, C. (1966). Organization for treatment. London: Collier-Macmillan. Sykes, G. (1958) The society of captives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ward, D., & Kassebaum, G. (1963). Patterns of homosexual behavior among female prison inmates. Los Angeles: School of Public Health, University of California. Ward, D., & Kassebaum, G. (1965). Women’s prison: Sex and social structure. New York: Aldine. Wilson, T. (1968). Patterns of management and adaptations to organizational roles: A study of prison inmates. American Journal of Sociology, 74, 146–157.

L impact on racial minorities, in particular (p. xiii). LaFree saw a need to document and describe these trends but, more importantly, to offer an explanation for these dramatic changes in street crime. This explanation is to be found in a number of social developments, in particular the declining legitimacy of political, economic, and family institutions.

LaFree, Gary D.: Legitimacy and Crime Crime rates in the United States started to climb rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s and remained high through the mid- to late 1980s, making the United States’ level of crime (particularly violent crime) exceptionally high compared to other western countries. During that time period, many criminologists tried to explain why the United States appeared to be so much more vulnerable to crime compared to other countries. However, when starting in the late 1980s crime rates in the United States started to drop significantly, the same criminologists scratched their heads in disbelief and scrambled to explain this unanticipated “crime drop” (Marshall, 1996). LaFree’s Losing Legitimacy, published in 1998, represents one of the more recent attempts by American scholars to relate crime trends over the last half of the 20th century to other social trends. In the 50 years following World War II, street crime rates in the United States increased about eightfold; these increases “were historically patterned; were often quite rapid; and were disproportionally driven by young, African American men” (LaFree, 1998, p. xiii). Much of the initial, dramatic increase in crime took place in just 10 years, beginning in the early 1960s. Common explanations of crime that blamed biological or psychological pathologies or slow-changing social conditions could not account for “the speed or the timing” of these changes or their devastating

Explaining Long-Term Crime Trends Based on analysis of national crime data, LaFree separates post–World War II United States into four different periods. First, the low crime period, from 1946 to 1960, is marked by low and stable crime rates; the crime boom period, from 1961 to 1973, is marked by rapidly increasing crime rates; the crime plateau period, from 1974 to 1990, is marked by fluctuating but consistently high crime rates; and the crime bust period, from 1991 to 1999, is marked by steep declines in crime (LaFree, 2000, p. 270). He notes that “the two biggest events in the history of violent crime in America since World War II are first, the crime boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, and second, the crime bust of the 1990s” (p. 295). Explanations of crime should be able to account both for the crime boom (early 1960s to the mid1970s), as well as for the crime bust (1990s). But that is not enough. Analysis of trends by the age, race, and gender of offenders show three additional facts. First, an increasing proportion of crimes (with the exception of murder and aggravated assault) were committed by women, disproportionally young, black women. Second, the 535

536

LaFree, Gary D.: Legitimacy and Crime

young committed a disproportionate number of street crimes throughout the post war period. Third, street crime rates have been substantially higher for African Americans than whites throughout the postwar period. Thus, explanations of crime trends should also account for the noted trends in the age, gender, and racial characteristics of offenders. LaFree finds that explanations that emphasize individual responsibility, such as biological and psychological perspectives as well as rational choice perspectives, cannot account for the changing crime trends, or for the higher crime rates of the young, of men, and of African Americans. Social explanations such as labeling theory, strain theory, cultural deviance theories, control theories, and situational crime theories likewise fall short in their ability to explain the long-term crime trends in the United States. None of these explanations can stand alone and explain the trends. Therefore, LaFree proposes an integrated theoretical framework, which draws from virtually all of the above theories: Labeling theory (and its emphasis on the social construction of society, including that institutions are human creations), rational choice theory (which assumes that people can be deterred from crime by the fear of punishment), strain theories (which illustrate the fundamental importance of economic, political, and educational institutions for controlling crime), cultural deviance theories (emphasizing the importance of socialization), social control and situational theories (emphasizing the importance of informal social control systems), and cultural deviance and social control theory (which suggest the centrality of families to crime control) (p. 69). The social institution is the linchpinthat ties all these theories together into an integrated theoretical framework.

Declining Institutional Legitimacy Institutions are “arguably the most important of all human creations” (LaFree, 1998, p. xiii) and may be defined as “the patterned, mutually shared ways that people develop for living together” (p. 71). They include the rules, laws, norms, values, roles, and organizations that define and regulate human conduct. According to LaFree, institutions can limit crime in three interrelated ways: (1) by minimizing motivation to commit crime, (2) by

effectively controlling criminal behavior, and (3) by protecting citizens against crime. The three institutions that are most central to crime control are political, economic, and familial. Political institutions (such as legislative bodies, the military, police, and courts) are extremely important for crime control because they formulate and enforce criminal law, and they should motivate individuals to follow social rules. Economic institutions (reflected in the labor market, unemployment, income inequality) may decrease crime by reducing the motivation of individuals to offend, or they may increase crime by making it relatively more rewarding than legal behavior. The family is critical in the control of crime because they socialize the young to be lawabiding members of society, and they also are strong agents of social control. The second key term in LaFree’s theory is that of legitimacy, which refers “to the ease or difficulty with which institutions are able to get societal members to follow these rules, laws and norms” (p. 6). As the title of his book suggests, in Losing Legitimacy, LaFree argues that the rapid increase in post–World War II street crime rates was produced by a “crisis in institutional legitimacy” (Short, 1999, p. 540). His main argument is that overlapping declines in the legitimacy of political, economic, and familial institutions were largely responsible for the postwar crime boom. He supports his argument by showing that trends in civil unrest, litigation, electoral participation, polls concerning trust in institutional leaders, income and economic inequality measures, and measures of family composition and births out of wedlock are consistent with crime trends over the last half century. African Americans who experienced the greatest distrust in political institutions, the greatest economic-related stress, and the greatest changes in the structure and functioning of families during postwar years also showed the highest levels of involvement in street crime.

Institutional Responses to the Legitimacy Crisis As the legitimacy of political, economic, and family institutions eroded during the 1960s, American policy makers responded by funding major increases in criminal justice spending, education,

LaFree, Gary D.: Legitimacy and Crime

and welfare. These three institutions have direct relevance for crime control. As the legitimacy of political institutions declined, the United States relied increasingly on formal criminal justice institutions to maintain law and order. As the legitimacy of traditional family institutions declined, Americans relied increasingly on the education system to perform responsibilities that were once done by families. Welfare institutions also grew significantly during the post–World War II period (up to 1994 in LaFree’s book). Welfare support is supposed to make up for the decline in economic institutions by lessening economic stress and reduce criminal motivation, and improve the effectiveness of informal social control. In spite of the enormous increases in spending on criminal justice, education, and welfare, crime rates did not decrease immediately. LaFree explains this paradox by arguing “that these expenditures occurred only after crime had begun to accelerate and that their effects were muted or neutralized by intraracial income inequality and other events affecting this country’s political, economic, and family life” (Short, 1999, p. 541).

Conclusion The policy implications of LaFree’s institutional model of postwar crime rates in America (1998, Figure 5.1, p. 87) are—in his own words— “straightforward” (p. 178): “either strengthen traditional crime control institutions or spend more on newer institutional responses to crime or pursue some combination of both strategies.” Thus, increasing trust in political institutions, reducing economic inequality and stress, and “renewing families” (p. 179), with particular attention to the need to increase the legitimacy of institutions for African Americans is called for. Combine this with strengthening educational and welfare institutions and measured use of criminal justice institutions, and American society will be able to maintain control over its street crime problem. In the decade or so after its publication in 1998, Losing Legitimacy has become a frequently cited text in American criminology. One important test of institutional legitimacy theory will be how well the model can account for the developments in street crime after the mid-1990s. Because of its complexity, institutional theory has not had many

537

empirical tests. A number of LaFree’s ideas on legitimacy and crime have been incorporated in theoretical work, and some components of the theory have been included in empirical research. James F. Short, Jr., has criticized the theory as being too focused on national (rather than community-level) data, for ignoring ethnic and racial categories other than African Americans, and for overlooking the importance of other institutions and social changes, such as voluntary associations, religious institutions, illicit and legitimate opportunity structures, and youth subcultures. Most social-level crime theories include factors related to economics, politics, family, education, welfare, and criminal justice—the six major institutions discussed in Losing Legitimacy. In that sense, LaFree’s theory is not unique. However, the institutional legitimacy theory attempts to integrate these major social forces in a model that can account for the ups and downs of crime trends. As such, Losing Legitimacy provides an important contribution to criminological theory. Importantly, the theory continues to evolve, not only because of other criminologists’ work but also because in his subsequent work, LaFree has expanded his study of the link between macro-level social developments and crime trends to include global developments and terrorism. Ineke Haen Marshall See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide; Inequality and Crime; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

References and Further Readings Blumstein, A., & Wallman, J. (Eds.). (2000). The crime drop in America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Crespo, F. (2006). Institutional legitimacy and crime in Venezuela. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 22, 347–367. Deibert, G. R. (2003). Teens, drugs and the American dream: A partial test of American institutional explanations of crime. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, GA. Hagan, J., Shedd, C., & Payne, M. R. (2005). Race, ethnicity, and youth perceptions of criminal justice. American Sociological Review, 70, 381–407.

538

LaFree, Gary D., and Christopher Birkbeck: Situational Analysis of Crime

LaFree, G. D. (1998). Losing legitimacy: Street crime and the decline of social institutions in America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. LaFree, G. D. (2000). Explaining the crime bust of the 1990s. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 91, 269–306. LaFree, G. (2007). Terrorism and institutional legitimacy: When do ordinary citizens support extraordinary violence? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Hilton Chicago. LaFree, G., & Dugan, L. (2004). How does studying terrorism compare to studying crime? In M. Deflem (Ed.), Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives (pp. 53–74). New York: JAI Press. Lafree, G., & Tseloni, A. (2006). Democracy and crime: A multilevel analysis of homicide trends in forty-four countries, 1950–2000. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 605, 26–49. Marshall, I. H. (1996). How exceptional is the United States? Crime trends in Europe and the United States. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 4, 8–35. Robinson, T. H. (2003). Towards bridging the gap between micro and macro levels of analysis in criminology. Dissertation Abstracts International: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 63, 4101. Short, J. F., Jr. (1999). Review of Losing legitimacy: Street crime and the decline of social institutions in America, by Gary LaFree. The American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 540–542.

LaFree, Gary D., and Christopher Birkbeck: Situational Analysis of Crime Since the early 20th century, a debate has ensued as to the importance of (1) dispositional theories— ones in which characteristics of the individual provide explanation for “criminality” or the inclination to offend versus—(2) situational theories, ones in which characteristics of the situation or setting provide explanation for the occurrence of a “crime” or an actual criminal act. Edwin H. Sutherland presented one of the first arguments for the study of situational correlates to delinquency. However, scholars at the time were headstrong in their studies of dispositional correlates to deviance

and a focus on the study of criminality as opposed to crime. Although this debate began many years prior, research in the arenas of criminology and sociology focused mainly on dispositional theories until the 1980s. During this time, scholars began to reassess the situational nature of crime and deviance. While Ronald Clarke assessed the situational nature of crime prevention techniques, Gary LaFree and Christopher Birkbeck furnished strong arguments for a renewed interest in situational correlates to crime and deviance and divergence from a strict dispositional focus. To provide a sound foundation for situational analysis, Birkbeck and LaFree argued that a distinct definition of “situation” needed to be developed and that the theoretical basis for situational analysis must be understood for it to achieve relevance within the realm of criminology.

Situation Because the idea of a “situation” varies based on individuals’ interpretations, Birkbeck and LaFree (1993) sought to refine the concept into a working definition. In doing so, they proposed that a situation refers to “the immediate setting in which behavior occurs” (p. 115). However, in support of the varied nature of defining the concept, the authors used a slight alteration in their 1991 work. In this article, they defined the term as the “perceptive field of the individual at a given point in time” (p. 75). Thus, a situation is, in general, the setting in which an action occurs that is within the scope of an individual’s perception. Following the lead of Lawrence A. Pervin, Birkbeck and LaFree (1993) assessed three components that are part of this concept: stimulus, situation, and environment. A stimulus is the object or action within a setting on which the individual is focused. Situations refer to a set of objects or activities that occur within a setting over a time period. Environments, then, are a group of “situations and characteristics [of those situations that] may be continuous across situations” (p. 116). For crime analysis based on situational concepts, Birkbeck and LaFree focus on situations, not stimuli or environments, as situational settings. Thus, it follows that a situational explanation for

LaFree, Gary D., and Christopher Birkbeck: Situational Analysis of Crime

crime or deviance is a theory of crime assessing the relationship between crime and the characteristics of the setting at the time of the incident.

Theoretical Foundation for Situational Analysis Across the realm of sociological, psychological, and criminological theories, three schools of thought form the foundation for the situational analysis of crime. Those include psychological experimental studies, symbolic interactionism, and opportunity theories. According to Birkbeck and LaFree, psychological experimental studies of deviance have focused mainly on aggression and dishonesty. These studies have shown that situational correlates play a role in the acts of aggression and dishonesty, namely situational role models and reward/punishment structures. For example, objects or individuals within settings can act as catalysts for aggressive behavior, models within the larger environment portrayed in the media can lead to aggressive behavior or the development of dishonest practices, and the reward/punishment structure of the setting can impact the likelihood of lying and cheating. From a sociological perspective, symbolic interactionist researchers provide two main concepts in support of a situational relationship with crime: an objective factor and a subjective factor. Symbolic interactionists emphasize that all action takes place within situations. In other words, these studies focus on assessing situational factors in real time, as they occur, objectively. On the other hand, these theorists also argue that the meaning provided by the situational frame of reference can only be given by the “subjective experiences of actors” (Birkbeck & LaFree, 1993, p. 119). Without the subjective interpretation of the characteristics of the setting by the key players, an existing relationship between the situational characteristics and the crime and/or deviance has no substantial meaning. Opportunity theories also play a role in the situational foundation of the study of crime based in both situational selection theories and victimization theories. Situational selection theories, based in rational choice concepts, posit four major factors. First, offender decisions are partially determined by situational factors. Second, the study of

539

situational selection helps identify criteria used by offenders to select situations. Third, situations chosen by offenders vary by crime type. Fourth, the degree of importance of the use of situational selection varies by offender and crime type. According to Birkbeck and LaFree, victimization theories contribute to the situational analysis of crime by providing an explanation for patterns of victimization, as opposed to criminality, that are rooted in situational models of crime, namely routine activity theory.

Conclusion Although studies of crime focused on dispositional theories, situational theories of crime also play an important role in explanation. All three theoretical foundations provide a basis for the study of situational correlates of crime and delinquency. Experimental studies furnish examples of situational characteristics impacting the likelihood of crime and deviance. Symbolic interactionist foci demonstrate the need for both an objective and subjective view of the situation by emphasizing the need for actors’ subjective interpretations of situations and by demonstrating that crime and deviance vary across situational factors. Opportunity theories of crime explain patterns of criminality and victimization that are correlated to situational factors. Overall, situational-based theories contribute because they help explain patterns in relationships among behavior of individuals and characteristics of the settings in which the behaviors occur and because they lead to a focus on offender decision making. Jessica R. Dunham See also Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory; Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

References and Further Readings Birkbeck, C., & LaFree, G. (1993). The situational analysis of crime and deviance. Annual Review of Sociology, 19, 113–136.

540

Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model

Clarke, R. V. (1980). “Situational” crime prevention: Theory and practice. British Journal of Criminology, 20, 136–147. Clarke, R. V. (1995). Situational crime prevention. In M. Tonry & D. Farrington (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research—Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention (Vol. 19, pp. 91–150). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, L. E, & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. LaFree, G., & Birkbeck, C. (1991). The neglected situation: A cross-national study of the situational characteristics of crime. Criminology, 29, 73–98. Pervin, L. A. (1978). Definitions, measurements and classifications of stimuli, situations and environments. Human Ecology, 6, 71–105. Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model Benjamin B. Lahey and Irwin D. Waldman propose a developmental propensity model to explain the origins of conduct problems and delinquency during childhood and adolescence. In formulating their developmental model, Lahey and Waldman integrate the most promising research from various other theories and perspectives, such as from Terrie Moffitt’s dual taxonomy theory, social learning theory, developmental criminology, and biosocial criminology. Overall, their model seeks to explain why there are multiple developmental trajectories for conduct problems from school entry age through adolescence. According to Lahey and Waldman, the answer lies in an individual’s propensity toward conduct problems and the environmental factors that either foster or inhibit an individual from expressing his or her antisocial tendencies.

Developmental Model In their model, Lahey and Waldman integrate the developmental aspect of Moffitt’s dual taxonomy theory. Their model differs from Moffitt’s, however,

in terms of both the age of onset and the causal influences on conduct problems. First, Moffitt views age of onset as a dichotomous variable, that results in two distinct developmental trajectories for youths with conduct problems (i.e., adolescentlimited and life-course-­persistent). On the other hand, Lahey and Waldman, argue that the age of onset varies along a continuum rather than a true dichotomy, resulting in multiple developmental trajectories for conduct problems. Second, Moffitt’s theory asserts that the causal processes are different for the two categories of antisocial youths. In contrast, Lahey and Waldman contend that the underlying causes of conduct problems are the same regardless of the age of onset. Rather they argue that it is the strength and pattern of the causal influences that vary based on the age of onset. As mentioned, Lahey and Waldman’s model seeks to explain the various developmental trajectories of conduct problems in youths. The first step in accomplishing this is to distinguish between two types of conduct problems: developmentally early and developmentally late conduct problems. First, developmentally early conduct problems are actions that are seen as fairly “normal” in young children and tend to become less prevalent as the youth enters his or her teenage years. Examples of developmentally early conduct problems include lying and minor forms of aggression such as bullying, fighting, and hurting animals. On the other hand, developmentally late conduct problems encompasses nonaggressive forms of conduct problems, such as stealing, breaking and entering, running away from home, and truancy as well as serious forms of aggression, such as rape, use of a weapon, and mugging. These types of behaviors are rare in early childhood and tend to emerge in late childhood and peak during adolescence. Lahey and Waldman argue that there is considerable variation in the initial levels of developmentally early conduct problems in children at school entry age (i.e., intercept). The slopes (i.e., rate of change over time) can then vary in all possible directions from these initial start points. For example, two youths may have the exact same level of developmentally early conduct problems at school age, but based on their respective antisocial propensities and interactions with their environments, one youth may persist/worsen over time while the

Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model

other may desist. Lahey and Waldman propose several hypotheses related to the developmental trajectories of conduct problems in adolescence based on an individual’s level of developmentally early conduct problems at school entry. For example, youths who have high initial levels of developmentally early conduct problems at school entry are more likely (1) to continue exhibiting conduct problems, often to a higher degree, and are less likely to desist over time and (2) to demonstrate their developmentally late conduct problems at an earlier age and at a higher rate once they reach adolescence. Lahey and Waldman state that there are two key components in explaining the various developmental trajectories for conduct problems. These include characteristics specific to the child and the social environment in which the child is raised. In other words, the causes of conduct problems lie in both an individual’s propensity toward conduct problems as well as the environmental factors that either foster or inhibit an individual from transitioning antisocial tendencies into antisocial actions.

541

The first component in explaining why there are multiple developmental trajectories for conduct problems is related to characteristics specific to the child. Lahey and Waldman view individuals as having certain propensities toward criminal conduct. This antisocial propensity is based on four risk factors. Three are related to temperament, while the fourth deals with cognitive abilities, especially as they pertain to language development. It is important to note that these individuallevel risk factors (i.e., temperament and cognitive abilities) are influenced by both genetic and environmental factors.

to situations with negative emotions. These negative emotions emerge often, are intense in nature, and tend to be expressed with little provocation. Lahey and Waldman’s conceptualization of negative emotionality is similar to other temperament and personality measures, such as neuroticism and negative affectivity. It is hypothesized that individuals who score high on negative emotionality have a higher propensity toward conduct problems than those who score low. Second, daring refers to an individual’s preference for risk, adventure, and sensation seeking. Lahey and Waldman’s description of daring parallels the definition set forth by David Farrington and D. J. West and is also similar to Jerome Kagan, J. Steven Reznick, and Nancy Snidman’s concept of behavioral disinhibition, which is a known risk factor for criminal behavior. It is therefore hypothesized that individuals who score high on daring will be more likely to exhibit conduct problems than those who score low. Finally, prosociality refers to an individual’s tendency to be concerned for the feelings of others as well as an individual’s willingness to share and help others. Lahey and Waldman’s definition of prosociality stems from Nancy Eisenberg and Paul Henry Mussen’s construct of dispositional sympathy, which is inversely related to conduct problems. Thus, individuals who score high on prosociality are less likely to express antisocial behaviors compared to individuals who score low on prosociality. Although these dimensions of temperament are viewed as independent of one another, Lahey and Waldman argue that all three dimensions must be taken into account when assessing an individual’s level of antisocial propensity. For example, an individual is classified as high risk for conduct problems if the person is high in negative emotionality, high in daring, and low in prosociality.

Temperament

Cognitive Abilities

Lahey and Waldman highlight three dimensions of temperament believed to influence the likelihood of exhibiting conduct problems: (1) negative emotionality, (2) daring, and (3) prosociality. These three dimensions of temperament are viewed as independent risk factors, each exerting its own effect on conduct problems. First, negative emotionality refers to an individual’s tendency to react

Cognitive ability is the second child characteristic proposed by Lahey and Waldman to influence an individual’s propensity toward conduct problems. In other words, an individual’s level of cognitive ability, especially as it relates to language development, can influence the youth’s developmental trajectory for conduct problem. For example, individuals with lower cognitive abilities

Antisocial Propensity

542

Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model

coupled with slow language development are at an increased risk for displaying conduct problems. Conversely, it is hypothesized that youths who have high cognitive abilities and strong language skills are at low risk for conduct problems because they are better able to articulate frustrations rather than resorting to physical violence. It is important to note that while the three dimensions of temperament are said to be independent of one another, it is currently unknown whether cognitive abilities are independent of the three dimensions of temperament.

Genetic and Environmental Influences While temperament and cognitive abilities influence a child’s level of antisocial propensity, environmental factors also impact the developmental trajectories for conduct problems. Lahey and Waldman argue that both gene-environment interactions and gene-environment correlations are important in explaining the many developmental trajectories for conduct problems. In regards to gene-environment interactions, they argue that individuals who are genetically predisposed to conduct problems are not destined to become delinquent. For instance, exposing these susceptible youth to prosocial environments could decrease the chances that they will transition their antisocial tendencies into delinquent acts. Furthermore, being exposed to environments that foster the expression of delinquent activities will impact individuals differently based on their genetic predisposition to conduct problems. Gene-environment correlations may also help to explain the development of conduct problems in childhood and adolescence. These include passive, evocative, and active gene-environment correlations. First, a passive gene-environment correlation refers to the parents providing both their DNA and their environment to their child. For example, temperamental parents not only will pass down their high-daring genes to their child but also will provide an environment for the expression of those high-daring genes, such as positively reinforcing their child for risky behaviors. Second, an evocative gene-environment correlation refers to an individual’s genetic predispositions to evoke a response from his or her environment. For example, children with a difficult temperament, such as

high emotionality, high daring, and/or low prosociality coupled with lower cognitive abilities can negatively affect their own environment. Of particular importance to Lahey and Waldman’s developmental model is the child’s family environment. Thus, difficult children may elicit negative responses from their parents in the form of harsher and inconsistent parenting, thereby promoting further misbehaving by the child. Third, an active geneenvironment correlation refers to individuals’ selfselecting themselves into particular environments based on their own personal predispositions. For example, antisocial individuals tend to gravitate toward each other when choosing friends. These relationships can then serve to further promote the expression of their own antisocial behaviors over time.

Conclusion Lahey and Waldman put forth a developmental propensity model to explain the origins of conduct problems and delinquency during childhood and adolescence. Overall, they state that a child’s difficult temperament, measured by high negative emotionality, high daring, and/or low prosociality, coupled with low cognitive ability, will increase the likelihood that the youth will be predisposed to conduct problems. In turn, the child’s interactions with his or her environment will then dictate the extent to which the youngsters’ antisocial tendencies transition into antisocial acts over time. Danielle Boisvert See also Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model; Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory; Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior; Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime; Moffitt, Terrie E. A Developmental Model of Life-CoursePersistent Offending

References and Further Readings Eisenberg, N., & Mussen, P. H. (1991). The roots of prosocial behavior in children. New York: Cambridge University Press. Farrington, D. P., & West, D. J. (1993). Criminal, penal and life histories of chronic offenders: Risk and

Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior protective factors and early identification. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 3, 492–523. Kagan, J., Reznick, J. S., & Snidman, N. (1988). Biological bases of childhood shyness. Science, 240, 167–171. Lahey, B. B., & Waldman, I. D. (2003). A developmental propensity model of the origins of conduct problems during childhood and adolescence. In B. B. Lahey, T. E. Moffitt, & A. Caspi (Eds.), Causes of conduct disorder and juvenile delinquency (pp. 76–117). New York: Guilford Press. Lahey, B. B., & Waldman, I. D. (2005). A developmental model of the propensity to offend during childhood and adolescence. In D. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending (Advances in criminological theory: Vol. 14, pp. 15–50). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescent-limited and life-coursepersistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701.

Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior In 1997, Marc Le Blanc formally proposed a multilayered generic control theory of deviant behavior. This reconceptualization of control theory was meant to expand traditional control theories in two fundamental ways. First, unlike other control theories, his theory incorporates multiple levels of explanation (i.e., individual, community, and event) and argues that these levels are interdependent and function as a system of control. Second, this theory addresses the development of control over the life course. Specifically, Le Blanc contends that over the life course there is continuity and change in the level of control that individuals have, which explains changes in deviance over time. Although his theory is multilayered, this entry focuses on the layer that pertains to the individual deviance—personal control. It describes the theory’s personal control mechanisms, its structure, and the role of continuity and stability in deviant behavior. This layer of his theory is part of the control paradigm and seeks to explain why individuals refrain from engaging in deviant behavior. It is a general theory in the sense that it

543

can be applied to all deviant behaviors, not just criminal acts.

Control Mechanisms Le Blanc’s theory contends that individuals who do not participate in deviant behavior are being restrained by the interactions of four control mechanisms. Specifically, he states that individuals conform to conventional standards because they are bonded to society, have prosocial models in their lives, possess internal and external constraints, and are concerned about those around them. In Le Blanc’s original conception of personal control theory, he presented each of the four categories of control mechanisms separately. Recently, he has collapsed them into two groupings: social control (i.e., bonding, modeling, and constraining) and self-control (or allocentrism). In addition, he states that these control mechanisms are affected by several exogenous factors. Bond to Society

Le Blanc conceptualizes an individual’s bond to society as the person’s attachment or commitment to different societal institutions (i.e., family, marriage, work, school, and peers). He argues that during the life course, these institutions vary in importance (e.g., children are committed to school whereas adults are committed to work); however, attachment to people remains the most important bond. Being attached to individuals (i.e., parents, peers, and spouses) facilitates conventional behavior by enabling individuals to internalize societal norms. For example, if a daughter is attached to her father and cares about what her father thinks of her, she will choose not to engage in behaviors that will jeopardize their relationship. The stronger her relationship is with her father, the more likely she will adopt his norms as her own. An individual’s commitment to institutions, such as school, work, or religion, also plays a role in restraining the person from engaging in deviant behavior because such actions may jeopardize the efforts he or she has made to succeed in these areas of his or her life. For example, individuals who are committed to their jobs will consider the costs and benefits of committing a criminal act because of how this action may affect their employment status.

544

Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior

Prosocial Model

The control mechanism of prosocial models relates to an individual’s contact with antisocial influences. Such influences include violence on television and in video games, witnessing parents or a spouse engaging in deviance, antisocial peer groups, criminal companions, deviant subcultures, and routine activities (violence witnessed in daily activities). According to the theory, individuals that are exposed to more antisocial influences will be more likely to engage in deviant behaviors. For example, an individual that has antisocial friends, plays violent video games, and witnesses antisocial behaviors on his or her way home from school every day is more likely to engage in crime than someone who has parents that display prosocial behaviors and only witnesses violence on television. Constraints

Another mechanism through which individuals are restrained from engaging in deviant behavior is constraints. There are two forms of constraints: external and internal. External constraint, which is rooted in labeling theory, can be further subdivided into informal and formal. Both informal and formal constraints reside outside of the individual. However, formal external constraints are those established by communities (e.g., drinking and driving laws), whereas informal external constraints are established by an individual’s social network (e.g., child punished for disrespecting his mother). Internal constraint, which is based on bonding theories, is rooted inside the individual and pertains to the conscience or feelings of guilt, which prevents the person from engaging in deviant behaviors. The theory contends that there is a developmental aspect to constraints. Specifically, external constraints contribute more so to the formation of prosocial behavior in childhood and adolescents while internal constraints are more important during adulthood. Adolescence/Self-Control

Allocentrism is the control mechanism that represents individual differences. Le Blanc contends that over the life course, individuals experience a natural progression from egocentric to allocentric on several individual dimensions. These dimensions

include cognitive, moral, relational, social, and affective. In more recent statements of his theory, Le Blanc has also included self-control as a dimension of this control mechanism. This natural development results in individuals progressing from being self-centered to being concerned for others. In addition, Le Blanc states that this control mechanism involves the development of individuals in the direction of greater compliance with society’s norms, rules, and expectations. This control mechanism, therefore, argues that individuals naturally progress into people that care for others and have internalized society’s norms and expectations. Contextual Factors

Personal control theory also contends that contextual factors play a role in the commission of deviant acts. Specifically, Le Blanc states that two types of contextual factors have an indirect effect on deviant behavior: social status and biological capacity. Social status includes aspects of the person’s environment (i.e., structural and community organizational conditions), family’s socioeconomic status, and ethnic/racial background. Biological capacity relates to factors that impact the development of personality (i.e., central nervous system functioning and testosterone levels).

The Structure of Personal Control According to Le Blanc’s theory, the control mechanisms and contextual factors presented above and deviance operate in synergy. This means that there are reciprocal, retroactive, indirect, and direct relationships between these factors over time. In addition, each of these factors is state-dependent, which means that the factor’s prior state affects its future state. The structure of this theory is important because the interactions of all of these factors determine an individual’s overall level of control. This section presents causal structure of Le Blanc’s theory beginning with the contextual factors. Personal control theory argues that contextual factors do not have a direct effect on individual offending but instead operate through an individual’s control mechanisms. Specifically, social status has a direct effect on biological capacity, bonds to society, and prosocial models. For example, social status can influence biological capacity through

Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior

lead levels. Communities that are disadvantaged have a greater likelihood of having high levels of lead exposure, and this can affect an individual’s ability to develop cognitively. In addition, an individual positioned in a highly disorganized community will have a harder time developing bonds with people in their community and they are less likely to be exposed to prosocial models. The control mechanisms have four functions regarding the structure of this theory. First, they mediate the relationship between contextual factors and deviance. Second, there are reciprocal relations among them (except constraints and prosocial models). For example, a person’s egocentricity may influence his or her capacity to exercise internal control. Third, all of the control mechanisms have a direct impact on deviance. Fourth, there are retroactive effects. For example, a person’s level of constraint at time one affects his or her offending at time two.

The Development of Personal Control: Continuity and Change Le Blanc contends that over the life course, deviance takes the form of an inverted “U.” Although the exact shape of the inverted “U” varies by person, due to differences in onset, desistance, and frequency, he contends that its general shape can be explained using the developmental processes of controls over the life course. Specifically, these developmental processes aide in explaining why there is continuity and change in behavior over one’s life span. The theory addresses these developmental processes by examining the quantitative and qualitative changes in controls. In addition, continuity and change are explained through attractors and repellors. According to the theory, quantitative changes are operationalized in terms of increases and decreases in a mechanism (e.g., developing from a state of egocentric to allocentric or developing from a state of weak social bonds to strong ones). Such changes are the result of the aging-stability law, which states that over time development ceases and a pinnacle is reached—the construct has stabilized or finished maturing. Qualitative changes involve the natural movement from one developmental stage to the next. For example, an individual escalating from committing truancy to engaging

545

in theft. Therefore, according to the theory, the onset of deviance is caused by weak control mechanisms (low self-control, no prosocial models, and lack of constraints and prosocial models) and continued deviance results when the control mechanisms in an individual’s system of control remain stable. Desistance, however, occurs because over time these weak control mechanisms strengthen to the point where they are able to restrain the person from continuing to engage in deviant behaviors. In addition, change can result from a qualitative change or a change in one’s trajectory. Le Blanc states, however, that there is limited empirical support for the notion that qualitative changes occur, in regards to social controls, in a developmental sequence. Continuity and change are also the result of attractors and repellors. Le Blanc argues that deviant behaviors are attractive, which is why they are often repeated. The behavior itself, however, is not enough to attract an individual to engage in it. The behavior has to also be accompanied by a weak personal control system. If the state of personal control continues at the same level and the behavior is reinforced, deviancy will continue. For example, shoplifting a new video game is exciting on its own. Even so, if the individual wanting the new game also has low self-control, his or her magnetism to shoplifting is increased. Unless this individual’s level of self-control is increased, the person will continue to engage in this behavior. Le Blanc also argues that individuals can be repelled from engaging in deviant behaviors due to the nature of the behavior and their state of personal control. Thus, individuals may choose not to drink alcohol because they do not like the taste of it and they are committed to performing well in school. Furthermore, Le Blanc contends that stability is the result of relative rank ordering. Although individuals may change in their level of control over time, their relative rank order (how they compare to others on the same construct) is stable. For example, an individual with low self-control may acquire more self-control over time but so do other individuals; therefore, when he or she is compared with others, relative to them, the person’s level of self-control still appears low. Therefore, Le Blanc’s theory attempts to explain the continuity and stability of deviance across the life course. In addition, in more recent statements of his

546

Left Realism Criminology

theory, he also incorporates the notion of opportunity by arguing that the presence of an opportunity to offend also contributes to the likelihood of engaging in deviant behavior. This, of course, is also affected by an individual’s level of personal control. Rebecca Schnupp See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

References and Further Readings Farrington, D. P. (2006). Building developmental and life-course theories of offending. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in criminological theory: Vol. 15, pp. 335–364). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Le Blanc, M. (1997). A generic control theory of deviant behavior: The structural and dynamical statements of an integrative multilayered control theory. In T. P. Farrington (Ed.), Developmental theories of crime and delinquency (Advances in criminological theory: Vol. 7, pp. 215–286). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Le Blanc, M. (2005). An integrative personal control theory of deviant behavior: Answers to contemporary empirical and theoretical developmental criminology issues. In T. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental and life-course theories of offending (Advances in criminological theory: Vol. 14, pp. 125–163). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Le Blanc, M. (2006). Self-control and the social control of deviant behavior in context: Development and interactions along the life-course. In P.-O. H. Wikström & R. J. Sampson (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms, and development (pp. 195–242). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Left Realism Criminology Left realism is a main school of thought within critical criminology, and contrary to what some

critics declare, it is not dead. In fact, left realism is just as important now as it was during the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher years when it was born. Left realists take crimes of the powerful (e.g., corporate crime) seriously and publish scholarly materials on this topic, but the bulk of their theoretical work addresses street crime, draconian means of policing, and violence against women in heterosexual relationships. The main reason for this is that prior to the 1980s, most critical criminologists focused primarily on corporate and white-collar crime, as well as on the influence of class and race relations on definitions of crime and the administration of justice. Left realists agree that these are important topics and warrant much more social scientific and political attention. Still, they claim and have empirically demonstrated that failing to acknowledge crimes committed by the powerless allows conservative politicians in several countries to manufacture ideological support for “law and order” policies that harm the socially and economically disenfranchised and that preclude the development of a truly egalitarian society based on social justice principles. Moreover, left realists assert that the left’s ongoing failure to take working-class and female victimization seriously contributes to rightwing groups’ hegemonic control over knowledge about crime and policing. There are left realists based in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States, and Elliott Currie, John Lea, Brian MacLean, Roger Matthews, Martin Schwartz, and Jock Young are some of the most widely cited scholars in the field. Historically, though, most of the theoretical work on crime in impoverished inner-city communities was done by British realists. Furthermore, the early stages of British left realist theorizing, although clearly recognizing the criminogenic effects of capitalism and patriarchy, focused mainly on the concepts of relative deprivation and subculture. Additionally, they argued that the relation between one’s position in the broader social structure and crime is mediated by subjective experiences. For example, as strain theorist Robert K. Merton pointed out decades ago, in advanced capitalist societies, many people lack the legitimate means to achieve culturally defined goals, such as cars, houses, and other symbols of material success. Some people respond to the strain

Left Realism Criminology

induced by the disjunction between these goals and means by becoming what Merton refers to as “innovators.” In other words, they deal drugs or steal from their neighbors for material gain. Left realists also contend that people lacking legitimate means of solving the problem of relative deprivation may come into contact with other frustrated disenfranchised people and form subcultures, which, in turn, encourage and legitimate criminal behaviors. Indeed, a large body of research shows that receiving respect from peers is highly valued among ghetto adolescents who are denied status in mainstream, middle-class society. However, respect and status are often granted by inner-city subcultures when one is willing to be violent. Some progressive scholars criticize early left realist theories for paying only lip service to gender-related issues, such as the role of broader patriarchal forces. Certainly, feminist concerns, such as violence against women, influence left realist thinking. In fact, left realists were among the first critical criminologists to recognize the importance of feminist inquiry. Still, the influence of feminism never penetrated to the deeper levels of discourse prior to the start of this century. Nevertheless, today, some North American criminologists are developing theories of woman abuse that integrate key left realist concepts with feminist concerns. For example, Walter DeKeseredy and his colleagues recently constructed a theory that combines an economic exclusion/left realist argument with a male peer support model to explain separation/divorce sexual assault in rural U.S. communities. The square of crime is also a major component of British left realist theoretical offerings. The square of crime focuses on four interacting elements: victim, offender, state agencies (e.g., the police), and the public. Some readers might argue that since the square of crime is a dated contribution and that left realism has historically focused almost exclusively on inner-city street crime, it has little, if any relevance, to a critical criminological understanding of current criminal activities and societal reactions in rural communities. Of course, this is an issue that can only be addressed empirically, given that, at the time of writing this entry, no one has yet tested hypotheses derived from the square of crime in rural areas and small towns.

547

However, in their attempt to start the development of a rural critical criminology, Joseph Donnermeyer and Walter DeKeseredy contend that unlike the earlier Chicago School of criminology, the square of crime does not have an intrinsic urban bias and, instead, represents a way to understand the fundamental dimensions of crime at multiple levels. Left realists and other progressive criminologists claim that social and physical disorders do not always need to be dealt with by a massive police presence. True, many disenfranchised innercity residents view police “crackdowns” on public drinking, panhandling, and other minor offenses as grossly unfair with regard to the seriousness of these offenses and the degree to which the police monitor some sections of the city instead of others. Left realists in both North America and the United Kingdom theorize that “hard” police tactics, such as stopping and searching people who are publicly drunk, only serve to alienate socially, economically, and politically excluded urban communities. These tactics, it is also asserted, influence many people to withhold support and information the police need to solve crimes that are more serious. In turn, the police respond with more aggressive tactics, which lead to further community alienation from the police. Since its birth in the early 1970s, critical criminology has contributed to a rich interdisciplinary understanding of how various forms of inequality spawned by brutal macro-level forces, such as capitalism and patriarchy, contribute to a wide range of harms, including woman abuse, racist police practices, corporate crimes, and acts of predatory street violence committed by socially and economically disadvantaged youth. However, relatively little critical work has focused on how structural factors such as the shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy and the neoconservative assault on limited social services has negatively affected today’s middle-class youth. In his 2004 book The Road to Whatever: MiddleClass Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence, U.S. left realist Elliott Currie helps fill yet another major gap in the criminological literature and offers an empirically informed theory of juvenile troubles that emphasizes the role of modern social Darwinist culture. Further, like rural work done by DeKeseredy and his colleagues, Currie’s research, theory, and policy proposals demonstrate

548

Left Realism Criminology

that left realism’s contributions are not limited to addressing the plight of poor people in urban centers of concentrated disadvantage. In sum, then, left realists construct and test theories about a number of key problems facing contemporary society. Still, left realism is not just a theoretical enterprise. For example, left realists conduct local crime victimization surveys, which include quantitative and qualitative questions that elicit data on harms generally considered irrelevant to the police, conservative politicians, and most middle- and upper-class members of the general public. These topics include male-to-female physical and sexual assaults in adult intimate relationships; sexual harassment and the verbal harassment of gays, lesbians, and people of color in public places; and corporate crime. Even when government agencies decide to gather statistics on one or more of these topics, left realists typically elicit higher incidence and prevalence rates because they define criminal harms more broadly and in ways that more accurately reflect the pain and suffering caused by them. Mainstream government surveys, such as the U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey, typically ignore the plight of “nontraditional populations” and their voices are rarely heard, which, in turn, results in limited government resources being devoted to alleviate significant harms. Note, too, that although national surveys are claimed to be antithetical to the main objectives of left realism, some North American critical criminologists, such as DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz, have conducted a Canadian national survey of woman abuse heavily influenced by left realist discourse that generated incidence and prevalence rates markedly higher than those obtained by national victimization surveys conducted by federal government agencies based in Canada and the United States. Some progressives raise concerns about government-sponsored research and see it as a social control science that is used to serve the interests of politicians and others seeking more punitive means of dealing with crime. This point is well taken, given that much government-funded mainstream criminological research helps achieve this goal. Nevertheless, a few left realists receive government funding for some of their empirical work and produce results that challenge the status quo. There is even evidence that government-sponsored

left realist surveys occasionally make a difference. For example, a Canadian local survey of corporate violence against Punjabi farm workers and their children conducted in the early 1990s influenced a university based in British Columbia and the British Columbia government to provide suitable and affordable childcare for Punjabi farm workers. Although best known for doing local victimization surveys in inner-city communities, some left realists examine the plight of rural women abused by their current or former male partners, and this work involves using primarily qualitative methods such as in-depth semi-structured interviews. For example, at the start of this millennium, DeKeseredy and his colleagues conducted a study of separation/ divorce sexual assault in three rural Ohio communities. They uncovered that sizable portions of rural men have patriarchal attitudes and beliefs, and they also have male peers who view wife beating, sexual assault, and many other types of woman abuse as legitimate and effective means of responding to real or perceived threats to their masculinity. These researchers also found that collective efficacy can take different shapes and forms, and definitions of the “common good” of a neighborhood may vary among residents in different contexts or situations. What are perceived as indicators of the common good may actually be behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that threaten the safety of women seeking freedom from abusive male partners. Although left realists study and theorize crime and social control, they also offer many different progressive crime control and prevention policies. Still, all left realists have two things in common. First, while they would all like to see a major transformation from a society based on class, race/ethnic, and gender inequality to one that is truly equitable and democratic, they realize that this will not happen in the immediate future. This view is well-founded, given that historically, there has been massive public support for neo-conservative governments and their economic and social policies, such as government cuts to health care and unemployment insurance. Thus, left realists seek shortterm gains while remaining committed to long-term change. This is why they propose practical initiatives that can be implemented immediately and that “chip away” at patriarchal capitalism. North American left realists devote more attention to anticrime proposals than those based in the

Left Realism Criminology

United Kingdom and elsewhere. Thus far, the bulk of British left realist policies focus on criminal justice reforms, including democratic control of policing. These initiatives are subject to sharp criticisms from other groups of critical criminologists. For example, some progressives criticize British realists’ failure to address the power of police subcultures and accuse them of accommodating the government’s repressive crime control strategies. This is, perhaps, an unfair criticism, given that every advanced industrial society requires a combination of fair and equitable informal and formal processes of social control. Therefore, left realists argue that it is inappropriate to totally ignore criminal justice reforms for fear that they will only serve to maintain the status quo. All left realists, however, argue that criminal justice reforms should not be substitutes for socialist and feminist initiatives. In fact, it is an important argument of North American left realists that those who assume that the criminal justice system is solely responsible for dealing with crime and that other government agencies should manage the social, economic, or family problems that cause it do not consider how decisions on economic issues (e.g., factory closures) may significantly influence the rate of predatory street crime and violence against women. Consequently, according to U.S. left realist Elliott Currie, the failure to make the proper connections between the key causes and consequences precludes the development of effective policies to prevent crime. This failure also places an unnecessary burden on the criminal justice system, which is constantly required to try to fix the damage done by broader social, political, and economic forces. North American realists are sensitive to these concerns. For example, to curb various types of interpersonal crimes in both rural and urban communities, they call for minimal policing as well as a higher minimum wage, quality jobs, housing subsidies, and affordable governmentsponsored child care. Working with the media to make issues of central importance to critical criminologists very visible is another strategy frequently used by left realists. Some left realists also frequently use profeminist men’s strategies aimed at curbing violence against women. There are variations in the profeminist men’s movement, but a general point of agreement is that men must

549

take an active role in stopping woman abuse and eliminating other forms of patriarchal and social domination throughout society. Some examples of short-term profeminist men’s strategies incorporated into a left realist agenda are protesting and boycotting pornographic media and strip clubs, confronting men who make sexist jokes and who abuse their female partners, and supporting and participating in woman abuse awareness programs. Left realists do not neglect the crimes of the powerful. In fact, they argue that offenses such as price-fixing, creating unsafe workplaces, and the like may affect poor people in the same way as middle-class citizens, or it may affect them more. Moreover, British left realists John Lea and Jock Young assert that the more vulnerable a person is politically and economically, the more likely it is that a person will be victimized from all directions—by corporate and white-collar crime, street crime, unemployment and poverty, and a host of other social problems. To curb corporate crime, left realists call for policies such as the democratization of corporations, the organization of citizen patrols based on democratic principles, and more formal mechanisms to ensure that regulatory laws are strictly enforced. Yet, there is no question that left realists pay far more attention to inner-city street crime and woman abuse. While left realism may not be as popular in critical criminological circles as it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, it is still at the forefront of an unknown number of progressive criminologists’ minds. Many scholars continue to review this school of thought in undergraduate texts and in scholarly books and journals, and some rural critical criminological work is now heavily influenced by key left realist principles. Consider, too, that left realism is still the subject of sharp attacks from both left-wing and right-wing criminologists. Obviously, then, left realism continues to be granted some importance by the international criminological community. Walter S. DeKeseredy See also Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Inequality and Crime; Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology

550

Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance

References and Further Readings Currie, E. (1985). Confronting crime: An American challenge. New York: Pantheon. Currie, E. (2004). The road to whatever: Middle-class culture and the crisis of delinquency. New York: Metropolitan Books. DeKeseredy, W. S., Alvi, S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2006). Left realism revisited. In W. S. DeKeseredy & B. Perry (Eds.), Advancing critical criminology: Theory and application (pp. 19–42). Lanham, MD: Lexington. DeKeseredy, W. S., Donnermeyer, J. F., Schwartz, M. D., Tunnell, K. D., & Hall, M. (2008). Thinking critically about rural gender relations: Toward a rural masculinity crisis/male peer support model of separation/divorce sexual assault. Critical Criminology, 15, 295–311. Donnermeyer, J. F., & DeKeseredy, W. S. (2008). Toward a rural critical criminology. Southern rural sociology, 23, 4–28. Lea, J., & Young, J. (1984). What is to be done about law and order? New York: Penguin. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society. London: Sage.

Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance Edwin M. Lemert posited the notion of primary and secondary deviance in his 1951 text Social Pathology. The discussion of these distinct forms of deviance took only a few pages, but the effect on various theories of criminal behavior, particularly labeling theory, were rich and far-reaching. Lemert further delved into this dichotomy in his 1967 Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control, painting a fuller picture of how he believed that societal reactions to a violation of social norms could lead an individual to continued violation of these norms (including the commission of crimes) and an eventual self-identification with behaviors and groups existing outside of the established (i.e., mainstream) societal framework. According to Lemert, this self-identification would cement an individual’s status in society as that of a deviant. For Lemert, primary deviance is behavior that departs from a social norm yet causes no longterm consequences for the offender. This lack of consequence may be because the initial deviation prompts no reaction or, if the deviance does

prompt a reaction, that reaction is not particularly negative or stigmatizing. Primary deviance does not lead to a permanent label from external observers or to a deviant self-identity on the part of the offender. Secondary deviance is not simply a violation of social norms, but a violation of social norms that results from a realignment of an individual’s self-concept either with the deviance itself or with a subgroup that is considered deviant in relation to the social norms. The remainder of this entry unfolds in three parts. First, the theoretical roots of Lemert’s ideas are discussed briefly. Next, more detail is provided about the process of negative labeling, which serves to distinguish primary and secondary deviance. The essay concludes with a discussion of the status of Lemert’s ideas in contemporary criminological theory and practice.

Theoretical Basis Lemert’s concepts of primary and secondary deviance draw from George Herbert Mead’s perspectives on social interaction and from labeling theory, the genesis of which is usually attributed to Frank Tannenbaum in his 1938 Crime and the Community. Mead’s insights, which eventually evolved into symbolic interactionism, focused on how the individual defines himself or herself through the feedback received from the community at large. Through this interaction, an individual learns the rules and norms that the society has developed, and discovers how to act within this context to successfully integrate into the larger group. The individual then is able to communicate those norms to new individuals who seek entrance. Labeling theory follows Mead’s line of logic in the examination of social reactions to individual behavior outside the norms set forth by the larger group. According to Tannenbaum, violators of norms are given labels such as troublemaker, criminal, delinquent, or other stereotypes that carry negative connotations. The individual, then “labeled,” is consistently viewed and treated differently from “normal” members of the social group. The labeled individual is placed in groups, by social definition if not by physical location, with other individuals who have the same label. This new grouping both erects barriers for the individual’s future reintegration into the larger social group and

Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance

provides a behavioral model for further violations of norms. In short, a person actually becomes the label placed on him or her by the social group and exhibits behaviors along those lines. A person labeled as “criminal” because of past actions will be more likely to commit crimes in the future. Lemert attempted to give a more thorough exploration of the process by which a person’s behaviors lead to his or her labeling and potential exclusion from the larger social group. The core of this inquiry was the delineation of an individual’s normative violations as either primary or secondary deviance.

The Deviance Process Not all violations of social norms have long-term negative consequences. Some acts that violate criminal law, for instance, are undetected by law enforcement or other persons. Other acts, even if detected, result in a “corrective” penalty. In other words, a detected crime might be subject to a punishment that serves to deter the individual from further violations. Norm violations such as these are what Lemert referred to as primary deviance. Primary deviance is quickly forgotten, and the offender proceeds, for the most part, with “normal,” law-abiding behavior. The deviance about which Lemert spoke could consist of anything from a student speaking out of turn in class to the commission of a crime. The social reaction to such behavior could range from chastisement and stereotyping to imprisonment or other severely punitive action. Primary deviance receives no social reaction or mild, corrective reaction. However, as deviant behavior is repeated or becomes persistent, the societal reaction is likely to become stronger and more punitive. If continued violations of the norms produce societal penalties strong enough to cause stigmatization, secondary deviance can result. Lemert explained further how this strong societal reaction can create further deviance. As the penalties and rejections of the larger society become stronger and the individual becomes more and more indelibly marked as deviant, the individual begins to resent not only the norms being violated but also the social structures themselves levying the penalties. Further, non-deviant opportunities might be blocked due to the stigmatization

551

of the label (i.e., jobs denied due to the label of “convicted felon”). Once an individual reaches a certain level of resentment toward the larger group, the individual begins to create a self-­concept as actually being whatever the larger group defines as deviant. In Lemert’s view, the internalization of the label leads to deviance amplification. This causes a rejection of the larger society and an association with other “deviants”—for whom the deviant behavior is not seen as problematic. Deviant behaviors stemming from this identification with an excluded group are thus termed secondary deviance. As Lemert (1951, p. 76) puts it, “When a person begins to employ his deviant behavior or a role based upon it as a means of defense, attack, or adjustment to the overt and covert problems created by the consequent social reaction to him, his deviation is secondary.” Secondary deviance is often more severe than primary deviance and, most importantly, it is characteristic of an entrenched self- and social-identity as “deviant.” Additionally, an individual who manifests secondary deviance is also much more likely to align himself or herself with others who have been similarly labeled, thus becoming part of a subculture that stands outside of the framework created by the norms of the original social group. Lemert offers up the example of the “errant schoolboy” (p. 275) to illustrate his point. In this example, a child plays a prank in class and is mildly punished by his teacher (primary deviance). Later, he accidentally causes another disturbance and is again reprimanded (again, primary deviance). However, because of these repeated disturbances, the teacher begins using terms such as “bad boy” and “mischief maker” toward the child. The child then becomes resentful of the labels and may act out, fulfilling the role that he sees as expected of him, especially if he discovers that there is a certain status among a certain group of peers in playing that role (secondary deviance). That group of peers then may form their own subculture within which the behavior deemed deviant by the larger society is accepted and encouraged.

Beyond Lemert In the 1960s and 1970s, criminologists such as Howard Becker, Kai Erickson, John Kitsuse, and

552

Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear

others began focusing on what they deemed “social reaction” theory, which stemmed directly from the ideas set forth by Tannenbaum and Lemert. The study of societal reaction and other symbolic interactions as a major driver of criminal behavior was a marked departure from “traditional” criminological theories, which presumed that criminal behavior drove societal reaction. For a brief time, labeling theory became a dominant paradigm in the field. This dominance was short-lived, however, as a number of critiques emerged that targeted the empirical validity of many of the core assumptions of these theories. For instance, the effects of an individual’s day-to-day experience (family structure, social networks of acquaintances, educational attainment) were assumed to be of less import in determining the likelihood of future deviant behavior than being arrested and/or incarcerated. Empirical evidence simply does not support the idea that these characteristics of daily life and social environment are unimportant; much research suggests that there are many criminogenic conditions beyond being formally labeled as deviant. Further, developmental research has revealed that many of these criminogenic conditions occur well before official labels are applied (i.e., pre-natal or early childhood influences). Finally, radical nonintervention was the implied policy stemming from the work of Lemert and the labeling theorists of the 1960s. This policy implication, while popular during the 1960s, increasingly became viewed as impractical and potentially dangerous. Due to such limitations, labeling theory fell out of favor during the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, Lemert’s concepts experienced a rejuvenation in the 1990s as more empirically sound theoretical frameworks based upon labeling theory emerged. John Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming and Lawrence Sherman’s defiance theory are two such examples. While these contemporary approaches still largely ignore criminogenic factors that precede labeling, they are valuable in re-focusing attention on the potentially harmful effects of some reactions to crime. However, rather than advocating radical non-intervention, contemporary theories of labeling have been especially important in informing the concept of restorative justice as a reform strategy. Michael J. Rosenberg

See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Schur, Edwin M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency; Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil

References and Further Readings Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame, and reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social pathology: A systematic approach to the theory of sociopathic behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill. Lemert, E. M. (1967). Human deviance, social problems, and social control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Sherman, L. W. (1993). Defiance, deterrence, and irrelevance: A theory of criminal sanction. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 445–473. Tannenbaum, F. (1938). Crime and the community. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear In their 1986 work, Fear of Crime: Incivility and the Production of a Social Problem, Dan A. Lewis and Greta W. Salem made an important contribution to the field of criminology and to our understanding of fear of crime. Lewis and Salem formulated and tested what they call the social control perspective. The social control perspective blends aspects of the victimization perspective, a prominent theory in the 1970s and 1980s, with a body of sociological theory developed at the Chicago School during the 1920s and 1930s. Lewis and Salem were able to advance the field of criminology in two ways. First, they developed a valuable integrated theoretical framework to better understand fear of crime as a social problem. Second, they prescribed a treatment for the problem of crime and fear of crime brought about by rapid social change in the urban environment. Their remedy rests on improving social ties among community residents, proactively fixing the physical landscape of blighted urban areas, and mobilizing governmental agencies such as the police into a functional network of community control.

Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear

A major assumption of Lewis and Salem’s work is that the community context is a key factor in explaining fear of crime. Different neighborhoods evoke different levels of fear. Some neighborhoods simply look and feel more dangerous than other neighborhoods. People who traverse through these troubled areas or reside in them are quick to recognize and internalize the visual signs of crime. To incorporate these community contextual factors, Lewis and Salem add the concept of incivility into the theoretical model as a causal determinant of fear of crime. Lewis and Salem find ample support for their theoretical framework from data collected in 10 urban neighborhoods in Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The work of Lewis and Salem is recognized as a valuable addition to criminology. Lewis and Salem helped to legitimize the mainstream study of fear of crime. They also cast into the academic spotlight the concept of incivility and its important role in generating fear of crime. Researchers continue to draw insight and guidance from their work more than two decades after publication of their book.

Theoretical Development Victimization Perspective

To fully appreciate the theoretical contribution of Lewis and Salem, one must have an understanding of the developments taking place in criminological theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A prominent strand of criminological theory began to branch off from the main discipline in this period. This new area focused on what heretofore had only been of secondary interest to researchers, namely the victims of crime. A central tenet of the victimization perspective is that crime has ripple effects that affect virtually everyone. Some people are the immediate targets of crime and they are the ones who feel the effects of victimization directly. Others experience crime vicariously, perhaps through the victimization of a friend, a family member or a neighbor. Still others may only experience crime indirectly through the media. The victimization perspective posits that nearly every one is touched by crime to some degree. Researchers have been unable to confirm a strong empirical connection between victimization and

553

fear. Numerous studies show that the experience of being a crime victim is not a strong predictor of who is most fearful. This appears true even after statistical control is made for the seriousness of crime. Furthermore, females often express much greater fear of crime than males even though females are much less likely to be victims of crime (excluding sexual assault). Similarly, research often shows the elderly are more afraid of crime but much less likely to be victimized than teenagers and young adults. Scholars offer a variety of explanations to explain this apparent paradox of higher fear among those less likely to be victimized, including a heightened sense of physical vulnerability among females and the elderly, greater apprehension toward strangers, and a lower sense of inner locus of control. Refinements to the victimization perspective have improved its explanatory power. For example, scholars have made careful distinctions among the concepts of fear, worry, anxiety, and risk and have incorporated these distinctions into their works. Researchers have also developed more precise measures of victimization as an improvement over the vague and general indicators of victimization common in early studies. Despite these improvements, considerable empirical independence still exists between victimization experiences and fear of crime. Social Control Perspective

Lewis and Salem argue that the reason the victimization perspective has limited ability to explain fear of crime is because its psychological orientation is too individualistic and too narrow to account for variability in fear at the neighborhood level. What is needed is a more expansive conceptual formulation to incorporate community contextual factors. To rectify the problem, Lewis and Salem draw upon an established sociological tradition to augment the valuable but limited victimization perspective. Lewis and Salem found inspiration for their work on incivility and fear from a group of scholars working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago around the time of the Great Depression. Known as the Chicago School, these sociologists formulated a general theory of social control to make sense of the fundamental social

554

Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear

changes taking place in many urban communities. Like other cities of the day, Chicago was experiencing the adverse effects of urban density, racial and ethnic heterogeneity, business encroachment in established neighborhoods, and the ebb-andflow of economic fortune. With the traditional mechanisms of social control weakened, communities experienced what the Chicago scholars described as social disorganization. Accompanying social disorganization was increased public disorder, crime, and delinquency. The Chicago scholars were successful in placing the study of urban crime into the larger context of the community. According to the theory, the greater the social disorganization the greater the amount of crime and disorder. Unlike the victimization perspective, the consequences of crime were determined largely through social processes. Lewis and Salem saw the utility of incorporating this sociological perspective into their theoretical framework. Chicago sociologists took the social control theory one step further by applying its precepts to the real world. The Chicago Area Project in the mid-1930s attempted to reinvigorate the traditional control mechanisms operating in the community. Accordingly, if crime and disorder are the products of social disorganization, then crime and disorder could also be prevented if social control is re-­established. Preventing crime is a by-product of strengthening community ties. Further, while improvements in the police and other sectors of the criminal justice system would help reduce crime by increasing social control, what was also needed was for other community institutions, especially community leaders and volunteer associations, to reassert their socializing—and controlling—influences. Lewis and Salem extend the social control perspective of the Chicago School in one very important way. As they see it, sociologists place primary importance on social relations in maintaining community control. This means that social control through the political process is relegated to a secondary role. Lewis and Salem contend this is a mistake and distorts the true reality of the community context. Failing to properly recognize the influence of governmental agencies lends only a partial analysis. Indeed, a significant part of social control comes through political units—police,

courts, corrections and related agencies—that have been intentionally established to regulate criminal behavior. Lewis and Salem sought to correct the theoretical deficit in part through the conceptual integration of civility. Incivility and Fear

Lewis and Salem define incivilities as “those features in a community that reflect the erosion of commonly accepted standards and values” (p. xiv). Incivilities are relatively minor transgressions of community norms that are visible signs of community disorder. Bad areas send out unmistakable signals to the vigilant. For example, rowdy youth, trash and litter lying around, burned-out buildings, unkempt lots, abandoned cars, strangers, drunks, prostitutes, noise, and congestion all signal that conventional community standards have eroded. Breaches of community standards may take the form of tattered environs (physical incivility) or unseemly behavior (social incivility). Although incivilities may be relatively minor transgressions of community order compared to serious violent behavior, they are nonetheless potent signs of trouble and quite capable of triggering feelings of fear. Sociologists at the Chicago School were keenly aware of “incivilities” (the term was not applied then) as a community contextual element and how they influenced perceptions of fear among residents. Several decades later, Albert Hunter explicitly linked the concept of incivility to fear of crime. As Hunter notes, “Fear in the urban environment is above all a fear of social disorder that may come to threaten the individual. I suggest that this fear results more from experiencing incivility than from direct experience with crime itself” (1978, p. 9). The concept of incivility was further developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in their popular “broken windows” theory first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1982.

Empirical Test of Social Control Theory Lewis and Salem used data from the Reactions to Crime Project conducted at Northwestern Univer­ sity’s Center for Urban Affairs between 1975 and 1980 to test their theory. Over the course of the project, numerous data-gathering techniques were

Life-Course Interdependence

employed such as field research, telephone interviews, content analysis of newspapers, and archival data. A total of 10 neighborhoods in three cities were selected for the study: four neighborhoods in Chicago, three neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and three neighborhoods in San Francisco. The neighborhoods were intentionally selected to maximize variation in race, class, and crime. Researchers collected data on individuals’ perceptions of crime and on the neighborhood context. Incivility was measured through telephone interviews and field notes. In the telephone interviews, residents were asked to assess incivilities in their neighborhood on four items: teenagers hanging out on the streets, abandoned buildings and storefronts, people using illegal drugs, and vandalism. Results of the telephone interviews were used in conjunction with descriptive notes of field researchers who described their impressions of neighborhood conditions. Lewis and Salem employed various statistical tests to analyze the data. They found strong support for their theoretical contention that community context adds an important layer of understanding of who is most fearful and what places evoke the most fear. The inclusion of incivility into the statistical tests strengthened the congruence among crime rates, victimization, and fear of crime.

Conclusion Present-day research on incivilities and fear of crime continues to confirm a strong empirical connection between the two concepts. Since the time of Lewis and Salem’s work, virtually all published studies show a statistically significant and fairly strong link between community disorder and feelings of fear. From a crime control perspective, the clear policy implication is that social arrangements and government agencies both matter when it comes to regulating community order and reducing feelings of fear. Research on incivilities and fear is directly relevant to police practice today. For instance, the community policing movement draws heavily from this body of literature. Inspired by the research linking incivilities to fear, community policing seeks to reclaim neighborhoods before they become too disorganized or disorderly. The strategy is to improve the physical appearance of communities (fix the “broken windows”) while simultaneously

555

improving social relations with residents. Thus, minor transgressions of community decorum are treated worthy of police attention. Studies of the effectiveness of community policing often cite its ability to reduce feelings of fear. More recently, a few departments have adopted a policy of zerotolerance policing where police concentrate specifically on minor infractions and quality-of-life issues. Evidence suggests that tough enforcement of lowlevel breaches of public civility contributes directly to the reduction of more serious crime. The connection between incivilities and fear remains an important line of inquiry more than two decades after the work of Lewis and Salem first appeared. Randy LaGrange See also Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline; Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime; Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory

References and Further Readings Hunter, A. (1978). Symbols of incivility: Social disorder and fear of crime in urban neighborhoods. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, November 8–12, Dallas, TX. Lewis, D. A., & Salem, G. W. (1986). Fear of crime: Incivility and the production of a social problem. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982, March). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly, 249, 29–38.

Life-Course Interdependence An individual who commits a crime may be influenced by forces both within and outside of that person. Criminologists have given these forces different names, including “internal limits” and “external limits” (Lemert, 1951), “inner containment” and “outer containment” (Reckless, 1967), and “self-control” and “social control” (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Hirschi, 1969). More generally, we can think of such influences as either psychological (i.e., within a person) or sociological (i.e., between

556

Life-Course Interdependence

people). A life-course model of interdependence specifies the relative influence of these inner- and outer-influences on crime. This model posits that external, sociological influences have greater impact on people who are internally, psychologically predisposed to crime. For example, people with more education are less likely to commit crime because they have more to lose if caught. Also, people less able to defer gratification are more likely to commit crime because they have less control over their impulses. Putting these two observations together, the model of interdependence predicts that increased education prevents crime most strongly for people who have less self-control. This represents a socialprotection effect because in this example social factors protect people from their criminal inclinations. In another example, people with delinquent friends commit more crime because their friends provide both opportunity and motivation for it. Life-course interdependence predicts that delinquent peers bring about the most crime among people already prone to it. This is a social-amplification effect. The logic of the life-course interdependence model is one of relevance. If people are not psychologically inclined toward crime, then social and situational influences matter less. If people are not going to commit crime in the first place, because they can control their own behavior, social relationships that prevent crime become redundant, and relationships that foster crime are counteracted. The interdependence model builds on Robert Sampson and John Laub’s well-known life-course theory of crime. They posit that antisocial behavior in youth transitions into adult criminal behavior. They also argue that antisocial behavior weakens the formation of social ties, resulting in more crime. Thus, antisocial behavior has both a direct and an indirect effect on criminal behavior. The life-course interdependence model adds an interaction effect. Specifically, the effect of social ties on crime is most pronounced in the presence of antisocial behavior. Bradley R. E. Wright and colleagues proposed the life-course model of interdependence and tested it with data from a long-term, longitudinal study collected in Dunedin, New Zealand. The Dunedin Study started with about 1,000 children born in 1972, and it studied them every few years from early childhood into young adulthood. Wright et al.

measured low self-control among Dunedin study members during ages 3 to 11 based on markers such as impulsivity, inattention, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior. Study members who had less selfcontrol in childhood committed more crimes at age 21 than their more self-controlled peers. Wright et al. measured conventional social ties in adolescence (ages 15 and 18) as education achievement, employment, close family ties, and romantic partnerships. Study members with stronger conventional ties in adolescence committed less crime as young adults. Those with more delinquent friends in adolescence committed more crime. In addition to these direct and indirect effects, Wright et al. also found significant interaction effects. Conventional social ties decreased criminal behavior most strongly among study members with low childhood self-control (a social-­protection effect). Delinquent friends increased criminal behavior most strongly among the same study members (a social-amplification effect). While Wright et al. provide a compelling case for life-course interdependence, other studies have come to different conclusions. Theoretically, some have made the opposite prediction—that social ties most affect people not prone to crime. For example, Daniel S. Nagin and Raymond Paternoster argue that antisocial, low self-control people are too selfcentered and focused on the present to be swayed by conventional social ties. Empirically, Graham C. Ousey and Pamela Wilcox found interaction effects in support of life-course interdependence when they used one statistical technique (least squared regression) but not when they used another, perhaps more appropriate, technique (tobit regression). The life-course model of interdependence has implications for both the study of crime and policy responses to it. According to this model, crime results from the interplay between psychological and sociological processes. Psychological processes work through social factors, and social processes vary in importance by psychological factors. This implies that the study of crime, at least at the individual-level of analysis, is inherently interdisciplinary and that criminologists should also be social-psychologists. This model also sounds an optimistic note for policy-makers. Interventions to prevent crime commonly change people’s social circumstances, for example, providing a job or education. The

Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime

life-course model of interdependence suggests that this type of intervention has the greatest effect among those who most need it—young people at risk of criminal behavior, for they are particularly sensitive to their social environment. If true, this is good news for the parents, teachers, and officials who want to make a difference in the lives of troubled young people. Bradley R. E. Wright See also Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: AgeGraded Theory of Informal Social Control

References and Further Readings Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley, CA: Free Press. Lemert, E. (1951). Social pathology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1994). Personal capital and social control: The deterrent implications of a theory of individual differences in criminal offending. Criminology, 32, 581–606. Ousey, G. C., & Wilcox, P. (2007). The interaction of antisocial propensity and life-course varying predictors of delinquent behavior: Differences by method of estimation and implications for theory. Criminology, 45, 313–354. Reckless, W. (1967). The crime problem. New York: Appleton Century Crofts. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wright, B. R. E., Caspi A., Moffitt, T. E., & Silva, P. A. (2001). The effects of social ties on crime vary by criminal propensity: A life-course model of interdependence. Criminology, 39, 321–352.

Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime Developmental psychologists have described some key characteristics about the development of

557

delinquency. For instance, studies, such as LeBlanc et al.’s 1991 study, have revealed that less serious forms of deviant behavior often precede more serious behaviors. In addition, in 1982 Loeber found that youths who exhibit disruptive behavior earlier in life often engage in a wider variety of delinquent behaviors during adolescence. These youths also tend to commit more serious offenses at a higher rate than youths who have a later onset of antisocial behavior, as noted by Loeber et al. in 1991. Using these principles, Loeber et al. in 1993 set forth a typology of disruptive behavior that describes the developmental sequences of delinquency.

Developmental Pathways in Disruptive Child Behavior Loeber and his colleagues investigate how delinquent behavior develops along sequential pathways. They stated five hypotheses regarding the development of delinquent behavior. First, they argued that antisocial behaviors often develop along an identifiable pathway. This pathway accounts for the fact that the ages of onset vary by type of behavior, and that antisocial behavior often progresses from less serious to more serious antisocial behavior. That is, problem youths typically exhibit minor forms of antisocial behaviors early in the life course, and they may progress to more serious forms of antisocial behavior during late childhood and early adolescence. Thus, antisocial behaviors can be arranged along a pathway that accounts for developmental changes and changes in the type of behavior. Second, in addition to the general identifiable pathway, it was expected that there were multiple pathways into delinquent behavior. Previous research has identified multiple types of delinquent behavior (Frick et al., 1993). For example, Loeber and Schmaling’s 1985 meta-analysis of twentytwo child behavioral studies revealed that there were three forms of delinquent behavior: overt behavior, covert behavior, and non-compliant/ defiant behavior. In 1993 Loeber et al. revisited this classification of delinquent behavior to investigate whether the behaviors formed a single pathway or whether the three types of behavior represented different pathways of delinquency. Third, it was hypothesized that the multiple pathways could be further broken down into three

558

Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime

separate stages. These stages could be ordered to reflect the progression from less serious to more serious antisocial behaviors. Thus, lying may precede behaviors such as vandalism or damaging property, and vandalism may precede more serious behaviors such as forgery and selling drugs. Fourth, Loeber et al. proposed that a substantial proportion of youths will begin their delinquent behavior at the first stage of the pathway, a smaller percentage of youths will begin at the middle stages, and an even smaller percentage will begin their delinquent behavior at a later stage in the sequence. Finally, they posited that most youths would complete the first stage of the pathway, while few youths would complete the second and third stages. To evaluate empirically these hypotheses, Loeber et al. analyzed data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study. The Pittsburgh Youth Study is a prospective longitudinal sample of males in grades 1, 4, and 7 from 21 public schools within the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Boys in grade 1 were labeled the youngest sample, boys in grade 4 were considered the middle sample, and boys in grade 7 were referred to as the oldest sample. Loeber et al.’s 1993 study restricted their analyses to the middle and oldest samples. Approximately half of the boys were African American, and the remainder were Caucasian. Researchers collected data from the boys themselves, from parents, from teachers, from peers, from interviewer remarks, from home observations, and from official court records. Measures of disruptive and delinquent behaviors were collected through retrospective and prospective reports. There were six important findings that emerged out of Loeber et al.’s 1993 analyses. First, as found in previous studies, such as LeBlanc et al.’s 1991 study, the onset of less serious behaviors preceded the onset of more serious delinquent behaviors. For example, stubborn behavior had the earliest age of onset, followed by minor covert behaviors, defiance, aggression, and property damage. More serious behaviors, such as authority avoidance and fighting, tended to emerge around age 13. Second, three pathways emerged from the analyses: an authority conflict pathway, a covert pathway, and an overt pathway. The authority conflict pathway begins with stubborn behavior as the first stage, followed by defiance or disobedience at the second stage, and authority avoidance (e.g., truancy,

running away) as the last stage in the pathway. The authority conflict pathway had the earliest age of onset, with the onset of stubborn behavior beginning as early as age 3. The covert pathway begins with minor covert behavior (e.g., lying, shoplifting) as the first stage, property damage (e.g., setting fires) as the second stage, and more serious forms of delinquency (e.g., joyriding, illegal checks, selling drugs, breaking and entering) as the last stage in the pathway. Finally, the overt pathway is characterized by the following sequence: aggression (e.g., annoying others, bullying), physical fighting, and violence (e.g., rape, strong-arming). Third, the analyses revealed that the majority of boys entered the pathways at the first stage, whereas a smaller percentage of youths entered at the second and third stages. For instance, the majority of youths in the middle sample (60.4 percent) began the covert pathway in the first stage, fewer youths entered the covert pathway at the second stage (19.8 percent), and even fewer youths started at the third stage (2.9 percent). Fourth, the analyses also showed that most youths only completed the first stage in the sequence, with few boys advancing to the second stage, and still fewer boys completed the entire sequence. Fifth, boys who entered into one pathway were more likely to crossover to another pathway. For example, approximately 40 percent of youths who had entered the first stage of the covert pathway had also entered into first stage of the overt pathway. Finally, analyses showed that the prevalence of official and self-reported delinquency was significantly higher among boys who had exhibited behaviors in all three pathways. Delinquency was also significantly higher among boys who exhibited behaviors in certain dual pathways. Findings revealed that boys in the dual covert-overt pathway and the dual covert-authority conflict pathway reported a higher number of offenses. There were no significant differences in delinquency across the single pathways. In sum, Loeber et al.’s 1993 analyses were in line with previous studies’ findings that less serious deviant behavior tends to precede more serious delinquency. This suggests that minor disruptive behaviors will emerge earlier in the life course, and that youths will progress to more severe behaviors in adolescence. In addition, the analyses identified the ages of onset for various types of disruptive

Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime

behavior, and the findings highlighted the unfolding of delinquent behavior across early and middle childhood. These findings help to clarify which types of deviant behaviors may be considered normative for a developmental time period, and which types of behaviors (given the developmental stage) may be indicative of future behavioral problems. Finally, Loeber et al.’s 1993 findings also suggest that delinquent behavior is best captured by multiple pathways rather than a single pathway. This is a significant finding because some research conceptualizes delinquency as a single pathway (Patterson et al., 1992). This assumes that different types of antisocial behavior have similar characteristics (e.g., age of onset, stability), and that the risk factors are similar for different types of antisocial behavior. Loeber et al.’s findings challenge the single pathway assumption by showing that there are significant differences in the age of onset for different behaviors, and that escalation in one pathway is not necessarily related to escalation in another pathway.

Extensions Since Loeber et al. established their pathways of delinquent behavior, there have been numerous tests and extensions of their typology. These extensions have focused on two areas: the generalizability of the pathways across different populations, and the predictors of placement in a certain pathway. Four studies have investigated whether the pathway model is generalizable across different populations. First, Loeber, Keenan, and Zhang examined whether the pathways model equally applied to youths who merely experimented in delinquency (experimenters) and those that consistently engage in delinquency (persisters). Data from the middle and oldest samples of the Pittsburgh Youth Study revealed that persisters were more likely to enter a pathway at the first stage and they were more likely to advance to the later stages than experimenters. Boys who persisted in a single or multiple pathways also had a greater number of court petitions and more self-reported offenses. Second, Loeber, DeLamatre, Keenan, and Zhang analyzed data from the youngest sample (n = 503) of the Pittsburgh Youth Study and found that the majority of boys who engaged in delinquency (91 to 97 percent) followed the developmental pathways that were put forth by Loeber et al. in 1993. Further,

559

the analyses revealed that a substantial number of boys completed the first stage of the pathway, while a smaller percentage of boys advanced to the middle stages and only a few youths completed the entire sequence. These results suggested that the pathway model can accurately classify and predict disruptive behavior in early childhood. Third, Tolan, Gorman-Smith, and Loeber’s analysis of data from the Chicago Youth Development Study revealed that the majority of Latino and African American adolescent boys (79–94 percent) followed the proposed pathways. In addition, boys who displayed behaviors in multiple pathways were also more likely to be arrested than boys in single pathways. These findings parallel those in previous studies that show that boys who engage in a variety of behaviors, especially serious behaviors, have an increased risk of arrest (Loeber, 1982). Fourth, Gorman-Smith and Loeber analyzed data from the National Youth Survey to investigate whether the pathway model could be applied to girls’ disruptive behaviors. Their analyses found that a substantial proportion of girls who engaged in antisocial behavior had followed the proposed pathways. They noted that the model fit for boys was somewhat better than the fit for girls, and that girls’ age of onset tended to occur slightly later than boys’ age of onset. Despite the minimal differences between the male and female models, the general pattern of results was consistent for both genders. Gorman-Smith and Loeber also examined whether peer and family risk factors predicted participation in the pathways for boys and girls. They found that family and peer factors predicted males’ involvement in the pathways, but only one family factor (parental monitoring) predicted females’ involvement in the pathways. This suggests that the general patterns of disruptive and delinquent behavior may be similar for males and females, but the risk factors for delinquent behavior may vary by gender. Other studies have also examined whether certain factors increase one’s risk for participating in the pathways. Loeber et al.’s 1994 analyses revealed that involvement in one or more pathways was significantly related to internalizing behavioral problems, conduct disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Studies have also found that childhood abuse and adolescent victimization were significantly related to youths’ participation in one or more pathways (Loeber et al., 1999;

560

Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

Stouthamer-Loeber et al., 1991). Together, these findings suggest that individual, family, and peer factors may place one at risk for involvement in disruptive behavior.

Conclusion In sum, Loeber et al.’s 1993 analyses revealed that antisocial behavior follows a developmental sequence. This developmental sequence takes into account different manifestations of an underlying behavioral propensity, as well as the ages of onset for these different types of behavior. In addition, Loeber et al. found that behavior develops along multiple pathways (overt, covert, and authority conflict), rather than a single pathway. This suggests that there are important distinctions between different types of antisocial behavior, and these differences should be accounted for in analyses. More recent research has shown that the three developmental pathways are generalizable to females, chronic offenders, young adolescents, and African American and Latino youths. Jamie Vaske See also Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: The Social Development Model; Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of LifeCourse-Persistent Offending

References and Further Readings Frick, P. J., Lahey, B. B., Loeber, R., Tannebaum, L., Van Horn, Y., Christ, M. A. G., et al. (1993). Oppositional defiant disorder: A meta-analytic review of factor analyses and cross-validation in a clinical sample. Clinical Psychology Review, 13, 319–340. Gorman-Smith, D., & Loeber, R. (2005). Are developmental pathways in disruptive behaviors the same for girls and boys? Journal of Child and Family Studies, 14, 15–27. LeBlanc, M., Côté, G., & Loeber, R. (1991). Temporal paths in delinquency: Stability, regression, and progression analyzed with panel data from an adolescent and a delinquent male sample. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 33, 23–44. Loeber, R. (1982). The stability of antisocial and delinquent child behavior: A review. Child Development, 53, 1431–1446.

Loeber, R., DeLamatre, M., Keenan, K., & Zhang, Q. (1998). A prospective replication of developmental pathways in disruptive and delinquent behavior. In R. Cairns (Ed.), The individual as a focus in developmental research (pp. 185–215). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Loeber, R., DeLamatre, M., Tita, G., Cohen, J., Stouthamer-Loeber, M., & Farrington, D. P. (1999). Gun injury and mortality: The delinquent backgrounds of juvenile victims. Violence and Victims, 14, 339–352. Loeber, R., Keenan, K., & Zhang, Q. (1997). Boys’ experimentation and persistence in developmental pathways toward serious delinquency. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 6, 321–327. Loeber, R., Russo, M. F., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (1994). Internalizing problems and their relation to the development of disruptive behaviors in adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 4, 615–637. Loeber, R. & Schmaling, K. (1985). Empirical evidence for overt and covert patterns of antisocial conduct problems. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 13, 337–352. Loeber, R., Stouthamer-Loeber, M., & Green, S. M. (1991). Age at onset of problem behavior in boys, and later disruptive and delinquent behaviours. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 1, 229–246. Loeber, R., Wung, P., Keenan, K. Giroux, B., StouthamerLoeber, M., van Kammen, W. B., et al. (1993). Developmental pathways in disruptive child behavior. Development and Psychopathology, 5, 101–133. Patterson, G. R., Reid, J. B., & Dishion, T. J. (1992). A social interactional approach: Antisocial boys. Eugene, OR: Castalia. Stouthamer-Loeber, M., Loeber, R., Homish, D. L., & Wei, E. (2001). Maltreatment of boys and the development of disruptive and delinquent behavior. Development and Psychopathology, 13, 941–955. Tolan, P. H., Gorman-Smith, D., & Loeber, R. (2000). Developmental timing of onsets of disruptive behaviors and later delinquency of inner-city youth. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 9, 203–220.

Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man Cesare Lombroso, who lived from 1835 to 1909, was an Italian physician best known for his studies

Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

in the field of criminal anthropology and his theories of the “criminal type”—an individual whose physical structure and psychological characteristics possessed the atavistic and degenerative traits that differentiated him from the civilized, socially well-adjusted human. Lombroso is also remembered for shifting the focus of legal thinking from crime to the criminal, and his theory on the constitutional and hereditary roots of criminal conduct. His theories have heavily influenced developments in criminology throughout both Europe and the United States, although they have been challenged and often discredited. His most famous work, L’uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man), considered by many historians the founding text of modern criminology, went through five editions between 1876 and 1897, and during Lombroso’s lifetime was translated into French, German, Russian, and Spanish. Each edition contained additional data, observations, and illustrations: the first edition was a reasonably short volume of 255 pages; the last edition consisted of four volumes and was 1,902 pages long.

Short Biography Lombroso, born Ezechia Marco, came from a Jewish family in Verona that had lived in North Italy for generations. Lombroso was educated as a physician in Pavia, Padua, and Vienna, and obtained his degree in 1858. He was drawn to German materialism, French and Italian positivism, and different European evolutionist theories. In 1859, he entered in the national army as a volunteer doctor. In 1862, Lombroso’s battalion was sent to Calabria, in the South of Italy, to fight bandits. Lombroso, while in Calabria, began to conduct anthropometrical research in order to investigate racial variations within Italy. Similar to many young intellectuals of the period, Lombroso valued science. In the context of Italian history, Lombroso was committed, as were many other physicians, to the ideals of Risorgimento (resurgence), the political and social movement that sought to free Italy from foreign domination and to unify the different states of the peninsula, which was finally achieved in 1861. Driven by the political enthusiasm of Risorgimento, physicians such as Lombroso were committed to putting an end to the great curses of the nation:

561

poverty, illiteracy, and endemic illness. They promoted “scientific” solutions to these problems through ambitious social hygiene and sanitary programs and through the moral education of the population. In this way, they reflected a well-established Italian tradition that linked scientific and, above all, medical practice with progressive political thinking and activism. This tradition involved a concept of science as a crucial instrument for civil progress and emancipation, an idea that, even before deriving from the Italian Risorgimento, had its roots in the Enlightenment. In 1863, Lombroso began working at Pavia University, lecturing in clinical mental disorders and anthropology. In 1866, he was appointed professor of Clinical Mental Pathology at Pavia University. In 1870, though still active in academia, he was appointed director of the asylum at Pesaro, and at the same time he began using both asylums and prisons to study the phenomenon of human deviancy. In 1874, he obtained the Chair of Legal Medicine, along with that of psychiatry, at Pavia University. In 1876, Lombroso moved to Turin where he was appointed professor of Legal Medicine and Public Hygiene; subsequently, in 1896, he obtained the Chair of Psychiatry, and finally in 1905, that of criminal anthropology. In the meantime, he joined the Socialist Party in 1893 and served as a socialist representative on the city council of Turin from 1899 to 1905. After the first publication of L’uomo delinquente in 1876, Lombroso was successfully able to establish himself as the founder of the new discipline of criminal anthropology and the leader of the so-called Italian School. This was due to, among the other things, his vast number of publications in the field and his ability to mobilize people through his journal and international congresses. In 1880, with Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo, he founded Archivio di psichiatria, antropologia criminale e scienze penali (Archive of Psychiatry, Criminal Anthropology and Penal Sciences), a journal that became an influential tool of the Italian positivist movement and served to link quite distinct institutions, including asylums, prisons, universities, and the law courts. Lombroso’s ideas circulated quickly in international professional circles thanks to a series of international congresses on criminal anthropology that were held regularly in various European cities from

562

Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

1885 until World War I. The first of these congresses was organized by Lombroso’s Italian followers in Rome. By the turn of the century, Lombroso’s inconsistent empirical methods were being increasingly criticized by European scientists, who soon described his writings as anecdotal and his theories as conceptually flawed. Nevertheless, Lombroso had enthusiastic followers within scientific circles in Europe and the United States, and his accounts of the criminal captured the imagination of a broader audience. An example of Lombroso’s cultural impact outside criminology is provided by Bram Stoker’s image of Dracula, which was influenced by the work of the Italian criminologist. Lombroso’s appeal to late-19th-century society must be considered in historical context. At the end of the 19th century, industrialized countries faced new problems such as the urbanization of large proportions of the population, proletarization of the lower classes, increased unemployment, prostitution, and vagrancy. Through journalism, public opinion came to hold the belief that crime was not only escalating but also changing its methods to adapt to the cities. Lombroso’s criminal anthropology offered a rational answer to the question about the dangerous elements in civilized society.

The Study of the Criminal Rather Than Crime From the beginning of his medical career, Lombroso was concerned with social problems, as is evident from his medical interest in public hygiene. Before becoming renowned for his L’uomo delinquente, Lombroso worked on pellagra and cretinism, which were endemic diseases in certain parts of Italy in the second half of the 19th century. A second concern, according to the historian Renzo Villa, was madness and the level to which the insane could be responsible for their actions. Lombroso conceived the study of mental illness as a contribution to the understanding of how society could most effectively defend itself from the insane. In these terms, establishing to what extent the mentally ill were responsible for their actions was a crucial study. Lombroso’s interest in the criminal arose alongside his interest in madness. He held that psychological aberrations corresponded to and depended

on physical anomalies. In the same way, he believed that most criminals did not act out of free will, but rather they were urged to commit crimes because of their innate organic nature. Thus, aiming to understand criminal minds and therefore prevent crime, it was important to study, measure, and classify criminals as physicians did with the ill—through a bodily examination. This physical survey was especially important in the case of criminality because Lombroso believed that physical anomalies were a sign of social danger. Moving away from the so-called Classical School of Penology, which had its roots in the Enlightenment and in particular in the work of Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crime and Punishments), Lombroso focused on the criminal rather than crime. While Beccaria emphasized the free will of criminals and the necessity to consider all criminals equal regardless of their social status, and therefore the necessity to punish proportionally to the crime committed, Lombroso advocated that the punishment should be proportional to the dangerousness of the criminal, and not to the crime committed as such. For instance, if one committed a crime because a momentary overwhelming passion, but had never shown any social dangerousness, that individual had to be punished more mercilessly than another individual who had displayed criminal tendencies from a young age or who was a habitual offender. Therefore, according to Lombroso, the threat the criminal posed and the need to defend society were the critical factors that should be considered when individuals were being sentenced.

The Criminal Man Lombroso was not the first to advance the medicobiological explanation of crime. Richard Wetzell notes that Franz Joseph Gall’s phrenology, EtienneJean Georget’s study of “homicidal monomania,” and James Prichard’s investigation of “moral insanity” might be seen as predecessors of Lombroso’s modern criminology. Yet before Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente, the study of the criminal was rather fragmented. Since the first edition of his work, Lombroso had argued that crime was rooted in multiple causes, ranging from the biological and psychological organization of the individual to social factors such as urbanization or

Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

education. He accumulated a wide range of data analyzing skulls and the physical anomalies of criminals using both cadavers and living subjects. In the latter case, Lombroso reported every single detail from the height, weight, and strength to the shape of noses, ears, foreheads, and even feet. Along with detailed measurements of the body, Lombroso used criminals’ tattoos, poetry, and jargon to provide a portrait of the criminal. Psychologically, male offenders were described by Lombroso as vain, vindictive, lazy, dominated by a thirst for blood, and delighting in orgies. Lombroso also searched for relationships between criminality and age, marital status, sex, profession, diet, and environment. Within this analysis, he concluded that while a small part of criminality was caused by social conditions, most of the criminals were constitutionally so. Thus, Lombroso emphasized the influence of biological factors over environmental explanations. Key concepts in the various editions of L’uomo delinquente were atavism, degeneration, and the idea of the born criminal. The notion of atavism to explain deviant behavior was introduced in the first edition of L’uomo delinquente and remained central in Lombroso’s theories. Atavism was thought to be the tendency to reproduce ancestral types in plants and animals and, where humanity was concerned, to resemble one’s grandparents or great-grandparents more than one’s parents. The notion of atavism used by biological writers certainly referred to Charles Darwin, but its origin came from botanical studies. Villa has warned that Darwinian influence on Lombroso should not be emphasized. Instead, he has observed that Lombroso’s theory of atavism owed more to preDarwinian comparative anatomy, medicine and linguistics, than to the work of Darwin himself. The atavistic criminal man represented an earlier stage of human evolution. Lombroso identified this ancestral type through several stigmatized physical characteristics, including the length of ear lobes and fingers and the bone structure of the head. This supposed physical atavism was associated with moral corruption and thus more frequently produced deviant behaviors. Atavism, according to Lombroso, became manifest in the criminal, in the insane person, and in other human deviations, but the white civilized “normal” man was at-risk of reverting to the ancestral type

563

because it was the earliest stage of individual and human evolution. While atavism formed the main theoretical aspect of the first two editions of L’uomo delinquente, from the third edition, which was published in 1884, Lombroso increasingly drew on the concept of degeneration and introduced the term born criminal. Developed by the French physician Bénédict Augustin Morel in Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (Treatise on Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species), by the 1880s the notion of degeneration had become the dominant framework for the understanding of mental disorders. Degeneration was understood to be a pathological state of the organism, which was constitutionally weakened both physically and psychologically. Such weakening was hereditary and progressive from one generation to another, and it was believed to ultimately result in the extinction of the species. Degeneration was believed to be a process of pathological decay affecting not only in the individual but also society at large. While Morel interpreted degeneration as a reverse process of evolution, Lombroso interpreted degeneration as an arrest of development in the individual. Lombroso, like many physicians in the second half of the 19th century, adopted the theory of degeneration and used it to explain not only physical and psychological pathology but also criminality. While the first edition of L’uomo delinquente already contained an underlying idea of criminality as an inborn condition, it was only in the third edition that the term born criminal appeared. This term was originally coined by the criminologist Ferri in 1880. According to Lombroso, the born criminal was constitutionally morally insane, had psychological characteristics that belonged to the primitive stage of humankind, and lacked any moral sense. At the time “moral insanity” was widely used by European psychiatrists to explain those forms of mental derangements in which most of the intellectual faculties were unaffected, but the moral principles of the individuals were “depraved” or “perverted” so that the person’s free will was unimpaired. Lombroso also maintained that the born criminal could be identified by the possession of certain visible “stigmata,” such as asymmetry of the face. Lombroso believed that despite the fact that the punishment of the born criminal was

564

Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

useless to repress criminality, society had the right to punish criminals in order to defend itself.

Criminal Woman As early as the first edition of L’uomo delinquente published in 1876, Lombroso included observations on the specificity of female criminality, pointing out that prostitution represented the typical form of female crime. In 1893, Lombroso extended his analyses and, with his son-in-law Guglielmo Ferrero, published La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (The Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman). In La donna delinquente, those parts regarding the evolution of the two sexes, women’s psychology and women’s intelligence, were written mainly by Ferrero; Lombroso wrote those parts dealing with criminal anthropology. Lombroso and Ferrero systematized widely held notions on women within medical science. The two authors portrayed the normal woman as strongly associated with motherhood, which many physicians of the late 19th century thought was women’s biological goal. Lombroso and Ferrero represented the normal woman as a good bourgeois mother, sexually passive, without any autonomy, dependent on the father of her children, and naturally and organically monogamous and frigid. Similar to many of his contemporaries, Lombroso thought that women were inferior to men. He used biological data, such as the smaller size of the average female brain and body, to allegedly demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of women. Supported by evolution theories of the time, Lombroso described women as “undeveloped” men. While participating in the struggle for existence, men had acquired more skills and so were in a superior evolutionary stage compared to women. Female deviancy for Lombroso was rooted in sexuality; therefore, prostitution represented the most typical female crime. Lombroso pointed out that female delinquency was a less common phenomenon than male criminality, a fact that was at odds with women’s supposed inferiority. However, he explained that if one viewed female prostitution as the typical female crime, male and female criminality could be seen as similarly widespread in society. According to Lombroso, a woman became a prostitute more through a special tendency of her organism than because of her poverty

or any other social explanation. His studies showed limited cranial capacity in prostitutes, as well as narrow or receding foreheads, prominent cheekbones, short stature, short arms, excessive weight, left-­handedness, and prehensile feet. He also noted that prostitutes shared a lack of modesty, a brazen attitude to vice, an irregular lifestyle, a love of idleness, vanity, and a fondness for amusements and for having orgies and alcohol.

Conclusion From the beginning of his medical career, Lombroso examined the social implications of diseases such as insanity. These investigations were the starting point for later contributions to the study of the phenomenon of criminality. Throughout his study, Lombroso maintained a medical gaze on criminals as his research on the physical characteristics of the criminal show. The novelty of Lombroso’s approach was that it focused not only on the criminal and his or her physical and psychological characteristics rather than on crime, but also on deviant individuals. Lombroso’s interest in the criminal man and woman stemmed from a more general concern with deviancy. Lombroso did not go unchallenged for his theories, and legislators were especially unwilling to abandon a discourse of legal responsibility. However, his work had been crucial for the developments of criminology. At the beginning of the 20th century, Salvatore Ottolenghi, one of Lombroso’s disciples, founded the Polizia scientifica (Scientific police) that used Lombroso’s criminal anthropology tools to detect criminals. In this way, the methods of criminal anthropology were incorporated into the government apparatus. While in Italy criminology entered the medical curriculum and Lombroso’s influence remained strong, throughout Europe and the U.S. criminological journals, such as the French Archives de l’anthropologie criminelle et de sciences pénales (Archives of Criminal Anthropology and Penal Sciences), which were founded at the end of the 19th century. Along with the editorial activity within the field starting from the end of the 19th century, criminal anthropology entered academia and became an established discipline in the following century. Chiara Beccalossi

Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School; Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School; Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender; Phrenology

References and Further Readings Becker, P., & Wetzell, R. F. (2006). Criminals and their scientists: The history of criminology in international perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, J. E., & Gilman, S. L. (Eds.). (1985). Degeneration: The dark side of progress. New York: Columbia University Press. Colombo, G. (1975). La scienza infelice: il museo di antropologia criminale di Cesare Lombroso [Bad science: The museum of Lombroso’s criminal anthropology]. Turin: Boringhieri. De Peri, F. (1984). Il medico e il folle: introduzione psichiatrica, sapere scientifico e pensiero medico fra Otto e Novecento [The physician and the madman: Psychiatric introduction, scientific knowledge and medical thought between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries]. In F. Della Peruta (Ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 7 [Italian history: Annals 7] (pp. 1060–1140). Turin: Einaudi. Frigessi, D. (2003). Cesare Lombroso. Turin: Einaudi. Giacanelli, F. (1975). Appunti per una storia della psichiatria italiana [Notes on the History of Italian Psychiatry]. In K. Dörner (Ed.), Il borghese e il folle. Storia sociale della psichiatria [Madmen and the bourgeoisie: A social history of insanity and psychiatry] (pp. v–xxxii). Bari: Laterza. Horn, D. G. (2003). The criminal body: Lombroso and the anatomy of deviance. New York: Routledge. Lombroso, C. (1876). L’uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto alla antropologia, alla medicina legale ed alle discipline carcerarie [The criminal man studied in relationship to anthropology, forensic medicine and prison doctrines]. Milan: Ulrico Hoepli. Lombroso C. (1995). Delitto, genio, follia: scritti scelti [Crime, genius, madness: Selected writings] (D. Frigessi, F. Giacanelli, & L. Magoni, Eds.). Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Lombroso, C. (2006). Criminal man (M. Gibson & N. H. Rafter, Eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lombroso, C., & Ferrero, G. (1893). La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale [The criminal woman, the prostitute and the normal woman]. Turin: Roux. Minuz, F. (1989). Femmina o donna [Female or woman]. In V. P. Babini, F. Minuz, & A. Tagliavini (Eds.),

565

La donna nelle scienze dell’uomo [Woman in the male sciences] (pp. 114–160). Milan: Franco Angeli. Pick, D. (1988). “Terrors of the night”: Dracula and “degeneration” in the late nineteenth century. Critical Quarterly, 30, 71–87. Pick, D. (1989). Faces of degeneration: A European disorder, c. 1848– c. 1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Villa, R. (1985). Il deviante e i suoi segni: Lombroso e la nascita dell’antropologia criminale [The deviant man and his signs: Lombroso and the birth of criminal anthropology]. Milan: Franco Angeli. Wetzell, R. F. (2000). Inventing the criminal: A history of German criminology, 1880–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender The Female Offender, by Cesare Lombroso, was the first modern criminological text to focus on the woman as a criminal. Lombroso, the Italian psychiatrist and physician, is often cited as the father of criminology, for turning to the individual as the subject of study in crime rather than the crime itself. This new approach to criminal studies is cited by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson as criminal anthropology, the study of the “human body” and the human mind/psychology. In taking this anthropological approach to criminology Lombroso established his theory of the born criminal, a subspecies of the human race. Today, criminology has moved away from such notions of crime as natural or born into the person, and thus The Female Offender is widely discredited. Lombroso’s The Female Offender is the first and most widely cited English translation of his Italian text, La Donna Delinquente, published in 1893. Note that a new and extended translation is now available, translated by Rafter and Gibson, titled Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman. The text is a companion piece to Criminal Man. Both texts are seminal studies in criminal anthropology and are also often categorized as part of phrenology, the determination of people’s character, including their criminality, through the study of skulls and cranial abnormalities. Lombroso uses these criminological

566

Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender

approaches in The Female Offender to conceptualize the female born criminal. In The Female Offender Lombroso sets out to profile the characteristics—the physical and moral attributes—of the female born criminal that distinguish the depraved female criminal type from the occasional criminal and normal woman. Lombroso also makes comparisons between criminal women and criminal men, often using the terms virile and virility to refer to the masculine qualities of female offenders. The female born criminal is a composite of many physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics that make her naturally crime prone. He categorizes some of these attributes as degenerative, exhibiting devolution, or as atavistic, throwbacks with primitive qualities. For both men and women, Lombroso argues, the criminal can be born, rather than made. Lombroso’s analysis of the female offender looks particularly at women who committed the following offenses: homicide, murder, infanticide, arson, poisoning, theft, wounding, rape, and prostitution. Throughout the text, he contrasts the characteristics of offenders of the majority of these crimes from those of prostitutes; the prostitute is not only treated as a sexual deviant by Lombroso but also is considered a serious criminal type. Lombroso’s analysis, however, relies on his argument that women are inherently morally weaker, and inferior to men. The normal woman, who typically avoids crime and partakes in normative female roles, still has the potential to commit crime due to the inferior morality in all women. For this reason, although the born female criminal is rare, when she is found she is worse than her male counterpart in depravity.

Physical Anomalies and Crime In The Female Offender Lombroso begins his work by defending the use of anthropometry, the measurement of the human body, and the study of anomalies, those characteristics that differ from the norm or what distinguishes the criminal from the normal woman. The analysis of the criminal woman starts with statistical measures of cranial capacity and other head and skull measurements. Lombroso finds through a comparison of his own work to that of other scientists that criminal women have a smaller cranial capacity than normal

women. The cranial capacity of female criminals and prostitutes is more like that of lunatics than the normal woman. Additionally, he also finds that the jaw of female offenders is heavier and more masculine than normal women. Overall, criminal women’s skulls are more like men’s skulls than normal women’s skulls, but the criminal male cranium exhibits more anomalies than the female. While the skull for both criminals and normal women tend toward short headedness, the criminal group exhibits degeneration at a higher rate. Through cranial analysis, Lombroso shows that while not all female criminals and prostitutes have the identified characteristics, a higher percentage of criminals exhibit the anomalies than do normal women. Rather than concluding that “all criminals have” cranial anomalies, he asserts that a “higher proportion than” average have such anomalies. Among the many physiological characteristics that Lombroso identified as indicative of criminality in women, he included hair, skin, eyes, and hands. Criminal women, particularly in murder, theft, and prostitution, are close to or above average female weight but are rarely of average height. For prostitutes, the proportion of arm span to height is smaller than other women. Lombroso explains that good arm span is developed in those women who labor. On the other hand, prostitutes had disproportionately larger hands and shorter and narrower feet. Criminals and prostitutes tend to have darker hair, although there are more lighthaired women in prostitution because of the demand for them, and criminal women turn grey faster than their male counterparts and normal women. These women also go bald less frequently than others. Prostitutes and thieves have darker eyes. Aged criminal women will exhibit more prominent wrinkles, which Lombroso likens to a typical witch image. In terms of age, criminality is more common among older women. More facial anomalies found in the criminal type include a receding forehead, over-jutting brows, projecting cheekbones, oversized lower jaw, abnormal or projecting ears, unaligned eyes, and anomalous teeth. There is also a prevalence of masculine characteristics among the criminal female kind. Traits that Lombroso categorized as degenerative or atavistic, found particularly among the prostitute, included hairy moles, general hairiness, enlarged jaw muscles, and manly larynx,

Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender

which produced a deep voice. Both female criminals and prostitutes can have degenerative appearances, but the prostitute exhibits less unattractive and virile qualities. Part of Lombroso’s explanation for this difference is that prostitutes need to attract men. He further argues that, while these women may bare a degenerative or masculine appearance, sexual drive may cause a man to overlook these unattractive qualities and attribute more sensitivity and passion to these women than they deserve. Although he asserts that some of the aforementioned anomalies could be attributed to regional, ethnic differences in physiological development (i.e., cephalic index), Lombroso argues that the measurable anomalies are significantly consistent among the criminal class to warrant the conclusion that there are distinct features to the skulls, facial structures, and other attributes of criminal women. The criminal man, however, has a higher number of notable anomalies when compared to his female counterpart. Lombroso’s findings were not statistically overwhelming, but he found them of enough value to conclude that physiologically there are visible and measurable indicators to criminality.

The Female Criminal Type Lombroso contends that the female criminal type is a rare find, and more rare than her male counterpart. The female offender is also less obvious than the male type because the male exhibits more anomalies than the female, and so the female criminal type can even look normal. Lombroso defines the female criminal type as one who has four or more of the degenerative characteristics listed above (a half-type would have at least three). The criminal type’s degenerative characteristics or anomalies in both male and females are indicative of atavism, a primordial-like existence. Lombroso even argued that all women are naturally more atavistic than men. He contended that this lack of evolution in the female is the result of her conservatism and sedentary state as the caretaker, who remains in the home while the male moves about the environment, adapting. This lack of need for adaptation explains why the female criminal type exhibits fewer anomalies than her male counterpart. Additionally, the female, according to Lombroso, is naturally less inclined to

567

offend. She may be found as an occasional offender, and when a born criminal she may require some level of beauty or attractiveness to commit her crimes. These are all reasons for the lesser prevalence of anomalies in female criminal types.

Female Born Criminal Although the female criminal may be more rare than the rather prevalent male criminal, according to Lombroso she is the more ferocious of criminal types. The female born criminal’s capacity for cruelty is also stronger than the male. She kills, but also makes the victim suffer. In Lombroso’s analysis, women in general are found to be immature, sharing traits with children, including vengefulness, jealousy, and cruelty. Every woman naturally has a moral deficiency; she is a semi-criminal. While in the normal woman these characteristics can be subdued by religion, maternity, sexual frigidity, or lesser intelligence, the drive for evil in the born criminal lacks in these controls. The female born criminal is lacking in maternal drive and piety. Instead, she is driven by passions—a highly erotic sensibility—that, when combined with her intelligence and physical strength, enables her to commit the greatest of offenses. The latent fund of wickedness in all women comes to fruition in the born criminal. The born criminal woman differs from the normal woman on multiple matters of sociality and morality. Lombroso argues that because the female born criminal is more like a male, she is wanting of maternal feeling. Not only does she not have maternal affection, but also she would make a bad mother. He further cites her overt sexuality as cause for bad motherhood. Religiosity is not wholly absent from the born criminal, for she may pray for the souls of those she murders or pray for spiritual assistance in the commission of the crime. For these women, however, religion does not serve to deter them from offending. The born criminal woman expresses kindness as a means for egoist motivations. Her kindness is not always authentic and is short in duration. In terms of motivation for offending, the female born criminal can be motivated by revenge. This is less often found in the male born criminal. However, the vengeance of the female born criminal is not impulsive, but a process that engages her

568

Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender

intelligence and takes time. Premeditation is a common characteristic of the born criminal’s offense. The vengeance of the female born criminal can be complicated by feelings of jealousy, which also implicate her exaggerated sexuality. Still, love is not commonly the motivation behind her offenses. For the born criminal woman, love is an egoistic experience, not an altruistic kind of love. It is closely related to her egoistic hatred, which typically emerges with betrayal. The love of the female born criminal is fleeting, short in duration, and volatile. The born criminal woman can be motivated by greed. Similar to her male counterpart, she may desire dress and accessories that represent a certain status. She is more likely, however, to harm her own family in pursuit of money and other resources. When she is not physically strong enough or needs the help of another, the born criminal will implicate an accomplice into the offense. The commission of the female born criminal’s offense is often more complicated than that of the male’s. These complex constructions of crimes demonstrate her higher level of intelligence over her male counterpart. She conceives intricate alibis for her crimes; when caught she will stand by her conviction of innocence even when her story changes. The female born criminal, however, is a better liar than the male born criminal. The occasional female offender is unlike the born criminal in that others often influence her into offending. Although the occasional criminal is not as degenerative or as virile, it is in moral constitution that the female born criminal and occasional criminal mostly differ. She is not the mastermind behind the crime, but an accomplice or instrument. Unlike a born criminal, the occasional criminal is not lacking in maternal love, is sexually subdued, and can be moved to penitence.

Conclusion According to Lombroso’s work, The Female Offender, the female born criminal is rare in comparison to the male born offender and is more vicious than her male counterpart. There is no complete composite of the female born offender; rather, there is a synthesis of physiological and moral characteristics that in combination distinguish the born criminal woman from the normal

woman. These consist of the many virile physical qualities and immoral attitudes and behaviors, including deviant sexuality, of the female offender. Not all offenders, however, are born criminals. The occasional criminal has a stronger moral constitution than the born criminal that makes her more like the normal woman. But Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal cannot be understood without accepting his ideas that women are naturally morally weaker than men, and thus predisposed to criminal life. It is social controls through religion, regulated sexuality, domesticity, and the like that help deter the majority of women from offending. The female born criminal is the way that she is because she is much more like men, in appearance and moral constitution. For many decades, criminology, as well as other sciences, was influenced by Lombroso’s work. As noted, The Female Offender is widely discredited as criminology has moved away from notions of crime as natural or born into the person. However, there is a legacy of essentializing the nature of certain groups, whether criminals or women or criminal women, that is revisited in the social sciences to try and explain the condition of said groups. Lombroso’s contribution to the sciences is significant to tracing the history and shifts of scholarship, but also because he was a forerunner in turning the scientific gaze to the individual, a tradition that has proven significant to our understanding of human behaviors. Heidi M. Baez See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Phrenology; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology

References and Further Readings Lombroso, C. (1958). The female offender. New York: Philosophical Library. Lombroso, C. (2006). Criminal man (M. Gibson & N. H. Rafter, Trans.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lombroso, C., & Guglielmo, F. (2004). Criminal woman, the prostitute, and the normal woman (N. Hahn Rafter & M. Gibson, Trans.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence

Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence David F. Luckenbill’s theory of the six stages in violence was one of the first micro-sociological theories to account for the ways in which criminal homicide develops through the course of interaction. Building on Erving Goffman’s work, Lucken­ bill theorized that cases of criminal homicide resemble a confrontation in which victim and offender struggle over maintaining face—the image of self one claims during a social interaction. Luckenbill employed content analysis of a variety of sources such as police reports, court testimony, and offender and victim statements to examine 71 cases of criminal homicide occurring from 1963 to 1972. From his analysis, he developed a typology of six time-order stages in which transactions ending in murder most typically develop.

The Six Stages Stage one, the opening move of the transaction, is performed by the victim and subsequently defined by the offender as offensive. Victims most commonly made a direct, verbal comment which offenders interpreted as insulting. At other times, transactions began with a physical or nonverbal gesture which the offender deemed personally offensive. Stage two denotes the process whereby the offender interprets the victim’s actions as deliberate and insulting. At times, offenders interpreted the victim’s actions as intentionally offensive even though the victim may have been unwitting. Regardless of the victim’s intent, offenders interpreted the victim’s opening move as purposefully insulting, setting in motion a character contest in which opponents attempt to save face. In Luckenbill’s third stage of violence, the offender responds to the victim’s opening move. Here, the offender faces a choice: either deal with the victim’s actions by demonstrating strength of character or attest to questions of face by excusing the violation. In all of the cases that Luckenbill examined, the offender attempted to restore face through a retaliatory move. Offenders most

569

typically retaliated by issuing a verbal or physical challenge. Rather than excusing the violation or fleeing the scene, offenders established violence as an appropriate means for settling the conflict. During the fourth stage of violence, the victim confronts a similar choice as the one faced by the offender in the previous stage: the victim can avoid further contact with the offender or agree that violence would be an appropriate way to resolve the situation. Luckenbill found that transactions ending in murder involve the victim and offender forging a working agreement of violence. The offender sometimes incorrectly interpreted the victim’s actions as an implicit agreement of violence. More frequently, however, the victim established a mutual agreement with the offender by defining the situation as suited for violence. At times, victims implicitly accepted violence by refusing to comply with the offender’s commands. In other cases, victims more explicitly accepted violence by issuing counter-challenges or retaliating with physical force. The audience surrounding the victim and offender was often instrumental in fostering a working agreement of violence. In 57 percent of the cases involving an audience, onlookers actively encouraged the use of violence. In the remaining cases, the audience was neutral. Victims and offenders, however, often interpreted audience inaction as a move favoring the use of violence. The audience’s neutrality, in other words, suggested that violence was an unproblematic way of resolving the conflict. As a result, the presence of an audience often shaped the development of the fourth stage. Stage five signifies the battle in which the victim is left dead or dying. After the victim and offender forge a working agreement of violence, they engage in a fight resulting in the victim’s death. The possession of weapons often plays a significant role in stage five. In 36 percent of cases, offenders brought guns or knives into the situation. Even more frequently, offenders left temporarily to secure a weapon or used an everyday prop to harm the victim. Stage six involves the offender responding to the victim’s death. In a majority of cases, offenders fled the scene. At times, they voluntarily waited for the police to arrive or they were involuntarily held for the police by onlookers. The manner in which offenders responded to the

570

Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence

murder varied depending on their relationship to the victim and the moves of the audience. For instance, when the victim and offender were intimately related, offenders typically remained at the scene. In contrast, offenders usually left the scene when the victim was an acquaintance or enemy. Furthermore, the degree to which the audience was hostile or supportive structured the offender’s response to the murder. While hostile audiences usually directed the offender to remain at the scene, supportive audiences permitted the offender to flee. Luckenbill’s theory of the six time-ordered stages in violence has influenced sociological and criminological conceptions of crime. His theory was one of the first to explain murder as a process that develops over the course of interaction. It revealed that criminal homicide occurs as a result of a character contest in which opponents attempt to save face. Moreover, it demonstrated the role of the audience in structuring the development of criminal homicide. In sum, his theory

revealed that murder can be explained in part by a dynamic interchange between victim, offender, and audience. Doug Meyer See also Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence; Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence; Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime; Lafree, Gary D., and Christopher Birkbeck: Situational Analysis of Crime; Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime; Thornberry, Terence P.: Interactional Theory; Wikström, Per-Olof H.: Situational Action Theory

References and Further Readings Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-toface behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Luckenbill, D. F. (1977). Criminal homicide as a situated transaction. Social Problems, 25, 176–186.

Editorial Board Editors Francis T. Cullen University of Cincinnati Pamela Wilcox University of Cincinnati

Managing Editor Kristin Swartz University of Cincinnati

Editorial Board Robert Agnew Emory University

Jody Miller Rutgers University

Mark Colvin Kent State University

Daniel S. Nagin Carnegie Mellon University

David P. Farrington Cambridge University

Alex R. Piquero Florida State University

Copyright © 2010 by SAGE Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of criminological theory / edited by Francis T. Cullen, Pamela Wilcox. v. cm. – (A SAGE reference publication) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4129-5918-6 (cloth) 1. Criminology–Encyclopedias. I. Cullen, Francis T. II. Wilcox, Pamela, 1968– HV6017.E527 2010 364.01—dc22 2010011183 This book is printed on acid-free paper. 10   11   12   13   14   10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1 Publisher: Acquisitions Editor: Editorial Assistant: Developmental Editor: Reference Systems Manager: Reference Systems Coordinator: Production Editor: Typesetter: Proofreaders: Indexer: Cover Designer: Marketing Manager:

Rolf A. Janke Jim Brace-Thompson Michele Thompson Carole Maurer Leticia M. Gutierrez Laura Notton Tracy Buyan C&M Digitals (P) Ltd. Annie Lubinsky, Rae-Ann Goodwin David Luljak Bryan Fishman Amberlyn McKay

Contents Volume 2 List of Entries   vii Entries

M N O P Q R

571 655 675 681 749 765

S 799 T 935 V 977 W 989 X 1035 Y 1039

Annotated Further Readings   1043 Index   1133

List of Entries A

Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect Brain Abnormalities and Crime Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control

Abolitionism Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory Agnew, Robert: Integrated Theory Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory Alarid, Leanne Fiftal, and Velmer S. Burton, Jr.: Gender and Serious Offending Alcohol and Violence Alexander, Franz, and William Healy: Roots of Crime Altruistic Fear Anarchist Criminology Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street Andrews, D. A., and James Bonta: A Personal, Interpersonal, and Community-Reinforcement (PIC-R) Perspective on Criminal Conduct Anomie and White-Collar Crime Aschaffenburg, Gustav: German Criminology Athens, Lonnie: Interaction and Violence

C

Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang Capitalism and White-Collar Crime Catalano, Richard F., and J. David Hawkins: Social Development Model Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime Chambliss, William J.: The Saints and the Roughnecks Chamlin, Mitchell B., and John K. Cochran: Social Altruism and Crime Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention Clinard, Marshall B.: The Black Market Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity Cognitive Theories of Crime Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control

B

Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum, and Ross L. Matsueda: Gender and Reflected Appraisals Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers Bennett, William J., John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: Moral Poverty Theory Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School Bernard, Thomas J., and Jeffrey B. Snipes: Variable-Centered Approach Blau, Judith R., and Peter M. Blau: Inequality and Crime vii

viii

List of Entries

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory Collective Security/Fear and Loathing Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency Convict Criminology Cook, Philip J.: Supply and Demand of Criminal Opportunities Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory Costello, Barbara J., and Helen J. Mederer: A Control Theory of Gender and Crime Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime Crime Hot Spots Criminal Career Paradigm Croall, Hazel: Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime Cultural Criminology Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime

D

Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court Decker, Scott H., and Richard T. Wright: Decisions of Street Offenders De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order Dodge, Kenneth A.: Aggression and a Hostile Attribution Style Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency Dugdale, Richard L.: The Jukes Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide

E

Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle Economic Theory and Crime

Elliott, Delbert S., Suzanne S. Ageton, and Rachelle J. Canter: Integrated Perspective on Delinquency Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory England, Ralph W.: A Theory of Middle-Class Delinquency Environmental Toxins Theory Erikson, Kai T.: Wayward Puritans Eugenics and Crime: Early American Positivism Eysenck, Hans J.: Crime and Personality

F

Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Nature Felson, Richard B., and James T. Tedeschi: Social Interactionist Theory of Violence Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman Freudian Theory

G

Gangs and the Underclass Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals Gendreau, Paul, D. A. Andrews, and James Bonta: The Theory of Effective Correctional Intervention General Deterrence Theory Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime Goddard, Henry H.: Feeblemindedness and Delinquency Goffman, Erving: Asylums Gordon, David M.: Political Economy and Crime Goring, Charles: The English Convict Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory Green, Stuart P.: Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime Grounded Theory

List of Entries

H

Hagan, John: Power-Control Theory Hagan, John, and Holly Foster: Stress and Gendered Pathways to Delinquency Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Mean Streets and Delinquency Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter Haynie, Dana L.: Contexts of Risk Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray: Crime and the Bell Curve Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency

I

Incarceration and Recidivism Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime Inequality and Crime Insanity and Crime: Early American Positivism Integrated Theories of White-Collar Crime Irwin, John, and Donald R. Cressey: Importation Theory

J

Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street Jeffery, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

K

Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape

ix

Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime Krohn, Marvin D.: Networks and Crime Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

L

Lafree, Gary D.: Legitimacy and Crime Lafree, Gary D., and Christopher Birkbeck: Situational Analysis of Crime Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior Left Realism Criminology Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear Life-Course Interdependence Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender Luckenbill, David F.: Stages in Violence

M

Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency Matza, David: Becoming Deviant Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing McCarthy, Bill, and John Hagan: Danger and Deterrence McCorkel, Jill: Gender and Embodied Surveillance Media Violence Effects Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory Mental Illness and Crime Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

x

List of Entries

Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio

N

Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence Negotiated Coexistence Neurology and Crime Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory Nutrition and Crime Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency

O

Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, Jerald G. Bachman, Patrick M. O’Malley, and Lloyd D. Johnston: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior

P

Parmelee, Maurice Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime Peacemaking Criminology Peers and Delinquency Perceptual Deterrence Perceptually Contemporaneous Offenses Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The Phrenology Physical Environment and Crime Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect

Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal Postmodern Theory Prenatal Influences and Crime Prison Insurgency Theory Psychophysiology and Crime

Q

Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

R

Racial Threat and Social Control Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder Rape Myths and Violence Against Women Rational Choice and White-Collar Crime Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape

S

Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: AgeGraded Theory of Informal Social Control Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture Schizophrenia and Crime Schur, Edwin M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory

List of Entries

Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology Southern Subculture of Violence Theory Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence Stinchcombe, Arthur L.: Rebellion in a High School Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization Systemic Model of Social Disorganization

T

Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology Thio, Alex: Relative Deprivation and Deviance Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl Thornberry, Terence P.: Interactional Theory Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang

xi

Tittle, Charles R.: Control Balance Theory Tittle, Charles R., David A. Ward, and Harold G. Grasmick: The Capacity and Desire for Self-Control Toby, Jackson: Stake in Conformity Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison Turk, Austin T.: The Criminalization Process Turner, Ralph H.: Deviant Roles and the Social Construction of Behavior Tyler, Tom R.: Sanctions and Procedural Justice Theory

V

Vaughan, Diane: The Normalization of Deviance Vigil, James Diego: Multiple Marginality Theory Vila, Brian J., Lawrence E. Cohen, and Richard S. Machalek: Evolutionary Expropriative Theory Vold, George B.: Group Conflict Theory

W

Walters, Glenn D.: Lifestyle Theory Wells, Edward L., and Joseph H. Rankin: Direct Controls and Delinquency Whyte, William Foote: Street Corner Society Widom, Cathy Spatz: The Cycle of Violence Wikström, Per-Olof H.: Situational Action Theory Wilcox, Pamela, Kenneth C. Land, and Scott A. Hunt: Multicontextual Opportunity Theory Williams, Kirk R., and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and Non-Legal Sanctions Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory Wortley, Richard: A Revised Situational Crime Prevention Theory

X

XYY Aggression Theory

Y

Yochelson, Samuel, and Stanton E. Samenow: The Criminal Personality

M Maher’s study takes place during the decade of the 1990s. By this time, criminological research on women offenders had primarily moved in one of two directions. The “victimization” model portrayed women offenders as passive victims of circumstance. Research in this vein suggested that women’s crimes are a function of drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and/or oppressive social arrangements. In contrast, the “volitional” model emerged in light of the increasing numbers of women arrested and convicted for drug-related crime. In this model, researchers challenged the portrayal of women as passive victims and instead emphasized how women actively strategized their criminal involvements. Several researchers in this model boldly predicted that women’s crime would ultimately come to resemble that of men. Maher’s research challenges each of these portrayals. She argues that each perspective is an oversimplification of the relationship between human agency and social structure. By conducting extensive ethnographic research with both women and men in a local drug economy, she is able to demonstrate that neither model is capable of adequately capturing the complexity of women’s crime participation. Instead, she argues that economic, cultural, and social structures shape relationships and conditions within local labor markets. Social structures influence the range of choices that individuals have available to them, but they do not determine behavior per se. Maher situates women’s decision making within these structures, as well as the intersecting dynamics of race and gender that organize the drug economy in Bushwick, New York.

Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work Lisa’s Maher’s Sexed Work: Gender, Race, and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market is an ethnographic study of women’s participation in a local drug economy—one that begins with the question of how gender and race structure poor women’s access to licit and illicit labor markets. Originally published in 1997, it is already considered a classic in the field of feminist criminology because of its rich account of the inner workings of the crackcocaine market and its sharp theoretical insights regarding social structure and human agency. The emergence of feminist analyses of crime can be traced to civil rights activism in the 1960s, particularly the second wave of the women’s movement. The women’s movement raised awareness and offered alternate theoretical perspectives and analyses of various crime-related topics ranging from prostitution to rape. The movement sparked scholarly interest in women’s experiences with crime and renewed longstanding debates over gender differences in crime participation. Feminist criminologists challenged positivist explanations that attributed differences in men and women’s criminality to biologically essentialist claims about women’s weakness and passivity. Instead, feminist research demonstrated that observed gender differences in crime are a function of social factors including labor market participation, opportunity structures, formal and informal social controls, cultural expectations, differential socialization, and prior victimization. 571

572

Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work

Ethnographic Context and Discoveries As a method of data collection, ethnography plays a critical role in criminology. By spending extensive time in a setting and conducting lengthy interviews with research subjects, ethnographers are wellpositioned to answer questions of how and why individuals engage in the crimes that they do. Maher’s decision to study the drug economy in Bushwick, New York, was driven by at least two sets of concerns. First, a number of quantitative indicators like arrest and self-report data suggested that, in general, women’s participation in drug crime was increasing. Some researchers argued that women’s greater involvement in drug crime was a sign that the crack-cocaine economy of the 1980s was an “equal opportunity employer” when compared to the heroin market of the 1970s. Maher was curious about the extent to which gender influenced the structure of opportunity in the crack-cocaine market and wondered whether women could be seen as having reached positions of parity with men. Second, Bushwick was by all accounts a “drug supermarket” in the years that followed the advent of crack-cocaine. By the 1980s, the neighborhood was enmeshed in a vicious cycle of diminishing economic opportunities, declining population, and expanding poverty. It was the poorest neighborhood in Brooklyn with a median household income of just over $16,000 and a high school drop out rate of 80 percent. The majority of its residents were Latino/a, primarily Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Columbian. Maher spent 3 years collecting ethnographic data and conducting interviews in Bushwick. Over the course of the research project, Maher observed and recorded the lives of more than 200 drug-involved women in three Brooklyn neighborhoods (Flatbush, Williamsburg, and Bushwick). The conclusions offered in Sexed Work are drawn primarily from multiple interviews and extensive field observations of 45 women in Bushwick, all of who were street-level drug users. With few exceptions, her subjects’ lives were almost entirely structured around their drug use as well as by poverty, racism, violence, and social marginality. The rapid growth and subsequent contraction of the crack-cocaine market greatly changed the scope and structure of the illicit economy in neighborhoods like Bushwick. Maher’s study

picks up in the early 1990s, a few years after crack production and distribution peaked nationally. While the drug market in other communities contracted, it became increasingly more concentrated in Bushwick. The intensive police presence that followed actually exacerbated rather than diminished the high levels of violence and economic decline plaguing the community. Nonparticipants in the drug economy continued to move out of the neighborhood as inconvenience and police harassment increased. Legitimate businesses closed or moved and Bushwick became a “world of relentless poverty and resounding lack of opportunity” (1997, p. 20). Drugs, violence, poverty, and AIDS thrived in Bushwick. Maher’s research demonstrates that the drug economy in Bushwickis comprises three distinct yet mutually reinforcing sectors: drug-business hustles, non-drug hustles, and sexwork. The core of the illict labor market is dominated by drug-business hustles. Drug-business hustles include any activity that is directly linked to the transfer of goods and services related to the use and consumption of drugs. This includes sales and various distribution roles such as serving as a lookout, running a shooting gallery, steering potential customers, and guarding and running drugs. Non-drug hustles are acts that provide revenue to the drug economy even though they are not directly related to buying or selling drugs. Non-drug hustles include activities like robbery, burglary, or shoplifting that are undertaken for the purpose of generating income to buy drugs. The third sector of the labor market included street-level sexwork, in which sexual services are performed in exchange for either money or drugs. Both non-drug hustles and sexwork constitute peripheral sectors of the illicit economy. Neither is well organized, and there is no direct “career path” emerging from either. Maher discovers that while large numbers of women are present in the general drug economy, they are overwhelmingly confined to the sexwork sector. Few women are present in the primary labor market of drug-business hustles. When they were, they did not work in the more lucrative areas of selling and distributing drugs. Instead, they were more likely to serve in peripheral roles such as “copping” (buying small quantities of drugs for others) or selling small amounts on “risky” corners (e.g., those under police surveillance). Women are

Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work

similarly underrepresented in the secondary market of street hustles. Instead, they are overwhelmingly clustered in the high-risk, low-status, low-paying world of sexwork. Maher concludes the institutionalized sexism in the criminal underworld is the primary explanation of why women’s participation in the drug economy is limited to that of consumer and sexworker. Indeed, male managers refuse to hire and/or promote women in the drug-business hustle because they are invested in gendered and racialized constructions of women as unreliable, untrustworthy, and incapable of effectively mobilizing violence to deter theft and encroachments on sales territory.

Conclusion Sexed Work challenges a number of popular and academic generalizations about women drug users. Perhaps the most significant contribution of the study is Maher’s contestation of a long-standing dichotomy in the literature that casts women criminals as either dependent victims or self-­ determined, cunning criminals. The women users in Maher’s study are neither. She shows that druginvolved and crime-involved women are severely constrained by poverty, drug addiction, and the structure of the street-level drug market. Nonetheless, they weigh their options, think strategically, and consider personal ties in their decision-making processes. Her findings are contrary to the stereotype of crack-addicted women as “willing to do anything” for the drug. The opportunity structure in the informal economy reflects broader inequalities based on race and gender that help shape legitimate work. Women’s roles in the drug economy are severely limited. Women are at the bottom of the hierarchy in the drug market, where high-level sales jobs are almost-exclusively reserved for males. Women struggle to piece together an income from lowpaying enterprises and hustles. Race further stratifies women’s opportunities and social networks. The drug business is dominated by Dominican males, which has various consequences vis-à-vis white, African American, and Latina women. Sexwork remains the one occupation dominated by women in Bushwick, as other occupations available to women, such as shoplifting, disappeared with the decline of the legitimate economy.

573

But the economics of crack also changed the landscape of street-level sexwork. The low cost of crack has driven the going rates for sexual services down and has largely dismantled the pimping structure. At the same time, the spread of addiction has created a new crop of women workers. The public’s imagination contributed to the creation of a more demanding clientele and greater risk of violence as “dates” perceive sexworkers as disposable women whose sole concern is acquiring drugs. The increased competition has also contributed to greater isolation among women. Race and gender converge to produce divisions of labor within sexwork. These divisions are culturally and locally specific. In Bushwick, Latinas are problematized by African American and white women, who blame Latinas for driving down the market rate for sexual services. Black and white women are more likely to have professional histories as sexworkers, while Latinas’ participation in sexwork is more directly associated with the crack economy. While white women have an advantage in the sexwork market due to racist perceptions of safety and danger on the part of dates, Maher also suggests that white women are perceived as weak by their African American peers, even as the two groups form loose alliances. The social networks that result from the raced division of labor are crucial to women’s survival and income-generating potential, but they also provide a means for sexworkers to establish norms and standards of their work that enable them to maintain a sense of dignity and self-respect. Maher’s study convincingly demonstrates that women’s participation in sexwork and the wider drug economy in which it is embedded is a product of both social structure and human agency. Women do not choose sexwork over better-paying, lessdegrading alternatives. Rather, men’s dominance of street economies and their investment in cultural constructions of gender serves to limit women’s access to more lucrative forms of illicit work. In this sense, the street economy is analogous to inequalities that are continually reproduced in the formal economy. Jill A. McCorkel and Brittnie Aiello See also Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime; Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity; Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys

574

Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance

and Homegirls in the Barrio; Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime; Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld

References and Further Readings Adler, F. (1975). Sisters in crime. New York: McGraw-Hill. Baskin, D., Sommers, I., & Fagan, J. (1993). The political economy of violent female street crime. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 20, 401–407. Belknap, J. (2007). The invisible woman. Belmont, CA: Thomson. Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect: Selling crack in el barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press. Britton, D. (2000). Feminism in criminology: Engendering the outlaw. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 571, 57–76. Covington, J. (1985). Gender differences in criminality among heroin users. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 22, 329–354. Fagan, J. (1994). Women and drugs revisited: Female participation in the cocaine economy. Journal of Drug Issues, 24, 179–225. Hagan, J. (1987). Class in the household: A powercontrol theory of gender and delinquency. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 788–816. Maher, L. (1997). Sexed work: Gender, race, and resistance in a Brooklyn drug market. New York: Oxford University Press. Messerschmidt, J. (1997). Crime as structured action. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miller, E. (1986). Street women. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Miller, J. (2000). One of the guys: Girls, gangs, and gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Richie, B. (1996). Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of battered black women. New York: Routledge. Simon, R. (1975). Women and crime. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Smart, C. (1976). Women, crime, and criminology: A feminist critique. London: Routledge. Steffensmeier, D. (1983). Organization properties and sex-segregation in the underworld. Social Forces, 61, 1010–1032.

Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance Observers of politics and popular culture are likely familiar with the idea of the habitual offender: the

criminal with a long record of past offenses. Political platforms and fictional plot lines often focus attention on the super-predator and the career criminal, dramatizing the notion that crime is intractable and offenders unchangeable. A powerful fact of criminology, however, is that virtually all criminals—including those with long and serious histories of criminal involvement—eventually stop committing crime (Blumstein & Cohen, 1987; Farrington, 1992). This process of abstaining from crime is referred to as desistance. Although much of criminology is concerned with explaining why people commit crime, or why they continue to commit crime (a process referred to as persistence), there is good reason to ask why people desist from crime. Not only is desistance the most likely outcome, but there is also a strong public interest in understanding the factors that make desistance more or less likely. Annually in the United States, for example, more than 700,000 inmates are released from prison (Sabol & Couture, 2008) and another 2 million are released from probation supervision (Glaze & Bonczar, 2007). As a matter of public safety, it is important to facilitate the process of desistance and avoid official actions that make it more difficult for people to abstain from crime. In Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives, Shadd Maruna proposes a theory to explain how people with long and serious records of criminal involvement turn their lives around and desist from crime. Maruna’s work is identified with a branch of criminology known as life-course criminology, which is concerned with understanding how and why patterns of criminal involvement change over the course of individuals’ lives. Maruna proposes that ex-convicts have a lot to explain—to themselves and to others. They need a story that helps make sense of their criminal past and assert convincingly their reform. “[E]x-offenders . . . need a logical selfstory to help them deal with their own feelings of culpability, external stigma, and the potential emptiness and void of their lives” (p. 55). Moreover, Maruna suggests that these self-stories are instrumental in shaping behavior. How individuals respond to situations depends in part on interpretations and self-perceptions. Based on a narrative analysis of the life stories of 20 active offenders and 30 desisting offenders

Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance

from Liverpool, England, Maruna discovered that the stories interviewees told about themselves followed certain distinguishing patterns. Active offenders told stories that followed a condemnation script, a self-narrative characterized by a lack of personal agency, a sense that they had nothing left to lose, and a focus on the pursuit of happiness through consumption and material gain. Desisting offenders, in contrast, constructed a story to redeem themselves of their past and assert a meaningful future, a so-called redemption script. The two groups of interviewees were carefully matched on characteristics related to criminality. In other words, the study participants shared remarkably similar backgrounds and future prospects: both groups were extensively involved in crime (usually from a young age), had poor employment records, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, grew up in “tough” neighborhoods with few legitimate economic opportunities, experienced physical and emotional abuse, and had spent significant amounts of time incarcerated and under criminal justice supervision. Interestingly, although they confronted similarly bleak prospects for success, the desisters managed to find a “tragic optimism” in their circumstances and an almost zealous hope for their future. In contrast, the active offenders “seemed fairly accurate in their assessment of their situation (dire), their chances of achieving success in the ‘straight’ world (minimal), and their place in mainstream society (‘need not apply’)” (p. 9). The sections below takes a closer look at the concept of desistance from crime and provide a fuller explanation of condemnation and redemption scripts. Finally, the entry concludes by briefly exploring how knowledge of how people voluntarily “go straight” can inform efforts to support desistance from crime.

Desistance From Crime In his book, Maruna relates an old joke: “stopping smoking is easy—I do it every week.” This joke aptly illustrates the definitional challenges associated with studying desistance. Some criminologists define desistance as an event, like quitting a job. The trouble with thinking about desistance as an event, however, is that crime is not a continuous, uninterrupted activity. In this respect, the criminal career analogy, which suggests that offenders “go

575

to work” committing crime five days a week or more, is misleading. Offenders are involved in crime sporadically and “stop” committing crime frequently. If an offender does not commit a crime for a year, have they desisted? What about five years? Can we know if they “really” desisted only after they are dead? Other criminologists have conceptualized desistance as a decision, the point at which someone decides to stop committing crime. This definition is also problematic. Like the smoker in the joke above, deciding to desist and actually desisting can be different things. In Maruna’s research, desistance is conceptualized as a process of maintaining crime-free behavior in the face of life’s obstacles and temptations. “Desistance might more productively be defined as the long-term abstinence from crime among individuals who had previously engaged in a persistent pattern of criminal offending” (p. 26). Rather than an event or a decision, desistance is a process. In turn, this definitional distinction shifts our focus from trying to understand turning points in a person’s life (why did they desist?) to instead thinking about how people desist from crime. Research by scholars such as Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub finds that having a meaningful job and a supportive marriage are important structural factors related to desistance. As noted above, Maruna thinks that the answer to how people desist is at least partially explained by differences in how they think about themselves, their past and the future— reading from a condemnation script or a redemption script.

Condemnation Scripts Contrary to popular portrayals, active offenders in the Liverpool Desistance Study (LDS) were not so much committed to a criminal lifestyle as they were resigned to it. Maruna found that active offenders believed they were doomed to deviance. Their self-stories lacked personal agency and active offenders tended to attribute their criminal involvement to poverty, stigma, and criminal peers. Interestingly, Maruna notes that active offenders tended to have a realistic view of their life prospects and the significant social challenges they confronted. Another distinguishing feature of the condemnation script is a sense of freedom that comes from no longer worrying about succeeding

576

Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance

in conventional terms. With nothing to left lose, active offenders were able to find some psychological shelter: “intentionally failing may be less stressful on a person’s ego than trying to succeed and failing anyway” (p. 78). A third distinguishing feature of the condemnation script was an emphasis on making the “big score” and finding happiness through consumption and material gain. A surprising number of the active offenders, for example, mentioned that one of their life objectives was to win the lottery. Rather than being motivated by greed, however, the active offenders expressed the desire to share the elusive big score, seemingly in an effort to fill with excitement, drugs, and popularity, an otherwise empty life characterized by a sense of personal failure.

Redemption Scripts Desisting offenders’ self-views are not simply the opposite of those of active offenders’. Indeed, desisting offenders espoused a tragic optimism about their lives, a sense that something uniquely good (redeeming) could come from a criminal past. A central feature of the redemption script is that the self-story asserts the essential goodness of the narrator. When talking about their past, desisting offenders drew a clear distinction between crime and their true selves, psychologically distancing themselves from their crimes and from other criminals. Many maintained that deep down they were always a good person. Moreover, they described their criminal involvement as “it,” something that happened. Crime was not “them,” rather “it was the drugs,” or it was the people they were around. Thus, rather than reinventing themselves, desisting offenders reembraced an earlier identity—not the “new me” but the “real me.” Part of this process involved identifying a positive attribute that distinguished themselves from other criminals. For example, they always had a “good heart” or a “good brain.” Whereas active offenders tended to characterize themselves as pawns with little or no control over their future, desisting offenders expressed an exaggerated sense of self-determination, efficacy, and hope for their future. Rather than “burning out,” their stories suggested they were “firing up.” Their vision of desistance was a comeback story—a story of renewal, gaining strength, and realizing their true selves. This mindset included a belief that they

could beat the odds of The System that keeps people like them trapped in a cycle of crime. As Maruna et al. (2004, p. 227) explain, “by transforming desistance from an acquiescence to authority into a rebellious act, they can simultaneously preserve their identities [as defiant rebels] and change their behavior.” Finally, the redemption script involves a wish to make good and give something back to society as a display of gratitude and possibly cosmic restitution. A common theme of the redemption story is that the bad (the criminal past) had to happen in order to achieve some larger good. The almost zealous desire to make good was illustrated in the frequent telling and retelling of the claim that even if just one person was prevented from going through what they did, a lifetime of waste could be put to use. The desire to give something back to society and make good may allow the former offender to find a moral high ground. As Maruna explains, this framework enabled desisting offenders to cope with the shame and stigma of their past. Defining the past as prologue to a higher calling allowed the desisting offender to announce their criminal history instead of running from it. Maruna’s work makes an important contribution to criminological theory by bringing into focus how offenders desist from crime. Desisting offenders frame their criminal past and law-­ abiding future with the use of a redemption script. The redemption script includes three important elements: the assertion of a good “core self”; a sense of control over and hope for the future; and, generativity, the desire and effort to give something back, especially to future generations. Maruna’s work may provide direction for efforts to reintegrate former offenders into our communities. If the way people talk and think about themselves and their pasts have implications for their futures, it follows that those who work with and care about former offenders should be careful about the words they use and the stories they tell. Encouraging and supporting those who have been involved in crime to find the good in themselves, take responsibility for their future (not just their past crimes), and to make good, may be instrumental in supporting the process of desistance from crime. Jody L. Sundt

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime See also Criminal Career Paradigm; Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders

References and Further Readings Blumstein, A., & Cohen, J. (1987). Characterizing criminal careers. Science, 237, 985–991. Glaze, L. E., & Bonczar, T. P. (2007). Probation and parole in the United States, 2006. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Farrington, D. P. (1992). Explaining the beginning, progress, and ending of antisocial behavior from birth to adulthood. In J. McCord (Ed.), Facts, frameworks, and forecasts (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 3, pp. 253–286). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys at age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Maruna, S., Porter, L., & Carvalho, I. (2004). The Liverpool Desistance Study and probation practice: Opening the dialogue. Probation Journal, 51, 221–232. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1992). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sabol, W. J., & Couture, H. (2008). Prison inmates at midyear 2007. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Shover, N. (1996). The great pretenders: Pursuits and careers of persistent thieves. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are the founding fathers of an important paradigm of social theory, known as historical materialism or simply as Marxism. Their work is central to conflict theory

577

and influences a wide range of social and political thought, including some approaches to criminology. Only a few points in their voluminous work deal directly with issues of crime and criminality, yet this has provided a firm, although contested, grounding for Marxist criminology. This entry explains Marx and Engels’s conception of how capitalism as a mode of production both defines disorderly populations as criminal, and produces the conditions of disorder that make such criminality likely in the first place. It also discusses their ideas regarding alienation, as the means through which these disorderly conditions result both in criminality and in working class resistance, which is in turn criminalized. Criticisms of Marx and Engels’s approach, which argue that it is a form of economic determinism, are also addressed.

The Development of Capitalism and the Criminalization of Poverty In writing about the origins of the capitalist mode of production, Marx pays particular attention to the process of enclosure in England, which occurred in waves from roughly the 15th to the 19th century. This process transformed common lands into private property, separating the agrarian working population from the lands that had been their primary means of subsistence. This precipitated a massive wave of internal migration, as peasants were forced to seek out alternative ways to provide for themselves and their families. By the 18th century, England was beginning to undergo both an agricultural and an industrial revolution, both of which required waged labor, and this proved to be the main source of income available to displaced peasants. However, this transition was not smooth. There were far more displaced peasants than available jobs in the factories. Further, these factories were often in industrial towns far from where many peasants lived, and thus they required potential wage-laborers to accept entirely new patterns of work and life. As a result, many of the displaced peasants, or vagabonds, resisted this industrial transformation and considered begging and stealing to be a more reasonable alternative to wagelabor. As Marx (1976, p. 896) writes, “these men, suddenly dragged from their accustomed mode of life, could not immediately adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned

578

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime

in massive quantities into beggars, robbers and vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances.” To control this itinerant and socially disruptive population, the British government used the legal system to define them as criminals. New laws imposed harsh corporeal punishments for begging, stealing, and vagabondage. For example, Marx (1976, pp. 896–897) recounts a law passed by Henry VIII in 1530: “whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then they are to swear on oath to . . . ‘put themselves to labour.’ . . . For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common wealth.”

The Reserve Army of Labor and the Lumpenproleteriat Massive waves of unemployment were not limited to capitalism’s first emergence out of feudalism, but are, Marx argues, an integral part of the ongoing functioning of capitalism. Capitalism not only requires, but in fact produces an unemployed population, which Marx (1976, p. 791) calls “the industrial reserve army” or the “surplus population.” To the extent that capitalism creates this ever-growing population of marginalized people, it creates an ever-increasing potential for criminal activity. Marx sees this surplus population as an unavoidable effect of a profit-maximizing economy that always seeks to minimize labor costs by keeping wages down and by keeping the number of necessary employees to a minimum through technological and organizational advances. As a result of this drive for profits, some portion of those workers who are thrust out of (or never able to enter) the productive sphere find themselves in the “lowest sediment” of the laboring population, the realm of the “lumpenproleteriat,” in which Marx includes (1976, p. 797) “vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes.” As a brief aside, not only did Marx and Engels cast aspersions at the lumpenproleteriat, whom they regarded in a morally disdainful fashion, but they also made a connection between these cast-offs and what might be considered the surplus capitalists, or the financial aristocracy, who

were, in Marx’s estimation, “nothing but the resurrection of the lumpenproleteriat transported to the heights of bourgeois society” (Marx & Engels, 1976, p. 326). Engels writes about the criminal activity of the lumpenproleteriat in his work The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In this book, which chronicles the abhorrent conditions of working-class life in an industrial town, Engels (p. 132) argues that capitalism leads to a growing demoralization of the working class and therefore to ever more “violent, passionate, irreconcilable” outbursts of energy, which can take the form of criminal activity. Crime is considered to be a symptom of capitalist exploitation and of the demoralization of the laboring population. This theory of criminality connects to Marx and Engels’s broader conception of capitalist alienation, which is centered upon the wage-relation. When a worker takes a wage-labor job, they agree to exchange their labor-power, or capacity to work, for a wage. In order for this exchange to be possible, workers must be in a position to treat their productive capacity as an alienable commodity. Hence, the wage relation is predicated on the alienation of the working population from their productive capacity, both individually and generally. This alienation lies at the core of the capitalist mode of production, and it has a pervasive effect on the subjectivity of all those living within its web. Engels sees this alienation as a cause of discontent that will either lead to working-class resistance or, in the case of the lumpenproleteriat, to violence and criminal outbursts. It is clear that both Marx and Engels prefer the former over the latter, which they pejoratively discuss as false or pre-political outbursts. For them, according to Paul Hirst, working class organization is productive (as it builds toward positive social change and even revolution) whereas criminality is unproductive (and even, in many instances counterproductive insofar as it can be mobilized against working class struggles). However, both of these outbursts against the prevailing system of private property result, or are made possible by, the same conditions of alienation, where the laboring population is disconnected from its laboring capacity, and hence frustrated and demoralized by its alienation from social production as well as its structural lack of self-sufficiency.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime

The Criminalization of the Working Class Marx and Engels believe that capitalist alienation provokes both organized and disorganized forms of resistance, and that it then becomes the responsibility of the capitalist state to keep these expressions of discontent in check. This is accomplished through the legal system, which, along with the state more generally is understood by Marx and Engels to be a set of institutions created and maintained to secure the interests of the ruling class. According to Richard Quinney, this is central to the Marxist conception of crime—that the law itself is a tool of the ruling class. Both the origins and the ongoing reproduction of capitalist social relations require the working class to accept their exploitation as a natural fact. Writing about 19th-century industrial labor relations in England in Capital, Marx shows how the law was used to discipline labor through criminalizing working-class organization. English workers fought for their right to organize collectively, and their employers fought back, using the law to establish limits to the scope and types of organization deemed permissible. Workers fought for legislation that would criminalize overly exploitative and unsafe working conditions, such as limits on the working day, minimum wages, safety standards, and age-minimums, while employers fought for legislation that would limit the effectiveness of working class organization—associating them with criminal anti-establishment activity—and that would minimize the restrictions placed upon their employment practices. Even though Marx understands the state to be, at the most fundamental level, a tool of the ruling class, he also understands how historically, the state is a site of contestation, where struggles to define the limits of wage-labor relations take place.

Economic Determinism or Historical Materialism? Many criminologists have focused on the connection between Marx and the positivism of social determinists, with their search for objective predictors of criminal behavior (Taylor et al., 1973, p. 216). It is in this vein that Marx and Engels have been labeled economic determinists, as it appears their theory completely attributes the existence of crime to the structural effects of the capitalist

579

economy. While even Marxist criminologists will acknowledge this tendency within Marx and Engels’s work, they will also read this as an anomalous dimension of Marx and Engels’s broader project, arguing that it is not in line with the far more dialectical methods of historical materialism. Such a dialectical approach would consider the criminal as an individual actor who is both determined by and determinant of his or her material conditions. Hence, in a historical materialist approach to criminology, crime cannot be understood as a completely isolated and subjective phenomenon or as a completely structurally determined effect of economic conditions. It is, in any real historic situation, a combination of the two. As Marx (1963, p. 15) famously writes, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”

Revolution, Resistance, and Criminality As mentioned above, Marx and Engels were somewhat dismissive of the lumpenproleteriat, or the “dangerous classes” to which they attributed much criminal activity. This population represented a false or pre-political reaction against the capitalist system, and therefore held less revolutionary potential than the more organized resistance of the working class. This is important, insofar as their entire theoretical project was at the same time a political project, aimed at promoting revolution, or the supersession of the entire mode of production, as the only viable means of achieving any truly humane, democratic, and equitable form of society. Marx and Engels had faith that the end of capitalism would lead to the rise of communism. This transition would entail the “withering away” of the state (Engels, 1969, p. 333), a phrase that has subsequently been interpreted in many different ways. Without a state, are we to presume that there would no longer be a means to regard certain people as criminals, or as transgressing a legal order? Would there be crime in an ideal communist society? Marx and Engels say little about these issues, and they remain an unresolved debate within Marxist criminology today. Jesse Goldstein

580

Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency

See also Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime; Capitalism and White-Collar Crime; Currie, Elliot: The Market Society and Crime; Greenberg, David F.: Age, Capitalism, and Crime; Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime; Taylor Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young: The New Criminology

light of the interactionist tradition. This exposition of Matsueda’s theory is then followed by a section summarizing empirical support for Matsueda’s perspective. Limitations of the perspective and directions for future theoretical and empirical work are discussed briefly in a concluding section.

References and Further Readings Engels, F. (1950). Condition of the working class in England in 1844. London: Allen and Unwin. Engels, F. (1969). Anti-Dühring. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Hirst, P. Q. (1972). Marx and Engels on crime, law, and morality. Economy and Society, 1, 28–56. Marx, K. (1963). The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Vol. 1). London: Penguin. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976). Basic writings on politics and philosophy (L. S. Feuer, Ed.). London: Fontana. Quinney, R. (1975). Crime control in capitalist society: A critical philosophy of legal order. In I. Taylor, P. Walton, & J. Young (Eds.), Critical criminology (pp. 181–202). New York: Routledge. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. New York: Routledge. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (Eds.). (1975). Critical criminology. New York: Routledge.

Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency The perspective put forth by Ross L. Matsueda in 1992 essentially posits that delinquency results from an individual’s reflected appraisals of oneself. More specifically, Matsueda suggests that individuals whose appraisals of themselves are that of “delinquent” are, in fact, more likely to be delinquent in the future. These reflected appraisals of self as delinquent stem from actual appraisals from significant others as well as from previous delinquent behavior, according to Matsueda. This theoretical framework regarding the role of reflected appraisals in delinquency, which is reviewed in greater detail below, builds upon the theoretical tradition of symbolic interactionism. This entry thus begins by, first, examining the symbolic interactionist theoretical roots of Matsueda’s ideas. The next section explains Matsueda’s theory more fully in

Theoretical Roots We as humans identify ourselves, think about ourselves, and judge ourselves. The term self-concept is sometimes used to describe the fairly stable picture we have of ourselves. For an actor to say “I am this kind of person” or “that kind of person” is a selfappraisal, or an assessment of self. How does this assessment or conceptualization of self occur? The self-concept has been central throughout the history of symbolic interactionism. The theoretical foundations for self-concept are found in the work of Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead, most specifically. In the theories of Cooley and Mead, the self would not exist without society. Cooley adopted the view of “self” as the ability to see and recognize oneself as an object. Cooley believed that humans use the gestures of others to see themselves. In this way, the images that people form of themselves are quite similar to reflections from a mirror, or what Cooley describes as a looking glass. The images are similar to a looking glass in the sense that they are provided to the individual by the reactions of others to their behavior. The notion of “self as object” thus involves how the self is influenced by others’ perceptions (actual appraisals) or how an individual thinks others are perceiving him or her reflected appraisals. Over time, self-perception develops some stability. This stability is what allows us to become knowledgeable about who we are and what we do. Nonetheless, the self-concept is a process and not a fixed entity. Hence, the picture we have of ourselves will change over time and across situations. In other words, because the self is social, it arises in interaction and then changes or remains stable due to interaction. The looking glass, therefore, is a continual process. However, a stable self-­conception evolves out of the accumulation of self-images and self-evaluations with reference to specific and then increasingly generalized others. In sum, Cooley and Meade argue that our understanding of ourselves is primarily a reflection of our

Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency

perception of how others react to us. Others label and define the self to the actor, and they help the actor understand and situate himself or herself in the environment. Because of the importance of labels of others in self-concept, Cooley’s and Meade’s symbolic interactionism lies at the heart of what is referred to as labeling theory. It is Frank Tannen­ baum, however, who is often credited with popularizing the labeling approach by expressing the view that society can produce antisocial behavior by defining an individual as a deviant. Other labeling theorists elaborated on the importance of interaction and interpretation in the production of deviance. One of the more popular theorists was Edwin Lemert, who distinguishes between primary and secondary deviation. According to Lemert, primary deviation is the occasional or situational behavior that is often excused or rationalized by the actor and/or social audience. Primary deviance consists of those deviant acts that do not help redefine the self and public image of the offender. Secondary deviance, on the other hand, is the result of a process between the actor’s actions and the societal response to those actions. When the response leads to a deviant label being applied to an individual, it is extremely difficult for the person to escape the classification. The label then emerges as a main or primary identifier for others, which prompts the individual to start seeing himself or herself in terms of the deviant identity (a dramatic redefinition of the self). These are the acts that redefine the offender’s self and public image. Thus, acts become secondary deviance when they form a basis for self-concept. Beyond the influences of Cooley, Meade, Tannenbaum, and Lemert, the work of John W. Kinch is also key to the development of Matsueda’s theory. Kinch presented a theoretical model of behaviors that can best be described as a causal chain wherein past behaviors determine actual appraisals of others, which in turn lead to a person’s reflected appraisals of self. These reflected appraisals will then determine self appraisals, and finally, lead to future behavior.

Matsueda’s Theory of Reflected Appraisals Matsueda’s 1992 research builds on Kinch’s work most directly and attempts to specify a more refined symbolic interactionist theory of the self and delinquent behavior. In the tradition of

581

symbolic interactionism, Matsueda defines reflected appraisals as one’s appraisal of self from the standpoint of others. He views one’s self as, in part, a reflected appraisal—how an individual thinks significant others are assessing him or her as a result of taking the role of the other and seeing oneself as others do. Matsueda identifies reflected appraisals of self as a primary variable in explaining future behavior. In brief, significant others such as parents, teachers, and friends label individuals in particular ways (e.g., “troublemaker” or “delinquent”). These appraisals are reflected on and internalized by the individual such that they shape the person’s self-concept. As such, they lead to behavior that is consistent with the actual and reflected appraisal. Matsueda’s theory shares both similarities and differences with that of Kinch. First, Matsueda identifies reflected appraisals of self (as opposed to self appraisals, in the case of Kinch’s theory) as the main variable for explaining future behavior. Thus, delinquency results primarily from a person’s perception of the impressions others form about him or her (reflected appraisals). In Matsueda’s theory, as in Kinch’s theory, reflected appraisals mediate the relationship between labels of others (actual appraisals) and deviance. However, Matsueda emphasized that reflected appraisals resulted from selective perceptions of actual appraisals. As such, reflected appraisals only stem, in part, from actual appraisals, and actual appraisals can affect delinquent behavior above and beyond their effects on reflected appraisals, according to Matsueda. Matsueda’s theory, like Kinch’s and other symbolic interactionists, also highlights the importance of prior delinquency. Kinch had proposed that prior deviance affects others’ appraisals, which, in turn, affects reflected appraisals. Matsueda accepted that idea, but also suggested that past behavior affects reflected appraisals directly, net of its influence on actual appraisals of others. In addition, Matsueda’s conceptualization allows for the possibility that past behavior can have a direct impact on future behavior, above and beyond the effects of reflected appraisals (i.e., non-reflective habit)—a point neglected by Kinch.

Empirical Support Matsueda used the National Youth Survey (NYS) to test his theoretical perspective. The NYS data

582

Matsueda, Ross L.: Reflected Appraisals and Delinquency

are well-suited to examine reflected appraisals because they include questions on labeling, where youths were asked to indicate the extent to which their parents, teachers, and friends would agree with a set of descriptive labels as applied to them (reflected appraisals). Specifically, the youths were asked, “I’d like to know how your parents, friends, and teachers, would describe you. I’ll read a list of words or phrases and for each, will ask you to tell me how much you think your [parents, friends, teachers] would agree with that description of you.” The list of descriptive labels included the following 11 items: “well-liked,” “needs help,” “bad kid,” “often upset,” “gets along well with others,” “messed up,” “breaks rules,” “has a lot of personal problems,” “gets into trouble,” “likely to succeed,” and “does things that are against the law.” As for delinquency, the NYS provides information on the incidence and prevalence of delinquent behavior among American adolescents (Huizinga and Elliott, 1987). To measure delinquent behavior, the NYS investigators included a delinquency inventory. This inventory was designed to represent the entire range of delinquent acts for which juveniles could be arrested. The NYS self-reported delinquency inventory asks respondents to report the frequency with which they engaged in each of a variety of behaviors during the past year. This delinquency inventory has proven to be a successful tool in a great deal of contemporary research. Matsueda found that youths’ reflected appraisals of themselves were strongly influenced by their parents’ independent appraisals of them. So, reflected appraisals were found to be related at least in part to actual appraisals of significant others, just as Matsueda’s theory predicts. Furthermore, as also predicted, the “reflected appraisals as a rule violator exert a large effect on delinquent behavior and mediate much of the effect of parental appraisals as a rule violator on delinquency” (Matsueda, 1992, p. 1603). Thus, one of Matsueda’s major premises— that appraisals by others affect reflected appraisals, which, in turn, affect crime—found support in this analysis of the NYS data. However, a direct effect of actual appraisals on delinquency remained, even after controlling for reflected appraisals. Matsueda also found that past delinquent behavior had an impact on youths’ reflected appraisals, net of actual appraisals of others, especially when

the appraisals centered on being a “bad kid” or a “rule breaker.” In other words, there was a direct link between prior behavior and reflected appraisals that did not operate through actual appraisals. In addition, Matsueda found evidence of a direct link between prior delinquency and subsequent delinquency above and beyond the indirect effect of prior delinquency through reflected appraisals. Thus, he found support for the idea that some delinquency may be due to non-reflective habit. Finally, Matsueda also found that past delinquency and reflected appraisals explained much of the effects of socio-demographic correlates of delinquency. For instance, he reported that, “age, race and urban residence exert significant total effects on delinquency, most of which work indirectly through prior delinquency, and partially through the rule-violator reflected appraisal” (Matsueda, 1992, p. 1603). Although Matsueda’s framework examined the causes and consequences of reflected appraisals and delinquent behavior, he did not explore possible age-graded factors that may be influencing both reflected appraisals and selective perception, and any subsequent influence on offending. In Michael Patrick Phelan’s research (using the NYS), it was found, that for all ages, prior offending was the best predictor of subsequent offending. Of the reflected appraisals, it was the appraisal “bad kid” that shared the strongest relationship with subsequent offending. The dimensions “distressed” and “needs help” also indicated statistically significant positive relationships with offending, while the dimensions “successful” and “sociable” were found to have a negative association with offending. Another important finding of Phelan’s work was that the effects of being male or female mattered, but not until age 15.

Conclusion Limited studies of the role of reflected appraisals in delinquency have shown promising yet inconclusive results. Further, problems have been noted in studying reflected appraisals, with most criticism centering on the inability to adequately test the theory with existing data. More specifically, the data from the NYS do not allow for an assessment of reflective appraisals of specific others. The NYS’s operationalization and measurement of

Matza, David: Becoming Deviant

reflected appraisals almost assure an inability to find source-specific variation in reflected appraisals. In sum, the NYS leads respondents to think about reflected appraisals in a most general way, not a source-specific manner. Accordingly, the NYS offers no means to analyze the salience and centrality of reflected appraisals. These shortcomings in the NYS data are significant. What researchers know about reflected appraisals and delinquency is primarily derived from this data source, to be sure, and the extant body of work based on the NYS has provided many useful insights. However, Phelan’s analysis suggests that the NYS data offer only a partial explanation of the relationships between identity and delinquency, especially the role of reflected appraisals. What is needed are longitudinal data with better measures of reflected appraisals and offending behaviors. Michael Patrick Phelan See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control; Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Tannenbaum, Frank: The Dramatization of Evil

References and Further Readings Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press. Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order. New York: Schocken. Heimer, K., & Matsueda, R. L. (1994). Role-taking, role commitment, and delinquency: A theory of differential social control. American Sociological Review, 59, 39–61. Huizinga, D., & Elliott, D. S. (1987). Juvenile offenders: Prevalence, offender incidence, and arrest rates by race. Crime and Delinquency, 33, 206–223. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Henry Holt. Kinch, J. W. (1962). Self conceptions of types of delinquents. Sociological Inquiry, 32, 228–234. Lemert, E. (1951). Social pathology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Matsueda, R. L. (1992). Reflected appraisals, parental labeling, and delinquency: Specifying a symbolic interactionist theory. American Journal of Sociology, 97, 1577–1611.

583

Matsueda, R. L., & Heimer, K. (1997). A symbolic interactionist theory of role transitions, role commitments, and delinquency. In T. P. Thornberry (Ed.), Developmental theories of crime and delinquency (pp. 163–213). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Phelan, M. P. (2003). Towards a developmental social psychology of crime. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky. Tannenbaum, F. (1938). Crime and the community. Boston: Ginn.

Matza, David: Becoming Deviant Labeling theory and the broader symbolic interactionist perspective were likely reaching a zenith in 1969 when David Matza published Becoming Deviant. Interestingly, this was the same year that Travis Hirschi’s Causes of Delinquency was published, signaling a significant redirection of criminological thinking away from the phenomenological assumptions of interactionism found in Matza’s work. In Becoming Deviant, Matza critiques the contributions of three sociological traditions: the Chicago School, the functionalists, and the neoChicagoans. He notes how the contributions of each built upon its predecessors in the development of a naturalistic approach to understanding deviance and criminality. As an alternative to earlier correctional theories that held deviance to be pathological, Matza argued that only naturalistic theories of deviance would be able to faithfully render the complexity of deviant lives and lifestyles in their true nature. Viewing deviance as an inevitable and natural element in society offers an approach based on three master conceptions: affinity, affiliation, and signification.

Naturalism Matza’s naturalism—and its emphasis on appreciation of how the actor views his or her own situation—stands in marked contrast to the previous five decades of the dominant correctional perspective found in American criminology.

584

Matza, David: Becoming Deviant

Cor­rectional theories are concerned with questions of causation and ultimately of getting rid of unwanted phenomena. For Matza, “the stress on the bad consequences of evil phenomena obscured . . . the possibility of evil arising from things deemed good and good from things deemed evil” (p. 22). Evil, or deviant, phenomena are pathological in nature, concrete, objective, and measurable. Standing in contrast to a correctional approach are naturalistic theories. According to Matza, “naturalism . . . is the philosophical view that strives to remain true to the nature of the phenomenon under study or scrutiny” (p. 5, emphasis in the original). Naturalism focuses on the complex diversity of deviance and the deviant subject, requiring criminologists to appreciate or empathize with the deviant phenomenon, to consider it from the subject’s definition of the situation, ultimately to understand how the world appears to the subject. In contrast to a correctional approach which emphasizes the need to get rid of pathologically deviant phenomena, Matza celebrates the diversity reflected in deviance as a necessary and vital part of society.

Affinity In the last two-thirds of Becoming Deviant, Matza explores how criminologists have dealt with the question of the etiology of deviance. Affinity conceptualizes deviance as being the result of a combination of many possible factors in an individual’s background—for example, biological or psychological factors, or cultural or social factors such as urban poverty. People have an affinity to deviance because it reflects an attractive force or deterministic notion of contagion. The favorite affinity of sociologists, according to Matza, has been “between poverty and pathology” (p. 96). Individuals do not choose their actions; rather they are objects predisposed or strongly drawn to deviance. According to Matza, however, becoming deviant is not a structurally predetermined process; instead it involves an unfolding of desire and choice.

Affiliation In contrast to affinity, affiliation emphasizes the process of becoming converted to deviance through making conscious choices. From a correctional perspective, affiliation suggests contagion in which

exposure to particular factors lead to deviance. From a humanized naturalistic perspective, affinity produces a simple willingness to act. The consequence of being exposed to the “causes” of deviance is not to act; instead the exposure opens the possibility of seeing oneself as the kind of person who might engage in a particular act. Matza explains that the process of making conscious choices involves a subject being willing to try something deviant and, once having tried it, to evaluate the experience and then to choose whether to engage in the act a second time. Using an extensive discussion of Howard Becker’s “Becoming a Marijuana User,” Matza explores the internal processes or stages in the process of a subject becoming deviant. For Matza, “The specific truth of affiliation and its human method of conversion is that the subject mediates the process of becoming in the terms and issues provided by the concrete matters before him” (p. 142, emphasis in the original).

Signification Signification is the final stage in the process of becoming deviant. For Matza, “To signify is to stand for in the sense of representing or exemplifying . . . thus, signifying makes its object more significant. . . . To be signified a thief is to lose the blissful identity of one who amongst others happens to have committed a theft. It is a movement, however gradual, towards being a thief and representing theft. . . . [T]hose selected and then cast as thieves come to represent the enterprise of theft” (pp. 156–157). Before a subject can fully engage a deviant identity, the subject must understand the distinction between engaging in a deviant act and being a deviant. The answer to the question “essentially, am I a thief?” involves the subject doing (committing a theft) and being (signified a thief). This process of building a deviant identity is similar to Edwin Lemert’s notion of “secondary deviation” and is fully dependent on the state banning some activities, apprehending those individuals who violate the ban, and then convicting and punishing, often through imprisonment, the identified deviant.

Ban Contrary to conflict theorists, Matza suggests that social control mechanisms of the state operate

Matza, David: Becoming Deviant

primarily to transform subjects rather than to cause them to become deviant. This transformation is brought about by ban. A primary function of the state includes the identification of both deviant activities and deviants, making them objects of state surveillance and control. Ban identifies and designates acts as deviant and as proper subject matter for state intervention and punishment. Ban acts to produce a moral transformation of activity that, as designated deviant, deters by inculcating an attitude of avoidance in “right-minded” individuals. For Matza, the most relevant issue regarding the deterrent effects of ban should be focused on the “wrong-minded,” those who disobeyed and have tried the deviant activity anyway. Yet, the state will impact the subject even when disobeyed. According to Matza, “Leviathan [the state] bedevils the subject as he proceeds and thus is partly compensated for its gross failure to deter. . . . A main purpose of ban is to unify meaning and thus to minimize the possibility that, morally, the subject can have it both ways. Either he will be deterred or bedeviled” (p. 148). To be bedeviled is to be made a devil in the sense of the subject finding himself or herself in a position of tending toward greater disaffiliation and, consequently, greater involvement in deviance. Ban leads to further disaffiliation and anticipation of apprehension and penalization. As the subject more fully understands the meaning of ban, choices are made by the “wrong-minded” and continued participation in deviant activity leads to an accommodation to the reality of being deviant. For Matza, such accommodation ultimately leads to further acceptance and adaptation to state control. The subject becomes highly conscious of ban, and knowing that he or she has violated it, becomes self-conscious. Attempting to keep one’s deviant activities secret when engaging in them or not, leads the individual to sensing himself or herself as transparent to others. However, being self-­conscious of violating ban and feeling transparent, the subject fears being publically identified as the kind of person who engages in deviance. To the extent that ban “criminalizes” a subject’s activities, it is inevitable that to engage in deviance leads the subject down a path inviting discovery, apprehension, and correction. The event of selection through apprehension signifies the individual as deviant through a registration,

585

labeling, defining, or classifying. To be caste with a deviant identity also carries with it a gross exclusion. As Howard Becker suggests, the new stigmatizing deviant identity becomes a master status or the primary perceived status of the individual. The master status determines how other people initially react when they see or meet the person for the first time. The deviant, who is labeled, convicted, and imprisoned will never be free of the deviant identity: The subject moves from deviant to convict to ex-con. The finished product of signification reflects the success of the state in representing “concentrated evil, or deviation, and pervasive good, or conformity” (p. 197). The state, in its commitment to provide for public order and safety through effective policing and punishment, is vindicated. The benevolence and wisdom of the state is affirmed whether the deviant reoffends and is apprehended again or who has been corrected and reformed, although continuing to be a person who had once been a thief.

Critiques Matza’s phenomenological description of the process of becoming deviant is not without criticism. Deryck Beyleveld and Paul Wiles argue that Matza fails to clearly establish that persons are fully “subjects” and not “objects.” That is, Matza suggests both possibilities that “Man is subject” as a metaphysical truth and that “Man has only a partially determined non-free will.” Matza never develops “a clear thesis of the nature of causality, the relationship between biological, psychological and sociological factors, and in particular a thesis about man’s rationality” (Beyleveld & Wiles, 1975, p. 120). In addition, Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young believe that Matza fails to provide an explanation for why individuals would “find affiliation to deviation attractive” (p. 191) and limits his explanation of the process of becoming deviant to an individualistic phenomenology, never accounting for the effects of collective choice. “Becoming Deviant . . . presents us with an essentialist view of deviation. The essence of deviation is its base in an unanalysed and unanalysable existential Angst” (Taylor et al., 1973, p. 192, emphasis in the original) John D. Hewitt

586

Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift

See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Lemert, Edwin H.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift; Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization

References and Further Readings Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press. Beyleveld, D., & Wiles, P. (1975). Man and method in David Matza’s “Becoming Deviant.” British Journal of Criminology, 15, 111–127. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lemert, E. M. (1967). Human deviance, social problems, and social control. New York: Prentice Hall. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New York: Wiley. Matza, D. (1969). Becoming deviant. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Matza, D., & Sykes, G. M. (1961). Juvenile delinquency and subterranean values. American Sociological Review, 26, 712–719. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664–670. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift David Matza’s Delinquency and Drift, published in 1964, offers a complex and multilayered critique of what its author considered to be the dominant theories of juvenile delinquency at that time—indeed the dominant themes in criminology since the late 19th century. On one level, the book is a critique and reformulation of the major postwar subcultural theories of delinquency, including the work of Albert Cohen in Delinquent Boys and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin in Delinquency and Opportunity. On another level, it represents an affirmation of some of the key themes of control theories of crime and delinquency, which were considerably less prominent in criminology

in the 1950s and early 1960s than they are today. More generally, the work is a critique of what Matza describes as the core assumptions of criminological positivism, and a reaffirmation of some of the principles of the classical theories of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. Matza’s (1964, p. 3) aim was not to throw out the positivist framework altogether, but to “incorporate modified versions” of the classical perspective into it. All of these levels are closely related and come together in a densely argued and closely reasoned theoretical analysis.

Explaining Too Much Delinquency: The Critique of Positivism and Subculture Theories Matza’s main purpose in Delinquency and Drift is to “question and modify the positivist portrait” of the delinquent (p. 1). He believes that, since the time of Cesare Lombroso, positivism has dominated criminological thinking, even more than it has other branches of social science. “Modern criminology,” he writes, “is the positive school of criminology” (p. 3, emphasis added). But there are three crucially problematic assumptions in the dominant criminological positivism, all of which represent overreactions against the assumptions of the earlier Classical School. The first of those problematic assumptions is what Matza calls the “primacy of the criminal actor rather than the criminal law” (p. 3) in the explanation of crime. Modern positivist criminology, unlike the Classical School, looks for the explanation of delinquency in the motivation, character, and background of offenders. Oddly, however, despite its emphasis on the social institutions that influence the delinquent, positivist criminology leaves out one of the most important of them—the law itself. The relationship between legal institutions and delinquency, he argues, is complex, but crucial, since delinquency is, after all, an infraction—a violation of law—not simply an action. Indeed, committing infractions is the defining characteristic of the delinquent, and delinquency cannot be understood outside of that socio-legal reality. Hence, a key task of Delinquency and Drift is to “bring the legal system back in” as a crucial part of the explanation of delinquency. The second problematic characteristic of positive criminology is its commitment to what Matza

Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift

calls a “hard” version of determinism—a view that, he argues, has been largely abandoned in most of the rest of social science. Hard determinism assumes that delinquents break the law because they are powerfully compelled to do so by some factor or set of factors—whether those factors are biological, social, or cultural. This leads modern criminology to reject altogether the element of choice in the explanation of delinquency, and to embrace a vision of the criminal as entirely “constrained.” Against this, Matza poses what he calls a “soft” determinist view. Human beings possess “some leeway of action.” The delinquent is not simply pushed around by compelling forces, whether internal or external: “He acts, and his acts are variably free” (p. 11). Positive criminology, relatedly, views the delinquent as fundamentally different from law-abiding people. That is its third crucially mistaken assumption, for the emphasis on difference, in Matza’s view, is both exaggerated and empirically unsupported. Early versions of positivist criminology focused on the delinquent as biologically distinct from everyone else. By the 1960s, those views had been largely discredited. But they had been replaced by an equally problematic sociological sense of difference, best represented in those contemporary subcultural theories of delinquency that saw the delinquent as “constrained through an ethical code which makes his misdeeds mandatory” (p. 18). For Matza, the “central idea of the dominant sociological view of delinquency” (p. 19) is that the delinquent has different beliefs, and those beliefs are carried by a distinct and oppositional subculture. Against this view, Matza offers once again a softer version of the distinctiveness of the beliefs of ordinary delinquents. He does not propose to reject subculture theories altogether, but to modify them in ways that, in his view, better fit what empirical research and common sense observation tell us about the nature of delinquency. He agrees that many delinquents do participate in a subculture of delinquency. But the subculture of delinquency is not a delinquent subculture, and the distinction is crucially important. Delinquents are neither as different from other people nor as committed to delinquency as the dominant theory suggests. Most of the time, delinquent youths are not actually engaging in delinquency. Much of what they do all day long is conventional, as are most of

587

their beliefs. Moreover, the subculture’s hold is usually time-limited. Most delinquents get out of delinquency, sooner rather than later, and the fact that they mature out of delinquency is difficult to square with the idea of powerfully constraining beliefs that impel the delinquent inexorably toward a life of lawbreaking. The delinquent subculture is permeated by conventional values and continually exposed to the influence of conventional adults— most notably parents. As a result, rather than being a distinctively oppositional culture, the subculture’s precepts and customs are “delicately balanced between convention and crime” (p. 59). Matza’s critique of subculture theory, however, is not only that it exaggerates the oppositional character of the delinquent subculture, but also that it exaggerates how uniformly conventional the rest of the culture is. The dominant subculture theories, in his view, often seem to assume that the conventional culture is thoroughly Puritan, straightlaced, and unambiguously rejecting of all aspects of delinquency. But Matza argues that the dominant culture is actually far more complex and ambiguous than this. It is shot through with what he calls “subterranean” traditions that support rough and contrary behavior, including a kind of cowboy individualism and disrespect for authority that is not all that different from the defining themes of the subculture of delinquency. Delinquency itself, Matza argues, is a kind of subterranean tradition in American life, and one that is not entirely at odds with, or completely rejected by, the norms of the larger culture.

Drift and Neutralization The potential delinquent, in short, is caught in between the conventional and the delinquent world. Delinquency is therefore not the result of special compulsions that distinguish the delinquent from others: rather, it involves a release from the ties that often—indeed most of the time—bind youths to the conventional moral order from which they are not nearly so distant as the reigning subcultural theories of delinquency assume. Once those ties are loosened, moreover, youths do not usually fall into a permanent state of delinquency, but are only episodically free from moral constraint. This is the essential meaning of Matza’s central conception of drift. Drift results when social controls are

588

Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift

loosened, but where those who are set loose from conventional controls have also not yet become “agents in their own behalf” (p. 29)—that is, capable of exerting a degree of control over their own destiny. The delinquent, Matza says, is not truly free in this state of drift, because freedom requires that modicum of control and agency. (Note that in stressing this element of agency, Matza is foreshadowing a renewed concern with the idea of agency, as an element of both committing crime and desisting from it, that emerged in criminological theory several decades later.) This is not to deny the existence of underlying influences that nudge delinquents toward infraction, but those influences may be almost infinite, and their effect is gentle, rather than compelling—a notion that again fits with Matza’s embrace of what he calls soft determinism. Many things might nudge youths into delinquency once they have been sufficiently freed from moral constraint; for that matter, many things might nudge them out of delinquency, and indeed usually do. What is constant is the “moral holiday” that permits the drift into delinquency. Matza acknowledges that the concept of drift bears considerable resemblance to the original meaning of anomie. Both refer to a condition of unregulated choice, but Matza prefers to use the term drift rather than anomie—partly because the latter has taken on confusing multiple meanings since Émile Durkheim originated it at the turn of the century, and partly because he wants to emphasize the “episodic,” rather than constant, quality of the moral deregulation that, in his view, permits delinquency (p. 69). Seen from another angle, drift is a condition that allows the idea of individual choice to come back into the picture, after having been banished by decades of positive criminology. The loosening of moral binds allows youths to choose to transgress, but does not make it certain that they will. Matza emphasizes that in most delinquent behavior there is what he calls an “ineradicable element of choice and freedom” (p. ix)—thus reclaiming a central element of classical theory, but again in a softer variant. He does not deny that some delinquents may indeed be constrained to commit infractions, but not many. The “ordinary” delinquent is one who drifts into delinquency—and also back again. Drift goes in both directions; it is movement between

criminal and conventional action. The youth in drift is free to choose delinquency—and also free to choose conventional behavior. But what causes drift to happen in the first place? How are the ties to the moral order loosened? Here Matza introduces the concept of neutralization, an idea developed in the 1950s with Gresham M. Sykes in an influential article called “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency.” “Neutralization,” Matza writes, “enables drift. It is the process by which we are freed from the moral bind of the law (p. 176).” Since the delinquent, like everyone else, usually adheres to at least some of the legal norms that proscribe infraction, those norms must be neutralized, or nullified, in some way before he or she can be “freed” to break them. Neutralization is not simply the delinquent’s after-the-fact rationalization of law breaking: it is an indispensable precondition for it. What is highly original in Matza’s treatment of neutralization is his argument that the law itself, along with other agencies of social control and indeed the modern discipline of criminology itself, contributes to this process of neutralization. In a sense, this argument is a variant of societal reaction theory, but one of a very specific kind. Where most such theories point to the role of labeling or maltreatment by the system in defining and cementing the delinquent in that role, Matza argues in essence that the law and other systems of control facilitate delinquency by helping delinquents to excuse it. The criminal law itself, Matza points out, contains a variety of justifications or exceptions that mitigate its force. The law “contains the seeds of its own neutralization” (p. 61), because it specifies a variety of conditions under which it may be violated, including the absence of intent, self-defense, and insanity. But neutralization may also be specifically fostered by both the ideology and the routine organization and practices of the youth control system. The modern positivist view of the delinquent, based as it is on the central idea that people are compelled to crime by external forces, matches the view of the subculture of delinquency itself and provides one path toward neutralizing the law’s bind. It is an ideology that, by locating the causes of delinquency in the delinquent’s parents, their community, the larger society, or even victims, itself becomes a cause

Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift

of delinquency. These views pervade the juvenile justice system, and, ironically, “are part of the causal nexus culminating in delinquency in that they bolster an otherwise precarious and brittle system of beliefs”—that is, the half-baked but consequential beliefs common to the subculture already (p. 95). Theories of delinquency rooted in hard determinism, then, are in Matza’s view not only intellectually untenable but, in a real sense, are causes of the very behavior they seek to explain. This effect is especially important since, according to Matza, it is precisely the sense of lacking control over their behavior that allows delinquents to drift—that promotes the sense of irresponsibility without which delinquency is unlikely. Matza here introduces the idea of the crucial role of fatalism in the trajectory into delinquency—the youths sense that they are an “effect,” rather than a “cause,” that they are driven by forces outside themselves. Crime is “extenuated and thus permissible” only when delinquents recall that they are “controlled by external forces” (p. 88) and thereby rendered irresponsible. This sense of irresponsibility, to Matza, is an indispensable “immediate” cause of drift. But drifting into delinquency is also facilitated by another condition, which he describes as a state of readiness to slide into delinquency once the sense of irresponsibility has been established. This longer-term condition Matza calls the sense of injustice—a feeling that is critical to the loosening of moral bonds because it provides “another and more profound condition of neutralization” (p. 101). The delinquent’s sense of injustice—an underlying “simmering resentment”—is fostered by the operation of the justice system itself, because the delinquent often perceives legal authorities as behaving in ways that are arbitrary and often flagrantly unjust. Crucial to Matza’s perspective is the argument that the delinquent’s perception of structured injustice is not entirely wrong. It is fostered by certain fundamental features of modern systems of juvenile justice—in particular, the rampant discretion that characterizes those systems, and, relatedly, the vagueness of the principles that guide their decisions about the fate of the youth who come before them. Unlike the legal definitions of offenses themselves, the criteria for judgment in a system of individualized justice, which is a core feature of modern youth control systems,

589

are diffuse and subjective, relying on the “wisdom” of court officials to weigh a variety of factors in deciding a youth’s fate, including many extra-legal characteristics of the youth themselves. This promotes the feeling that the system is inconsistent and arbitrary, and thus feeds the sense of injustice. The wide use of discretion may make the system work reasonably well for those who run it, but to the delinquent it appears as an injustice (p. 132). The sense of injustice is also fed by the enforcement of status offenses, which, as participants in the subculture of delinquency thoroughly understand, are infractions that apply only to them—and which, moreover, are only sporadically and inconsistently enforced. Activities like drinking, skipping school, and generally being outside of adult control are not merely common within the subculture of delinquency, but are the core of it. Criminalizing them—especially on an inconsistent basis—is thus unsurprisingly a source of resentment.

The Role of Will The sense of injustice bred by these aspects of the system, then, is a key underlying factor promoting the neutralization that enables the drift into delinquency. But Matza also argues that the process of neutralization alone does not fully explain why the youth chooses to break the law. Neutralization allows infraction but does not compel it. Something else needs to be present—something that does indeed provide the push into delinquency once the bonds to conventional behavior are loosened. Put in another way, the youth must in some sense want to do the crime and be sufficiently freed from constraint to do it. To provide that essential part of the explanation, Matza, again reaching back into classical criminology, introduces the notion of “will.” Without will, drift will not result in crime. But in contrast to the classical view, Matza does not suggest that the will to crime is an inherent aspect of human nature that predictably emerges when the “lid” of social control is taken off. Rather, the will to crime is invoked under certain conditions, which Matza labels “preparation” and “desperation.” Preparation means in essence that the youth must feel able to successfully commit the infraction—be prepared for offending in the sense of

590

Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency

feeling able to carry it off. Desperation, on the other hand, is a consequence of the mood of fatalism that afflicts the delinquent. According to Matza, the delinquent wills infraction in order to escape the sense of fatalism—the sense of being pushed around—by making things happen. The need to make things happen in this sense is especially urgent because of the fragile sense of masculinity that characterizes the subculture of delinquency. Being manly is a core norm of that subculture, and being at the mercy of external forces or authorities will be regarded as unmanly by both the subculture and the delinquent himself. Breaking the law, even if it means getting caught and suffering the legal consequences, can serve the purpose of making things happen—and thus represents a desperate move on the delinquent’s part to restore a sense of himself as cause: an effort to provide “some dramatic reassurance that he can still make things happen” (p. 189).

Conclusion Delinquency and Drift has remained an influential work in the theory of juvenile delinquency since its publication—a robust record—though many contemporary criminologists may be more familiar with a few of its key concepts, notably neutralization, than with its penetrating critique of contemporary juvenile justice or its subtle analysis of the role of criminal law in crime itself. Part of the reason for this endurance may be that empirical research has tended to support the assertion that many delinquent youths do indeed employ techniques of neutralization to justify their offenses— offering support to Matza’s central argument that delinquency may be less a reflection of deep divisions in fundamental values between delinquents and the larger culture than of a process of periodic loosening of moral ties that are mostly shared with law-abiding people. As noted, too, the theme of the importance of the ineradicable element of choice— the zone of at least partial freedom in which relatively unconstrained actors make decisions about the course of action they will take—has resonated in more recent discussions of the importance of agency in understanding individuals’ trajectories into, and out of, crime. And still other themes— including the role of fatalism and desperation in

precipitating crime—though less developed, may offer rich opportunities for exploration. Elliott Currie See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Matza, David: Becoming Deviant; Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency; Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency; Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory

References and Further Readings Currie, E. (2004). The road to whatever: Middle class culture and the crisis of adolescence. New York: Metropolitan Books. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New York: Wiley. Matza, D. (1969). Becoming deviant. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664–670.

Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency Following their work on the “techniques of neutralization” in 1957, David Matza and Gresham M. Sykes elaborated their perspective on delinquent conduct. It is not enough, they argued in “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values,” to explain how individuals cognitively free themselves from social control—that is, to know “how an impetus to engage in delinquent behavior is translated into action” (p. 713). It also is essential to explain “what makes delinquency attractive in the first place” (p. 713). In the occurrence of delinquent conduct, techniques of neutralization represent the how whereas the concept of subterranean values Matza and Sykes explained why— “the values and ends underlying delinquency and the relationship of these values to those of the larger society” (p. 713).

Matza, David, and Gresham M. Sykes: Subterranean Values and Delinquency

The why seemed obvious to many—that delinquents were “disturbed” and sought things they should not. But Sykes and Matza dismissed the notion of the disturbed delinquent, pointing to evidence that delinquents were actually conformists most of the time, and were quite capable of feeling guilt and shame for their actions. Rather than some “disturbed” social environment, most were exposed to the same societal pressures that produced nondelinquents. With the techniques of neutralization Sykes and Matza showed how, using culturally acceptable reasons, “normal” individuals could convince themselves that they were not actually doing something wrong. This focus on the normal, as opposed to the disturbed, led Matza and Sykes to search for values in the mainstream American value system that could produce delinquency.

Deviant Values? Drawing on a burgeoning literature on delinquents, particularly the behavior of youths in street gangs, Matza and Sykes (1961) found several “underlying values” that they concluded are entirely consistent with the mainstream American value system. The first of these is a preference or desire for “excitement,” an adventurous life filled with “displays of daring” and “charged with danger.” Next, delinquents value an ethic of “grandiose dreams and quick success.” This contrasted with the notion that one gets ahead through hard work. Better to make one’s financial success through the easy score and outwitting one’s peers. Finally, the delinquent values a “readiness for aggression” that is often observed in gang violence. The use of aggression, however, is not a pathological drive to create suffering; rather it “is a demonstration of toughness and thus of masculinity.” At first glance, this “cluster of values” appears to represent a disturbed subculture that deviates “from the dominant society,” rather than a reflection of conventional American values. Not so, argue Matza and Sykes. In fact, these values appear eerily similar to “the code of the ‘gentlemen of leisure’ depicted by Thorsten Veblen” (p. 714). Daring and adventure, rejecting the “prosaic discipline of work,” a taste for consumption and luxury, and the valuation of masculine endeavors—these are all prototypical of the “leisured elite.” It thus appears that non-delinquent

591

members of society’s upper classes possess the same values as their lower-class counterparts. The only difference, as Matza and Sykes see it, is the expression of those values in the form of delinquency. All youths, then, subscribe to a similar set of American values; the delinquent’s values are no more deviant than the law-abiding youth’s values.

Subterranean Values How then, do these values produce criminal behavior in some, but conforming behavior in others? Here Matza and Sykes show a stunning intuition for a cognitive feature of value systems that will be empirically demonstrated three decades later. Matza and Sykes argue that these values exist in a “system” with other cultural, subcultural, and class-specific values, but that they are often “lurking” just below values with a higher priority. They are “subterranean” in nature and often influenced by other values in the system. A desire for “adventure,” for example, is quite common, but it is often kept in check by the values of the routinized and bureaucratic lives that most people lead. There is an acceptable time and place for thrill-seeking. Delinquents, however, are not checked by the bureaucratic values, and as a result they seek their adventure in places, times, and ways that are considered inappropriate. People who play the stock market or buy lottery tickets are looking for the big score, but these are considered the conventional means by which one seeks easy fortune as opposed to the hustling of delinquent youths. Similarly, expressions of masculinity are ubiquitous throughout the social structure, but it is in the delinquent that the value of masculinity is expressed with less restraint than it is by others. Delinquents, then, are socialized with values similar to the rest of the society. The only difference is the influence or relative importance of the subterranean values to delinquent youngsters. While most of us value excitement, easy riches, and expressions of aggression, most people are guided by other important values that direct the expression of the subterranean values in conventional ways.

Modern Evidence Matza and Sykes intuitively offered this view of individual values as part of a system of values

592

Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing

where some values are more influential than others and, most importantly in their explanation of delinquency, these value priorities vary across individuals. In the 1970s, Milton Rokeach developed and tested the first general theory of values as cognitive bits of information that help form preferences. He also developed a survey instrument that demonstrated the hierarchical relationship of values within each person. Today, the work of Shalom Schwartz, Ronald Ingleheart, and many others continues to demonstrate the importance of value systems and value priorities on the formation of preferences, decision making, and behavior. Criminologists continue to link subterranean values to delinquent behavior. Messner and Rosen­ feld’s Crime and the American Dream argues that societies dominated by economic institutions will find that the values of these institutions like the fetishism of money, individualism, and achievement, but lacking the restraining values of civil institutions will experience higher rates of crime than other societies. Mark Konty used Schwartz’s value scale to demonstrate that subterranean values in the form of self-enhancement values produce positive evaluations of deviant behavior as well as deviant behavior, a cognitive condition called micro­ anomie. In both cases, when subterranean values are given highest priority in the value system, delinquency results. Mark Konty See also Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory; Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency; Southern Subculture of Violence Theory; Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization; Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory

References and Further Readings Inglehart, R., Basanez, M., Dietz-Medrano, J., Halman, L., & Luijkz, R. (2004). Human beliefs and values: A cross cultural sourcebook on the 1999–2002 value surveys. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo XXI Editores. Konty, M. (2005). Microanomie: The cognitive foundations of the relationship between anomie and deviance. Criminology, 31, 107–132. Matza, D., & Sykes, G. M. (1961). Juvenile delinquency and subterranean values. American Sociological Review, 26, 713–719.

Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2000). Crime and the American dream. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York: Free Press. Schwartz, S. H. (2006). A theory of cultural value orientations: Explication and applications. Comparative Sociology, 5, 137–182. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664–673.

Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the United States experienced a substantial rise in the incidence of violent crime committed by juvenile offenders. There was also an unprecedented increase in the gang presence in this country. In particular, gang proliferation was escalating. “Gang proliferation” refers to the increase in the number of localities reporting a gang presence. In other words, it is the expansion of gangs in areas that had previously been unaffected. Theory and research on gang migration, or the movement of gangs from one city to another, focuses on whether the proliferation of gangs is caused by gang members moving to new cities. Alternatively, cities may experience a gang problem independent of the occurrence of gang migrants entering their jurisdictions. Research on the proliferation of gangs has identified two distinct periods of proliferation. Larger cities and mid-size cities experienced gang proliferation at roughly the same period of time, while the proliferation into smaller cities and towns occurred later. Rapid rates of proliferation occurred first in highly populated areas (i.e., population equal or greater to 100,000) in the mid- to late 1980s until 1990. Mid-size cities (i.e., 50,000–99,999 people) experienced growth during the period of 1986 to 1995. The second trajectory of proliferation included small cities and towns (i.e., 25,000–49,999 people). The expansion in these areas occurred in the early to mid-1990s. While gangs had previously been thought of as a “big city” phenomenon, now municipalities of all sizes were confronted with the issue.

Maxson, Cheryl L.: Gang Migration Theorizing

Media headlines at the time attributed the proliferation of gangs to the migration of members from traditional gang cities (e.g., Los Angeles and Chicago). Gangs were depicted as organizations that were “franchising” their criminal enterprise to burgeoning areas. Numerous reasons for gang movement were offered. Some believed these moves were in responses to over-saturation of traditional gang cities or attempts to avoid laws in certain states. The most common reason, however, was attributed to gangs’ connections to the drug trade. Gangs were seen as central players in the distribution of crack cocaine. During this period, they were depicted in the media as highly structured groups that were migrating to new and smaller cities to expand their drug market. This was in contrast to previous empirical studies that concluded that gangs are more likely to result from local environmental factors as opposed to being formed as “satellite” branches of previously existing gangs. There was also strong research support for the influence of pop culture (e.g., movies, fashion, and music) on local gang activity. In these cases, new gangs adopted the names and/or traditions of well-known gangs like the Crips or the Bloods, but had no actual affiliation with these gangs in other cities. Most of this previous research was geographically specific. In other words, researchers pinpointed one or two cities as sites for study/ investigation. As an improvement on these previous designs and an attempt to offer a more expansive perspective, a team of scholars at the University of Southern California, headed by Cheryl L. Maxson, embarked on a national study of gangs. The goal was to address whether there was evidence that widespread gang proliferation was due, all or in part, to gang migration (Maxson, 1998; Maxson et al., 1995).

Gang Migration in the United States In 1992, Maxson and colleagues conducted a national survey of law enforcement agencies. In total, they mailed instruments to over 1,100 agencies around the country. Their sample consisted of all cities with a population of 100,000 or more. In addition, they contacted 900 smaller cities that they deemed to be “likely” environments for street gangs or gang migration. A “likely” city was identified by

593

suggestions from other jurisdictions and all cities that had established special organization(s) to investigate gangs. After repeated mailings and follow-ups, the researchers received over 90 percent participation from the contacted agencies (i.e., over 1,000 cities responding). The researchers described this sample as a “purposive” sample of gang cities as opposed to a full national representation. In addition, Maxson and colleagues conducted phone interviews with law enforcement officials from 211 cities that reported a moderate level of gang migration (i.e., at least 10 gang migrants in the year 1991). This study also included some interviews with community members and migrant gang members. As is common in this area of research, the authors make a distinction between street gangs and other gangs. Their working definition of “gang” did not include motorcycle gangs, prison gangs, taggers (i.e., groups that concentrate on graffiti), or racial supremacy groups. First, Maxson and colleagues addressed whether there was any evidence that gangs were migrating to other cities. They found that, of the approximately 1,000 responding cities, 710 had experienced some amount of gang migration by 1992. Law enforcement agencies in only three states (New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Vermont) reported having no gang migrants. The areas reporting gang migration were most often in the western United States (44 percent), then the midwest (26 percent), southern states (25 percent), and least likely in the North East region of the country (5 percent). A vast majority (approximately 80 percent) of cities with over 100,000 people reported migrant gang members. This was not a systematic investigation of all cities in the nation, and as such, the authors could not speak definitively regarding the prevalence of gang migrants in medium and small cities. They did, note, however, that despite this limitation, cities of all sizes did report gang migrants. One important finding was that while the distribution of gang migration was widespread, the depth of the problem was not as extreme. Almost half of the cities (47 percent) reported that they received less than 10 migrant gang members in the previous year. Only 6 percent of cities (n=34) reported over 100 gang migrants in the last year. The next step for the authors was to investigate whether gang proliferation was due to gang

594

McCarthy, Bill, and John Hagan: Danger and Deterrence

migration. Temporal ordering was of primary importance. If gang migration was the cause of gang proliferation, one would expect the emergence of gangs in a city to follow the arrival of migrating gang members. The authors found that 54 percent of cities had local gangs prior to the arrival of migrant gang members. Only 5 percent of cities report gang migration occurring at least one year prior to the formation of any gangs. The remaining half reported that local gangs and gang migrants occurred in the same year. Over 80 percent of interviewed law enforcement agents disagreed with the idea that gang migration was the cause of their city’s gang problem. These findings do not offer support for the notion that gang proliferation is primarily due to the extent of gang migration into those new gang cities. Local gang problems more often precede gang migration than follow it. What factors led gang members to migrate to different cities? Maxson offers evidence that refutes the claim that the expansion of the drug trade is the primary reason for gang migration. Interviewed officers were asked to choose the primary reason that most gang members moved into their cities. The most common reason cited was that gang members moved to be with their families (39 percent) or other relatives and friends. In total, 57 percent of law enforcement officers chose these social reasons as the primary reason for relocation. Opportunity for criminal behavior was the next most common reason (32 percent) offered for gang member migration. Within these examples, the most commonly cited criminal opportunity was the expansion of drug sales. Lastly, 11 percent of cities reported that the most common reason for gang migration to their cities was gang members being pushed out of their old areas due to law enforcement, court order, or a desire to leave the gang. In light of these findings, the authors argue the reason for gang migration is more likely to be for social reasons than a specific emphasis on criminal motivations. While a valuable contribution to gang migration theory and research, Maxson’s study does suffer limitations. The authors describe it as an exploratory study. First, they rely primarily on law enforcements’ assessment of the nature of gangs in their cities. This is one, but certainly not the only, point of view on the subject. Other empirical literature in the area has included data from community members and gang

members. In general, the body of research supports the notion that gang members move for social reasons like most people, and not solely with the intention to commit crime. Maxson’s study is also cross-sectional. It offers great insight into the time period of late 1980s and early 1990s, but current evaluations of the topic are also valuable. In conclusion, Maxson and others have strongly refuted the notion that gang migration is the major reason for the gang proliferation in the 1980s and early 1990s. The work does not support the belief that gang members leave their cities in search of new areas to expand their membership. This is not to suggest that gang members never move to expand their criminal enterprises but that the highly organized gang with expanding territories is the rare exception. Kristy N. Matsuda See also Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization; Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio; Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes; Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang

References and Further Readings Klein, M. W., & Maxson, C. L. (2006). Street gangs: Patterns and policies. New York: Oxford University Press. Maxson, C. L. (1998). Gang members on the move: Juvenile justice bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Maxson, C. L., Woods, K. J., & Klein, M. W. (1995). Street gang migration in the United States. Unpublished final report, Los Angeles Social Science Research Institute, University of Southern California.

McCarthy, Bill, and John Hagan: Danger and Deterrence Deterrence theory assumes that individuals have free will, are capable of rationally weighing the

McCarthy, Bill, and John Hagan: Danger and Deterrence

costs and benefits of their actions, and will make decisions that maximize the likelihood of a positive outcome. Previous research has focused on an individual’s ability to analyze the benefits of committing crime against the potential formal, informal, and economic costs of being apprehended and punished for their criminal misdeeds. Bill McCarthy and John Hagan contribute to the existing literature on deterrence by suggesting physical danger may be a determining factor in an individual’s criminal decision-making process. Specifically, they hypothesize a negative relationship between physical danger and crime wherein the greater the likelihood for physical danger, the less likely an individual will commit crime.

Offenders and Physical Danger Although many of the characteristics associated with being a perpetrator of crime are also associated with being a victim of crime, victims and offenders are usually studied as separate entities. McCarthy and Hagan bridge this gap and examine offenders who, through their criminal activity, may find themselves victims of physical violence from one or more of McCarthy and Hagan’s four sources of physical danger. First, an offender may become the target of physical violence from a victim who is unwilling to surrender one’s self or property to the offender. Second, bystanders to a criminal event may intervene, resulting in a physical confrontation. Third, police may use physical force against an offender. Fourth and finally, offenders may be victimized by other criminal offenders. To date, limited research exists describing the relationship between individual perception of physical danger and criminal decision making. McCarthy and Hagan’s 2005 study of prostitution, theft, and drug sales among homeless youths indicates that physical danger is a determining factor in an offender’s decision-making process. The direction of the relationship suggests that the more the physical danger, the less likely an individual will commit crime. Similar findings emerged from Eric Beauregard and Benoit Leclerc’s study of sex offenders who report the likelihood of resistance from a potential victim and likelihood for bystander involvement are critical factors in the criminal decision-making process. The importance

595

of capable guardianship is evident in these empirical findings (Cohen & Felson, 1979, p. 588).

Implications for Future Research McCarthy and Hagan’s theory of physical danger and decision making has implications for three additional lines of empirical inquiry. First, Julie Horney and Ineke Haen Marshall suggest that an offender’s perception of risk may be shaped by the number of successful crimes committed compared to the number of arrests. This line of reasoning can be applied to the study of physical danger. That is, does an offender’s perception of physical harm vary based on the number of crimes committed successfully without sustaining physical injury? Second, does the “resetting effect” extend to physical harm (Pogarsky & Piquero, 2003, p. 95)? Intuitively, one would expect an individual’s perception of danger to increase if the individual encounters physical danger. The resetting effect suggests the opposite—that is, an offender’s perception of physical danger decreases subsequent to a dangerous encounter because the offender believes the odds of a second dangerous encounter to be extremely low. Third, researchers, such as Greg Pogarsky, Alex Piquero, and Ray Paternoster, have begun to integrate social learning theory into deterrence research. Testing the degree to which vicarious learning experiences may influence one’s individual perception of physical danger and criminal decision making will further the deterrence/social learning research agenda.

Conclusion McCarthy and Hagan’s theory and empirical findings support the statement that offenders are rational thinkers and have the capacity to weigh the costs and benefits of their actions. Moreover, McCarthy and Hagan’s theory of danger and deterrence is a nod to the past, present, and future of deterrence research in that it incorporates the basic tenets of early deterrence research (free will, calculating costs and benefits), builds on contemporary research that focuses on individual perception and decision making, and outlines a research agenda for the future that integrates sociological, economic, and psychological explanations for danger and decision making. Brenda Vose

596

McCorkel, Jill: Gender and Embodied Surveillance

See also Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime; Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence; Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory

References and Further Readings Baynard, V. L. (2008). Measurement and correlates of prosocial bystander behavior: The case of interpersonal violence. Violence and Victims, 23, 83–97. Beauregard, E., & Leclerc, B. (2007). An application of the rational choice approach to the offending process of sex offenders: A closer look at decision-making. Sex Abuse, 19, 115–133. Beccaria, C. (1963). On crimes and punishment. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Original work published 1764) Becker, G. S. (1976). The economic approach to human behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bentham, J., & Lafleur, L. J. (1948). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. New York: Hafner. (Original work published 1789) Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Eagly, A. E., & Crowley, M. (1986). Gender and helping behavior: A meta-analytic review of the social psychological literature. Psychological Bulletin, 100(3), 283–308. Horney, J., & Marshall, I. H. (1992). Risk perceptions among serious offenders: The role of crime and punishment. Criminology, 30, 575–594. Jaeger, C. C., Ortwin, R., Rosa, E. A., & Webler. T. (2001). Risk, uncertainty, and rational action. London: Earthscan. Jensen, G. F., & Brownfield, D. (1986). Gender, lifestyles, victimization: Beyond routine activity. Violence and Victims, 1, 85–99. Kleck, G., & DeLone, M. A. (1993). Victim resistance and offender weapon effects in robbery. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 9, 55–81. McCarthy, B., & Hagan J. (2005). Danger and the decision to offend. Social Forces, 83, 1065–1096. Pogarsky, G., & Piquero, A. R. (2003). Can punishment encourage offending? Investigating the “resetting” effect. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40, 95–120. Pogarsky, G., Piquero, A. R., & Paternoster, R. (2004). Modeling change in perceptions about sanction threats: The neglected linkage in deterrence theory. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 20, 343–369.

Pratt, T. C., Cullen, F. T., Blevins, K. R., Daigle, L. E., & Madensen, T. D. (2006). The empirical status of deterrence. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 367–395). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Sampson, R. J., & Lauritsen, J. L. (1990). Deviant lifestyles, proximity to crime, and the offender-victim link in personal violence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 27, 110–139. Terrill, W., Leinfelt, F. H., & Kwak, D. H. (2008). Examining police use of force: A smaller agency perspective. Policing, 31, 57–76. Topalli, V., Wright, R., & Fornango, R. (2002). Drug dealers, robbery and retaliation: Vulnerability, deterrence and the contagion of violence. British Journal of Criminology, 42, 337–351. Williams, K. R., & Hawkins, R. (1986). Perceptual research on general deterrence: A critical review. Law & Society Review, 20, 545–572. Wyckoff, R., & Simpson, S. S. (2008). The effects of selfprotective behaviors on injury for African American women in domestic violence situations. Crime, Law, Social Change, 49, 271–288.

McCorkel, Jill: Gender Embodied Surveillance

and

In the 1980s, the United States witnessed unprecedented prison growth. While the numbers of men under correctional supervision increased dramatically, the rate at which women were being locked up outpaced men. The reason for these increases was the result of new policies aimed at getting tough on crime. These get-tough policies included harsher prisons sentences, mandatory sentences for certain offenses, and tougher drug laws. The 1980s were ripe for these get-tough policies given the social context of the prior decades; the country seemed out of control to many in the 1960s and 1970s, and laws were created to deter people from committing crime. Both men and women offenders were targeted with these policies. Despite the appearance of neutrality with regards to these policies for men and women offenders, Jill McCorkel argues that gender still matters. While supervision and punishment strategies in the gettough era are based on the assumption that male

McCorkel, Jill: Gender and Embodied Surveillance

offenders are rational actors, corrections administrators set up surveillance and punishment mechanisms based on the idea that women offend due to a failure in themselves. Thus, women offenders are both deviant in terms of their gender but also in terms of their criminality. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Joan Acker, McCorkel argues that prisons are gendered organizations and, for women, surveillance and punishment takes a new form. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected U.S. president in 1980, the country was ready for a leader who was going to get the country “back on track.” The 1960s included events such as the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, the Attica prison riot and the Kent State student shootings by the police. Liberals believed that the government could not be trusted to be fair, whereas conservatives believed that laws were too soft on crime. This combination led to determinate sentencing policies whereby certain offenses were given specific punishments. In addition, however, more punitive policies were put into place such as mandatory minimum sentences. Mandatory minimum sentences were often imposed for drug offenses, which in turn increased the prison population. Thus, the general feeling of the 1980s was that criminal justice laws should be tougher. This idea that criminal justice laws should be tougher was not applied only to male offenders. Many thought that females should not be immune from these harsher punishments. Women, too, were being locked up at increasing rates. The same punitive policies were imposed on women prisoners, yet in these prisons, women were often not afforded the same amenities and programs as men. This led many feminists to call this “equality with a vengeance” (Chesney-Lind & Pollock, 1995). McCorkel was interested in how discipline and punishment differed in women’s prisons than in men’s prisons following this get-tough era.

Foucault and Acker McCorkel draws on two theorists to frame her study and findings. She builds her study and discussion on several theorists that have presented theories on punishment or gender. First, she discusses Foucault’s analysis of penal surveillance and concludes that women’s prisons surveillance differs from this. Second, she builds on Acker’s idea of

597

“gendered organizations” and argues that prisons are gendered in that, within the organization, women are treated and thought of as different from men in both criminality and in gender. In 1977, Foucault published his now famous analysis of prisons and other social organizations, Discipline and Punish. In this book, Foucault argues that prisons act as punishment and surveillance mechanisms that control not only inmates’ behavior but also their minds. He claims that the architecture of prisons, the Panopticon style whereby prisons are circular with a watchtower in the center, creates the impression that prisoners are always being watched. The guards can see the inmates’ every move or the inmates perceive this, yet the inmates cannot see the guards. This fosters a sort of disembodied surveillance, where the inmates do not know who is watching them but they know they are being watched. The goal of this is to control the inmates’ behavior. In 1990, Acker suggested that rather than sexism occurring in the workplace as a result of sexist managers or bosses, sexism is often the product of the larger culture of the organization. By that she means that the organization is based on the idea that there are gender differences and that men are the standard and are the preferred employees. McCorkel draws on this concept of gendered organizations when she conceptualized her ethnographic study of women’s prisons.

McCorkel’s Study McCorkel’s ethnographic study began in 1994 and ended in 1998. The setting was a medium security prison for women undergoing a shift in punishment strategies by creating a hard-core drug treatment program. McCorkel conducted interviews with 74 women inmates in addition to her participant observation. The drug treatment model was based on the therapeutic community (TC). The main philosophy of TCs is that drug addiction is caused by problematic personality traits and that what is needed is surveillance, discipline and confrontation, and humiliation. Unlike the surveillance used in Foucault’s prisons, surveillance for the women offenders in McCorkel’s study was embodied—the women knew who was watching them. Signs were posted around the housing unit that reminded the inmates that

598

Media Violence Effects

they were being watched and they could not escape surveillance. In addition, relationships were controlled, and the women were taught to trust no one. When women did break a rule (even a mundane one), they were confronted in ceremonies where staff and other inmates were present. Thus, discipline manifested itself through confrontation. Surveillance was also bound up with therapy and diagnosis in the women’s prison. The program rested on the assumption that the women were “sick.” Women were told they required surveillance because they needed structure due to their chaotic lives and personality deficiencies. According to McCorkel, these surveillance mechanisms allowed the staff to “spy” on the offenders under the guise of determining their diagnoses. The inmate’s behavior could then be used to justify her mental health diagnosis. Thus, therapy and diagnosis were used in women’s prisons more than men's due to the assumptions that women are sick and men are rational actors who weigh the costs and benefits of their actions.

Conclusion McCorkel’s findings led to her theory of embodied surveillance and gendered punishment. Embodied surveillance is different than Foucault’s analysis of surveillance. In Foucault’s analysis of (men’s) prison, surveillance was a way of getting into the prisoners’ heads in order to control their behavior, thus maintaining the order of the prison. However, in the Panopticon-designed prisons, the “watcher” is not known to the inmate. The guards are in the watch tower looking down at the inmates. The inmates cannot see in the watch tower and thus do not know who is watching them or when they are being watched. McCorkel argues that in the equality with a vengeance era in women’s prisons, the women inmates are still being watched. However, now they know who is watching them, and thus the surveillance is embodied. Punishment is gendered according to McCorkel in that it is different from men’s prisons. Punishment in women’s prisons is tied to therapy and diagnosis. The assumption is that women are “sick” and in need of structure and surveillance. Their punishment is based on hard-core therapy, which includes diagnoses, confrontation, and humiliation. Dana J. Hubbard

See also Giallombardo, Rose: Women in Prison; Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner: Women and Imprisonment

References and Further Readings Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4, 139–158. Chesney-Lind, M., & Pollock, J. (1995). Women’s prisons: Equality with a vengeance. In A. Merio & J. Pollack (Eds.), Women, law and social control (pp. 155–176). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. New York: Random House. Gartner, R., & Kruttschnitt, C. (2004). A brief history of doing time: The California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s. Law and Society Review, 38, 267–304. Hannah-Moffat, K. (2004). Losing ground. Social Politics: State, and Society, 11, 363–385. McKim, A. (2008). Getting gut-level. Gender and Society, 22, 303–323. Pollack, S. (2005). Taming the shrew: Regulating prisoners through women-centered mental health programming. Critical Criminology, 13, 71–87.

Media Violence Effects As media technology has advanced, the issue of media violence and its effects on human behavior has become an important issue of concern for policy makers. The issue of media violence has garnered significant attention from the United States Congress. In 2000, for example, representatives of six different public health organizations (American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) signed a joint statement delivered to the Congressional Public Health Summit arguing that “television, movies, music, and interactive games are powerful learning tools and highly influential media” (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2000). The joint statement also asserted that prior research has “point[ed] overwhelmingly to a causal connection

Media Violence Effects

between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children.” Claims that violent media consumption has led to an increase in violent and aggressive behavior has not only been presented by representatives of public health organizations. Independent university-based scholars have also argued that the effects of violent media consumption on subsequent aggression and violence are robust. Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson have asserted that in research produced since 1975, the statistical magnitude of the links between media violence and aggression have been “positive and have consistently increased over time” (p. 477). Robert Sege has claimed that “one of the best documented causes of the modern upsurge violence appears to be childhood exposure to television violence” (p. 129). Lastly, in 2003 Anderson et al. suggested that there is “unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts” (p. 81). The entry first identifies the theoretical mechanisms that scholars have used to connect media violence consumption and subsequent aggression, violence, and criminal aggression. Next, the entry reviews the findings of meta-analytical reviews. A meta-analysis is a statistical method of reviewing literature that reports mean (average) effect sizes of a predictor variable of interest (media violence consumption) on an outcome variable of interest (subsequent criminal or aggressive behavior). The entry reviews meta-analyses that have examined the link between violent media consumption and subsequent aggression and violence. The essay also separately reviews a meta-analysis conducted by Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey; this meta-analysis is treated separately because it is the only published meta-analysis that examined only the effect of media violence consumption on criminal aggression. Lastly, conclusions about the link between violent media consumption and aggression, violence, and criminal aggression are summarized.

Theories of Media Violence Effects on Behavior Theories of the precise mechanisms through which media violence consumption is linked to future aggressive behavior focus on psychological and physiological processes. Many psychologists who

599

have theorized about media violence effects have focused attention on modeling and imitation. Psychologist Albert Bandura suggested that people learn through direct experience and by watching others; thus, media characters who engage in violence serve as violent role models. Rowell Heusmann expanded on Bandura’s social learning approach by asserting that when people observe media violence, they develop aggressive cognitive scripts that guide their behavior; in essence, people imitate the actions of characters or individuals they see in mass media by applying these scripts to interactions and circumstances in their own lives. Notably, the theoretical statements by both Bandura and Heusmann suggested a direct causal connection between consuming media violence and future aggression and violence. Others have suggested a direct causal connection by considering how consumption of media violence impacts human beings physiologically. Scholars using this line of reasoning have argued that when people are exposed to violent images or ideas, there are clear and measurable physiological responses (e.g., increased heart rate and higher blood pressure). And these physiological responses to violence that people experience serve as reinforcements (e.g., something that they enjoy) for future aggressive and violent reactions. D. Zillmann’s model of suspense enjoyment argued that when liked characters in a media depiction are victimized or threatened with victimization, such a depiction “arouses dysphoric emotional reactions or empathetic distress” (Hoffner & Levine, 2005, p. 209). Zillmann further noted that most media depictions end, or are resolved, in a way that is satisfying to the viewer (e.g., the offender is caught in the end or the main character survives). The arousal from the suspenseful scenes was viewed as carrying over to, and intensifying, the enjoyment of the positive resolution. Thus, according to Zillman, media violence is reinforced. In contrast, other psychologically based research studies have suggested that the link between media violence consumption and aggression/violence is not a direct causal connection, but instead media violence consumption serves as a moderating factor for individuals who are already inclined toward aggression and violence. In this approach, consumed media violence simply serves as a behavioral cue for aggressive reactions in individuals

600

Media Violence Effects

who have pre-existing violent thoughts and tendencies. In essence, individual-level differences are the main factor that creates violent responses, and media violence consumption is one of several different conditions that, if present, could trigger a violent reaction. Bushman, for example, found that individuals classified as having a pre-existing aggressive trait (physical aggression) were more drawn to violent depictions than individuals classified as not having such a trait. Additionally, he found that individuals with a pre-existing aggressive trait were more likely to respond aggressively to stimulus after the individual had been shown media violence than when the individual had been shown innocuous media material. This difference was not observed for people who did not have a pre-existing aggressive trait.

Media Consumption and Aggression/ Violence: Meta-Analytical Reviews Some meta-analytical reviews of the relationship between violent media consumption and subsequent aggression or violence have suggested a link. However, the studies gathered for these meta-analyses were drawn from a body of research that has been heavily criticized. Three areas of criticism are salient to the current review. First, this area of research has been criticized for its failure to account for competing variables that render the relationship between media violence and subsequent aggression spurious. In other words, if a third variable (such as individual traits and exposure to violence in other contexts) were accounted for, the relationship between media violence consumption and subsequent aggression might disappear or be appreciably reduced (Savage & Yancey, 2008). Second, there is a possible filedrawer effect. The file-drawer effect is the argument that the influence of violent media consumption on subsequent behavior in prior research has been overestimated because researchers and journal editors are less likely to publish the results of studies that find no media violence effects; thus, there is a greater likelihood that studies that produce positive findings become part of the knowledge base when drawing conclusions about media violence effects (Ferguson, 2007). Third, this body of research has been criticized for a failure to adequately define and develop reliable, standardized, and valid measures of aggression (Ferguson, 2007).

Some meta-analyses have attempted to address these methodological issues by accounting for them in the study design. A meta-analysis by Christopher Ferguson considered the influence of the file-drawer effect and different methods of measuring aggression on the media consumption effect. The Ferguson meta-analysis focused on 25 different studies of the effects of violent video game play on aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts, prosocial behavior, and physiological responses. The analysis found that publication bias had a strong influence on the media violence consumption effect sizes for experimental and nonexperimental research that examined media influence on aggressive behavior and aggressive thoughts. Academic journals have a greater tendency to publish studies that are supportive of a media violence effect and such a tendency produces artificially high media violence effect sizes. The Ferguson meta-analysis also produced results suggesting that studies that use less reliable and less standardized measures of aggression produce higher media violence effect sizes. This study offers credence to the notion that a portion of the media violence effects observed in many studies is the result of publication bias and poor conceptualization of aggression.

Media Consumption and Criminal Aggression/ Violence: Meta-Analytical Reviews As previously suggested, one of the main problems with existing media violence effects research is inconsistent conceptualization of aggression and violence. This is particularly problematic for the field of criminology because not all aggression and violence is condemned and punishable by the criminal justice system; some forms are socially acceptable. Yet many of the published meta-analyses have not adequately distinguished criminal aggression and criminal violence from other forms of aggression and violence. One notable exception is a recently published meta-analysis by Savage and Yancey. Savage and Yancey’s meta-analysis reviewed 26 independent samples from studies that examined the connection between violent media consumption and subsequent criminal aggression. What is most noteworthy about this meta-analysis is that the authors focused much of their analysis on the

Media Violence Effects

media violence effect in studies that utilized a control for various psychological traits that serve as predisposing factors toward criminal aggression (or what some criminologists have referred to as self-control variables). They discovered that these studies produced a very small effect size for media consumption. The authors found that when male and female samples were combined, there was no statistically significant difference in levels of criminal aggression between those exposed to a lot of media violence and those exposed to much less media violence. When males and females were separated, there was a statistically significant difference in level of criminal aggression between high consumers of media violence and low consumers of media violence among males, but not females. Even here, however, the effect was very small and the effect was barely significant. Savage and Yancey noted that the effect size for the male sample was likely exaggerated somewhat because many studies failed to control for relevant competing explanatory factors.

Conclusions on the Effects of Violent Media Consumption Prior to discussing the research on the effects of violent media consumption, it is important to note that firm conclusions are difficult to establish because the prior research has been less than optimal. As Savage and Yancey note, “there is not one study that reports the comparison we would really like to see to satisfy our curiosity about the media violence–criminal aggression relationship” (p. 786). Savage and Yancey also suggested that an adequate study would be one that uses a measure of serious criminal aggression or crime rates as the outcome variable; in terms of predictor variables, they suggested that an optimal study would be one that has a measure of exposure to violent media, an independent rating of violence in the media under consideration, and controls for pre-existing aggressive traits, social economic status, parent education, parental violence, neglect, and intelligence. At this point, an optimal study does not exist; thus, the best that can be offered are tentative conclusions. The existing research has produced little evidence suggesting a broad, direct link between media consumption and subsequent aggressive or violent behavior that operates through either

601

psychological or physiological mechanisms. The best available scientific research suggests that many of the claims of special interest groups, asserting a strong link between media consumption and crime and aggression, have been exaggerated and that much of the culture beliefs about this link have been socially constructed. However, there is evidence which suggests that certain people (those with pre-existing aggressive or violent tendencies and males) are more susceptible to behavioral reactions triggered by consumption of violent media. More research needs to be done to establish the nature of the relationship. Kevin G. Buckler and Steve Wilson See also Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: SelfControl Theory; Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems

References and Further Readings American Academy of Pediatrics. (2000). Joint statement on the impact of entertainment violence on children. Congressional Public Health Summit, July 26. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from http://www.aap.org/ advocacy/releases/jstmtevc.htm Anderson, C. A., Berkowitz, L., Donnerstein, E., Huesmann, L. R., Johnson, J. D., Linz, D., et al. (2003). The influence of media violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4, 81–110. Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bandura, A. (1983). Psychological mechanisms of aggression. In R. G. Green & E. I. Donnerstein (Eds.), Aggression: Theoretical and empirical reviews: Vol. 1. Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 1–40). New York: Academic Press. Bushman, B. J. (1995). Moderating role of trait aggressiveness in the effects of violent media on aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 950–960. Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2001). Media violence and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation. American Psychologist, 56, 477–489. Ferguson, C. J. (2007). Evidence for publication bias in video game violence effects literature: A meta-analytic review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 12, 470–482.

602

Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory

Freedman, J. L. (2002). Media violence and its effect on aggression: Assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grossman, D., & DeGaetano, G. (1999). Stop teaching our kids to kill: A call to action against TV, movie, and video game violence. New York: Crown. Hoffner, C. A., & Levine, K. J. (2005). Enjoyment of mediated fright and violence: A meta-analysis. Media Psychology, 7, 207–237. Huesmann, L. R. (1986). Psychological processes promoting the relation between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior by the viewer. Journal of Social Issues, 42, 125–139. Paik, H., & Comstock, G. (1994). The effects of television violence on antisocial behavior: A metaanalysis. Communication Research, 24, 516–546. Potter, W. J. (2003). The 11 myths of media violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Savage, J., & Yancey, C. (2008). The effects of media violence exposure on criminal aggression: A metaanalysis. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 35, 772–791. Sege, R. D. (1998). Life imitating art: Adolescents and television violence. In T. P. Gullotta, G. R. Adams, & R. Montemayor (Eds.), Delinquent violent youth: Theory and interventions (pp. 129–143). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wood, W., Wong, F. Y., & Chachere, J. G. (1991). Effects of media violence on viewers’ aggression in unconstrained social interaction. Psychological Bulletin, 109, 371–383. Zillmann, D. (1996). The psychology of suspense in dramatic exposition. In P. Vorderer, H. J. Wulff, & M. Friedrichsen (Eds.), Suspense: Conceptualizations, theoretical analyses, and empirical explorations (pp. 199–231). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zillman, D. (1980). Anatomy of suspense. In P. H. Tannenbaum (Ed.), The entertainment functions of television (pp. 133–163). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory Sarnoff A. Mednick, who received his Ph.D. in psychology from Northwestern University in 1954, is a well-known scholar with a background in sociobiology and methods of learning. Much of his earlier work focuses on how students interact and

efficiently comprehend information in class. Since the initial stages of his career, he has promoted interdisciplinary cooperation, especially among the social and biological sciences. It was this multifaceted approach that led him to concentrate on how biological, environmental, and learning traits all were capable of explaining antisocial behavior for certain members of the general population. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the early 1990s, Mednick’s research sought out a series of biological and heritable traits that correlated with criminal behavior. It was his intention to bring to the forefront biological facts from his Danish adoption and schizophrenia studies and merge them with positivistic theories of criminal behavior. His focus, as it is for all modern biosocial criminologists, was not to seek out one specific criminal “gene” or “trait” as the Classical School researchers had done, but rather to uncover more generalized genetic anomalies and assess how they relate to antisocial, and more specifically, criminal behavior.

Mednick’s Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory of Crime Original research from Copenhagen in which Mednick was centrally involved prompted him to develop a socio-biological theory of criminal behavior that focuses on physiological characteristics and, most specifically, on the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Briefly, the autonomic nervous system is the regulatory sector of the central nervous system and is largely responsible for controlling arousal and one’s ability to adapt to the surrounding environment. Mednick’s construct is a “theory which suggests how autonomic nervous system (ANS) responsiveness may play a role in the social learning of law-abiding behavior” (Brennan et al., 1995, p. 84). The ANS theory assumes that law-abiding behavior is a learned trait (Mednick, 1977). Individuals learn to act in a social manner through proper primary caregiver interaction in childhood, most often through their rearing parents. Parental rearing is conjured to teach the child passive avoidance, a learned personality trait that acts as a protective factor in the person’s decisionmaking process. Passive avoidance is a characteristic that does not develop immediately but rather builds upon

Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory

itself over multiple stages. The first stage occurs when a child commits an aggressive act and is punished for it by the primary caregiver. At a later time, the child will likely be presented with a situation in which that prior action would be of some use to gain something, but instead the child refrains from the act because he or she has been punished before for the same behavior. ANS theory premises that within this contemplation the youth is overcome with a fear of punishment, causing the normal child to be deterred from the action, which dissipates the fear. The dissipation of fear is crucial to the ANS theory. If a child experiences a very quick reduction in fear of primary caregiver punishment, the person will be rewarded by a swift reinforcement— not being scared anymore, which in turn reinforces the inhibition of antisocial behavior. However, if the youth is incapable of reducing his or her level of fear of punishment quickly, then there is no significant reinforcing element for refraining from the behavior in the future. The implication is that those individuals who are completely incapable of reducing any fear of punishment will have no inhibiting factors that will restrain them from antisocial behavior and thus cannot learn the notion of passive avoidance. Operant conditioning clearly is at work within Mednick’s fear dissipation notion, which reflects on his background in learning. Mednick points out that fear, whether it is fear of punishment or fear for one’s life, is a powerful psychological element that operates through the ANS. One is characterized by having a properly functioning ANS if he or she dissipates fear quickly, thus offering an immediate relaxation. Adversely, someone with a slowly recovering ANS is incapable of reducing this fear and is in no way reinforced, leaving the pathway open for future antisocial behavior of this form again. Mednick also proposes a method through which the ANS construct can be tested—the common polygraph exam. The polygraph test measures three elements: heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal conductance (how much electrical current is carried through the skin). The most typical form of measure implemented to test the theory is by utilizing an electrodermal recovery (EDRec) test. The EDRec is a timed measure that records the length (in fractions of a second) it takes someone

603

to relax after presented with unpleasant stimuli. The procedure of the test typically requires the administrator to place sensors on the ends of one finger of each hand that measure the conductivity of the electrical currents within one’s skin. The participant is then asked to relax while initial readings are taken. The subject is then presented with unpleasant stimuli, which ranges from electric shock, as used by D. T. Lykken, to simply a scenario-based recording to which a person listens, as in Mednick’s work. Upon the point in the scenario where there should be a release of built-up fear, the diodes record the amount of time it takes the person’s skin conductance to reach the normal levels that were present in the relaxed state. Therefore, one with a quickly recovering EDRec is deemed to have a properly functioning ANS and thus is theorized to not be biologically predisposed to criminal behavior. However, Mednick (1997, p. 4) predicts that the “slower the recovery, the more serious and repetitive the asocial behavior” will become for an individual. Those marked with slow ANS recovery are also deemed to show hyporesponsiveness, a term used to indicate that while their ANS levels do return to normal, it takes more time to do so (also termed half-recovery). ANS theory is purported to best explain the behavior of the 1 percent of the general population that is responsible for nearly half of all criminal convictions. It is these chronic recidivists, Mednick argues, that display the most dangerous form of the ANS—one that either is marked by extreme hyporesponsiveness or complete nonresponsiveness. Mednick (1977, p. 1) hypothesizes, “Most offenders are convicted of having perpetrated only one, two or three relatively minor offenses. These offenders are doubtless instigated by socio-­ economic and situational forces.” However, those individuals that so frequently return to the courtroom are the individuals that this theory is stated to best explain. Mednick offers an additional distinct claim in the proposal of the ANS theory of crime. While having a slow EDRec does place someone at risk for criminal activity, this trait can be controlled with proper child-rearing, social learning, and environmental factors. With this point emphasized, Mednick claims that a slow EDRec is a heritable trait that is passed along through a faulty ANS. His central assertion is that “criminal fathers

604

Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory

would have children with slow EDRec” at a rate much higher than the general population would (Mednick, 1977, p. 5). To test this, as he emphasizes, longitudinal data are needed.

Evidence Regarding ANS Theory Given that there are several different elements of the ANS theory (EDRec, hereditary transmission, and learning), it can be argued that many different tests of these elements can garner partial support to the construct. However, there have been more direct tests of the theory, typically yielding mixed results. In 1977, Mednick and colleagues tested electrodermal recovery for fathers and their sons in Copenhagen, hypothesizing that a fast EDRec time would serve as a protective factor on the offspring’s criminal behavior. Four groups were created, consisting of criminal father/criminal son, noncriminal father/criminal son, criminal father/ noncriminal son, and noncriminal father/noncriminal son. Although “the criminality of the sons and fathers is interdependent” (p. 16), the researchers did find that the criminal son/criminal father group was marked by a fast EDRec, except in the lower­middle and middle classes. This left open the possibility that there could have been a spurious relationship through socio-economic status. Because this 1977 research by Mednick and colleagues had a small sample size in that it was only a pilot study, it was expanded to represent the entire country of Denmark by Mednick and colleagues in 1984. Criminal conviction and hospital records were gathered on a large cohort of adoptees, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. Interestingly, the strongest concordance in criminality was between the biological parents and their offspring (24.5 percent of children of criminal biological fathers were convicted) and not between adoptive parents and their adopted children (20 percent of children of criminal adoptive parents were convicted). While this difference is somewhat minute, the authors concluded, “Adoptive parent criminality was not found to be associated with a statistically significant increment in the son’s criminality, but the effect of biological parent criminality was” (p. 892). This provides support for the ANS construct’s claim that criminality could be passed on genetically. Similar results were found by Mednick and colleagues in 1987.

Other studies have provided positive results for the claims of ANS. Bell and colleagues tested ANS’s delayed EDRec hypothesis and found that identical twins consistently had stronger correlations in recovery time than fraternal twins did, indicating that there may be a partial genetic factor in the ANS’s ability to return to a normal state. However, the ability to generalize this study should be interpreted cautiously because this finding was observed on measurements of the left hand, but not the right hand. A 1981 study by Mednick and colleagues tested brain wave patterns through an electroencephalogram (EEG), a device that measures brain activity through electrodes placed on the occipital, frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. Testing a cohort of 11-year-olds to predict their criminality 6 years later, researchers found that alpha brain waves, which affect arousal and are produced by the ANS, were significantly slower for children that would become criminally charged. Overall, findings such as these have been replicated across different cultures and in both laboratory and natural settings, thus lending support to the construct.

Critiques of ANS Theory However, ANS theory is not without its critics. Mednick has recognized this fact throughout his career as he “has been told to burn data which implicate genetic factors among the causes of crime” (Buikhuisen & Mednick, 1988, p. 6). He also notes that “it should be clear that partial genetic causation need not imply pessimism regarding treatment or prevention” (Mednick, 1987, p. 5) but that rather “a number of environmental mediators have been shown to actually protect the biologically at-risk child against long-term deviant or less than optimal outcomes” (Baker & Mednick, 1984, p. 144). The most prominent academic critics of Mednick’s work are Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi. They note that there are multiple methodological problems with Mednick’s research that are potentially severe enough to alter findings. For instance, the authors note that the same participants in Mednick’s pilot study were also included in his national sample, indicating that the samples are not independent of each other which “is essential to the interpretation of replication research” (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990, p. 55).

Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory

Another criticism Gottfredson and Hirschi have is that the measures of the independent variables changed from the pilot to the national study. The measure of parental criminality in the pilot was the biological father’s police contact and citations, while in the Denmark sample it is measured by biological parents’ (mother’s and father’s) criminal convictions. The authors concluded that by adding criminal mothers into the sample for the national data, Mednick’s results are inflated to significance when they should not be. Furthermore, they note that studies that Mednick cites as supportive of his work are seriously methodologically flawed (e.g., Cloninger & Gottesman, 1987; Crowe, 1975).

Conclusion Despite these criticisms, there has been some support garnered for ANS theory. Evidence has been gathered for the construct across nations and in natural and laboratory designs. In adoption studies, the best predictor of an offspring’s criminality is whether their biological parents were criminal, which lends support to the construct’s claim that a delayed ANS can be passed on intergenerationally. Brain waves generated by the ANS have been shown to be delayed in children that later became criminal, lending additional support to the ANS construct. Further, a delayed EDRec response has also been demonstrated to predict criminality in middle-class populations. Although it does have critics, it appears that a delayed or stunted ANS response could in fact be a predictor of criminal behavior in certain populations. Due to repeated, supportive findings, it appears that this socio-­biological construct is of use to the field, as at some level it does seem to be predictive of criminal behavior. John Boman See also Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory; Neurology and Crime; Psychophysiology and Crime; Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature

References and Further Readings Baker, R. L., & Mednick B. R. (1984). Influences on human development: A longitudinal perspective. Boston: Kluwer Nijhof Press.

605

Bell, B., Mednick, S. A., Gottesman, I. I., & Sergeant, J. (1977). Electrodermal parameters in male twins. In S. A. Mednick & K. O. Christiansen (Eds.), Biosocial bases of criminal behavior (pp. 217–225). New York: Gardner. Brennan, P. A., Mednick, S. A., & Volavka, J. (1995). Biomedical factors in crime. In J. Q. Wilson & J. Petersilia (Eds.), Crime (pp. 65–90). San Francisco: ICS Press. Buikhuisen, W., & Mednick, S. A. (1988). The need for an integrative approach in criminology. In W. Buikhuisen & S. A. Mednick (Eds.), Explaining criminal behavior: Interdisciplinary approaches (pp. 3–7). Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Cloninger, R., & Gottesman, I. (1987) Genetic and environmental factors in antisocial behavior disorders. In S. A. Mednick, T. E. Moffitt, & S. Stack (Eds.), The causes of crime: New biological approaches (pp. 92–109). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Crowe, R. (1975). Adoptive study of psychopathy: Preliminary results from arrest records and psychiatric hospital records. In R. Fieve, D. Rosenthal, & H. Brill (Eds.), Genetic research in psychiatry (pp. 95–103). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gabrielli, Jr., W. F., & Mednick, S. A. (1983). Genetic correlates of criminal behavior: Implications for research, attribution, and prevention. American Behavioral Scientist, 27, 59–74. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lykken, D. T. (1957). A study of anxiety in the sociopathic personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55, 6–10. Mednick, S. A. (1964). Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Mednick, S. A. (1977). A biosocial theory of the learning of law-abiding behavior. In S. A. Mednick & K. O. Christiansen (Eds.), Biosocial bases of criminal behavior (pp. 1–8). New York: Gardner. Mednick, S. A. (1987). Introduction: Biological factors in crime causation: The reactions of social scientists. In S. A. Mednick, T. E. Moffitt, & S. Stack (Eds.), The causes of crime: New biological approaches (pp. 1–6). New York: Cambridge University Press. Mednick, S. A., Gabrielli, W. F., & Hutchings, B. (1984). Genetic influences in criminal convictions: Evidence from an adoption cohort. Science, 224, 891–894. Mednick, S. A., Gabrielli, Jr., W. F., & Hutchings, B. (1987). Genetic factors in the etiology of criminal behavior. In S. A. Mednick, T. E. Moffitt, & S. A. Stack (Eds.), The causes of crime: New biological

606

Mental Illness and Crime

approaches (pp. 74–91). New York: Cambridge University Press. Mednick, S. A., Kirkegaard-Sorensen, L., Hutchings, B., Knop, J., Rosenberg, R., & Schulsinger, F. (1977). An example of biosocial interaction research: The interplay of socioenvironmental and individual factors in the etiology of criminal behavior. In S. A. Mednick & K. O. Christiansen (Eds.), Biosocial bases of criminal behavior (pp. 9–23). New York: Gardner. Mednick, S. A., & Mednick, M. T. (1965). The associative basis of the creative process (University of Michigan Cooperative Research Project No. 1073). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Mednick, S. A., & Volavka, J. (1980). Biology and crime. In N. Morris & M. H. Tonry (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 2, pp. 85–158). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mednick, S. A., Volavka, J., Gabrielli, W. F., Jr., & Itil, T. M. (1981). EEG as a predictor of antisocial behavior. Criminology, 19, 219–229.

Mental Illness

and

Crime

According to Doris James and Lauren Glaze, over half of the inmates in state prisons and local jails manifest symptoms of mental illness. Specifically, 56 percent of state prison inmates have exhibited symptoms of mental illness within the past year, compared to 45 percent of federal prison inmates and 64 percent of local jail inmates. For female inmates, the rates are even higher. Signs of mental illness were reported for 61 percent of federal female inmates, and 73 percent of state female inmates. These statistics are imperative to understand when one examines the connection between mental illness and crime. Mental illness is an important part of the criminal justice system. The empirical relationship between mental illness and crime, particularly violent offending, has been documented through numerous empirical studies. This entry assesses the relationship between mental illness and crime through a variety of facets. First, this entry examines mental illness as a criminogenic factor, specifically reviewing some of the empirical studies that have connected mental illness and criminal behavior. Within this section, the theoretical implications of mental illness, particularly as it applies to women, are also considered. Second, this entry then examines how each part of

the criminal justice system—the police, courts, and correctional system—have been affected by mental illness. It also conveys some of the ways that these different parts of the system are coping with mental illness and the challenges that it often presents.

Mental Illness as a Criminogenic Risk Factor People have assumed for quite some time that there is a link between mental illness and crime. This is documented through decades of public opinion research. Historically, empirical findings have been mixed, with some studies showing no relationship and others showing a small significant correlation. Upon review of the research, it seems that little to no empirical relationship was documented between mental illness and crime or violence until the 1990s. A variety of researchers have since examined this issue in more detail, and most research does support a relationship between mental illness and criminal behavior or violence. Many believe that the results were mixed for so long due to methodological issues with the research that have since been able to be addressed. This section addresses some of the research with regard to the empirical relationship between mental illness and crime, as well as explores some of the theoretical implications of this relationship. James Bonta, Moira Law, and Karl Hanson conducted a meta-analysis that focused on mentally disordered offenders. These are offenders that suffer from a mental illness and that engaged in some type of behavior that triggered the involvement of the criminal justice system. Bonta et al. examined several individual risk factors for both general and violent recidivism among mentally disordered offenders. With regard to general recidivism, they found that psychosis had effect sizes ranging from –.03 to .06, mood disorders had effect sizes that ranged from –.09 to .01, and antisocial personality disorder had effect sizes that ranged from .11 to .19. The results were similar for violent recidivism, where effect sizes for psychosis ranged from –.07 to –.01, mood disorders effect sizes ranged from –.04 to .06, and antisocial personality disorder effect sizes ranged from .13 to .23. While the effects of psychosis and mood disorders were not found to be statistically significant for either general or violent recidivism, antisocial personality disorder was a robust predictor in both

Mental Illness and Crime

categories. This finding is not surprising when examining the literature with regard to individual risk factors for crime. Don Andrews and Bonta consider antisocial personality disorder to be one of the Big Four predictors of criminal behavior. Bonta et al. also compared the results from this study featuring mentally disordered offenders to another study for nondisordered offenders and found that the results were nearly identical. This held for both general and violent recidivism. In 2009, Kevin Douglas, Laura Guy, and Stephen Hart conducted another meta-analysis focusing strictly on the relationship between psychosis and violent behavior. According to Douglas et al., “psychosis is a syndrome found in mental disorders such as schizophrenia, delusional disorders, bipolar mood disorder, and some forms of severe depression. This syndrome comprises symptoms reflecting profound disturbances in thought, perception, and behavior” (p. 681). Douglas et al. were concerned about the relationship between psychosis and violence; they only considered violence—whether it be actual, attempted, or threatened—to another person or persons and not self-harm. This meta-analysis consisted of 885 effect sizes from 204 studies of 166 independent data sets. The results indicated that “psychosis was reliably associated with a 49 percent to 68 percent increased likelihood of violence” (p. 692). The average effect size for psychosis ranged from .12 to .16, which is comparable to the findings of antisocial personality disorder and other individual risk factors in Bonta et al.’s meta-analysis of mentally disordered offenders. While meta-analyses help provide an overall analysis of study results, individual study results are also important to analyze. Eric Silver, Richard Felson, and Matthew Vaneseltine conducted a retrospective longitudinal study examining whether inmates who were formally treated for mental health problems were more likely to be convicted of violent offenses. Particularly, Silver et al. were interested in the relationship between mental illness and conviction of violent crimes such as assault and homicide, which are violent crimes that are typically associated with mental illness. Silver et al. found that the mentally disordered offenders included in the study were more likely to engage in assaultive violence and sexual offenses than in property offenses. This relationship

607

strengthened even more when they examined individuals who had received mental health services both prior to prison and while in prison. However, while there was a stronger relationship hypothesized, it was also suggested that because these individuals had received mental health treatment both prior to and in prison, they may present more severe symptomology than some of the other mentally ill offenders. Silver et al.’s study was an important contribution to the literature because it showed that mentally ill offenders not only are more likely to engage in violent criminal behavior, but also that they are more likely to engage in sexual criminal behavior. A number of research studies have also sought to examine the theoretical relationship between mentally ill offenders and violent acts or criminal behavior. Silver (2006) argues that while there has been a documented relationship between mental illness and criminal behavior, particularly violent behavior, there is a lack of a causal mechanism in place. He asserts that the same criminological theories that apply in the general population can also be examined to understand why mentally ill offenders engage in violent behavior. This thought is empirically supported by Bonta et al.’s meta-analysis which showed that the individual risk factors for both general and violent recidivism were nearly identical for general offenders and mentally disordered offenders. Silver argues that the following theories can provide theoretical support for the relationship between mental illness and crime: Ronald Akers’s social learning theory, Robert Agnew’s general strain theory, Travis Hirschi’s social bond theory, Robert Sampson and John Laub’s age-graded theory of crime, Marcus Felson’s rational choice theory, and Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s social disorganization theory. While Silver argues that the theoretical support for mental illness and crime can be found in these theories, there is little to no empirical testing of these ideas, which he asserts is an area for future research. While there is little traditional criminological theory research with regard to mental illness and crime, this topic has been addressed in the growing criminological pathway research for crime with women. Emily Salisbury and Patricia Van Voorhis conducted a quantitative empirical study examining the pathways to offending for women. They examined three different causal models as they

608

Mental Illness and Crime

relate to prison admission for women on probation. First, they examined the childhood victimization model, which assumes that the effects of child abuse and the onset of mental illness occur prior to the onset of substance abuse. The second model examined was the relational model. Notably, this “model temporally begins with intimate relationship dysfunction, which is hypothesized to lead to reduced levels of self-efficacy and greater likelihood of adult victimization, followed by struggles with depression/anxiety, and substance abuse” (p. 546). Their third model was the social and human capital model, which “investigates how women’s social relationships (with intimate others and family) produce human capital (educational achievement, self-efficacy, and fewer employment/ financial needs) to create opportunities to desist from criminal activity” (p. 547). Using path analysis, Salisbury and Van Voorhis found statistical support for all three models. This study thus highlights the importance of mental illness with regard to women offenders. While it has been linked to criminal offending and violent behavior in a variety of empirical studies, the causal relationship is often unknown. Salisbury and Van Voorhis are able to articulate the importance of mental illness as a causal relationship leading to further criminal behavior, particularly for women. Qualitative research has asserted for quite some time that mental illness was an important trigger of criminal behavior for women; however, there had been very little quantitative data to back this idea up. Salisbury and Van Voorhis were able to demonstrate the theoretical importance of mental illness as it applies to women.

Mental Illness and the Police While contacts with the mentally ill make up 7 to 10 percent of all police-citizen encounters, they take up a significant amount of time. According to James Janik, mentally ill offenders are most likely to be arrested because they are engaging in some type of behavior that is harmful to themselves, which is not necessarily criminal in nature. When mentally ill offenders do engage in criminal activity, it is most likely to be of the misdemeanant nature. Janik notes that they are typically trying to fulfill some type of personal need. However, mentally ill offenders tend to respond very poorly to

the assertion of authority by the police, and this can cause a situation that can quickly escalate, sometimes resulting in physical altercations involving minor offenses. Janik asserts that this easy escalation of situations may be why the mentally ill population is more frequently arrested for these minor offenses compared to individuals who are not mentally ill. In fact, a 2004 study by Allison Redlich found that individuals exhibiting signs of mental illness were 67 times more likely to be arrested compared to offenders without mental illness for similar offenses. Due to the special situations that can arise when dealing with mentally ill offenders, it is often suggested that police officers should receive special training regarding this population. However, in a survey conducted by Martha Deane, Henry Steadman, Randy Borum, Bonita Veysey, and Joseph Morrissey involving 174 police departments in cities with populations of 100,000 or more, over half of the departments (55 percent) had no specialized response for dealing with mentally ill offenders. In a national survey of police departments, Judy Hails and Randy Borum found that training hours dedicated to mentally ill offenders varied from 0 to 41, with the median number of hours being 6.5 (mean = 9.16; mode = 4). However, many departments stated that these hours also included training on substance abuse and dealing with disorderly and/ or unruly suspects. Conversely, while a minimal amount of time is sometimes dedicated to training the entire force, Hails and Borum reported that 32 percent of the departments surveyed had a specialized response for calls that involved mentally ill individuals. Therefore, while some departments may not be providing the 16 hours of training on mentally ill offenders recommended by the Police Executive Research Forum, specialized units have been developed in some, which could account for the lower number of training hours. As one can see, mentally ill offenders pose a significant problem for members of the police force. While they typically are committing minor offenses, they make up a large percentage of our nation’s jail population. There are several possible explanations for this phenomenon, which include the fact that the police are minimally trained to deal with mentally ill offenders. Second, mentally ill offenders often agitate the situation which in turn leads to arrest, and third, many police officers

Mental Illness and Crime

have limited resources within the community or police department available at their disposal. Mentally ill offenders make up a substantial portion of the criminal population; therefore, it is important to understand some of the obstacles that are faced by the police when dealing with this specialized population.

Mental Illness and the Court System Once mentally ill offenders enter the court system, historically there was little that could be done. Court officials were often left to attempt to handle mentally ill offenders with very few disposition alternatives or treatment options. However, since the 1990s there has been an emergence of mental health courts in the United States, which can sometimes be used as a diversion program for mentally ill offenders. In 1997, there were just a handful of mental health courts across the United States. Now, the popularity of these courts as an alternative to dealing with mentally ill offenders is growing rapidly. In 2005 and 2006, several researchers (e.g., Redlich et al. and Steadman et al.) estimated that there were more than 100 mental health courts nationwide. Mental health courts were modeled after drug courts and have several distinctive factors. First, there is a separate court docket for all mentally ill offenders in the mental health court. Second, there will be one judge that will preside over the mental health court from the initial hearing through the final disposition. Third, mental health courts require that there be both prosecutors and defense attorneys that are dedicated to the mental health court as they are both vital components. Fourth, both criminal justice officials and mental health professionals work together to form a nonadversarial team approach. Fifth, participation in mental health courts must be voluntary. The defendant has to agree not only to participate in the mental health court, but also in all necessary treatment and services. Sixth, there must be constant monitoring by all of the officials involved in the mental health court. Finally, in order for mental health courts to work, there must either be dismissal of charges (if a pre-adjudication model is followed) or avoidance of incarceration (if a postadjudication model is followed). This last point is important because it provides a motivator for the individual to complete the mental health court.

609

Mental health courts provide an important way of dealing with mentally ill individuals through the court system in the United States. As previously stated, many mentally ill offenders are charged with minor offenses, and they will continue to engage in these offenses if the mental illness is not treated. Mental health courts provide a way of addressing the reason that many of these offenders are engaging in criminal behavior. They also may mandate treatment in an effective manner. Individuals who participate in mental health courts are encouraged and rewarded for their continued participation in treatment, while still being closely monitored. Although mental health courts are still a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, Marlee Moore and Virginia Aldigé Hiday’s research has indicated that individuals who participate in these courts are less likely to recidivate than offenders who receive traditional penalties. Recidivism statistics have also examined individuals who successfully completed mental health courts compared to those who did not, and findings reveal that both groups have lower recidivism rates, with individuals who successfully completed mental health courts having the lowest rates. Mental health courts seem to be a promising area regarding court diversion for mentally ill offenders. As discussed earlier, mentally ill offenders make up a significant portion of our incarcerated population, and mental health courts provide a potential way to adequately deal with this population in an effective manner. As funding and research increases in this area, it is expected that this will become a more popular way to deal with this special population.

Mental Illness and the Correctional System Once mentally ill offenders make it into the correctional system, there are sometimes few options that are available. This causes both the correctional system and mentally ill offenders to suffer unnecessarily. Mentally ill offenders who end up in the correctional system have few treatment options available to them, and correctional officials are often left with very few management alternatives. Because of the large number of mentally ill individuals who are incarcerated throughout the country, institutions are often overwhelmed with the number of individuals who need services and

610

Mental Illness and Crime

unable to provide adequate services for all of these individuals, according to James and Glaze. While diversion programs, such as mental health courts, help to alleviate the burden on the correctional system, they are still relatively new in nature and limited in availability. However, while options in the correctional field may be limited, there are a number of court cases that have helped establish the right to treatment for mentally ill offenders. In 1977, Bowring v. Godwin asserted that prisoners’ right to treatment for physical ailments also included psychiatric conditions. In 1980 this was further extended by Ruiz v. Estelle, which established that prisons must meet minimal standards of mental health care for all prison inmates. However, although the Supreme Court has asserted that minimum standards of care must be established for prison inmates, this does not always extend to individuals who are on parole or probation. Various research studies have found that mentally ill offenders have a much higher rate of recidivism following release from prison when compared to non-mentally ill offenders, especially within the first year. Mentally ill offenders are also significantly more likely to be hospitalized within the first year following release from prison. Because of high recidivism rates among mentally ill offenders, correctional officials are faced with unique challenges. While services may be mandated within prison (although minimal in nature), they are not mandated once the inmate is released. Parole supervision can help make sure that individuals are required to continue with mental health treatment through their parole rules and regulations; however, according to Arthur Lurigio, parolees often face unique challenges when trying to gain access to mental health treatment. Many mental health treatment facilities are hesitant to accept individuals who have previously been incarcerated and may deny them treatment. In addition, there is a large presence of co-morbidity within mental health individuals in the criminal justice system. That is, many offenders not only have mental health issues but also have substance abuse issues—a fact that may disqualify many of them from available mental health treatment. Because of the variety of issues that mentally ill inmates are subject to upon release, detailed re-entry plans are crucial to their continued success in the community, according to Nancy Wolff et al. When

reentry programs are successfully put into place, this ensures continued and stable treatment for the mentally ill offender that is crucial with regard to minimizing the potential for relapse. Along with minimizing the potential for relapse, the potential for recidivism also decreases. The Criminal Justice/ Mental Health Consensus Project Report highlights the importance for reentry plans for all mentally ill offenders. The Report calls for the inclusion of an “individualized written pre-release plan, provision of a temporary supply of medications for those inmates receiving medication, referrals and linkages to appropriate community mental health providers, and assistance in obtaining necessary financial benefits and housing” (Wolff et al., 2005, p. 25). This reentry plan helps to maximize the success of mentally ill offenders in the community. Mentally ill individuals in the correctional system are subject to special challenges. While some level of care is mandated in prisons, it is often difficult to enforce in the community. Many of these individuals also face special challenges, especially related to co-morbidity. Although the correctional system is much more likely to have individuals trained to deal with mentally ill offenders, they are still limited by their potential resources. For this reason and many more, it is imperative to have detailed reentry plans for mentally ill offenders prior to release.

Conclusion This entry has provided a brief overview of the empirical research connecting mental illness to crime and how mentally ill offenders affect each part of the criminal justice system. As this entry has demonstrated, there is an empirical relationship between mental illness and crime, particularly violent crime. This relationship is important not only from an empirical standpoint but also from a theoretical standpoint. While the idea of how the relationship between mental illness and crime can be explained through many of our current criminological theories is still being examined, there has been a documented theoretical relationship between mental illness and future criminal activity with women. Although female inmates may make up a small part of the criminal justice population, as the statistics indicate, mental illness is extremely prevalent within this population.

Mental Illness and Crime

Mentally ill offenders make up a large part of the criminal justice population. However, the criminal justice system is still struggling with how to deal with this population. Typically, police officers receive little training with regard to mentally ill offenders, and this often leads to higher arrest rates for minor offenses. Once individuals enter the court system, there is often little that the court system can offer, unless there are diversion programs present. The development of mental health courts across the United States has helped to offer more successful alternatives for dealing with mentally ill offenders. However, the problems that mentally ill offenders face also continue into the correctional system. Offenders must receive a minimum level of treatment in prison, but it is often difficult for them to secure treatment services in the community. These challenges are areas that the criminal justice system will have to continue to work on as the understanding of the mentally ill population grows. However, what is important to remember is that this specialized population constitutes a large part of the criminal justice population. Therefore, it is imperative that we find successful ways of dealing with these offenders throughout all the stages of the criminal justice system. Catherine M. Arnold See also Alcohol and Violence; Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory; Cognitive Theories of Crime; Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime; Schizophrenia and Crime

References and Further Readings Andrews, D. A., & Bonta, J. (2003). The psychology of criminal conduct (3rd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Bonta, J., Law, M., & Hanson, K. (1998). The prediction of criminal and violent recidivism among mentally disordered offenders: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 123, 123–142. Deane, M. W., Steadman, H. J., Borum, R., Veysey, B. M., & Morrissey, J. P. (1999). Emerging partnerships between mental health and law enforcement. Psychiatric Services, 50, 99–101. Douglas, K. S., Guy, L. S., & Hart, S. D. (2009). Psychosis as a risk factor for violence to others: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 679–706.

611

Hails, J., & Borum, R. (2003). Police training and specialized approaches to respond to people with mental illness. Crime and Delinquency, 49, 52–61. James, D. J., & Glaze, L. E. (2006). Mental health problems of prison and jail inmates. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. Janik, J. (1992). Dealing with mentally ill offenders. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 61(7), 22–26. Lovell, D., Gagliardi, G. J., & Peterson, P. D. (2002). Recidivism and use of services among persons with mental illness after release from prison. Psychiatric Services, 53, 1290–1296. Lurigio, A. J. (2001). Effective services for parolees with mental illnesses. Crime and Delinquency, 47, 446–461. Moore, M. E., & Hiday, V. A. (2006). Mental health court outcomes: A comparison of re-arrest and re-arrest severity between mental health court and traditional court participants. Law and Human Behavior, 30, 659–674. Police Executive Research Forum. (1997). The police response to people with mental illness: Trainers guide. Washington, DC: Author. Redlich, A. (2004). Mental illness, police interrogations, and the potential for false confession. Psychiatric Services, 55, 19–21. Redlich, A. D., Steadman, H. J., Monahan, J., Robbins, P. C., & Petrila, J. (2006). Patterns of practice in mental health courts: A national survey. Law and Human Behavior, 30, 347–362. Salisbury, E. J., & Van Voorhis, P. (2009). Gendered pathways: A quantitative investigation of women probationers’ paths to incarceration. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 36, 541–566. Silver, E. (2006). Understanding the relationship between mental disorder and violence: The need for a criminological perspective. Law and Human Behavior, 30, 685–706. Silver, E., Felson, R. B., & Vaneseltine, M. (2008). The relationship between mental health problems and violence among criminal offenders. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 35, 405–426. Steadman, H. J., Redlich, A. D., Griffin, P., Petrila, J., & Monahan, J. (2005). From referral to disposition: Case processing in seven mental health courts. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 23, 215–226. Wells, W., & Schafer, J. A. (2006). Officer perceptions of police responses to persons with a mental illness. Policing, 29, 578–601. Wolff, N., Bjerklie, J. R., & Maschi, T. (2005). Reentry planning for mentally disordered inmates: A social investment perspective. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 41, 21–42.

612

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie Robert K. Merton was one of the most distinguished and influential sociologists of the 20th century. Throughout his career, he was a leading figure in the sociology of science, and he made substantial contributions to general sociological theory by developing the paradigm of structural analysis. In the field of criminology, Merton is best known for advancing and popularizing the anomie perspective on crime. This perspective highlights the ways in which the normal features of the social organization of American society ironically contribute to high levels of crime and other forms of deviant behavior by producing anomie, a breakdown in the culture. This anomie or cultural breakdown is characterized by a very strong emphasis on the importance of success goals (especially monetary success) and a comparatively weak emphasis on the importance of using the normatively approved means to achieve these goals. Merton further argues that such a strain toward anomie arises when the culture encourages virtually everyone to aspire to lofty goals, while those located at the lower ends of the class hierarchy have limited access to the legitimate means for success. People in such circumstances experience pressures to “innovate”—that is, to substitute technically expedient but often illegal means in the pursuit of their goals. Merton introduced his initial formulation of the anomie perspective in a brief article titled “Social Structure and Anomie,” which was published in the American Sociological Review in 1938. He was a little-known instructor at Harvard University at the time, and his article did not create much of a stir at first. This would change dramatically. Over the course of subsequent decades, Merton’s arguments as introduced in the initial article and as subsequently elaborated, most significantly in his book Social Theory and Social Structure, have inspired an extraordinary volume of empirical studies on crime and deviance, as well as numerous theoretical extensions, exegeses, and critiques. Recently Robert Agnew has attempted to build on Merton’s work by explicating more fully the ways in which social

psychological experiences of “strain” link adverse social conditions with crime and delinquency, while Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld have highlighted the role of imbalances among major social institutions (economy, family, the polity) in generating anomie. In addition, Merton’s ideas about the sociological causes of crime and delinquency have had a profound influence well beyond the academic community. His ideas have informed major policy initiatives that seek to prevent crime by enhancing job opportunities and by providing social services, such as those associated with the Great Society in the 1960s. Moreover, much contemporary discourse about the role inequality of opportunity as a cause of crime continues to be rooted in insights that are traceable to “Social Structure and Anomie.”

Social Structure and Anomie and Sociological Theory Merton’s paradigm of social structure and anomie— commonly referred to by Merton and scholars generally by its acronym, SS&A—has a deceptive simplicity surrounding it. As the information scientist Eugene Garfield has observed, much of Merton’s work seems “so transparently true that one can’t imagine why no one else has bothered to point it out” (quoted in Kaufman, 2003). This quality of Merton’s scholarship is attributable in large measure to his mastery of the English language. Merton had the ability to write clear, engaging prose, free of “opaque,” “confusing,” and “pompous jargon” (Holton, 2004, p. 515). As a result, core elements of his theorizing are easily discerned by the general reader, and they can be summarized quite succinctly, as presented above. However, SS&A can be read at multiple levels. At one level, Merton offers a concise, incisive description of American culture and suggests a few rather straightforward propositions about the relationship between social class position and crime. At a deeper level, SS&A represents an attempt to apply “general theorizing in sociology” to the “specialized theorizing in criminology” (Merton, 1997, p. 518). Indeed, the various themes developed in SS&A cohere into a highly sophisticated sociological analysis of the interconnections between the social organization of society and levels of crime and other forms of deviant behavior, and of the

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

ways individuals make choices among socially structured alternatives. To appreciate Merton’s arguments, it is useful to locate his work in intellectual context. SS&A falls within the more general tradition associated with a founding figure in sociology—Émile Durkheim—who introduced the concept of “anomie” to the sociological community, most prominently in his analyses of suicide. Durkheim assumed that humans have no natural limits on their desires. As a result, people cannot possibly be satisfied in the absence of some type of external restraint. Social norms provide this external restraint by circumscribing the goals that can be legitimately aspired to. Levels of suicide are likely to increase when norms weaken and fail to fulfill this critical function, a condition which Durkheim referred to as anomie. Merton appropriates Durkheim’s concept of anomie, reinterprets its meaning somewhat, and places it prominently in the title of his essay. Merton also shares an overarching objective that motivated much of Durkheim’s theorizing. Merton intends to develop a distinctively sociological explanation for crime and deviance to serve as an alternative to psychological, and particularly Freudian, explanations that emphasize instinctual impulses and that were popular at the time. In so doing, Merton is essentially making the case for sociology as a scientific discipline that offers a unique perspective on human behavior. The questions addressed in SS&A are thus quintessentially sociological in nature. In Merton’s words, For whatever the role of biological impulses, there still remains the further question of why it is that the frequency of deviant behavior varies within different social structures and how it happens that the deviations have different shapes and patterns in different social structures. . . . Our perspective is sociological. We look at variations in the rates of deviant behavior, not at its incidence. (1968, pp. 185–186)

Given the nature of the questions under examination, Merton quite naturally turns to sociological concepts to look for the answers. He adopts the general approach in sociology referred to as structural/functionalism and conceptualizes society in terms of a social system. According to this approach, any social system can be described with reference

613

to two fundamental properties: its culture (or culture structure) and its social structure. Merton does not provide rigorous definitions of either culture structure or social structure in SS&A, but he clarifies their meaning while formulating his explanation for deviant behavior. The key elements of the culture structure are the prescribed goals (or ends) of action and the normatively approved (or institutionalized) means for realizing these goals. The other component of social organization—social structure—refers to patterned social relationships. To illustrate the application of these basic conceptual tools of sociology to the explanation of deviant behavior, Merton focuses his analytic lens on one particular social system—the social system prevalent in the United States in the 1930s. The distinguishing feature of this social system, according to Merton, is malintegration—intrinsic tensions between core features of the system. Such malintegration is manifested in two ways: (1) between the main components of the culture and (2) between the culture and the social structure. With respect to the culture, the priority awarded to goals and means is out of balance. The cultural emphasis on the pursuit of goals is exceptionally strong, especially the emphasis on the goal of monetary success. Comparatively less emphasis is placed on the importance of using the institutionalized means to realize these goals. Instead, societal members tend to be governed mainly by “efficiency” norms in the selection of means. People are prone to use whatever means are technically expedient in striving to reach their goals, regardless of whether these means are socially approved of or not. These twin features of culture—the strong emphasis on monetary success goals and the weak emphasis on normative means—are part of the dominant cultural ethos of the society; they are at the heart of the American Dream. Moreover, for Merton (1964, p. 226), the breakdown in the culture associated with the American Dream constitutes the essence of anomie or normlessness: “when a high degree of anomie has set in, the rules once governing conduct have lost their savor and their force.” The second sense in which the social system in the United States exhibits malintegration involves the interrelationships between culture and social structure. Merton underscores the extent to which the cultural goals in American society are universalistic;

614

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

they apply to everyone. However, social structure distributes access to the normatively approved means differentially. This is where social class comes into the picture. Opportunities to reach the cultural success goals through legitimate means vary by class position. Specifically, those in the lower classes are not awarded the same chances as those in the higher classes to pursue success in the acceptable ways. It is precisely this disjuncture between features of social structure (inequality of opportunity rooted in the class system) and elements of culture (universal success goals) that undermines the integrity of the culture and leads to anomie. To quote Merton, the social structure strains the cultural values, making action in accord with them readily possible for those occupying certain statuses within the society and difficult or impossible for others. The social structure acts as a barrier or as an open door to the acting out of cultural mandates. When the cultural and the social structure are malintegrated, the first calling for behavior and attitudes which the second precludes, there is a strain toward the breakdown of norms, toward normlessness. (1968, pp. 216–217)

Having laid out his analysis of how features of the organization of society can create strains toward anomie, Merton proceeds to consider the ways in which individual actors might respond to their social environment. He sets forth the logical possibilities in the form of a typology of modes of individual adaptation. The respective types are determined by the actor’s acceptance of (signified by +) or rejection of (signified by –) the cultural goals and institutionalized means. His types include conformity (+ +), innovation (+ –), ritualism (– +), retreatism (– –), and rebellion (+/– +/–). The most common mode of adaptation is that of conformity. The actor accepts both the cultural goals and the institutionalized means for pursuing these goals despite any malintegration of the society. Merton maintains that this type of adaptation is actually quite common. If it were not, society would cease to exist in any meaningful sense. The second mode of adaptation is innovation. The innovator aspires to the culturally prescribed goals, especially the goal of accumulating wealth, but is willing to use whatever means are expedient to realize these goals. The applicability of this mode of

adaptation to criminal behavior is readily apparent, given that illegal means (e.g., robbery, theft, drug dealing) may be highly expedient. In the third mode of adaptation, ritualism, the actor abandons the cultural goals but nevertheless continues to adhere to the institutionalized means, essentially “going through the motions.” An example would be the low-level bureaucrat who has given up on any chance to rise through the ranks but who nevertheless compulsively follows the rules of the workplace. The retreatist mode of adaptation, in contrast, entails the rejection of both the goals and the institutionalized means. The person adapting in this fashion essentially drops out of society. Drug abuse, alcoholism, and vagrancy are examples of retreatism. Finally, the adaptation of rebellion involves not only rejecting the goals and means of the existing social order but also replacing them with a new set of goals and means. Rebellion constitutes an effort to change the cultural and social structures of society rather than to accommodate to them. Merton indicates that the likelihood that someone will adapt in a designated way is socially structured, although his account of the linkages is not always very clear. His most explicit and plausible arguments, and those that have generated the most interest in criminology, pertain to innovation. Given that members of the lower classes are confronted most directly with the harsh realities of inequality of opportunity, it is reasonable to anticipate that they will be especially prone to turn to illegitimate means (i.e., to innovate) as they pursue the common cultural goal of monetary success and accompanying high social status. These arguments further imply that rates of criminal behavior should tend to vary inversely with social class position. In sum, Merton uses the conceptual building blocks of general sociological theory to formulate an original and provocative explanation for the social structuring of crime and other forms of deviant behavior. His explanation is radically sociological in the sense that it is cast in terms of the basic properties of social systems and their interconnections rather than individual propensities. High rates of deviant behavior can be traced to anomie, a cultural imbalance in the emphasis on goals versus means. This cultural imbalance is itself generated by a system disjuncture—an intrinsic incompatibility between goals that are universalistic and inequality in the opportunity to realize

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

these goals. In addition, Merton develops the sociological insight that while people are capable of adapting in varying ways to the social environment, they do so by choosing among socially structured alternatives. Criminal behavior understood as innovation is thus a perfectly understandable (if undesirable) response for those who occupy positions in the social structure where the opportunities to use the legitimate means are limited. The rates of crime should accordingly be comparatively high among the disadvantaged social classes.

Subcultural Extensions SS&A explains how normal features of the social structure can exert pressures toward crime and other forms of deviant behavior, and the accompanying typology of the modes of individual adaptation sets forth a logically coherent and concise schema for describing possible responses. However, as scholars such as Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young have noted, SS&A does not offer a clear or compelling account of the determinants of specific adaptations. For example, assuming comparable exposure to a strain toward anomie, why might people choose the retreatist rather than the ritualist adaptation? There is also a curious sense in which the adaptation to structural pressures is depicted in highly individualistic terms in SS&A, despite Merton’s commitment to advancing a sociological explanation for deviant behavior. As Marshall Clinard has observed, it is almost as if each individual confronts and responds to structural pressures in isolation. Two particularly noteworthy efforts to overcome this limitation of SS&A appeared in the mid1950s and in 1960—Albert Cohen’s Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. Both works synthesize elements of Merton’s anomie perspective with insights about subcultural dynamics. In addition, both scholarly developments grew out of personal contacts with Merton, reflecting what Merton (1997) called their shared “cognitive microenvironments.” Cohen had been exposed to lectures on SS&A when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in a course taught by Merton. Cloward wrote his doctoral dissertation under Merton’s direction at Columbia.

615

As indicated in the title of his work, Cohen’s primary analytic focus is on explaining juvenile delinquency. He begins with a basic “psychogenic” assumption about motivation, namely, that “all human action—not delinquency alone—is an ongoing series of efforts to solve problems” (p. 50). Cohen further reasons that problems are not distributed randomly. Instead, persons similarly located in the social class system find themselves confronting similar problems. When such persons have effective interaction with others, they tend to develop subcultures as solutions to their shared problems. Cohen proposes that members of the working class, and especially working-class boys, confront a basic status problem in American society. The dominant values in the culture are those of the middle class, and these are the values that govern the prevailing standards for achievement. In Cohen’s words, all youths are judged according to middle-class “measuring rods.” Yet working-class boys tend not to fare very well when these measuring rods are applied to them. Following in the spirit of SS&A, Cohen accepts the basic premise that class position determines opportunities. The middle-class home is simply better equipped to train the child to compete for status according to the prevailing standards (p. 94). Cohen outlines several possible subcultural solutions, but the most important one for understanding juvenile delinquency is the delinquent subculture. The delinquent subculture solves the status problem that is experienced by working-class boys when they are judged by middle-class measuring rods by “providing criteria of status which these children can meet” (p. 121, emphasis in the original). These standards of status in the delinquent subculture bear an ironic relationship to middle-class standards—they essentially represent an inversion of middle-class values. “The delinquent conduct is right, by the standards of [the] subculture, precisely because it is wrong by the norms of the larger culture” (p. 28, emphasis in the original). Drawing loosely on psychoanalytic theory, Cohen suggests that the delinquent subculture can thus be understood as a collective reaction formation on the part of working-class boys. These youths have been socialized into middle-class values, and yet they seek to escape the status problems that would result were they to acknowledge

616

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

the legitimacy of these values by embracing a value system that seems to affirm the opposite. These complex socio-psychological and subcultural dynamics help makes sense out of the peculiar quality of much delinquent activity which, according to Cohen, is “non-utilitarian, malicious, and negativistic” in character rather than rational and goal directed (p. 25). The other classic subcultural extension of SS&A is Cloward and Ohlin’s differential opportunity theory, which is also directed toward explaining juvenile delinquency. Following in the spirit of Cohen, the authors take as their point of departure the premise that delinquency is best understood as a collective, subcultural solution to shared problems. They also remain faithful to the general logic of SS&A by accepting the basic assumption that in American society, members of the lower classes are confronted with structural barriers to achieving the cultural goals of success. The pressures for delinquent behavior can ultimately be traced to problems of adjustment resulting from these unequal opportunities associated with social class position. Cloward and Ohlin’s most distinctive contribution is to expand the conceptualization of opportunity structures by incorporating and building on insights associated with the classic Chicago School in criminology. Whereas Merton directs attention to lack of access to opportunities for achievement in the realm of legitimate activities, Cloward and Ohlin observe that the performance of illegitimate acts also depends on opportunities. They propose that “each individual occupies a position in both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures” (p. 150). The collective, subcultural responses to problems of adjustment will accordingly reflect the illegitimate opportunities that are available in the social environment. Cloward and Ohlin identify three common types of delinquent subcultures that are likely to emerge in disadvantaged areas of large cities: a criminal subculture, a conflict subculture, and a retreatist subculture. The criminal subculture is oriented toward criminal values and the pursuit of material gain through illegal means. The conflict subculture regards the use of violence as the currency of respect and status. The retreatist subculture is characterized by withdrawal from society through the consumption of drugs. The likelihood

that the respective subcultures will emerge and persist depends on the available learning and performance structures in the social environment— that is, on the illegitimate as well as the legitimate opportunity structures.

Empirical Assessments and Critiques The anomie perspective as represented in SS&A and in the subcultural extensions stimulated a large volume of research in the middle decades of the 20th century. The perspective was applied to a variety of forms of deviant behavior, including not only crime and delinquency but also mental disorders, drug addiction, and alcoholism. Some researchers attempted to develop measures of anomie based on indicators of social structural conditions, whereas others directed their efforts to measuring the subjective experience of being in environments with high levels of anomie (this subjective condition was often referred to as anomia). The results of this research failed to support anomie theory in many instances which, combined with theoretical critiques, led to its gradual decline in influence through the 1970s and early 1980s. The perspective has subsequently enjoyed a reversal in fortunes, as scholars have responded to and challenged earlier criticisms. With respect to theoretical concerns, critics raised questions about the adequacy of Merton’s basic conceptual framework and the plausibility of underlying assumptions. Some, such as Edwin Lemert, expressed skepticism that a clear line can be drawn between cultural and social structure in concrete analyses of social phenomena, while others, such as Ruth Rosner Kornhauser, questioned the view that there is in fact a value consensus in American society about the importance of the goal of monetary success. Scholars sympathetic to Merton’s approach responded to the latter of these criticisms of SS&A by arguing that the critique is based on an oversimplified rendering of its thesis. Merton does not propose that monetary success is the only success goal. Rather, the proposition at the heart of SS&A is that monetary success enjoys a position of special prominence in the hierarchy of goals in the United States. With respect to empirical critiques, a good deal of research focused on the commonly derived prediction of an inverse relationship between social

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

class and crime. Interestingly, Merton himself rejected the notion that the validity of his theory depended on an inverse relationship between social class and crime, as he reported in a personal interview with Francis Cullen and Steven Messner. Merton observed that the paradigm of SS&A could explain fraud among scientists who, blocked from much-cherished professional status, sought to innovate by publishing fabricated data. Still, because of his emphasis on differential access to success goals across the class structure, Merton’s theory was seen as predicting high rates of crime and deviance among the disadvantaged. In this regard, an association between neighborhood levels of disadvantage and officially recorded rates of crime and delinquency had been well documented in the early decades of the 20th century by researchers in the Chicago School. The validity of this relationship, however, was questioned in the 1950s as criminologists began to move away from the use of official crime data in favor of the newly developed self-report methodology. In self-report studies, samples of respondents, usually juveniles, are presented with questionnaire items asking about involvement in various forms of criminal and delinquent behavior. Analyses based on self-reported offending typically detected little or no relationship with social class. This led Charles Tittle et al. to conclude in an influential study that the widely held view that crime and delinquency are concentrated in the lower classes is a “myth.” Other researchers urged caution in dismissing a class/crime relationship on conceptual and methodological grounds. One of the limitations of selfreport studies is that they typically measure relatively minor forms of offending, especially selfreport studies that are focused on juvenile delinquency. The domain of behavior in these studies thus differs from that represented in the official crime statistics, which record very serious offenses (along with some relatively minor offenses). Research that encompassed the more serious forms of illegal behavior in the measurement of selfreported offending tended to find relationships between social class and crime that were more similar to those reported in studies based on official data. A second issue involved the nature of the relationship between social class and crime. Some researchers proposed that high levels of offending

617

are likely to be observed only among those at the very bottom of the social class hierarchy, and if so, standard socioeconomic status measures that cover the entire range of social classes might fail to detect much of an association because they do not focus on the strategic population. Studies using measures that differentiate the highly disadvantaged from others revealed evidence consistent with the expected association between class and offending. As noted by J. Robert Lilly et al., critics of the efforts to extend SS&A by incorporating subcultural dynamics have questioned the adequacy of the description of delinquent subcultures. Cohen’s claim that the delinquent subculture is oriented toward “non-utilitarian, malicious, and negativistic” activities was criticized as being an exaggerated portrayal. While some delinquent activity reflects these qualities, much delinquency is in fact utilitarian and goal directed. Similarly, Cloward and Ohlin’s typology of criminal, conflict, and retreatist subcultures was faulted for implying a degree of specialization that is at odds with reality. Delinquents are typically much more versatile, engaging in activities that cut across the respective subcultural types. As a result of these criticisms, few contemporary criminologists regard the typologies of Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin as faithful descriptions of most delinquent gangs, although there is still considerable appreciation for their accounts of the social processes underlying the formation and persistence of youth subcultures. A considerable body of literature also accumulated on a social psychological implication derived from SS&A. Researchers formulated an analytic framework to assess strain theory, which was considered to be the individual-level analogue to the social structural arguments advanced by Merton. The principal hypothesis examined was that a perceived discrepancy between aspirations and expectations should be related to levels of offending. More specifically, individuals who aspire to lofty goals but who expect that actual achievements will fall short of these goals should experience strain and exhibit a high degree of criminal and delinquent involvement. Numerous studies implemented this analytic strategy, with results that were often interpreted as being non-supportive of strain theory. However, other researchers identified methodological limitations of these studies and offered more favorable assessments of the accumulated evidence.

618

Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

Legacy The renewed interest in the anomie perspective in the late 1980s and early 1990s has led to concerted efforts to refine and elaborate key insights originally put forth in SS&A. At the social psychological level, Robert Agnew has formulated a general strain theory, which enumerates the wide range of sources of strain and identifies conditions that affect the expression of strain in criminal or noncriminal ways. At the macro-level, Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld have proposed an institutionalanomie theory, which postulates that anomie and high rates of crime are likely when the institutional structure of society is out of balance, specifically, when the economy tends to take priority over noneconomic institutions. These theories are still relatively young and their impact on criminology remains to be determined, but they have stimulated a growing body of empirical research and commentary. In addition, recent efforts to conduct rigorous assessments of Merton’s “classic” version of anomie have provided some suggestive support. Reflecting on the legacy of SS&A in the field of criminology, one cannot help but be impressed by its adaptability and resiliency. Merton often referred to the “evolving” character of SS&A, and the perspective has indeed evolved appreciably over time. Merton himself continued to revise and refine his arguments in response to critical commentary. Others sympathetic to his approach to understanding crime and to sociological theorizing more generally have picked up the baton as well. To be sure, SS&A has been subjected to intense scrutiny and legitimate criticism over the years. Moreover, many contemporary criminologists disagree with specific arguments put forth by Merton. It is nevertheless fair to say that the core insights of SS&A have inspired the sociological imagination of generations of scholars, and this distinctive approach to explaining crime and other forms of deviant behavior continues to enjoy a “living presence” in the discipline at the onset of the 21st century. Steven F. Messner See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and

Suicide; Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (2006). General strain theory: Recent developments and directions for further research. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 101–123). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Akers, R., & Sellers, S. S. (2004). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application (4th ed.). Los Angeles: Roxbury. Baumer, E. P., & Gustafson, R. (2007). Social organization and instrumental crime: Assessing the empirical validity of classic and contemporary anomie theories. Criminology, 45, 617–663. Burton, V. S., Jr., & Cullen, F. T. (1992). The empirical status of strain theory. Journal of Crime and Justice, 15(2), 1–30. Clinard, M. B. (1964). The theoretical implications of anomie and deviant behavior. In M. B. Clinard (Ed.), Anomie and deviant behavior (pp. 1–56). New York: Free Press. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. New York: Free Press. Cullen, F. T., & Messner, S. F. (2007). The making of criminology revisited: An oral history of Merton’s anomie paradigm. Theoretical Criminology, 11, 5–37. Durkehim, É. (1966 [1897]). Suicide: A study in sociology. New York: Free Press. Holton, G. (2004). Robert K. Merton. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 148, 506–517. Kaufman, M. T. (2003, February 23). Robert K. Merton, versatile sociologist and father of the focus group, dies at 92. The New York Times. Retrieved October 22, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/ nyregion/robert-k-merton-versatile-sociologist-andfather-of-the-focus-group-dies-at-92.html ?pagewanted=1 Kornhauser, R. R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency: An appraisal of analytic models. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lemert, E. M. (1964). Social structure, social control, and deviation. In M. B. Clinard (Ed.), Anomie and deviant behavior (pp. 57–97). New York: Free Press.

Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime Lilly, J. R., Cullen, F. T., & Ball, R. A. (2007). Criminological theory: Context and consequences (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Merton, R. K. (1964). Anomie, anomia, and social interaction: Contexts of deviant behavior. In M. B. Clinard (Ed.), Anomie and deviant behavior (pp. 213–242). New York: Free Press. Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure. New York: Free Press. Merton, R. K. (1997). On the evolving synthesis of differential association and anomie theory: A perspective from the sociology of science. Criminology, 35, 517–525. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2006). The present and future of institutional-anomie theory. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 127–148). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2007). Crime and the American dream (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Stinchcombe, A. L. (1975). Merton’s theory of social structure. In L. A. Coser (Ed.), The idea of social structure: Papers in honor of Robert K. Merton (pp. 11–33). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. New York: Harper & Row. Tittle, C. R., Villemez. W. J., & Smith, D. A. (1978). The myth of social class and criminality: An empirical assessment of the evidence. American Sociological Review, 43, 643–656.

Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime Gender is one of the most stable and pronounced demographic associations with criminality. Men commit the vast majority of most crimes, especially serious crimes. In hindsight, one may wonder why a book placing men’s crimes and criminality in the context of their lives as men did not appear until 1993. After all, much criminology was done with all-male samples by male researchers. Yet the gendered (or sexed) nature of crime was taken for granted. While some early scholars examined social

619

and cultural structures that would be linked to masculinities concerns by later researchers (e.g., Walter Miller’s focal concerns or Albert Cohen’s status frustration), at the time they were presented in an a-gendered fashion. As feminist criminology developed in the 1970s, the problem of women’s and girls’ offending became central for the first time. Early feminist criminologists attacked the discipline as either ignoring the existence of female crime and criminality or dismissing it in stereotypical ways. It took seriously a project of measuring and explaining crimes by women and girls, developing into a theoretically rich and empirically diverse subfield. Women’s crime and justice experiences were typically explained by placing women’s lived experiences in a gendered context. The next logical step was the application of gender theory to men’s lives and offending.

Masculinities and Crime In Masculinities and Crime, James Messerschmidt presents a solid review and critique of existing feminist and criminological theory. He not only takes criminology to task for failing to adequately deal with issues of gender, but he also critiques existing feminist theories for their failures as well (both in and out of a criminological context). He offers up as an alternative to these problematic interpretations his own theory of structured action (later a book on its own). Structured action is predicated on two central critiques presented in the book, as well as from Messerschmidt’s prior book, Capitalism, Patriarchy and Crime. The first emphasis is on what is now often referred to as intersectionality: the idea that “it is necessary to make relevant theoretical links among class, gender and race without surrendering to some type of separate systems approach” (1993, p. 62, emphasis added). Clearly all three of these aspects of social structure influence a person’s experiences and behavior. But to look only at one and exclude the others means that essential information is missed. Socialist feminism downplayed race and gender, looking to class systems to explain women’s experiences of inequity. Radical feminism, with its sole focus on patriarchy, missed how class systems influence gender inequity. Similarly, emergent black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks criticized feminism for ignoring race and ethnicity.

620

Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime

Structured action theory shows that while each of these elements may vary independently of each other, they work together to create a social context in which social actors perceive, interpret, and project their own actions and the actions of others. All three are important elements in their own right but do not come together without intermixing their effects. The second foundation is the realization that these structures arise and are replicated through social actors and their actions. This idea comes from sociological symbolic interactionism. For much of the 20th century, social theory had trouble linking two of its main objects of study. At the macro level, sociologists explored how social forces shaped the experiences of various groups in society. Others examined individual-level experiences of social actors and how people interacted with their most immediate social environments and stimuli to produce behavior. Decision making and perception were key foci of this social psychology. Yet, conceptually, these two realms of study were rarely linked together to show how these macro-level forces were working on individual-level perceptions and actions. A strain of sociological thought began developing in the 1960s and 1970s, and was more fully realized in the 1980s and 1990s (in part, due to structured action theory), that resolved this problem by suggesting that individuals cannot exist outside of social structure and social structure does not exist without its (re)creation as embodied in behavior. As Messer­schmidt puts it, “social actors maintain and change social structures within any particular interaction, and those social structures simultaneously enable and constrain social action” (1993, p. 63). Conceptually, action and structure are fused together in a dialectical dance of crossinfluence. Macro-level forces and trends shape the environments that social actors live in and gain information and other inputs from. Such experiences are internalized and influenced by an individual’s specific experiences and worldview. From there, the person acts. Acting in a given way creates patterns of behavior that shape an environment, which is then perceived by other social actors, shaping their behavior, and so on. In exploring this set of postulates, Messerschmidt brings together numerous strands of work done within symbolic interactionism generally and feminist studies specifically. He draws heavily upon the work of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkle,

establishing the mutually reinforcing nature of structure and action. He also explicitly draws on the work of Candace West and others on gender performance. Simply, West and numerous colleagues over the years have demonstrated that individuals enact gender performances based upon their perceptions of audience expectations. As a person is socialized into a set of gender expectations, they enact (or do not) those scripts when in a social situation. This is doing gender—the process of conforming one’s behavior to a set of specific gender expectations. This view of gendered behavior and relations breaks us conceptually out of the narrow confines of sex role theory (especially the representation of gender as two opposite set of “choices” for behavior). A lifetime of lived experiences composes an individual’s gender scripts, whose enactment will vary in various interactions based upon specific audience expectations. Establishing the performative nature of gender is essential to understanding the link between masculinities and crime. The result of this theoretical situation is the realization that “crime by men is a form of social practice invoked as a resource, when other resources are unavailable, for accomplishing masculinity” (1993, p. 85). To understand male crime one must place that crime commission in the broader context of social life and capital attainment. Men do crime to do masculinity. The enactment of crime becomes a way for men to “do gender.” For example, responding to a perceived threat or slight with violence (or even the threat thereof) is a way for men to demonstrate independence, control, and toughness, all key elements of masculinities in most societies. Further, Messerschmitt points out, that the very root of these conflicts often involves masculinity and masculine capital. Terming these interactions “masculinity challenges” in later work, Messerschmidt argues that the reason slights and threats require response is the tentative nature of masculinity and masculine reputations. While femininity is often assumed or bestowed upon women, men have to earn their masculinity in the eyes of others. If presented with a social interaction potentially involving the loss of face (which is almost any interaction), men may find that they have to guard their reputations from others. The core of conflicts are between social actors who are both trying to gain and maintain masculine capital. Violence is a way to do masculinity as it simultaneously

Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime

(1) establishes one’s ability to draw upon those assets of human bodies and behavior that are typically regarded as masculine (i.e., toughness, strength, courage); (2) prevents one from losing “maleness” in the eyes of one’s peers, which would occur if a challenge were ignored; and (3) establishes dominance and power over the other party in the conflict, if successful, through victory. Such an explanation has been frequently used to discuss the gender gap in lethal and non-lethal violence. Men are more likely than women to get into violent disputes and men’s disputes (compared with women’s) are more likely to cause serious injury or death to combatants. This is a major contribution to understanding the interlinkage of masculinity and crime. However, there is one more theoretical layer to Messerschmidt’s structured action theory. There is no monolithic masculinity or femininity— there is no single way to do masculinity or to do femininity. Men’s behavioral performances and demands vary within various structural locations. To explain this variation, Messerschmidt calls on the work of R. W. Connell on hegemony and variations of masculinity. Conceptualizing gender roles and relations as being centrally about power, Connell notes that gender positions are defined not only by what they are but also in opposition to what they are not. Masculinity is defined by femininity and vice versa. Further, within any given social context, there will be plural masculinities and femininities. Connell identifies hegemonic masculinity as the most desired and most empowered form of masculinity within a social milieu. Hegemonic masculinity defines itself in relation to femininities but also in relation to subordinate masculinities. Subordinate masculinities are those ways of being male that are denigrated and unvalued within a social context. The base realization here is that men not only oppress women to maintain their positions of power, but they also oppress other men. Sexuality is an excellent example. Most hegemonic masculinities are compulsorily heterosexual. Heterosexual activity becomes a central way of proving one’s maleness. Similarly, heterosexual masculinity is empowered through the denigration and oppression of homosexuality and bisexuality, with men engaging in these acts being typically defined (and treated) as weak and effeminate. This proposition reconnects us with intersectionality and structured action theory is fully laid out. To understand any behavior,

621

but especially criminal behavior, one must place that behavior squarely within the social interactional context and place social actors within the broader and immediate frames of reference. Messerschmitt establishes that not only is masculinity constructed in relation to social position and in relation to femininity but also in relation to other masculinities relevant in the social milieu. White men will do masculinity different from black men. Upper-class men do masculinity differently from working-class men. Within each of these intersected milieu, there are several options for masculinity enactment, with general social pressures (and thus social actors) placing greater value upon hegemonic forms of masculinity than subordinate forms. Just as masculinity varies between social contexts, it varies within social contexts. Establishing dominance through, say, success in sports (i.e., “jock” masculinity) is only meaningful when situated in opposition to another masculinity within the same context (i.e., “nerd” masculinity). Social capital can only be gained in interactions through displaying heterosexual sexual conquest if it can be contrasted with others who lack that capital, say, male virgins or homosexuals. This theoretical positioning allows Messer­ schmidt to show us that men within certain social positions use crime as a sign of masculinity accomplishment. But because the nature and demands of a specific masculinity depend on the distinct interaction of structural location and social actor performances, men do crimes differently to do masculinities differently. That becomes the central focus of chapter 4 (“‘Boys Will Be Boys’—Differently”) and chapter 5 (“Varieties of ‘Real Men’”) of the book, both of which have been widely excerpted and anthologized. Typically, a reader on crime includes an edited version of either of these chapters in their section on gender and crime. They also appear ubiquitously in readers focused on gender and crime, as well as in general books directed at sociology and gender studies courses. These two chapters explore how varying social contexts—racial and class-based—produce the impulses to crime in the boys and men which inhabit them. Chapter 4 provides discussions of how race and class intersect in the lives of adolescents to produce a wide variety of criminal behavior ranging from street robbery, to gang membership and violence, to petty theft and delinquency to gang

622

Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime

rape. Chapter 5 provides focused case studies on specific environments and their ties to crime: urban streetlife subculture and the production of both the pimp and the “badass,” workplaces and the production of theft and sexual harassment, and corporate culture and the production of corporate crimes. The value here is not only in the narrowed discussions of specific milieu but the broad scope of discussions. Men dominate almost all crimes, from petty street theft to corporate crimes and crimes of nation-states. In these two chapters, Messerschmidt shows how structured action theory can explain all of these behaviors (something very few other theories of crime can do). His final chapter of the book goes beyond crime commission to the process of criminalization itself. Through exploring the influence of gender and gendered politics on the behaviors of the state, Messerschmidt explores how masculine dominance and world views within governments and other public institutions shape social control endeavors. His gendered analysis of the regulation of child labor, female sexual “morality,” and the nature and functioning of policing and police work highlight that structured action theory is also amenable to the other concerns which arise in the field of criminology—law making and implementation.

Legacy Landmark as it was, Masculinities and Crime, and the ideas within, took time to gain currency within the field, even within a feminist criminology focused on gender issues. In part, this was due to broader tensions and ambivalences within feminist academia overall about gendering the study of men. The field had created itself through critiquing academe’s patriarchal biases and was not terribly quick to return to studies focused on men as it could serve to remarginalize the study of women and women’s experiences. With the exception of a handful of publications (e.g., a special issue in The British Journal of Criminology [Volume 36, issue 3, 1996] and Tim Newburn and Elizabeth Stanko’s edited volume on masculinity and crime published in 1994), the idea of exploring the gendered nature of men’s crimes was ignored. For example, Kathleen Daly’s contribution to Michael Tonry’s 1998 Handbook of Crime and Justice contained a single paragraph on issues of masculinities and crime,

spending half of it suggesting that studying men’s crimes as gendered was a return to the discipline’s gender blindness. It was not until Jody Miller and Christopher Mullins’s chapter in the 15th volume of the Advances in Criminological Theory series that a survey article either on feminist criminology or upon gender and crime contained a substantial section devoted to the issues of masculinities. Messerschmidt has continued to elaborate both theoretically and empirically upon the core ideas he presented in this work. Two later books, Nine Lives and Flesh and Blood not only expand the nuances of structured action theory (e.g., through incorporation of other advances in feminist theory like attention to bodies and bodality) but do so within an empirical context. Both books are grounded in life-history interviews, which allows for complex and situated explorations of how individual social actors’ lived experiences and world views show an intersection of situated gender accomplishment and criminality. It also allows for richer development of the theory overall and the refinement that empirical research always brings. Others have also taken their cue from this book, producing a burgeoning criminology of men as gendered social actors. Little in the way of quantitative work has appeared testing the core theory discussed here, in part due to the difficulties of quantified operationalization of central concepts. However, qualitative researchers have expanded the project laid out here. Many interview and ethnographic based studies have drawn either directly or indirectly on structured action theory to examine the intersection of masculinities and crime by focusing on specific crimes or specific contexts. These works have examined different masculinities in different contexts, showing the richness and wide applicability of Messerschmidt’s work. Less has been done with white-collar crime and masculinity; in part this is due to the marginalized nature of white-collar crime studies, but it is also a function of obtaining appropriate data. Christopher W. Mullins See also Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity; Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory; Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

References and Further Readings Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R. W. (2002). Gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Daly, K. (1998). Gender, crime and criminology. In M. Tonry (Ed.), The handbook of crime and punishment (pp. 85–108). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Groombridge, N. (1998). Masculinities and crimes against the environment. Theoretical Criminology, 2, 249–267. Messerschmidt, J. (1993). Masculinities and crime: Critique and reconceptualization of theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Messerschmidt, J. (1997). Crime as structured action: Gender, race, class and crime in the making. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Messerschmidt, J. (2000). Nine lives: Adolescent masculinities, the body, and violence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Messerschmidt, J. (2004). Flesh and blood: Adolescent gender diversity and violence. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Miller, J., & Mullins, C. W. (2006). Taking stock: The status of feminist theories in criminology. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 217–249). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Mullins, C. W. (2006). Holding your square: Masculinities, streetlife and violence. Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan. Mullins, C. W., Wright, R. T., & Jacobs, B. A. (2004). Gender, streetlife, and criminal retaliation. Criminology, 42, 911–940. Newburn, T., & Stanko, E. (Eds.). (1994). Just boys doing business? Men, masculinities and crime. London: Routledge.

Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory It is a well-established fact that crime is substantially more prevalent in some societies than others. Why? What can explain this pattern? These basic questions have stimulated a significant body of criminological theory and research over the past

623

several centuries, and it is the central question to which institutional-anomie theory is directed. Institutional-anomie theory refers to a theoretical argument developed by Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld to account for variation in levels of serious crime across nations and, in particular, to explain why rates of acquisitive crime (e.g., robbery) and lethal violence are especially high in America. Messner and Rosenfeld outlined their explanation in the first edition of Crime and the American Dream and elaborated on some of the implications of their argument in subsequent editions of the book. This argument has become widely referenced in the literature as institutionalanomie theory or IAT. Institutional-anomie theory builds on Robert Merton’s classic anomie theory and posits that rates of serious crime, especially robbery and homicide, will be highest in nations characterized both by a cultural imbalance in which there is a strong cultural emphasis on pursuing monetary success goals and weak cultural emphasis on using only legitimate means to pursue such goals, and by an institutional imbalance whereby economic institutions dominate other social institutions in various ways and limit their ability to regulate behavior. In this entry, the origins, core argument, and empirical status of IAT are outlined in more detail. The first section provides a general overview of the components of Merton’s anomie theory that are central to IAT. Subsequent sections focus on Messner and Rosenfeld’s description of the nature and sources of the cultural orientation they label the American Dream, how this cultural makeup can increase levels of serious crime, and the role that the institutional balance of power plays in the process. The closing sections summarize the state of the existing empirical evidence related to IAT and outline some issues that require additional attention in future scholarship.

Merton’s Anomie Theory The foundation of IAT rests on the shoulders of Merton’s anomie theory. Merton’s anomie theory is quite general in scope and open to alternative interpretations, but most observers acknowledge that Merton’s theoretical argument implies that levels of instrumental crime will likely be higher in societies in which there is a particular type of

624

Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

cultural imbalance, namely a relatively strong cultural emphasis placed on the importance of pursuing monetary success goals and a relatively weak cultural emphasis placed on the importance of using only legitimate means of pursuing monetary success goals. Importantly, Merton noted that the criminogenic tendencies of this type of cultural imbalance are likely to be contingent on individual adaptations to cultural conditions (i.e., whether or not members of society accept or reject cultural messages) and on the distribution of legitimate opportunities for pursuing monetary success goals. The cultural imbalance highlighted by Merton is also central to Messner and Rosenfeld’s IAT. Like Merton, Messner and Rosenfeld suggest that American culture places significant value on material success goals while not emphasizing strongly normative limits on how such goals should be pursued, and they argue that this cultural imbalance is one of the keys to understanding why America tends to exhibit particularly high rates of serious crime, especially robbery and homicide. But Messner and Rosenfeld also extend Merton’s theory by integrating ideas from Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Karl Polanyi, and Karl Marx about the nature, interrelationships, and functioning of various social institutions in taming the criminogenic tendencies of a weakly regulated American Dream. Messner and Rosenfeld (2007, p. 68) define the American Dream as “a commitment to the goal of material success, to be pursued by everyone in society, under conditions of open, individual competition.” They argue that the highly universal cultural orientation that accompanies the American Dream defines personal worth largely in terms of achievement and success in the accumulation of money and wealth, places a high degree of esteem on individual (especially economic) accomplishments, and places relatively little emphasis on the importance of how such accomplishments are realized. Messner and Rosenfeld note that these cultural values have been prominent in America since at least the early 1900s, and are one of the byproducts of the distinctive form of capitalism that had emerged in America in the previous century. In essence, American capitalism developed in a context in which noneconomic social institutions were not highly developed, thus giving rise to an imbalanced institutional structure in which economic

institutions and imperatives dominated and diluted other institutions (e.g., the family, polity, and schools) and the socialization and social control functions they tend to play in society. According to Messner and Rosenfeld, the dominance of the economy in the institutional sphere and the distinctive value orientations of the American Dream are mutually reinforcing and, together, form a recipe for high levels of serious crime in America.

The American Dream, Anomie, Institutional Imbalance, and Rates of Serious Crime Messner and Rosenfeld (2007) document in Crime and the American Dream that there are substantial differences across nations in the number of homicides and robberies per capita, and that America has exceptionally high rates of both of these crimes. IAT is a general account of why some nations exhibit higher rates of serious crime than others, and specifically why America is “exceptional” with respect to levels of serious crime. Messner and Rosenfeld are quick to point out that the hallmarks of the American Dream—a universal achievement orientation in which individual success is defined largely in terms of the accumulation of money—have yielded a variety of innovations in society. But, as Merton also alluded to, they note that the American Dream can yield some undesirable outcomes as well, including high levels of serious crime. In essence, the American Dream represents a distinctive form of cultural imbalance where the pursuit of economic success goals and realization of economic achievement are strongly valued and encouraged while at the same time there is a relatively weak emphasis on the importance of using legitimate means to satisfy those cultural prescriptions (i.e., high levels of anomie). As Messner and Rosenfeld put it, “The cultural stimulation of criminal motivations derives from the distinctive content of the American Dream.” And, “at the same time, the American Dream does not contain within it strong injunctions against substituting more effective, illegitimate means for less effective, legitimate means in the pursuit of monetary success” (2007, p. 84). In essence, they suggest that the cultural values underpinning the American Dream strongly encourage members of society to pursue and achieve monetary success goals through the most expedient means possible.

Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

The anomic cultural imbalance that embodies the American Dream is central to IAT, but according to Messner and Rosenfeld it does not full account for why rates of serious crime in America are exceptionally high. Rather, like Merton, they see the social structure as highly important for shaping the ways in which people respond to the cultural milieu. In many ways, Messner and Rosenfeld provide a much more detailed explication of the social structure than Merton, but they also largely omit from early articulations of their arguments a discussion of the dimension of social structure that is central to Merton’s thesis: the stratification system. As Jón Gunnar Bernburg points out, “Messner and Rosenfeld ignore Merton’s insight on the role of the unequal distribution of people’s objective conditions in translating the anomic ethic into crime and deviant behavior” (p. 738). Messner and Rosenfeld (2006, 2007) have recently acknowledged this omission, and they suggest that integrating it into their theoretical model would yield a more complete explanation. Despite the limited attention they give to the legitimate opportunity structure, though, Messner and Rosenfeld (1994, 2007) integrate ideas from Parsons, Marx, Durkheim, and Polanyi to highlight the potential role that social institutions can play in regulating behavior generally and in countering or mitigating the anomic cultural pressures toward criminal behavior specifically. Messner and Rosenfeld emphasize the relative strength of economic, political, educational, and familial institutions in the United States, and they suggest that the balance of power between these institutions is both a consequence of and a contributor to the prevailing cultural structure. Perhaps not surprisingly, the institutional arrangement that has accompanied the cultural structure of the American Dream is one in which the economy is particularly dominant, and familial, educational, and political institutions are relatively weak. Building on Parsons’s notion that social systems are composed of interrelated social institutions, Marx’s insights about how such systems often contain fundamental conflicts between institutions, and Polanyi’s arguments about the importance of providing institutionalized protections from the free market economy, Messner and Rosenfeld embed in their anomie theory of crime a significant role for the institutional balance of power.

625

They highlight the importance of the social institutions of the polity, the family, and education for providing social control over behavior and, specifically, for taming the intense anomic pressures to pursue economic imperatives that are part and parcel to the American cultural structure. In theory, when these social institutions are strong and coordinated, they can play vital roles in regulating behavior both by contributing to and reinforcing the prevailing normative cultural structure and by providing roles that expose people to social controls and social supports. As Messner and Rosenfeld see it, however, the long-standing reality in America is that the dominance of the economy in the institutional structure not only provides an everlasting fuel for the American Dream, but also serves to handcuff the ability of other social institutions to tame the dark side of this cultural prescription (i.e., intense pressure to pursue, and achieve at any cost, visible signs of economic success). The relatively quick and intense development of capitalism in America in a context in which noneconomic social institutions were still evolving and not well prepared to compete with economic institutions set the stage, they say, for an institutional imbalance in which economic norms penetrate other (noneconomic) institutional domains, and in which the independent functions and roles of these other institutions are devalued and increasingly diluted to accommodate economic roles and functions. Messner and Rosenfeld (2007) provide several examples of how the dominance of the economy in the American institutional sphere has overwhelmed and weakened the potential social control capacity of political, family, and educational institutions. More germane to their theoretical explanation for the exceptionally high rates of serious crime observed in America, however, are the consequences of this process. Specifically, they note that the dominance of the economy in American institutional life has reduced the capacity of noneconomic institutions to “inculcate beliefs, values, and commitments other than those of the marketplace,” which in turn has weakened their capacity to “promote allegiance to social rules” and has limited the “social support that they can offer for culturally prescribed behavior” (2007, pp. 85–86). In essence, the dominance of the economy in American life has generated cultural conditions that strongly encourage the pursuit of economic

626

Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

achievements while also weakening the capacity of noneconomic institutions to temper those pursuits or limit the use of illegitimate activities to realize them. According to Messner and Rosenfeld, this combination of cultural arrangement and institutional imbalance has produced a population in America that is more likely than other populations to pursue monetary success goals by any means necessary. More vividly, they suggest that these social and cultural conditions are the main reason why America exhibits rates of robbery and homicide that are substantially higher than those observed in most other nations.

Theoretical Critiques Since the initial statement of IAT by Messner and Rosenfeld in 1994, three main theoretical critiques have been highlighted in the literature. These critiques question the limited attention devoted in IAT to the distribution of legitimate opportunities for pursuing economic success goals, the relevance of the theory for explaining variation in lethal violence, and the ability of the theory to account for several well-established patterns of serious crime. With respect to the first critique, as noted earlier, Messner and Rosenfeld largely omit from early articulations of their arguments a discussion of the role of the stratification system in generating crime. They acknowledge this omission in later versions of their argument, however, and also discuss the importance of integrating the stratification system into their conception of the social structure (Messner & Rosenfeld, 2006, 2007). In another critique of the initial statement of IAT, Leonard Beeghley argues that key factors identified in prior research as sources of variation in serious crime rates are ignored or dismissed as unimportant in the theory, most notably racial discrimination, the widespread availability of guns, and the rapid expansion of drug markets. In more recent editions of Crime and the American Dream and other writings, Messner and Rosenfeld articulate how these and other wellknown crime patterns (e.g., race and gender differences in crime) are consistent with the internal logic of IAT, while also emphasizing the need for additional attention to such issues in future theoretical and empirical examinations. Finally, some scholars have questioned the relevance of anomie theory for explaining differences

in lethal criminal violence across social collectivities. Critics have suggested that, while IAT provides a logical explanation for why certain socially structured pressures related to economic goal attainment would yield higher levels of crimes with motives to enhance one’s financial circumstances, they do not adequately explain how those pressures would translate into higher levels of lethal criminal violence, except of course for the modest proportion of cases in which money-generating crime turns deadly. Brian Stults and Eric Baumer focus explicitly on this issue and outline an elaborated theoretical model that links the core concepts of IAT to lethal violence through their influence on property crime, drug market activity, and firearm carrying.

Empirical Research The core linkages implied in IAT rarely have been examined, so it is difficult to draw strong conclusions about the status of existing empirical evidence. Several empirical studies have considered hypotheses related to the arguments outlined in the theory, if not directly relevant to the core causal predictions. For example, in a pioneering empirical test of IAT in 1995, Mitchell Chamlin and John Cochran examined the effect of poverty on property crime rates, and the extent to which that effect is conditioned by the strength of noneconomic institutions. Several subsequent studies have applied similar logic in examining whether the influence of economic inequality on homicide rates across nation-states and other aggregate units (e.g., U.S. counties and cities) is conditioned by noneconomic institutional strength. These studies have advanced understanding of the nature of spatial variation in crime, but they do not speak directly to the core arguments of IAT—whether levels of serious crime are higher in societies with a stronger cultural commitment to monetary success goals and a weaker cultural commitment to legitimate means exist, and whether this is amplified in contexts of weakened noneconomic social institutions. A small handful of studies have assessed more directly the cultural arguments implied in IAT. Liqun Cao, Gary Jensen, and Chamlin and Cochran evaluate whether America exhibits the type of exceptional cultural features suggested by IAT. Although there is some debate about the utility of

Messner, Steven F., and Richard Rosenfeld: Institutional-Anomie Theory

the principal source used in these studies to capture cross-national differences in cultural values, the results of such investigations raise questions about claims that Americans are exceptional in their commitment to monetary success or in their willingness to justify deviant means of pursuing such success. Two recent studies have attempted to model more directly the causal mechanisms implied in IAT. Baumer and Regan Gustafson integrate aggregate-level survey data on value commitments from the General Social Survey with data on crime rates and other measures for counties and county groups in the United States. Consistent with some of the key predictions of the theory, this study reveals that rates of instrumental crime are higher in places with a relatively strong commitment to monetary success and weak commitment to legitimate means, and they tend to be particularly high in such areas when accompanied by relatively low levels of welfare support and weakened family institutions. Stults and Baumer expand on this analysis by including homicide rates in the empirical analysis and showing that rates of homicide are significantly higher in areas with high levels of commitment to monetary success goals and low levels of commitment to legitimate means, largely because such areas tend to exhibit elevated levels of property crime and drug market activity, which in turn yield higher rates of homicide.

Conclusion Institutional-anomie theory has emerged as an influential theoretical perspective for explaining aggregate-level variation in serious crime rate and has stimulated a large body of research since initially outlined fully in the first edition of Crime and the American Dream. As Messner and Rosenfeld (2006) noted in a recent commentary on the current status of IAT, this signals that the theory has provided some provocative research “puzzles” to the criminological community of scholars. In taking stock of the scholarship that has emerged on IAT, however, they also highlighted some issues, or puzzles, that warrant additional attention in future inquiry, including elaboration on how the social stratification system interacts with other social institutions in producing high rates of crime in advanced industrial societies and a greater focus on illuminating the ways in which the American

627

cultural structure may be different from or similar to those found in other nations and the implications this may have for observed differences across societies in crime rates. Perhaps not surprisingly given the framework within which they have couched their theory, Messner and Rosenfeld encourage these scholarly pursuits while also emphasizing the importance of doing so through legitimate methodological means. Perhaps future theoretical and empirical developments relevant to IAT will follow both the prescriptions and proscriptions suggested by Messner and Rosenfeld. Eric P. Baumer See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Currie, Elliott: The Market Society and Crime; Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide; Merton Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

References and Further Readings Baumer, E. P., & Gustafson, R. (2007). Social organization and instrumental crime: Assessing the empirical validity of classic and contemporary anomie theories. Criminology, 45, 617–663. Beeghley, L. (2003). Homicide: A sociological explanation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bernburg, J. G. (2002). Anomie, social change and crime: A theoretical examination of Institutional-Anomie Theory. British Journal of Criminology, 42, 729–742. Cao, L. (2004). Is American society more anomic? A test of Merton’s theory with cross-national data. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 28, 17–31. Chamlin, M. B., & Cochran, J. K. (1995). Assessing Messner and Rosenfeld’s Institutional-Anomie Theory: A partial test. Criminology, 33, 411–429. Chamlin, M. B., & Cochran, J. K. (2007). An evaluation of the assumptions that underlie Institutional Anomie Theory. Theoretical Criminology, 11, 39–61. Cullen, F. T. (1984). Rethinking crime and deviance theory: The emergence of a structuring tradition. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenhend. Cullen, J. B., Parboteeah, K. P., & Hoegl, M. (2004). Crossnational differences in managers’ willingness to justify ethically suspect behaviors: A test of Institutional Anomie Theory. Academy of Management Journal, 47, 411–421.

628

Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime

Jensen, G. (2002). Institutional anomie and societal variations in crime: A critical appraisal. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 22, 45–74. Maume, M. O., & Lee, M. R. (2003). Social institutions and violence: A sub-national test of Institutional Anomie Theory. Criminology, 41, 1137–1172. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American dream. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (1997). Political restraint of the market and levels of homicide: A cross-national application of Institutional Anomie Theory. Social Forces, 75, 1393–1416. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2006). The present and future of institutional-anomie theory. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 127–148). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Messner, S. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (2007). Crime and the American dream (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Pratt, T. C., & Godsey, T. W. (2003). Social support, inequality, and homicide: A cross-national test of an integrated theoretical model. Criminology, 41, 101–133. Savolainen, J. (2000). Inequality, welfare state, and homicide: Further support for the Institutional Anomie Theory. Criminology, 38, 1021–1042. Stucky, T. D. (2003). Local politics and violent crime in U.S. cities. Criminology, 41, 1101–1135. Stults, B. J., & Baumer, E. P. (2008). Assessing the relevance of anomie theory for explaining spatial variation in lethal criminal violence: An aggregatelevel analysis of homicide within the United States. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 2, 215–247.

Michalowski, Raymond J.,  and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer’s concept of state-corporate crime recognizes that socially injurious actions can be facilitated at the intersection of the political and economic orders, regardless of the existence of criminal codes officially recognizing the malevolence of those actions. Grounded in both the critical criminological discourse of the 1970s and the existing literature on

organizational deviance, the concept represents an advance over existing explanations that did not account for the interdependent nature of relationships between public and private institutions. The following discussion chronicles some of the theoretical developments that led to the formulation of the concept of state-corporate crime and articulates the explanatory framework of state-corporate crime. An attempt is also made to highlight some of the case studies examined within its context.

The Concept Michalowski and Kramer (2006) note that the concept of state-corporate crime was formulated amidst the suite of investigations that followed the 1986 explosion of the NASA space shuttle Challenger. However, the episteme of the time did not recognize the functional interdependencies between corporate and government entities, evident in the fact that those two institutions have traditionally been studied separately within the literature on organizational deviance. The concept of state-corporate crime represents an advance over previous studies of corporate or governmental malfeasance in that it recognizes the instrumental role that those relationships play in facilitating socially injurious outcomes. State-corporate crime involves at least two entities (public and private) and is described by Michalowski and Kramer as “illegal or socially injurious actions that result from a mutually-­ reinforcing interaction between 1) policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more institutions of political governance, and 2) policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more institutions of economic production and distribution” (p. 20). Furthermore, Judy Aulette and Michalowski identify two types of state-corporate crime: state-initiated and state-facilitated. Stateinitiated corporate crime refers to socially injurious actions that result from corporate entities working at the behest of (or with the tacit approval of) governmental organizations. State-facilitated corporate crime refers to the failure of governmental authorities to create meaningful regulatory or enforcement mechanisms concerning organizational malfeasance. Incorporating insights from a number of differing theoretical perspectives on organizational deviance, the researchers have

Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime

identified three “catalysts for action” that impact deviant organizational outcomes. These catalysts include the degree of emphasis on goal attainment within organizations, the balance between institutional and noninstitutional means for achieving those goals, and the functional availability of effective sources of social control. The theoretical rationale for state-corporate crime is found amidst the wave of critical discourse that was one of the hallmarks of criminological theorizing of the 1970s. Richard Quinney’s refinement of Edwin Sutherland’s original definition of white-collar crime differentiated between occupational and corporate crimes, but did not extend that analysis by linking crime in the workplace with the institutional relationships that exist between corporate and governmental entities. Building upon Quinney’s work, itself grounded in Marxian analyses, the theory of state-corporate crime recognizes the importance of power differentials in determining how crime is legally demarcated. In doing so, state-corporate crime recognizes the role that the interests of elites play in structuring both legal codification and enforcement practices with respect to formally addressing socially injurious behavior. Consequently, many of the socially injurious actions addressed within the context of state-corporate crime are neither recognized officially nor form the corpus of behaviors central to conventional criminological discourse (namely street crimes), according to Michalowski and Kramer. Michalowski and Kramer admit that their framework of state-corporate crime may be less a theory (in the formal sense) and more of an explanatory scheme aimed at identifying, understanding, and giving context to relationships between public and private entities. Despite this self-criticism, the theory (as it has often been referred to) does provide insight into the machinations behind some of the most socially injurious actions perpetrated by man. Consequently, state-corporate crime has at least three useful characteristics. First, the concept directs attention toward deviant organizational outcomes that can be intensely socially injurious, yet have traditionally been ignored by legal scholars, institutions of formal social control, and criminologists. Second, the concept of state-corporate crime does not treat corporate and governmental institutions atomistically, instead recognizing the importance

629

and power of relationships between those institutions that are central to their effective functioning. This represents an advance over existing theories and explanations of corporate and governmental wrongdoing that ignore those relationships or that explain such malfeasance in terms of individual agency. Third, state-corporate crime considers how relationships are impacted by differing levels of organizational action at the individual, institutional, and macro (politicaleconomy) levels.

Case Studies As previously noted, the concept of state-corporate crime was developed subsequent to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Kramer’s analysis of that tragedy revealed that it was not simply the result of an accident, as so many at the time had presumed, but instead was the result of faulty decision making on the part of government safety experts at NASA and technical advisors and engineers at Morton Thiokol (MTI), the private company that designed and manufactured the doomed solid rocket boosters. Political and economic pressures resulted in an ethos focused on launching shuttles in a timely (hence, profitable) fashion, inhibiting those in authority from responding to the legitimate safety concerns of engineers at both NASA and MTI. The lack of effective oversight and communication between internal divisions at NASA manifested itself in the decision to launch the shuttle in weather deemed too cold for the effective functioning of the O-rings, critical for operation of the solid rocket boosters. Another case study of state-corporate crime involves the tragic 1991 fire at the Imperial Foods’ chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, which resulted in the deaths of twentyfive employees. In their analysis of the event, Aulette and Michalowski determined the tragedy was set in motion through a confluence of historical forces and organizational practices coupled with an atmosphere devoid of effective regulatory oversight. The fire resulted when a hydraulic line containing flammable fluid ruptured near an industrial deep-fat fryer, resulting in a fireball and a significant amount of smoke that suffocated workers trapped behind fire escape

630

Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime

doors that had previously been barricaded by managers of the facility. A nuanced analysis of the event revealed that the tragedy was not solely the result of faulty individual decision making on the part of Imperial Foods’ management, but had been set in motion years prior due to a number of economically motivated state policies. The state of North Carolina forfeited federal OSH (Occupational Safety and Health) money ostensibly because the state did not envision the protection of worker safety as complementary to its interest of promoting a robust business environment. To make matters worse, the owners of financially troubled Imperial Foods consciously ignored workers’ complaints of safety violations concerning the barricading of fire-escape doors, rationalizing those decisions as either related to the prevention of trivial amount of employee theft or to keep insects from contaminating foodstuffs. Both state and local safety inspectors (as well as federal food inspectors) ignored those violations, tacitly allowing the fireescape doors to entrap workers who could turn to no one for effective protection. The defense industry was examined by David Kauzlarich and Kramer with respect to its contribution to significant environmental harms. In the rush to develop the first atomic weapons in the midst of World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission (subsequently replaced by the Department of Energy [DOE]) was more concerned with hasty development and testing of weapons than it was with implementing appropriate disposal methods for the volumes of toxic and radioactive waste produced in manufacturing. The secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project also inhibited effective regulatory oversight, a condition that did not change during the cold war era, when United States weapons production accelerated to keep pace with a rapidly developing Soviet arsenal. Despite the enactment of environmental legislation in the 1970s, the DOE continued its policy of dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the environment. The DOE’s self-aggrandized task of national security was emphasized to the extent that noncompliance with existing environmental regulations became departmental ethos; private contractors were given the responsibility of self-regulation by a department reluctant to acknowledge either Environmental Protection Agency oversight or the applicability of environmental regulations. To make

matters worse, the U.S. Department of Justice had a policy of not intervening where one government agency was acting out of compliance with environmental regulations. The end of the cold war and the discovery of massive levels of contamination surrounding weapons production led to the closure of facilities around the country, but not before significant environmental crimes had been perpetrated for more than 50 years. Finally, the crash of ValuJet flight 592 has been examined within the context of state-corporate crime, which uncovered the patently dangerous conditions that can result from the convergence of a public ideology committed to deregulation coupled with an intense private drive for profit maximization. ValuJet flight 592 plummeted nose first into the Florida Everglades only 10 minutes after takeoff, killing all 110 aboard—the result of a fire that rapidly spread from the plane’s cargo hold. Flight 592 contained packages of unused oxygen generators that had been previously removed from older planes in the ValuJet fleet by private maintenance contractors, yet were improperly packaged and shipped in the ill-equipped cargo hold of the doomed flight. In their analysis of the tragedy, Rick Matthews and Kauzlarich found that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) operated with two contradictory organizational directives: the regulation of the airline industry with respect to passenger safety and the promotion of the airline industry’s general economic success. The airline industry had been beset by massive consolidation in the wake of passage of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act. Consequently, the FAA was reluctant to stringently enforce the safety violations of the highly profitable and rapidly expanding ValuJet airline. The lack of effective formal oversight was coupled with a drive for profit maximization by corporate officials at ValuJet, who sacrificed safety in the interest of contracting critical maintenance work to the lowest bidder. The employees of SabreTech, ValuJet’s maintenance contractor, were found criminally responsible (in terms of individual agency) for the inappropriate packaging and shipping of the hazardous cargo. However, it was the series of corporate decisions to sacrifice safety in the interests of profit that served as motivation to initially employ relatively inexperienced maintenance contractors, coupled with the knowledge of

Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization

an institutional climate that indicated federal regulators would do little to intervene in decisions that might challenge the economic longevity of any individual airline. Douglas J. Dallier See also Capitalism and White-Collar Crime; Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology; Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Aulette, J., & Michalowski, R. J. (2006). The fire in Hamlet. In R. J. Michalowski & R. C. Kramer (Eds.), State-corporate crime: Wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government (pp. 45–66). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kauzlarich, D., & Kramer, R. C. (1998). Crimes of the nuclear state: At home and abroad. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Kauzlarich, D., & Kramer, R. C. (2006). Nuclear weapons production. In R. J. Michalowski & R. C. Kramer (Eds.), State-corporate crime: Wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government (pp. 67–81). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kramer, R. C. (2006). The space shuttle Challenger explosion. In R. J. Michalowski & R. C. Kramer (Eds.), State-corporate crime: Wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government (pp. 27–44). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kramer, R. C., Michalowski, R. J., & Kauzlarich, D. (2002). The origins and development of the concept and theory of state-corporate crime. Crime and Delinquency, 48, 263–282. Matthews, R. A., & Kauzlarich, D. (2006). The crash of ValuJet flight 592. In R. J. Michalowski & R. C. Kramer (Eds.), State-corporate crime: Wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government (pp. 82–97). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Michalowski, R. J., & Kramer, R. C. (Eds.). (2006). State-corporate crime: Wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Quinney, R. (1964). The study of white-collar crime: Toward a reorientation in theory and research. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 55, 208–214. Sutherland, E. H. (1949). White collar crime. New York: Dryden Press.

631

Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization Terance D. Miethe and Robert F. Meier’s integrated theory of victimization is a sociological theory that attempts to integrate offender-, victim-, and situation-based theories of crime into a single comprehensive theoretical perspective capable of predicting the occurrence of both personal and property criminal acts. The heuristic model of criminal events that emerges from their theory includes (1) sources of offender motivation, (2) victim characteristics that provide criminal opportunities, and (3) characteristics of the social context in which crime take place. These three related factors are assumed to interact with each other, thus influencing the probability of a criminal event occurring.

Theories of Criminality and Theories of Victimization Miethe and Meier’s approach to crime recognizes the importance of both criminals and victims and the facilitating context that brings them together. Their theory is explicated in their 1994 book titled Crime and Its Social Context: Toward an Integrated Theory of Offenders, Victims and Situations. Until the publication of their work, the understanding of the conditions that cause or prevent crime was achieved through theories focusing exclusively on criminals or on victims. There had been a dearth of attempts to consider theories of criminality and theories of victimization jointly in one theoretical framework. The study of criminals and their motivation for crime has been a primary focus of criminology since its establishment as an academic discipline. A variety of perspectives, ranging from social learning and social control theories to anomie and social disorganization theories, underscore the fact that criminal motivation is shaped by a range of factors that operate inside and outside individuals, on the micro- and macro-levels of analysis. The sole emphasis on the sources and causes of offender motivation, however, fails to consider how the

632

Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization

actions and supply of potential targets shapes the physical opportunities for criminal victimization, according to Miethe and David McDowall. Therefore, starting in the mid-1970s, criminologists began paying more systematic attention to the opportunity structure for crime and especially to the factors associated with the selection of targets for victimization. Lifestyle and routine activity theories highlighted for the first time the symbiotic relationship between conventional and illegal activities and managed to give a realistic explanation as to why particular persons become crime targets. They noticed that routine activities of everyday life provide an opportunity structure for crime by increasing the supply of attractive crime targets, decreasing the level of their protection, and increasing targets’ exposure and proximity to motivated offenders. Miethe and McDowall note that those theories failed, however, to take into consideration the social, psychological, and structural forces that produce criminal motivation. Noticing that neither an offender nor a victim perspective in isolation takes into consideration what the other regards as essential, Miethe and Meier argued that the ability to explain crime may be substantially improved by the integration of theories of criminality and theories of victimization. But they had yet another aspect to consider before proceeding to the integration of the two perspectives.

Offenders, Victims, and the Importance of Contextual Factors Sociologists had long ago observed that offenders’ characteristics that reinforce motivation and victims’ characteristics that increase vulnerability do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they operate in a social context that brings them together and that enhances (or diminishes) their effects. Thus, Miethe and Meier argued that a social explanation of crime can never be complete without a sense of the context in which criminal acts take place. According to Miethe and Meier, there are two main procedures through which social forces in the wider environment can affect (increase or decrease) individuals’ risk of victimization. The first takes place when aggregate-level measures of theoretical concepts exhibit a significant net

impact on individuals’ risks of victimization. Such a net impact effect would be observed if, for example, the high levels of residential mobility, ethnic heterogeneity, population density, and poverty of a neighborhood altered a resident’s victimization risks regardless of his or her personal characteristics. The second procedure through which social context can affect individuals’ risk of victimization involves a statistical interaction between aggregate-level and individual-level measures. Such an interaction effect would be observed if, for example, being non-white increased the risks of violent victimization more in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods than in ethnically heterogeneous neighborhoods.

Integrated Theory of Criminal Events Miethe and Meier’s integrated theory draws together all three necessary elements for crime: a motivated offender, a vulnerable victim or target, and a facilitating social context. The theory recognizes that an offender’s motivation to engage in law-breaking acts (crime readiness) is a necessary but insufficient condition in the crime process. Miethe and Meier posit that without the availability of a suitable target and a facilitating environment, the offender would be unable to act on his or her criminal intentions. Figure 1 shows a graphical representation of Miethe and Meier’s heuristic model of criminal events. The model depicts all the relationships among sources of offender motivation, victim characteristics, and the social context. The sources of offender motivation include economic disadvantage, weak social bonds, procrime values, psychological or biological attributes, generalized needs (e.g., money, sex, status), and noncriminal alternatives. The aforementioned sources of offender motivation are compatible with several macro-level and micro-level theories of criminality, including social disorganization theory, social control theory, social learning theory, and strain theory as well as theories emphasizing the physiological and psychological capacities of individuals. Macro-level theories concentrate primarily on structural characteristics of aggregates, such as the economic disadvantage of a community or the weak social bonds of residents at the neighborhood level.

Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization

Sources of Offender Motivation 1. Economic Disadvantage 2. Weak Social Bonds 3. Pro-Crime Values 4. Psychological/Biological Attributes 5. Generalized needs 6. Non-Criminal Alternatives

Social Context 1. The Physical Location Physical Space Darkness Tempo, Pace, Rhythm History 2. The Interpersonal Relationship

Victim Charactristics that Provide Criminal Opportunities 1. Proximity 2. Exposure 3. Attractiveness 4. Guardianship

633

3. The Behavioral Setting At Home At School At Work At Leisure

Crimnal Events Murder Rape Robbery Assault Burglary Auto Theft Larceny-Theft

Figure 1   Miethe and Meier’s Heuristic Model of Criminal Events Source: From Miethe, T. D., and Meier, R. F. (1994). Crime and Its Social Context: Toward an Integrated Theory of Offenders, Victims and Situations, p. 65. Albany: State University of New York Press. Reprinted with permission.

Micro-level theories, on the other hand, focus on the development of criminality in a single person. Learning theories, for example, emphasize how pro-criminal values are learned by an individual through associations with other criminals, while biological and psychological perspectives focus their attention on heredity, neurological defects, intelligence, personality, and so on. The list of sources of offender motivation in Miethe and Meier’s model is not meant to be exhaustive or rigid. Limitations of existing datasets and budget constraints in all studies clearly limit the number of sources of offender motivation that a scholar can take into consideration in a single investigation. Therefore, scholars working on a macro or micro perspective should bring into the model the sources of offender motivation that they consider most important. For their own empirical analysis, Miethe and Meier reasoned that an individual’s decision to engage in crime is influenced primarily by population mobility, low socioeconomic status, ethnic heterogeneity, and single-parent families since these factors are ultimately indicative of the social forces that trigger criminal motivation.

Turning to victim characteristics that provide criminal opportunities, the model includes four fundamental characteristics that have been previously identified by routine activity and life-style theories. These are proximity to potential offenders, exposure to high-crime situations, target attractiveness, and the absence of guardianship. Proximity indicates the physical distance between potential offenders and potential victims, whereas exposure indicates the physical visibility and accessibility of victims or targets to potential offenders. Target attractiveness involves the material or symbolic desirability of persons and targets to potential offenders. Finally, guardianship refers to the effectiveness of individuals or objects in preventing criminal acts. According to Miethe and Meier, all four characteristics are assumed to help define the social context as conducive to crime. At the same time, however, these characteristics are also assumed to have an independent impact on the probability of crime events, regardless of the particular social context. Moving on to the social context, Miethe and Meier have included in their model elements of the physical location, the interpersonal relationship,

634

Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization

and the behavioral setting. The social context is where criminal motivations and attractive victim characteristics are translated into action. Thus, according to Miethe and Meier, the amount of physical space in a setting may impede or facilitate the ability of potential victims to run away or the ability of offenders to escape. Poor lighting in a physical setting, on the other hand, may facilitate the commission of a crime by providing greater anonymity and cover for offenders. Furthermore, the periodicity with which events occur (i.e., rhythm) in a physical setting, the number of events per day (i.e., tempo), and the coordination of those events among other different activities (i.e., timing) may bring large numbers of people together causing the physical setting to become a “hot spot” for predatory violations. Finally, Miethe and Meier note that it is not unusual for a physical location to acquire a history of criminal activity that persists over time, and that this pattern may persist even after the composition and structure of the particular area has changed significantly. The interpersonal relationship between the victim and the offender is brought into the model in order to underscore the different opportunity structure and underlying motivation between a criminal act involving strangers and a criminal act involving victims and offenders known to each other. Thus, according to Miethe and Meier, in the case of domestic violence, for example, it makes little sense to place any great causal significance on the victim’s proximity to risky and dangerous physical environments or to emphasize economic marginality as a motivator for crime. On the other hand, the behavioral setting is brought into the model in order to indicate the activities of the victim at the time of the offense. The four different behavioral settings signified by Miethe and Meier possess particular characteristics that enhance or debase their attractiveness as criminogenic environments. Thus, for example, crimes occurring in or near the home between acquaintances are less likely to draw the attention of third parties (e.g., the police). On the other hand, for crimes occurring between students within schools, it is reasonable to expect that those crimes will draw the attention of school personnel (e.g., teachers, security guards). Moreover, a number of work settings routinely expose employees to motivated offenders (e.g., prisons, convenience stores), and

several leisure settings are especially crime prone because they draw together a large number of different people at nighttime (e.g., bars, taverns). The last component of Miethe and Meier’s heuristic model is the dependent variable of their criminal investigation, the criminal event. Their model is expected to be able to explain both personal (e.g., murder, rape, assault) and property victimizations (e.g., burglary, auto theft). As far as the causal ordering between each component is concerned, sources of offender motivation and criminal opportunities provided by victims are related to one another, but the direction of the relationship is unclear (the curved double-headed arrow indicates simply a correlation). The primary impact of both offender motivation and victim characteristics on crime is assumed to be transmitted through the social context (presumed direct causal relationships are represented in the model with a solid arrow). The social context thus becomes the central component for understanding criminal events in Miethe and Meier’s model. Nevertheless, the model allows for the occurrence of criminal events even when the nexus of offender motivation, victim characteristics, and the social context is not ideal or optimal. These residual causal relationships are presented in the model with the dashed arrows from offender motivation and victim characteristics to the criminal events.

Conclusion The publication of Miethe and Meier’s integrated approach in 1994 provided scholars with a new way of approaching criminal events. By successfully combining under a unified framework all the ideas and findings from micro-level and macro-level theories, Miethe and Meier were among the first to make a strong case for a multilevel conceptualization of criminal opportunity and crime prevention. Spyridon Kodellas See also Brantingham Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory; Systemic Model of Social Disorganization; Wilcox, Pamela, Kenneth C. Land, and Scott A. Hunt: Multicontextual Opportunity Theory

Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity

References and Further Readings Miethe, T. D., & McDowall, D. (1993). Contextual effects in models of criminal victimization. Social Forces, 71, 741–759. Miethe, T. D., & Meier, R. F. (1994). Crime and its social context: Toward an integrated theory of offenders, victims and situations. Albany: SUNY Press.

Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity Since the 1980s, an increasing number of social science researchers have begun to reexamine the significance of gender in social processes and interactions. Rather than treating it simply as a secondary variable, many researchers have begun to make the argument that gender is an important component of modern social structure, which helps to shape directly both social beliefs and personal interactions. Thus, individuals behave in a manner that both adheres to and reinforces the broader social stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. Many researchers who subscribe to feminist theories of criminology adopt this ideology in an effort to understand and explain the diverging patterns in men and women’s criminal behaviors. With her work, Jody Miller examined the role of gender in street robbery. She found that violent street criminals often accept “traditional” gender roles, which directly influences their criminal behavior. Although men and women may commit similar types of crimes, their methods and goals can vary significantly based on their selfperceived gender role.

Doing Gender Research has continued to show gender differences in crime rates, with the majority of criminal offenders being male. This phenomenon is especially true for violent street crime, such as murder, rape, robbery, and assault. One argument for the gender gap in criminal involvement is that men and women often behave in a manner that parallels socially prescribed gender roles. According to this ideology, masculinity is often associated with

635

dominant and aggressive behavior, whereas femininity is often associated with subservient and passive behavior. As a result, individuals who adhere to masculine ideals are more likely to commit violent street crime than those that adhere to feminine ideals. In fact, some scholars agree that violent crime is often used as a method of proving one’s masculinity in certain situations. Although the concept of committing violent crime to prove one’s masculinity helps explain why crime is a maledominated phenomenon, Miller contends that it fails to account fully for the amount, albeit small, of female violent street crime. However, there is another theory that may help to explain the cause of female violent street crime, while still taking into account the effects of gender. According to some social science scholars, female violent street crime can be explained as situated action.

Crime as Situated Action Many social science scholars argue that a large portion of criminal activity is merely situated action. First coined by Lucy Suchman in 1987, the term situated action refers to any act or behavior that is directly influenced by one’s immediate social situation—including social, cultural, economic, and environmental characteristics. According to this concept, individuals may be drawn to crime as a result of their lifestyle and/or personal situation. For example, racially and economically oppressed groups may resort to crime in order to vent their frustration and/or attempt to overcome the oppression, as noted by Sally Simpson. This line of reasoning is frequently used as an explanation for the disproportionately high rates of crime in inner-city areas. These areas are often inhabited by low-income, African American families who have very little opportunity for legitimate means of economic growth. As a result, crime becomes an attractive alternative, leading to high rates of crime by young, African American men. Although crime is a male-dominated phenomenon, especially violent crime, the influence of situational characteristics on criminality is by no means limited solely to men. The same structural and cultural characteristics that push low-income, inner-city, African American males toward violent street crime have similar influences on their female counterparts (Simpson, 1991). The concept of

636

Miller, Jody: Gendered Criminal Opportunity

crime as situated action helps to explain not only why some women commit seemingly masculine crimes, such as robbery, but also why lower-class, inner-city African American women commit a higher portion of violent street crime than other women. For example, in examining young female offenders, Suzanne Ageton found that lowerincome women were more often involved in violent assaultive-type crime, and African American women were involved in personal crimes at much higher proportions than white women. However, it has been often argued that even when women do commit violent crime, gender roles are still rigidly accepted and followed.

Gender and Crime as Situated Action: An Example From the Literature The effects of structural and cultural characteristics may somewhat offset the influence of gender on crime; it has been found that certain types of women commit “masculine” crimes. Even so, gender effects are not entirely eradicated. In fact, the influence of gender may still remain very significant. Further, some research has shown that it is possible that criminality can be simultaneously influenced by situational characteristics and gender. For example, with her work, Miller found that although both men and women in low-income, inner-city areas were drawn toward street robbery, methods of actual robbery commission varied drastically across gender types. In her study, Miller interviewed both male and female street robbers from a low-income, innercity environment. Representative of the population of the area from which her sample was taken, the overwhelming majority of Miller’s sample were African American. Miller’s intent was to perform a cross-gender comparison of both the motivation for and techniques of street robbery. In doing so, several clear patterns emerged. Examining why individuals were motivated to commit street robbery, Miller found strong similarities in the motivation for both male and female street robbers. It was found that the desire and/or need for immediate financial or material gain served as the key motivation for both male and female offenders. Thus, robbery could provide the quick and lucrative financial gain that was not available through any other avenue in the area,

such as employment. Miller’s discovery provides strong support for the crime as situation action hypothesis, given that both men and women in the area were drawn toward street robbery, a crime which is typically dominated by male offenders. With her examination of the techniques and methods of street robbery, Miller discovered several clear and repeated differences between male and female street robbers. First, Miller found that men typically selected only male victims whereas women typically selected only female victims. The reasoning behind victim-type selection was based strongly on socially indentified gender roles. Male offenders chose male victims because they felt it was a better declaration of their masculinity, because female victims are “too easy” and rarely have money. Similarly, female offenders typically chose female victims because they were easier to handle; male victims may be more likely to dismiss the offender or fight back. For both the male and female offenders, men were seen as more dominate and aggressive, while women were seen as more submissive and weak. Further, Miller also found that the methods used by the male and female offenders interviewed were strongly based on gender-role association. For example, the male offenders were more likely to use aggressive, strong-arm tactics when committing robbery, such as using a gun to threaten victims or even assaulting victims. Throughout the crime event, male offenders wanted to portray a sense of domination and masculinity. The female offenders, on the other hand, utilized more finesse in their techniques and rarely used a gun. Often, female offenders would exploit their own femininity to gain the trust of female victims or to sexually entice male victims. On several occasions, female offenders would even initiate sexual interactions, either posing as a prostitute or sexually available stranger. For the majority of the crime events, female offenders wanted to appear weak and/or nonthreatening. It was only during the climax of the crime that they wanted to portray a sense of aggressiveness and physical control. Finally, Miller continued to find gender-role reinforcement when examining multioffender cooperation. The majority of offenders interviewed chose to commit robbery alone in most instances. However, when they did cooperate, gender stereotypes were strongly upheld. Male offenders

Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory

typically worked with other male offenders. When male offenders did have female accomplices, the male offender usually performed the robbery, whereas the female offender remained in the car and/or served as a watchman. Likewise, female offenders most often chose male offenders as accomplices, believing that a woman would get in the way or be too weak. Even when a female offender would actually commit the robbery, the male accomplices typically served as dominate aggressors or “muscle” for the group.

Conclusion Gender-role identification is a phenomenon that is present throughout every social process and interaction. To that end, it makes sense that crime is also gendered. Crime, and especially violent crime, is often thought of as a masculine activity. However, there are still female offenders in the male-­dominated world of crime. A wide-range of situational variables—including social, cultural, economic, and environmental characteristics—may serve to push women into crime, much in the same fashion that they often push men. Still, although women may cross that invisible barrier, the influence of gender is not necessarily removed. Women can be drawn to crime, yet still adhere to socially defined gender stereotypes during the commission of crime. For example, women may base their techniques, targetselection methods, and overall process around gender stereotypes, adopting a less-aggressive approach to crime. In doing so, they often serve to reinforce those stereotypes. Billy Henson See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Bottcher, Jean: Social Practices of Gender; Broidy, Lisa M., and Robert S. Agnew: A General Strain Theory of Gender and Crime; Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency; Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime; Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender; Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime; Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld

References and Further Readings Ageton, S. S. (1983). The dynamics of female delinquency, 1976–1980. Criminology, 21, 555.

637

Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: W. W. Norton. Giordano, P. C., Cernkovich, S. A., & Rudolph, J. L. (2002). Gender, crime, and desistance: Toward a theory of cognitive transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 107(4), 990–1064. Jacobs, B. A., & Wright, R. (1999). Stick-up, street culture, and offender motivation. Criminology, 37, 149. Miller, J. (1998). Up it up: Gender and the accomplishment of street robbery. Criminology, 36, 37. Simpson, S. (1989). Feminist theory, crime, and justice. Criminology, 27, 605. Simpson, S. (1991). Caste, class and violent crime: Explaining difference in female offending. Criminology, 29, 115. Simpson, S., & Elis, L. (1995). Doing gender: Sorting out the caste and crime conundrum. Criminology, 33, 47. Steffensmeier, D., & Allan, E. (1996). Gender and crime: Toward a gendered theory of female offending. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 459–487. Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication. New York: Cambridge University Press. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender and Society, 1, 125–151.

Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory Jody Miller’s work in criminology illuminates how gender shapes crime and victimization. Her work is innovative in its application of the concept of gendered social organization to criminology. Miller’s work focuses on how gender shapes experiences of crime and violence for women and girls, as well as men and boys, and on the ways that gender intersects with street environments and offender networks. To understand Miller’s theoretical contribution, it is critical to first appreciate that in the literature on gendered organizations, gender is more than an individual attribute. It is not something that only individuals possess; it is rather a social, structural, relational, and institutional force. Therefore Miller’s theory of gendered social organization in criminology is best understood as the theory of how social, structural, relational, and institutional gender organizes crime and victimization.

638

Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory

This focus has been consistent throughout Miller’s work, including, in her research on women and street robbery (“Up It Up”), girls in gangs (One of the Guys), sex composition in gangs (“The Impact of Sex Composition on Gangs and Gang Member Delinquency”), neighborhood danger and victimization (“Gender, Neighborhood Danger, and Risk-Avoidance Strategies Among Urban African-American Youths”; Getting Played), and human smuggling (”Women’s Participation in Chinese Transnational Human Smuggling”). These contributions are discussed as follows.

Gendered Social Organization and Crime Miller discusses the gendered context of street robbery in “Up It Up: Gender and the Accomplishment of Street Robbery.” She concludes that although women and men do not have different motivations for street robbery, the difference in how they reach their goals is related to organizational context— namely, the gender-stratified environment of street robbery. In this study, Miller interviewed active street robbers, 14 women and 23 men. Her findings indicate that women and men enact street robbery in markedly different ways, with women less likely to carry guns and enact direct violence, for example. As in the legitimate economy, their earnings from robbery are also less than men’s. In One of the Guys, Miller studies the intersection of gang membership and gender using comparative qualitative methods. She details the “patriarchal bargain” struck by girls in gangs in order to balance their experiences of independence, empowerment, and equality while also grappling with the patriarchal hierarchy of gangs and gang activity that so often results in girls’ oppression and victimization. Here, Miller’s application of gendered social organization theory reveals how the lives of these girls are gendered, how their gangs and gang activities are gendered, and some of the consequences for gang girls and non-gang girls. Miller’s conceptual framework makes visible the ways in which gender structures criminal activities and risks of violence. Miller’s work on neighborhood crime, risk, safety, and violence demonstrates this very effectively. In “Gender, Neighborhood Danger, and Risk-Avoidance Strategies Among African-American Urban Youths” by Jennifer Cobbina, Miller, and Rod Brunson, Miller and her

coauthors “provide a contextual comparison of how at-risk and delinquent African-American young women and men understand and negotiate neighborhood dangers in distressed urban communities” (p. 675). In past studies of risk and victimization in distressed communities, researchers have paid attention to social and physical proximity to risk factors, often noting the risks connected to structural inequalities. Cobbina et al. find, however, that these structured inequalities are themselves gendered and result in gendered consequences. Young men report feeling at risk in neighborhoods other than their own, while young women perceive risk within their own neighborhoods. Both young women and young men fear men’s violence. The gendered structural inequalities in their community mean that the young men in this study are more likely to report feeling safe in their neighborhood. In part, this occurs because the neighborhood is characterized by a gender hierarchy that affords men more control over public space, more freedom of movement, and far more positions of power within street life and social and offender networks. The risks these young men perceive are related to maintaining respect, connections to offender networks, and avoiding threats from law enforcement. Conversely, young women evaluate their risks as related to men’s predatory behaviors and their own vulnerabilities as the “weaker” sex; study participants often report that the danger to young women is the threat of sexual violence. For the young women in this study, gendered structural inequalities mean that strategies for safety include avoiding public space in their own neighborhood altogether—a sharp contrast from the young men’s strategies. Some of the gendered organizational features of the neighborhood that contribute to these perceptions include “the congregation of male offenders in public spaces and the sexualization of women that results from the drug trade” (p. 692). Gendered social organization theory permits readers of this study to see how gender shapes the neighborhood, its disadvantages, the social and physical space, the risks and strategies for managing risks, and the gendered consequences. The manner in which gender socially and physically organizes African American girls’ experiences of violence in a distressed community is also a focus in Miller’s Getting Played: African American

Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory

Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence. In chapter 1 of this book titled “Gender ’n the Hood,” Miller discusses how gender shapes urban disadvantage and violence against girls in this setting. As in “Gender, Neighborhood Danger, and RiskAvoidance Strategies Among African-American Urban Youths,” Miller finds that the ways in which gender organizes neighborhood life is highly gendered. Miller notes that the young people in her study viewed risks in gendered terms, whether they believed boys or girls were more at risk. The risks to boys and young men were most often connected to guns and offender behaviors and networks; the risks to girls and young women were connected to men’s predatory behaviors, mostly men’s sexual violence. Miller’s study participants provide information about the physical and social characteristics of their neighborhoods, as well as the risks, including groups of male offenders who congregate in public spaces, public sexual harassment of young women by adult men, the widely held beliefs about women’s vulnerability and men’s greater strength, public incidents of violence—including domestic violence—against women, and sexual coercion and assault of women. As in “Gender, Neighborhood Danger, and Risk-Avoidance Strategies Among AfricanAmerican Urban Youths,” the strategies for safety for young women and girls included not only avoiding public space, but also the protection of having known men with them in public space. The young men in Miller’s study reported securing safety by being armed, not being alone in public space, and avoiding other neighborhoods and situations that might provoke violence. Miller makes the point that gendered social organization shapes not only what takes place, and who the actors are, but how these youth think about men and women. Getting Played demonstrates that social disorganization alone provides an incomplete picture of violence against young women in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Instead, gender plays a key role in organizing that violence and the conditions that make it possible. A final work that illuminates this focus on gendered social organizations is Sheldon Zhang, Ko-Lin Chin, and Miller’s study of Chinese transnational human smuggling. Here, Miller and her coauthors demonstrate that human smuggling as an organized criminal enterprise is gendered in

639

such as way as to “shape the nature of women’s involvement” (p. 702). In this study, rather than emphasizing supply and demand as an explanation for women’s involvement in an organized criminal venture, Miller and her coauthors examine the internal logic of the organizational structure and activities. They find that women are not excluded or relegated to marginal support work within the operations of human smuggling; rather women often have central positions. However, the strategies used to smuggle are gendered: “Women were more likely than men to facilitate human smuggling by arranging fraudulent marriages and were not involved in maritime operations. Arranged marriages represent the safest method for human smuggling, yield the highest success rate, and garner the highest smuggling fees” (p. 715). In addition, women faced gendered barriers in human smuggling, particularly in relation to the connection between generating and conducting business and interacting with social networks that were dominantly masculine and often corrupt (some government officials, for example). Central to their observations is that human smuggling can be—and often is—framed as a community service, as altruistic. This means that women can be seen as staying within the bounds of feminine caregiver norms while participating in illicit smuggling activities. Examining human smuggling with an eye to how it is structured by gender reveals how the internal logic of Chinese transnational human smuggling reflects unequal gendered patterns in the larger social environments in which the smuggling takes places, and also permits Miller and her coauthors to discover that gendered market demands and niches, gendered migration patterns, and increasing numbers of Chinese women in the workforce all contribute to a gendered labor market in Chinese human smuggling.

Conclusion Miller’s work reveals that crime and victimization are gendered through culture, policy and practice, as well as gendered interactions between individuals and groups. Her work also demonstrates how gender shapes the experiences of women/girls and men/boys who are victims and perpetrators of crime and violence. Her theoretical insights increase our understanding of the influence of

640

Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender

organizational context on crime and victimization and on offenders and victims, thus making valuable contributions to the fields of criminology and sociology. Laura S. Logan See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio; Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

References and Further Readings Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4, 139–158. Britton, D. M. (2000). The epistemology of the gendered organization. Gender and Society, 14, 418–434. Cobbina, J., Miller, J., & Brunson, R. K. (2008). Gender, neighborhood danger, and risk-avoidance strategies among urban African-American youths. Criminology, 46, 673–709. Miller, J. (1998). Up it up: Gender and the accomplishment of street robbery. Criminology, 36, 37–66. Miller, J. (2001). One of the guys. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. (2008). Getting played: African American girls, urban inequality, and gendered violence. New York: New York University Press. Peterson, D., Miller, J., & Esbensen, F. (2001). The impact of sex composition on gangs and gang member delinquency. Criminology, 39, 411–440. Zhang, S. X., Chin, K., & Miller, J. (2007). Women’s participation in Chinese transnational human smuggling: A gendered market perspective. Criminology, 45, 699–733.

Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender Jody Miller’s work on the gendered nature of gang life is contained mostly in her book One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender. Miller focuses on two gangs, one in Columbus, Ohio, and another in St. Louis, Missouri, and uses both ethnographic observation and interview techniques to gather

data. She also includes an equally sized comparison sample of non-gang-involved girls. Her work challenges many commonly held beliefs regarding the activities and roles of gang-involved girls. Perhaps most importantly, Miller begins by noting that much of the previous work on girl gangs is framed around a dichotomy that explains female gang involvement as either a product of victimization or other social pathology or as a non-­ normative masculine aberration. In recognizing this, Miller grounds her analysis in the understanding that young women’s experiences in gangs are a product of a dynamic interplay between structure and agency, not simply one or the other. In One of the Guys Miller documents a pervasive belief in gender equality among girl gang members. More specifically, the notion of equality for female gang members is one that exists within the unique context of the gang, and not necessarily on the street or society at-large. Here, according to Miller, so-called equality is determined more by girls’ beliefs in their ability to fulfill traditional masculine expectations of gang membership and “act like dudes” or “be one of the guys” than any idealistic notion of gender equality (p. 180). Miller observes that gang involvement offers a social location where girls find a measure of gender equality that is not available to similarly situated youth outside the gang. However Miller takes care to illustrate that there is a clear gendered hierarchy within the gangs that privileges masculinity. For example, her respondents note that while female gang members can be one of the guys, an all-girl gang would lack credibility and respect. Further, while many of the respondents in her study maintain a strong belief that females obtain some semblance of gender equality by participating in gangs alongside boys, they espouse the concurrent belief that boys are far better equipped to be gang members than girls. These assertions set up a very clear contradiction and a self-imposed hierarchical structure in girls’ and boys’ abilities to carry out the work of a gang member. Miller also critiques the rather simplistic notion that gang involvement offers girls a unique avenue to resist the limiting impositions of traditional gender norms. Miller finds that gender composition of gangs is an important influence on girls’ gang behavior, and may help explain the lack of female solidarity within gangs and the friction between

Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender

non-gang-involved youth. Drawing on Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s work on gender in the workplace, Miller finds that the numerical representation of girls in a particular gang shapes group dynamics and also the frequency and type of delinquent behaviors among girls. She finds that girls in predominately male gangs or “tokens” tend to exaggerate masculine, often violent behaviors in an attempt to mask their difference and remain socially invisible. In doing so, girls in male-­ dominated gang contexts develop an oppositional opinion of girls who do not fit the masculine ideal. Likewise, Miller finds that girls in gangs with a more balanced sex ratio are able to foster a more positive and reciprocal relationship with their female peers. This process, Miller contends, results in situations where gang-involved youths become complicit in the process of gender subordination by reaffirming attitudes and behaviors of male gang members about “other” girls who do not exhibit ideal masculinity. Maintaining status as an accepted or real gang member is thus something girls do at the expense of other girls. Miller also extends Deniz Kandiyoti’s concept of “bargaining with patriarchy” by noting that women and girls must develop different strategies to negotiate varying forms of patriarchal oppression, with gang life being no different. As Miller asserts, “gangs are not uniquely sexist, and do not stand alone in their patterns of gender inequality” (2001, p. 192). Therefore, it stands to reason that young girls will develop a variety of strategies to negotiate the complex, if not contradictory, relations of gang involvement, just as they do away from the gang. Further, many of the youths in Miller’s study faced a variety of personal difficulties including sexual assault and familial drug abuse, making the lives of these girls all the more precarious. These facts may make gang membership attractive for some, while others may be lured by the promise of gender equity as one of the guys regardless of how illusory this idea truly is. Another example of the layered structural inequality of the gang that Miller offers is her discussion of “sexing in,” a process by which girls enter a gang by having sex with a member or members, rather than being “beaten” or “jumped in” in the traditional sense. The manner in which girls enter the gang starkly illustrates the gendered hierarchy of gang structures. Girls who choose to be

641

sexed in occupy the lowest rung in the gang in terms of respect as they are seen by all members of the gang as less than girls who were jumped in “like guys.” Regardless of this clear distinction, both groups of girls remain subordinate to male gang members who perceive themselves as “harder” than girls, who are less accustomed to the rough, violent duties of the gang. Miller notes that the notion that girls are “softer” than boys often excludes some of them from serious delinquency such as drive-by shootings. Ultimately, Miller’s work on the gendered nature of gang life finds that gangs do not stand apart from the patriarchal oppression that structures everyday life. Contrary to notions of gangs as sites of female solidarity and sisterhood, Miller finds gang life to be highly stratified. The gendered nature of gang life creates an atmosphere where girls compete against and victimize each other to satisfy norms and expectations reflecting a masculine ideal. Miller’s description of the false promises of gender equality in gangs is similar to Philippe Bourgois’s study of the East Harlem crack market. Like Miller, Bourgois finds that gender, in this case hypermasculinity, plays an important role in the oppression of inner-city residents. Just as Miller’s respondents participate in violent, oppressive hierarchies to gain respect as one of the guys, Bourgois’s crack dealers commit crimes that often lead to prison or death in the effort to achieve and maintain the respect that is so valued on the streets of East Harlem. In this way, both studies articulate the consequences of the gendered nature of gang and street life that place a premium on respect maintained through hypermasculine hardness. The search for respect as one of the guys encourages marginalized and disadvantaged women and men to participate in their own oppression. Travis W. Linnemann See also Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang: Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory; Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio

References and Further Readings Bourgois, P. (2003). In search of respect: Selling crack in el barrio (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

642

Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency

Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with patriarchy. Gender and Society, 2, 274–290 Miller, J. (1998). Up it up: Gender and the accomplishment of street robbery. Criminology, 36, 37–66. Miller, J. (2001). One of the guys: Girls, gangs and gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. (2002). The strengths and limits of “doing gender” for understanding street crime. Theoretical Criminology, 6, 433–460. Moss Kanter, R. (1977). Some effects of proportion in group life: Skewed sex ratios and responses to token women. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 965–990.

Miller, Walter B.: LowerClass Culture Theory of Delinquency Subcultural theories of crime and delinquency became very prominent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Walter B. Miller was an anthropologist who studied youth gangs for many years. Miller’s 1958 paper, titled “Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency,” was one of the most influential publications on subcultural theory. Other prominent criminologists at this time who emphasized the role of subcultures included Albert Cohen and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. The influence of subcultural theories declined significantly in the last few decades of the 20th century. The lack of empirical support for a correlation between social class and crime was a major reason for the declining influence of subcultural theories. However, the role of values as a cause of crime and delinquency remains strongly supported by empirical research, and this may constitute the most enduring contribution of subcultural theorists such as Miller. Miller described in some detail a set of “focal concerns” or central values that he thought were characteristic of the lower-class culture. In contrast to psychological theories (which may focus on behavioral disorders) or social disorganization perspectives (which may focus on residential instability or high divorce rates), Miller interprets delinquency among street corner groups as—somewhat

ironically—a product of conformity to the standards of lower-class communities. A cultural system of the lower-class community is asserted by Miller to be “a long established, distinctively patterned tradition” that emphasizes values that encourage illegal behavior. Miller lists six focal concerns roughly in order of their significance in the lower-class culture. First and foremost, trouble is described as a focal concern in the lower-class culture. Miller argues that getting into trouble and staying out of trouble with official authorities are major issues or concerns for members of the lower-class culture. Among males, trouble is often expressed through fighting or sexual promiscuity and drinking. Miller argues that personal status in the lowerclass culture is often measured or assessed on a continuum of law-abiding and law-violating behavior. In contrast, middle-class people assess status based on occupational and educational achievement rather than potential trouble or involvement with authorities. Membership in gangs, Miller states, may confer prestige in the subculture; gang membership implies access to power in many neighborhoods. Getting into trouble may satisfy other lower-class culture values or standards, such as the pursuit of excitement and risk, as well as independence from control by authorities. The second most salient focal concern of the lower-class culture is toughness. Toughness is demonstrated by physical prowess (including the ability to fight) and general athletic skill. Adherence to a standard of masculinity is described that shuns sentimental or emotional expression, disdains academic endeavors and skill, and treats women as sexual objects. Miller attributes the focal concern of toughness to the large number of female-headed households in lower-class communities. The lack of male role models is alleged to be problematic in several ways, including the obsessive concern with masculinity in the lower-class culture. Smartness is the third focal concern of the lowerclass culture identified by Miller. This focal concern describes the value placed on the ability to outsmart, con, or take advantage of others (while also being able to avoid being outsmarted or taken advantage of by others). The ability to obtain valued possessions or status by means of mental agility or wit with minimal effort is supposedly a crucial skill in the lower-class culture. While intellectual pursuits are

Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency

denigrated as effeminate, the mental skills required to outsmart others are highly valued. There are several settings that allow individuals to display their smartness or mental agility. Gambling, in particular, offers opportunities to outsmart or dupe others. Miller observes that leadership roles in street corner groups are often based on this skill, as well as displays of toughness. The fourth focal concern described by Miller is termed excitement. Individuals in the lower-class culture might be confronted with tedious and boring routines in daily living. People deal with this boredom, according to Miller, by seeking excitement or emotional stimulation. The focal concern of fate is closely linked to the pursuit of excitement or thrills. The lower-class culture is characterized by Miller as emphasizing one’s luck and the sense that individuals do not control their fate or destiny. Instead of a sense of mastery, those in the lower-class culture perceive that their lives are determined by forces outside their control. The fatalistic attitude or value in the lower-class culture generates a disdain for hard work or effort devoted to any long-term goals. Miller states that within the subculture people believe they will be successful (or not) depending on their luck. Thus, this fatalism or absence of a sense of mastery in life leads to the attitude that it is not even worth trying to succeed. Miller again cites the prevalence of gambling in the lower-class culture as proof of the existence of this focal concern. Although successful involvement in gambling, whether playing poker or betting on horse racing, depends significantly on smartness, the lower-class subculture emphasizes that luck or fate are also crucial factors. Miller observes that certain activities in the lower-class culture, such as gambling, demonstrate several focal concerns simultaneously, including fate, excitement, and smartness. The sixth and final focal concern emphasized by Miller in the lower-class culture is autonomy. Miller describes an inconsistency between what is openly valued in the subculture and what is secretly or covertly desired. People in the lower-class subculture openly discuss their opposition and resentment of authority or external supervision. A frequently expressed sentiment is that “No one is going to push me around.” Yet Miller describes the link between “authority” and “nurturance,” in that

643

supervision and firm controls or restraints are also viewed as demonstrations of concern and caring. The focal concerns of the lower-class culture are often instilled by adolescent male street corner groups or gangs. Miller argues that dysfunctional families in the lower class lead individuals to search for membership in a social group that serves psychological and educational functions. The absence of stable male role models leads to the influence of street corner society, which also provides a sense of belonging. Cohen describes the desire for status and a sense of belonging that may be provided by membership in delinquent gangs. Miller states that conformity to lower-class standards or values generates crime and delinquency. Gang members who break the law are not afflicted with psychological disorders, but they are in fact viewed as the most capable or fit within the lowerclass culture. Ironically, conformity to explicit and implicit values or focal concerns (including toughness, trouble, and excitement) is the principal cause of crime in Miller’s subcultural theory. Ruth Kornhauser provides an emphatic critique of Miller’s subcultural perspective. She observes that focal concerns such as trouble express preference for both crime and law-abiding behavior; crime is not unambiguously valued in the subculture. Several studies have shown that offenders and non-offenders from all social class backgrounds tend to evaluate conventional images and behavior more highly than deviant images. Kornhauser concedes that poor children may indeed engage in more violent behavior than do middle-class children, but she attributes this to social disorganization or disordered neighborhoods rather than to values encouraging violence. Several studies have found that parents of all social classes prefer and try to socialize their children to accept conventional values. Working-class parents are more likely than middle-class parents to value obedience of children, responsibility, and achievement orientation. Kornhauser argues that it is implausible that lower-class parents would attempt to inculcate deviant values; instead, she argues that nearly all parents want the best for their children in terms of conventional accomplishments, and that conformity to both family rules and social rules is highly desired regardless of social class. Kornhauser states that Miller fails to distinguish social classes as “aggregates” and as “collectivities,”

644

Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency

as Karl Marx and Max Weber had noted. Only classes that are collectivities with a shared identity and sense of community are capable of transmitting culture. People in the lower or working class of large industrial nations are mere aggregates or a mass that shares only common structural positions (in terms of income or occupational level), but does not generate unique values. Kornhauser observes that Miller engages in tautological analyses by equating behavior with values; lower-class subcultural values are inferred from behavior (such as aggression, or risk-taking). Such circular reasoning cannot be falsified because those who engage in subcultural behavior are always interpreted as possessing subcultural values. Charles Valentine argues that most of the focal concerns described in Miller’s lower-class subcultural theory are also frequently expressed desires or values in the middle and upper class. Poor people are by no means the only ones who value toughness; higher status individuals openly express admiration for the fiercest competitors, whether in an athletic context or a business setting. Likewise, smartness is just as highly valued among the middle and upper class; individuals who can use their street smarts or wit to outmaneuver others are often admired by people in all social strata. Nor are autonomy and excitement the sole prerogative or pursuit of the lower-class culture; nearly everyone occasionally resents authority figures, and almost everyone enjoys some escape from dull routines. The issue of the possible existence of a correlation between social class and crime remains an unresolved debate. Concerns remain about the measures of social class, with underclass measures (such as unemployment or welfare status) potentially yielding more substantial differences in crime across strata. Those in the underclass or the “disreputable poor” may be more likely to function as a collectivity than as a mere aggregate; this conception of class could provide support for subcultural theory arguments. Even more significant for subcultural theory are consistent findings that values (or beliefs in social control theory terms) are strongly linked to crime and delinquency. “Definitions” described by differential association and social learning theorists are among the strongest correlates of delinquent behavior; those who endorse taking advantage of others and breaking the law (if punishment can be

avoided)—the sort of trouble identified by Miller— are the most likely to commit criminal and delinquent acts. The characteristics of low self-control, described by Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi in their influential general theory of crime, include risk taking and contempt for diligent and sustained effort; these characteristics are similar to focal concerns of excitement and fatalism in Miller’s subcultural theory. Several recent publications continue to support the subcultural perspective. For example, Derek Kreager argues that instead of race or social class, academic performance is the basis for delinquent subcultural membership. Analyzing data from both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, Kreager finds that peer acceptance (measured by the number of friendships) is increased by involvement in violent behavior, but only among males who do poorly in school. Consistent with a subcultural theory perspective, violent behavior is positively valued or leads to greater peer acceptance in some contexts. C. Wesley Younts studied the legitimacy of deviance (in the form of cheating by students on a computer assignment) as affected by status and endorsement of peers. Consistent with subcultural theory, he finds in an experimental design project that endorsement of deviant behavior by peers (regardless of status) increased the likelihood of involvement in deviance. Jeremy Staff and Derek Kreager report that violence can enhance status among peers for males of lower-status families (measured by parental educational attainment). Staff and Kreager conclude that their findings support the subcultural theory interpretation of violence as an alternative means to achieve status for disadvantaged youth. David Brownfield See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Cloward Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency; Whyte, William Foote: Street Corner Society

References and Further Readings Brownfield, D. (1986). A reassessment of cultural deviance theory. Deviant Behavior, 8, 343–359.

Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending Brownfield, D. (1996). Subcultural theories of crime and delinquency. In J. Hagan, A. R. Gills, & D. Brownfield (Eds.), Criminological controversies (pp. 99–123). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity. New York: Free Press. Cohen, A. (1955). Delinquent boys. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jensen, G., & Rojek, D. (1998). Delinquency and youth crime (3rd ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Kornhauser, R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kreager, D. (2007). When it’s good to be “bad”: Violence and adolescent peer acceptance. Criminology, 45, 893–923. Miller, W. B. (1958). Lower class culture as a generating milieu of gang delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14, 5–19. Staff, J., & Kreager, D. (2008). Too cool for school? Violence, peer status, and high school dropout. Social Forces, 87, 445–471. Valentine, C. (1968). Culture and poverty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, F., & McShane, M. (2004). Criminological theory. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Younts, C. W. (2008). Status endorsement and the legitimacy of deviance. Social Forces, 87, 561–590.

Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of LifeCourse-Persistent Offending The relationship between age and crime presents a wonderful conundrum for criminologists. It is simultaneously one of the most accepted and yet least understood empirical realities of the field. The aggregate age distribution of crime is nearly universal. On average, criminal offending starts in pre-adolescence, increases rapidly during adolescence, peaks around age 17 (for most offenses), and then rapidly declines during the transition to young adulthood. Criminologists are in agreement on this point—and have been for quite some time. There is considerable disagreement, however, as to what this aggregate age-crime curve represents.

645

Specifically, do individual patterns of criminal offending mimic the aggregate curve? What conclusions about individual patterns of behavior can be reached based on the age-crime curve? One school of thought articulated and embodied by Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson is that the agecrime curve is invariant. That is, it is essentially the same for all individuals. The counterposition is that the age-crime curve conceals heterogeneity of offending patterns, and that there is notable variation in the age-crime curve across individuals. This latter perspective is expressed by David Farrington, among others. This interpretation of the age-crime curve is also the cornerstone of Terrie E. Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy of offending.

Theoretical Summary Moffitt (1993) originally offered her account of antisocial behavior in order to address a persistent reality of criminal behavior: continuity and change. Lee Robins observed in 1978 that while “adult antisocial behavior virtually requires childhood antisocial behavior,” it is also true that “most antisocial delinquents do not become antisocial adults” (p. 611). The fundamental implication of this paradox is that criminal behavior is characterized both by stability over time (as in the case of persistent offending) and by marked change. This observation has sparked heated—and as yet unresolved—debates, particularly with respect to the age-crime curve. The core of the debate is the extent of homogeneity that exists among offenders and their involvement in crime over time. Moffitt offers a theoretical proposition to enlighten the debate. She proposes that the agecrime curve comprises two qualitatively distinct types of offenders, each with their own etiological path into, and out of, delinquent and criminal behavior. Life-course-persistent offenders (LCPs) are characterized by an early onset of problem behavior and marked continuity across much of the life course. Adolescence-limited offenders (ALs) experiment with delinquency during the teen years, but their delinquency is a behavioral anomaly and they will return to prosocial behavior as they age out of adolescence. In detailing the two types of offenders, each with distinct routes to delinquency, Moffitt is able to account for both the continuity and discontinuity of criminal behavior.

646

Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending

Explaining Continuity

The notion that the age-crime curve conceals distinct groups of offenders with different patterns of behavior is not unique to Moffitt’s theory. Marvin Wolfgang, Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin were the first to observe that 6 percent of the subjects in a Philadelphia birth cohort were responsible for more than half of the offending among the cohort. The presence of a group of persistent and high-rate offenders was noted in other studies as well, and it serves as the basis for Moffitt’s idea of the LCP offender. LCPs begin offending at an early age and continue offending across most of the lifespan. They comprise about 10 percent of the population, yet they account for about 50 percent of the offenses that are committed. Moffitt locates the causal factors of the LCPs’ antisocial behaviors early in childhood. Neuropsychological deficiencies formed before or shortly after birth place a child in a disadvantaged position. The difficult child then has little hope for effective socialization due to the high probability of a detrimental response from caregivers. The original neuropsychological disruptions interact negatively with the environment, which is itself more likely than not to be criminogenic. The result is the early initiation of offending and continuous pathological offending behavior thereafter. These neuropsychological deficits may be either inherited or acquired. Disrupted neural development during gestation, for example, may be the result of maternal drug abuse, inadequate prenatal nutrition, exposure to toxins, brain insult during delivery, or heritable conditions. Postnatal neurodeficiencies may result from inadequate nutrition, harsh and inconsistent parenting, or lack of stimulation and affection. In addition, child abuse could lead to organic brain damage with neuropsychological implications. A sizable body of research links neuropsychological deficits to antisocial behavior. Whether inherited or acquired, these neuropsychological deficiencies likely are manifested in the form of undercontrolled or difficult temperament, delayed motor development, low intellectual functioning, poor verbal and execution function, and hyperactivity, as noted by Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi. Outcomes observed among LCPs include weak family bonds, school dropout, alienation and impulsivity, and violent offending, mental health

problems, substance use, financial problems, and violence, and adverse physical health outcomes. The high incidence of negative outcomes in domains other than criminal behavior illustrates Moffitt’s concept of heterotypic continuity, or behavioral coherence, whereby an underlying trait is expressed across a range of behaviors. Moffitt is careful to highlight that her approach is neither a pure trait theory nor a pure environmental theory. Continuity of antisocial behavior is one potential product of the interaction between individual traits or characteristics and one’s environment; early vulnerabilities may be exacerbated over time to facilitate the continuity of antisocial behavior. Children with cognitive and temperamental disadvantage are more likely born into disadvantaged environments. Parents of difficult children are also less likely to have the resources required to manage their child’s disadvantage in a productive or prosocial manner. Explaining Discontinuity

While LCPs account for the observed continuity of criminal behavior, Moffitt theorizes that a group of ALs is the source of the observed change, or discontinuity, in offending. Adolescence-limited offending is far more common and, in fact, is very nearly normative. For the ALs, delinquency is confined to the period of adolescence. Causal factors must therefore be proximal and able to account for the discontinuity of offending that is the hallmark of ALs. Given the limited nature of adolescence-limited offending, the theory of causality must be specifically related to the time frame in which they offend—that is, adolescence. Moffitt proposes that a maturity gap has resulted from the earlier occurrence of biological maturity coupled with the lengthening of adolescence. The ALs’ offending is the result of their attempts to bridge that gap. As the maturity gap closes with time, inducements for offending behavior disappear and the adolescencelimited offending behavior stops. ALs do not have a history of antisocial behavior in childhood, which means that they have an established repertoire of conventional, prosocial behavior. Their offending behavior is the result of temporary experimentation with delinquency that emerges alongside puberty. It is ultimately rooted

Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending

in social processes; ALs mimic the antisocial behavior of their LCP peers. As they reach mature status and acquire the consequent autonomy, the strain of the maturity gap lessens and ultimately disappears, and the ALs return to conventional behavior. Adolescence-limited offenders, by definition, desist as they emerge into young adulthood.

Empirical Status Life-Course-Persisters

The empirical status of Moffitt’s theory can generally be regarded as favorable, with some suggestions in the literature for further specification and refinement of the theory. Much of the empirical research focuses on the life-course-persisters. The existence of a group of LCP-like offenders is empirically supported by a host of studies. Daniel Nagin and Kenneth Land, for example, identified four patterns of offending in a sample of 403 British males studied from ages 8 to 32. These four groups included non-offenders, low-level chronics, adolescence-limiteds, and high-level chronics. Moffitt’s own empirical tests have been conducted on data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a 33-year longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 1,037 New Zealanders born in 1972 and 1973. Using data from a birth cohort of several hundred New Zealand males, Moffitt, Donal Lynam, and Phil Silva found that neuropsychological deficits were associated with early onset of delinquency and persistent offending thereafter. Poor verbal ability is particularly predictive of LCP offending. In addition, neuropsychological status did not appear to be significantly related to adolescentonset delinquency. In a study of the males and females from the Dunedin data, Moffitt and Caspi found that early onsetters had childhoods marked by inadequate parenting, neurocognitive problems, difficult temperaments, and behavioral problems. Those who experienced adolescent-onset of delinquent behavior did not evince these childhood risk factors. In an important follow-up of the Dunedin cohort to age 26, Moffitt et al. (2002) tested an essential assertion of the theory: “that childhoodonset, but not adolescent-onset, antisocial behavior is associated in adulthood with antisocial

647

personality, violence, and continued serious antisocial behavior that expands into maladjustment in work life and victimization of partners and children” (p. 180). Their findings support the original tenets of the theory and also demonstrate the presence of heterotypic continuity, or behavioral coherence, whereby antisocial tendencies are expressed across a variety of behavioral domains. Adolescence-Limiteds

Additional empirical evidence supports Moffitt’s hypothesis that adolescence-limited offending is motivated by the co-occurrence of strain resulting from a maturity gap and social mimicry of persistent delinquent peers. From the Dunedin data, Moffitt and Caspi observe that offending among ALs is more strongly correlated with peer delinquency than that of LCPs. In their 2001 analysis of the Youth in Transition data, Alex Piquero and Timothy Brezina found that adolescence-limited offending is motivated, at least in part, by a desire for autonomy. Their findings suggest that the delinquency of the ALs is rebellious but not aggressive, and their research supports Moffitt’s hypothesis that the interaction between the onset of puberty with a craving for adult social roles and autonomy is a causal factor in the ALs’ delinquency. David Fergusson, L. John Horwood, and Nagin identified a group of adolescent-onset offenders in their examination of the Christchurch Health and Development study data, which tracks 900 New Zealand children from birth through age 18. They also identified a group that resembled the LCPs, a group of abstainers, and a group they referred to as moderate risk offenders. They used semi-parametric group-based modeling to examine the etiological trajectories of each group. They found that deviant peer affiliations were an important factor in adolescent-onset of offending, but only when such affiliation occurs in the presence of pre-existing moderate risk. These findings suggest that Moffitt’s theoretical explanation for ALs’ offending behavior may require some consideration of an interaction effect. Additional Groups

Fergusson and his colleagues are not the only ones who have found evidence of an offending

648

Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending

pattern not posited in Moffitt’s taxonomy. A third offending prototype emerges across multiple studies and from multiple datasets: the low-level chronics. They offend at low but consistent rates into adulthood, regardless of whether they onset or begin offending in childhood or adolescence. This group was originally given the misnomer “recoveries.” Longer term follow-up revealed, however, that what was first thought to be early recovery— that is, a fully realized desistance—was in fact a period of intermittency (Moffitt et al., 2002). The existence of this group demanded some theoretical revision and extension. According to the original articulation of the theory, those individuals who experience early onset of problem behavior are predicted to continue on to persistent and serious offending, while those who onset during adolescence will experiment only during adolescence and then will desist as they enter young adulthood and take on the attendant adult social roles. The low-level chronics defy these predictions on both counts. The 26-year follow-up data suggest that this group is indistinguishable from the LCPs in childhood but differs in adulthood in that their pathology is internalized. Low-level chronics exhibit depression, anxiety disorders, neuroticism, and social isolation as young adults (Moffitt et al., 2002). The follow-up study also prompted Moffitt and her colleagues to revisit the parameters of adolescence-limited offending. A nontrivial number of the ALs were still offending at age 26. Moffitt asserts that the explanation for this observation lies in the prolonged maturity gap experienced by later birth cohorts. It is possible that for more contemporary cohorts, true adulthood now begins after age 25. In this case, the continued antisocial behavior at age 26, even among those designated as ALs, is still consistent with the original tenets of the theory. Further bolstering this possibility is the relative success of the ALs compared to the LCPs in the domains of work, education, relationships, health, and mental well-being.

Criticisms and Controversies John Laub and Robert Sampson have described Moffitt’s dual taxonomy as one of the most influential developmental accounts of persistence and desistance in offending. They are also among her

most vocal critics. Their concerns with Moffitt’s taxonomy take two general forms. Broadly speaking, Sampson and Laub question the assumption that offender typologies are necessary for understanding continuity and change. Specifically, they are concerned that Moffitt overstates the persistence of the LCP, and that prospective identification of offending trajectories is futile, as criminologists are unable do so with any degree of accuracy given the actuarial strategies currently at their disposal. Laub and Sampson feel that Moffitt overstates the continuity of the LCPs, or put differently, she understates the possibility for change in the LCPs. Based on their follow-up of to age 70 of a sample of boys from Boston initially studied starting in the 1930s by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, Sampson and Laub conclude that everyone desists at some point. As such, there is no such thing in the literal sense as the “life-course” persister. The theoretical implication of this observation is that childhood characteristics are not sufficient to accurately predict long-term trajectories of offending. They criticize the post-hoc nature of Moffitt’s typology, and they offer data and analysis to suggest that, when tested prospectively, the precepts of Moffitt’s taxonomy do not hold. “One fundamental problem is that most typological approaches in criminology are atheoretical and post hoc” (Laub & Sampson, 2003, p. 287). According to Laub and Sampson, Moffitt’s theory is defined prospectively but is always tested retrospectively, and this has led to disingenuous support for the theory. Their analysis of the follow-up Glueck data suggests that early childhood predictors do not prospectively distinguish the various groups of offenders. That is, group membership is not predictable based on individual, childhood, and adolescent risk factors. They interpret this finding as a significant challenge to Moffitt’s position that the causal factors of life-course-persistent offending are located in early childhood. All of those goes to echo Sampson and Laub’s enduring point that heterogeneity in adult criminal trajectories cannot be explained by childhood differences. The Meaning of Groups

There are several sources of debate inherent in any use of a typology or offender classification

Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending

system. A logistic question concerns how many groups are necessary to completely but parsimoniously characterize the population. The debate on this point has both theoretical and methodological facets. Moffitt originally proposed two offending groups, but much research has noted the existence of four, five, or even six groups of empirically identified patterns of offending. Additionally, the reality of intermittency in offending is underdeveloped in most developmental theory (Piquero & Moffitt, 2005). Gaps in offending are widely observed and readily acknowledged, but we know little about the causal pathways in and out of offending in the short term. Moffitt is relatively silent on the topic of intermittency, but the recently identified lowlevel chronics may be a step in a fruitful direction. Theoretically, criminologists must ask what these groups actually represent. Are they meaningful groups with clear delineation, or are they an organizing heuristic with applications for theory development but little practical applicability? Barbara Maughan describes debates that have arisen in conjunction with developmental theory exploration, including the differing contributions of categorical versus dimensional approaches to conceptualizing antisocial behavior. She concludes that both approaches have much to offer. Empirical Concerns

Continued testing and verification of offending patterns remains an empirical priority, but there is also a paucity of empirical work on race and sex differences and the applicability of the theory to females and racial minorities. Persephanie Silverthorn and Paul Frick, for example, question whether the taxonomy applies to girls. They assert that there is no early-starter pathway for girls. Rather, female offending is characterized by a single developmental trajectory and by late onset of offending. Both Fergusson and Horwood (2002) and Moffitt and Caspi (2001) offer evidence to contradict this notion and conclude that Moffitt’s theory provides a parsimonious account of the etiology of antisocial behavior for both males and females.

Policy Implications Moffitt’s taxonomy of offending has important implications for prevention and intervention policy,

649

in terms of both identifying the best subjects for intervention and for the appropriate causal variables to target. Although adolescence-limited offending is near ubiquitous, it is a less troubling form of delinquency. According to Moffitt’s theory, it essentially resolves itself within a relatively short period of time. While the ALs are the larger of the offending groups, their delinquent and criminal behavior is not the most harmful. The offending of the LCPs, on the other hand, is more likely to be serious and by definition continues over a much longer period of time. The LCPs, then, represent the most efficacious target for prevention and intervention. Several of the neuropsychological deficits implicated in the etiology of LCP offending are preventable. Poor prenatal nutrition, prenatal drug and alcohol abuse, and organic damages from injury or exposure to toxic substances, for example, represent ideal venues for intervention to disrupt the causal process toward persistent offending. Recall, though, that the continuity evinced by the LCP is the product of an interaction between their neuropsychological vulnerabilities and their socializing environment. It is possible, then, that increased support for parents and caregivers of children with these challenges could also provide a helpful venue for prevention as well (Farrington & Welsh, 2007). Sarah Bacon See also Criminal Career Paradigm; Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory; Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance; Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior; Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime; Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

References and Further Readings Farrington, D. P. (1986). Age and crime. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 7, pp. 189–250). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farrington, D. P., & Welsh, B. C. (2007). Saving children from a life of crime: Early risk factors and effective interventions. New York: Oxford University Press. Fergusson, D. M., & Horwood. L. J. (2002). Male and female offending trajectories. Development and Psychopathology, 14, 159–177.

650

Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio

Fergusson, D. M., Horwood, L. J., & Nagin, D. S. (2000). Offending trajectories in a New Zealand birth cohort. Criminology, 38, 525–552. Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. R. (1983). Age and the explanation of crime. The American Journal of Sociology, 89, 552–584. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys to age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maughan, B. (2005). Developmental trajectory modeling: A view from developmental psychopathology. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 602, 118–130. Moffitt, T. E. (1990). The neuropsychology of delinquency: A critical review of theory and research. In N. Morris & M. Tonry (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 12, pp. 99–169). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and lifecourse-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Moffitt, T. E. (2006). Life-course-persistent versus adolescence-limited antisocial behavior. In D. Cicchetti & D. Cohen (Eds.), Developmental psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 570–598). New York: Wiley. Moffitt, T. E., & Caspi, A. (2001). Childhood predictors differentiate life-course persistent and adolescencelimited antisocial pathways among males and females. Development and Psychopathology, 13, 355–375. Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., Harrington, H., & Milne, B. J. (2002). Males on the life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial pathways: Follow-up at age 26 years. Development and Psychopathology, 14, 179–207. Moffitt, T. E., Caspi, A., Rutter, M., & Silva, P. A. (2001). Sex differences in antisocial behaviour: Conduct disorder, delinquency, and violence in the Dunedin Longitudinal Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moffitt, T. E., Lynam, D. R., & Silva, P. A. (1994). Neuropsychological tests predicting persistent male delinquency. Criminology, 32, 277–300. Nagin, D. S., Farrington, D. P., & Moffitt, T. E. (1995). Life-course trajectories of different types of offenders. Criminology, 33, 111–139. Nagin, D. S., & Land, K. C. (1993). Age, criminal careers, and population heterogeneity: Specification and estimation of a nonparametric, mixed poisson model. Criminology, 31, 327. Nagin, D. S., & Tremblay, R. E. (2005). Developmental trajectory groups: Fact or a useful statistical fiction? Criminology, 43, 873–904.

Piquero, A. R., & Brezina, T. (2001). Testing Moffitt’s account of adolescence-limited delinquency. Criminology, 39, 353–370. Piquero, A. R., Daigle, L. E., Gibson, C., Piquero, N. L., & Tibbetts, S. G. (2007). Research note: Are lifecourse-persistent offenders at risk for adverse health outcomes? Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 44, 185–207. Piquero, A. R., & Moffitt, T. E. (2005). Explaining the facts of crime: How the developmental taxonomy replies to Farrington’s invitation. In D. P. Farrington (Ed.), Integrated developmental and life course theories of offending (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 14, pp. 51–72). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Piquero, A. R., Moffitt, T. E., & Lawton, B. (2005). Race and crime: The contribution of individual, familial, and neighborhood risk factors of life-course-persistent offending. In D. Hawkins & K. Kempf-Leonard (Eds.), Our children, their children: Race, crime, and the juvenile justice system (pp. 202–244). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Piquero, A. R., & White, N. A. (2003). On the relationship between cognitive abilities and life-coursepersistent offending among a sample of African Americans: A longitudinal test of Moffitt’s hypothesis. Journal of Criminal Justice, 31, 399–409. Robins, L. N. (1978). Sturdy childhood predictors of adult antisocial behavior: Replications From longitudinal studies. Psychological Medicine, 8, 611–622. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (2003). Life-course desisters? Trajectories of crime among delinquent boys followed to age 70. Criminology, 41, 555–592. Silverthorn, P., & Frick, P. J. (1999). Developmental pathways to antisocial behavior: The delayed-onset pathways in girls. Developmental Psychopathology, 11, 101–126. White, H. R., Bates, M. E., & Buyske, S. (2001). Adolescence-limited versus persistent delinquency: Extending Moffitt’s hypothesis into adulthood. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 600–609. Wolfgang, M., Figlio, R., & Sellin, T. (1972). Delinquency in a birth cohort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio The main contributions of Joan W. Moore’s research on barrios and gangs in East Los Angeles

Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio

were her community-focused approach and her unique collaborative methodology. Unlike most studies of gangs by criminologists, Moore’s community studies understood gangs, drugs, and prison as integral components of a barrio/ghetto system. Her attention to the role of women in the gang and her collaborative methodology have set a largely unmatched standard in the field. She is one of the few women to do research with gangs, and one of the few social scientists to sustain research in specific neighborhoods over decades. Moore earned her M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1953 and her Ph.D. in 1959. Everett Hughes’s courses on field research would make a lasting impact on her and would lead her to construct her perspective on gangs inductively through empirical research. Her studies at Chicago included courses by Lloyd Warner, Peter Blau, and Louis Wirth. But it was Hughes’s methods courses, which sent his mainly white undergraduates out into Chicago’s south side to see for themselves how poor black people lived, that would inspire her future Los Angeles research. Unlike nearly all other researchers on gangs and poor minority communities, Moore did her dissertation on the power elite, exploring the “Stability and Instability in the Metropolitan Upper Class.” After she left Chicago, she began research on the Mexican American Study Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the midst of the heat of the 1960s social movements, Moore complemented her research on the study of Mexicans in the United States by looking for ways to be involved in the communities she was studying. She found a home in the Community Concern Corporation that worked with “pintos,” or released prisoners who were mostly addicts. As she gave time and expertise to community work, she discovered that the pintos also all belonged to longstanding gangs. Her first book, Homeboys, was subtitled Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles. Homeboys and her follow-up, Going Down to the Barrios, were unique in the literature in (1) understanding of the integral role of gangs in barrios; (2) Moore’s unprecedented collaborative research methods that included random sampling of gang klikas, or age-graded groups; and (3) laying the groundwork for extensive investigation of the role of women in gangs and drug use.

651

Gangs and Community Moore believes her greatest contribution was in situating the study of gangs in the context of their communities. The East Los Angeles Mexican experience, which she had studied in her earlier research, gave her an understanding of how pintos and particularly their gangs fit into barrio life. Unlike the theory-testing approach of James F. Short and Fred Strodtbeck’s Group Process and Gang Delinquency, or the theoretically driven Delinquency and Opportunity of Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, Moore based her analysis of East Los Angeles gangs on a historical analysis of their barrios: White Fence and Maravilla. Moore’s work stood in sharp distinction to Malcolm Klein’s contemporary Los Angeles studies. Klein saw community context as less important than universal characteristics of delinquent peer groups, while Moore looked at how barrio gangs reflected the experience of racism and in­­equality of Mexicans in the United States. Her perspective and strong community support would earn her the hostility of Klein at the University of Southern Califor­ nia and eventual involuntary termination. Few scholars after Frederick Thrasher’s seminal work would base their analysis of gangs on community dynamics. William F. Whyte described East Boston gangs within a context of the Italian community. But most gang research was concerned mainly with cultural outlook (Walter Miller, Lewis Yablonsky, and Albert Cohen), group processes (Malcolm Klein and James F. Short), or variations in macro-structural features (Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin as well as Irving Spergel). While some attention was paid to race and ethnicity, community context and the Chicago tradition declined throughout the 1940s and 1950s. One reason was that the main proliferation of gangs took place in black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican communities, and there were few minority researchers. Solving the problems of access and valid, reliable, and humane descriptions of minority gangs would become major trademarks of Moore’s work. Moore’s Homeboys described the persistence of Mexican East Los Angeles gangs over decades as products of Mexican American history. She explained how Chicano gangs differed from the white ethnic gangs of traditional gang research. Rather than the gang being only an adolescent peer

652

Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio

group, lasting only a short period before its members matured out of the gang, Moore pointed out that East Los Angeles gangs had persisted for decades. Borrowing from Hughes, she termed these gangs as “quasi-institutionalized” within the barrio. Unlike traditional gang theories, her research saw the gang as both adolescent and adult, firmly tied to heroin and drug addiction, and closely tied to the prison experience. Moore’s description of the ghetto/barrio economic and social system utilized a dual labor market model borrowed from economist Bennett Harrison. Her analysis of the closed worldview of the young barrio males reflected the persistence of a secondary labor market that promised little mobility to barrio youth. Writing in the mid-1970s, Moore was the first researcher to call attention to the sweeping changes in the economy and investigate how those changes might impact gangs.

Collaborative Research Moore’s methodology was derived from her studies under Hughes and Warner, but also was a straightforward way to solve the problem of access and validity in research. For Moore, the problem was obvious: Most importantly, unless community participants are actively involved in both the research and its uses, as we have done in this study, both the research and its ultimate uses tend to be highly suspect. While this can be termed politicization, the alternative is not every pleasant either. Unless the community is involved, socalled objective research will almost inevitably be politicized beyond the researcher’s control. (Moore, 1978, p. 10)

In order to access the pinto subculture, it was necessary to secure cooperation of pintos. The misuse of research by social scientists was a major issue at the time, with Project Camelot and other examples of research used for elite purposes. For Moore, research needed to be protected from politicization by the powerful, and the only way to safeguard such misuse was to firmly embed research in the community. Thus, Moore would serve as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Community Concern

Corporation, an organization founded and run completely by pintos: former convicts, drug addicts, and gang members. Her long association with Robert Garcia, former White Fence member, was as important for her research as Doc was for William F. Whyte. But unlike Whyte, Moore’s work was embedded in a collaborative effort of dozens of exgang members, organized into a research corporation, and dedicated to use the research to aid their community. Moore also testified as an expert witness on behalf of community groups and consultant to a host of community projects. Her involvement continued for many years in East Los Angeles and was not bounded by this or that funded study. Thus she gained credibility within the community that can only be secured with time. Her collaborative method differed radically from ethnography, Moore wrote in an essay coauthored by Robert Garcia. The research relied on its legitimacy within the community of those being researched and was carried out by trained staff drawn from that same community. For Moore, while this method was ethical, it was also the best means to assure validity. It confronted the tendency, in both ethnography and survey research, for respondents to put on displays and performances for well-meaning researchers. Collaborative research, for Moore, was a way to get to Erving Goffman’s “back stage” knowledge, to find out what the actors say to one another, not “perform” to authorities. This unique research model used random samples of gang members drawn from klikas over the past decades to draw conclusions about gang life. Using the insider knowledge of her pinto collaborators, Moore was able to assemble rosters of gang members in nearly all klikas and randomly sample them for interviews. This produced the first, and in many ways, only truly scientific sample of gang members in the history of gang research. Moore’s findings, humanizing gang members and portraying them as real people within a no-exit barrio system, was a direct product of her method.

Women and Gangs One other way Moore’s research stands out is her focus on women. From the beginning of her research, the role of women in community life was obvious, as was the influence of heroin and barrio gangs. She was principal investigator of a “Women

Moore, Joan W.: Homeboys and Homegirls in the Barrio

and Heroin” study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and she produced a host of reports and articles about women and drug use. She found that the “cholo” culture of East Los Angeles barrios severely handicapped women as they struggled with drug use and survival. Chicanas, Moore found, were more damaged going into the gangs and were more damaged by their gang experience than males. They were “doubly deviant”—both as gang members and as women, violating conventional gender norms. Her book Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change returns to Los Angeles to compare gangs active in the 1940s with those active in the 1970s. The study was based on a random sample of male and females and examined how the barrios had changed and not changed over the years. She noted the increasing presence and normalcy of gang members and drug use and sales. She also noted that fully a third of all gang members in East Los Angeles were women, and Going Down to the Barrio looked carefully at both males and females. It is difficult to argue with Moore’s (1991, p. 136) claim of her examination of women that “such even-handed treatment is virtually unknown in the literature on gangs.” Many of Moore’s later writings would be devoted to reviews of the literature on females in and around gangs, and what is known of female gangs around the world.

Conclusion In 1984, Moore was elected president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and her work has been pathbreaking. Still, her “outsider” status as a woman doing gang research may have kept her work from the acclaim it deserves. After leaving Los Angeles, she moved to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee where she continued her studies of East Los Angeles gangs and then went on to sponsor gang research in Milwaukee and nurture it elsewhere. Among those she mentored in gang research were Diego Vigil, Avelardo Valdez, and John Hagedorn. In an era when gangs are being increasingly demonized, Moore’s research stands out as a model

653

of how to use social science to humanize the gang member, while pulling no punches on the ugly side of gang life. The bulk of today’s federally funded gang studies are concerned with law enforcement questions of control. Moore’s research, however, turns attention to the conditions in barrios and ghettos and to how gang members attempt to both survive and make meaning. Her conclusion to Going Down to the Barrio might set the research agenda for the next decade. She says that gangs take on increased importance under changing economic circumstances, and have an increased impact on young kids (p. 138). Research in the future will be greatly indebted to the corpus of Moore’s work. John M. Hagedorn See also Bourgois, Philippe: In Search of Respect; Campbell, Anne: Girls in the Gang; Horowitz, Ruth, and Gary Schwartz: Honor and Gang Delinquency; Jankowski, Martin Sanchez: Islands in the Street; Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization; Maher, Lisa: Sexed Work; Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender

References and Further Readings Hughes, E. (1971). Bastard institutions. In The sociological eye: Selected papers (pp. 98–105). Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. Klein, M. (1971). Street gangs and street workers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Moore, J. W. (1978). Homeboys: Gangs, drugs, and prison in the barrios of Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moore, J. W. (1991). Going down to the barrio: Homeboys and homegirls in change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moore, J. W., & Garcia, R. (1979). Research in minority communities: Collaborative and street ethnography models compared. Milwaukee: Urban Research Center, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Moore, J. W., & Mata, A. (1981). Women and heroin in Chicano communities. Los Angeles: Chicano Pinto Research Project. Vigil, D. (1988). Barrio gangs. Austin: University of Texas Press.

N prefer risky or exciting acts or the benefits of immediate gratification. But IDD theory attempts to more completely fill in the picture by specifying a formal theory of why individuals weigh the costs and benefits of offending in different ways.

Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence This theory, proposed by Daniel Nagin and Raymond Paternoster, combines ideas from several other prominent criminology theories in a unique way. Thus, the theory of individual differences and deterrence (IDD) represents an important integration, elaboration, and synthesis of different streams of thought in the field of criminology. Drawing from deterrence theory, IDD places considerable weight on the crime-reducing effects of sanction threats. Although deterrence theory is one of the oldest formal theories of criminal behavior, criminologists have long been dissatisfied with its dominant focus on the effects of sanction threats. To address this concern, economists, social psychologists, and criminologists have proposed a range of so-called rational choice theories that emphasize both the benefits and the costs of criminal behavior. While most rational choice theories represent an important advance over traditional deterrence-focused theories, many of these perspectives provide limited insight into the problem of how two individuals—faced with the same set of objective costs and benefits—might come to very different decisions about whether and how much to offend. Rational choice theories have long recognized that individuals may simply differ in their tendency to

Deterrence and Rational Choice The powerful idea that the threat of sanctions can deter individuals from committing crimes traces its roots back to the foundational 18th-century-work of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. This work has become known as the Classical School and its primary argument is that the decision to offend will be sensitive to the certainty, swiftness, and severity of legal sanctions. Rational choice theorists argue that this perspective is too limited since it ignores informal sanction threats and the rewards of criminal behavior. Informal sanction threats and rewards can be easy to measure and quantify, or they can be the result of relatively complex, individual-specific, mental calculation. As Nagin and Paternoster point out, many rational choice theories also allow for a moral dimension in the explanation of offending. Thus, conscience can form a barrier to offending even if the other benefits of offending outweigh the costs. Though the rational choice perspective surely provides a more complete picture of decision-making calculus than deterrence theory, it has been limited by vague and incomplete descriptions of the process by which people approach the actual weighing of costs and benefits.

655

656

Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence

Key Theoretical Linkages To more completely specify the process of deterrence and rational choice processes involved in decision making, Nagin and Paternoster draw on several principal theoretical ideas. These ideas flow primarily from the self-control theory of Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson and the biocentric rational-choice perspective of James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein. According to these perspectives, individuals vary in their tendency to think about the long-term implications of their behavior (present-orientation) and the effects of their behavior on other people (self-centeredness). Additionally, these perspectives both maintain that individual differences in present-orientation and self-centeredness are established relatively early in life. Also, once established, these differences are relatively time-stable; individuals who rank high in the population on present-orientation and selfcenteredness early in life will tend to rank high in the population on these characteristics later in life. Additionally, Nagin and Paternoster draw on two key concepts from Travis Hirschi’s original theory of social control. According to control theories, people will naturally be inclined to offend because offending is the most expeditious and immediately satisfying solution to many problems. The question, then, is not why people offend but why they do not offend. According to Hirschi, attachment to others, commitments to conformity, involvement in conventional activities, and moral beliefs are barriers to offending activity. Like social control theorists, Nagin and Paternoster argue that attachments to others and commitments to conformity are essential for developing and strengthening relationships and a reputation for dependability. Finally, the role of chance events and “turning points” discussed in Robert Sampson and John Laub’s life-course control theory of criminal behavior allows for a “random component” in the explanation of why some individuals who were previously active offenders are able to turn away from criminality. A caring teacher, persistent relative, or attentive mentor can lead to important life transitions for individuals who might otherwise be doomed to a life of criminal behavior and other serious difficulties. Nagin and Paternoster’s theory also allows for the possibility that seemingly random chance occurrences can set the stage for major changes in life direction.

Summary of Individual Differences and Deterrence Theory Nagin and Paternoster contend that attachments and commitments can be viewed as investments that increase in value with the passage of time. In that sense, attachments and commitments can be viewed as commodities or “personal capital,” which can translate into specific benefits (e.g., job security, marital satisfaction, a secure financial position, and comfortable lifestyle). The accumulation of personal capital requires some sacrifice at one point in time in order to reap returns at later points in time. As the assets of relationships and reputations strengthen and mature, people have more to lose by engaging in behaviors that run contrary to those assets. But all individuals are not equally likely to develop reservoirs of personal capital. According to IDD theory, personal capital is most likely to accumulate when people are able to delay gratification and contemplate how their actions affect other people. They do note that the relationship between present orientation and self-centeredness and the development of personal capital is a probabilistic relationship. Chance events, such as those discussed by Sampson and Laub, can intervene to divert people toward and away from the development of personal capital. The theory’s key axiom is that individuals with high levels of personal capital have more to lose by engaging in criminal behavior and are, thus, more “deterrable.”

Theoretical Implications Rational choice considerations are predicted to operate for all people, but they are predicted to be more salient for individuals with high levels of personal capital. This elaborated theory of rational choice provides us with concrete, testable hypotheses about why some individuals appear to be more “rational” and sensitive to costs and benefits of offending than others. Robert Brame See also Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hagan, John, and Bill McCarthy: Social Capital and Crime; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime; Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory

Negotiated Coexistence

References and Further Readings Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1991). The preventive effects of the perceived risk of arrest: Testing an expanded conception of deterrence. Criminology, 29, 561–588. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1993). Enduring individual differences and rational choice theories of crime. Law and Society Review, 27, 467–496. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1994). Personal capital and social control: The deterrence implications of a theory of individual differences in criminal offending. Criminology, 32, 581–606. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, J. Q., & Herrnstein, R. J. (1985). Crime and human nature. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Negotiated Coexistence Christopher Browning, Seth Feinberg, and Robert Dietz’s “negotiated coexistence” model of community crime describes the paradoxical process by which intra-neighborhood social ties both contribute to social control orientations within urban neighborhoods and, simultaneously, generate social capital for resident offenders. Neighborhood residents who offend within their own community may draw on social capital to avoid sanction and maintain a presence in the community, complicating the local regulation of crime. The negotiated coexistence model is rooted in, but challenges, the classic social disorganization perspective on crime and John Kasarda and Morris Janowitz’s subsequent “systemic” reformulation. Below, the systemic approach and Robert Sampson and colleagues’ more recent “collective efficacy” approach to understanding community crime are described; then the entry turns to the core tenets of the negotiated coexistence model. The entry concludes with a brief review of empirical assessments of the negotiated coexistence approach and prospects for future development and testing of the theory.

657

Social Disorganization and the Systemic Model In a classic statement of the “social disorganization” perspective, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay argued that structural disadvantage at the neighborhood level—most notably poverty, residential instability, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity—attenuated the community-level capacity to achieve shared goals, including the local control of crime. In Juvenile Delinquency in Urban Areas, Shaw and McKay offered initial empirical support for a link between aspects of neighborhood structural disadvantage and the prevalence of crime. Their insights remain relevant today, as researchers continue to acknowledge the role of neighborhood structural disadvantage in explaining crime rate variations across urban space. Nevertheless, the approach has been criticized for failing to effectively articulate and measure the intervening mechanisms linking disadvantaged macro-level structure with crime. Kasarda and Janowitz’s systemic model of community social dynamics played a key role in the theoretical development of the social disorganization model by highlighting the link between residential stability, local social bonds, and the emergence of locality based solidarities. In their view, the local community could be seen as “a complex system of friendship and kinship networks and formal and informal associational ties rooted in family life and ongoing socialization processes” (1974, p. 329). Accordingly, the prevalence and strength of local networks was posited to be a key intervening social process through which neighborhoods acquired cohesion and identified shared values. Similarly, Ruth Rosner Kornhauser’s reformulation of the social disorganization approach emphasized the role of attenuated social ties in linking macro-level structural disadvantage with diminished informal social control capacity. Thus, both approaches placed considerable stock in the capacity of social network ties to foster effective action on behalf of collective goals such as the local control of crime. Empirical assessment of the regulatory role of social networks, however, has not yielded strong support for the systemic model’s assumptions. Research investigating the influence of dense or prevalent neighborhood social networks on local crime rates has not offered consistent evidence that

658

Negotiated Coexistence

networks contribute to crime control. Empirical support for the contention that networks are a key mediating link in the association between neighborhood structural disadvantage and crime has also been limited. Consequently, the systemic and related approaches have been criticized for lacking an effective explanation of communities with extensive social ties and local attachments that nevertheless maintain relatively high crime rates.

Negotiated Coexistence The negotiated coexistence model draws on key insights from the systemic and collective efficacy perspectives while positing a more complex and potentially paradoxical relationship between aspects of neighborhood social organization and crime. The negotiated coexistence model incorporates the systemic assumption that local social ties and the solidarities they promote contribute to normative orientations that support the control of crime and criminogenic conditions. Networks, however, are not presumed to function exclusively to limit the prevalence of crime. The notion that networks may promote crime is certainly not a new one, and can be linked with the long-standing tradition of “sub-cultural” and peerinfluence models that focus on the social dissemination of crime-tolerant attitudes. The negotiated coexistence model, however, does not assume that the crime-enhancing impact of neighborhood social networks operates through such a mechanism. Rather, offenders are acknowledged to maintain social ties with both potential offenders as well as “conventional” residents within urban neighborhoods. Ties to mainstream social networks, in turn, provide opportunities for conventional residents to monitor and sanction local offenders but also lead to the accumulation of social capital for the latter. Negotiated coexistence thus describes the process by which local social organization both regulates and protects the presence of potential offenders within urban communities. Below, the key elements of social organization central to the model of negotiated coexistence— networks and reciprocated exchange, solidarity, trust, and social control—from the standpoint of Alejandro Portes’s discussion of the sources of social capital are reviewed. Then insights from the collective efficacy perspective and recent ethnographic

research are incorporated to articulate the counterintuitive process by which local social ties diminish the effectiveness of neighborhood-based informal social control. The negotiated coexistence model acknowledges the multifaceted nature of social capital and the potential for competition between objectives toward which different social capital types may be deployed. Portes’s typology of social capital offers a useful framework for understanding this process. Portes describes three key types of social capital: as applied to neighborhoods, bounded solidarity captures locality-based identities and attachments that may foster prosocial activities on behalf of fellow residents (including the control of public space and vulnerability to victimization); enforceable trust promotes positive activity on behalf of the neighborhood in exchange for some reward or compensation by the collectivity (e.g., intervention on behalf of a neighbor threatened with victimization in anticipation of praise from the wider community and future unspecified benefits for conformity to shared community values); finally, reciprocated exchanges of information, favors, or material assistance contribute to an informal economy of “social chits” between actors, repayment of which is not governed by a clear expectations as to form or timing. The three forms of social capital identified can be distinguished based on their origin in a common social structure versus direct ties: Bounded solidarity and enforceable trust do not require direct ties between actors but, rather, shared membership in a group; reciprocated exchanges, in contrast, imply interaction. In the context of a neighborhood, the question of whether a particular form of social capital requires a social tie or not has implications for the analysis of two key functions of social capital: social control and network-mediated benefits. Neighborhood-based social control likely arises, principally, out of bounded solidarity and enforceable trust, according to Portes. Sampson and colleagues also link locality-based solidarities and trust with shared expectations for action on behalf of local goals—the combination of which they label “collective efficacy.” The negotiated coexistence model expects that network-mediated exchanges on a large scale will promote community attachment and trust. Network interaction and exchange, however, also

Negotiated Coexistence

results in the accumulation of obligations at a dyad or small group level. Outstanding obligations generated by extensive network exchange (including offenders and potential offenders) may compete with the social control objectives of the collectivity. Network ties that produce social capital for offenders may result in the attenuation of sanctions against them, diminishing the force and effectiveness of neighborhood level social control. Offenders may accrue benefits both directly and indirectly from more extensive residentially based networks. Offenders who are linked to conventional residents may leverage their potentially rich set of ties and obligations. Intergenerational closure within urban neighborhoods, for instance, may promote social control efforts of local adults directed toward youth who are not their own children. Nevertheless, these efforts are likely to be limited in severity if ties between intergenerationally connected parents are strong. Mary Pattillo captures this countervailing dynamic in an ethnographic analysis of a middle-class African American neighborhood. Although community ties were extensive and identification with the neighborhood was strong, broad-based acquaintance networks and familiarity led to hedging of social control actions. On witnessing a criminal act by a local adolescent, a neighborhood resident stated, “I didn’t wanna give this young man’s name [to the police] because his mama is such a sweet lady” (Pattillo, 1998, p. 765). The adolescent’s social capital (through the network-mediated exchanges of his mother) resulted in a more muted response of the witnessing resident to the offense—specifically, not involving formal authorities. Although potentially benefitting the adolescent in the long run (to the extent that contact with the criminal justice system diminishes long-term prospects), the community is exposed to the continued presence of the adolescent offender. Offenders may also acquire social capital through direct ties with more conventional neighborhood residents. Scott Decker and Barrik Van Winkle, for instance, found that gang member ties to, and exchanges with, family and extended kin groups were extensive. Other research by Robert MaCoun and Peter Reuter and Mercer Sullivan has documented the level of social (including instrumental) support provided by gang members to within neighborhood-based social networks. Sudhir Alladi

659

Venkatesh’s research suggests that provision of security is also a service frequently provided by local gang members to other community residents. These direct forms of social capital accumulation, though difficult to document, are likely extensive, and may result in conflicts with social control orientations shared at the community level. As noted, research on the role of network ties in regulating crime has offered mixed evidence on the benefits of networks for the control of local crime. Jeffrey Morenoff, Robert Sampson, and Stephen Raudenbush, for instance, found that while the prevalence of friendship and kinship ties among neighborhood residents positively predicted levels of collective efficacy in Chicago neighborhoods, networks had no direct effect on homicide rates once the level of neighborhood collective efficacy was controlled. Browning and colleagues found that simultaneous estimation of the effect of collective efficacy and social interaction and exchange on crime rates at the community level revealed positive effects of social interaction on measures of both violence and property crime. In a direct test of the negotiated coexistence model, social interaction and exchange was found to interact with collective efficacy such that the regulatory effect of the latter was diminished as interaction/exchange increased. Other research has also offered findings consistent with the expectations of the negotiated coexistence perspective. Examining hypotheses drawn from William Julius Wilson and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, Matthew Lee and Graham Ousey found that greater residential exposure of economically disadvantaged to more affluent African Americans does little to reduce violent crime rates. The authors speculated that, consistent with the negotiated coexistence perspective, the protective effects of socioeconomic integration may be offset by the greater likelihood of offender integration into conventional networks when residential exposures are racially homogeneous. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews of a sample of urban youth, Deanna Wilkinson found that social control efforts of local adults were less likely to involve calling the police when social ties between adults and youth were stronger. Thus preliminary tests have offered evidence in support of the basic assumptions of the negotiated coexistence model.

660

Negotiated Coexistence

Conclusion The negotiated coexistence approach acknowledges the ambiguous and complex role played by social network ties in the control of urban neighborhood crime. Urban communities are faced with multiple collective objectives, including the informal control of public space and freedom from predatory crime. Although community social ties may encourage shared values and inclinations to act on behalf of collective goals, they are also sustained by exchange dynamics that may conflict with broader community goals. When outstanding social obligations limit the severity of social control efforts directed against offenders, communities may experience more difficulty in regulating local crime. Future research on the negotiated coexistence model would benefit from more detailed social network data capturing the extent to which potential offenders are integrated into mainstream community networks. Such data, though difficult to collect, would shed more nuanced light on the role of network integration in both fostering and impeding the informal social control of crime. Chris Browning See also Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control; Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Systemic Model of Social Disorganization

References and Further Readings Bellair, P. E. (1997). Social interaction and community crime: Examining the importance of neighbor networks. Criminology, 35, 677–704. Browning, C. R. (2009). Illuminating the downside of social capital: Negotiated coexistence, property crime, and disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1556–1578. Browning, C. R., Feinberg, S. L., & Dietz, R. (2004). The paradox of social organization: Networks, collective efficacy, and violent crime in urban neighborhoods. Social Forces, 83, 503–534. Bursik, R. J., & Grasmick, H. G. (1993). Neighborhoods and crime: The dimensions of effective community control. New York: Lexington Books.

Clinard, M. B., & Abbott, D. J. (1976). Community organization and property crime. In J. F. Short (Ed.), Community organization and property crime (pp. 186–206). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Decker, S. H., & Van Winkle, B. (1996). Life in the gang: Family, friends, and violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Greenberg, S. W., Rohe, W. M., & Williams, J. R. (1982). Safe and secure neighborhoods: Physical characteristics and informal territorial control in high and low crime neighborhoods. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice. Kasarda, J. D., & Janowitz, M. (1974). Community attachment in mass society. American Sociological Review, 39, 328–339. Kornhauser, R. R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lee, M. R., & Ousey, G. C. (2007). Counterbalancing disadvantage? Residential integration and urban black homicide. Social Problems, 54, 240–262. Macoby, E. E., Johnson, J. P., & Church, R. M. (1958). Community integration and the social control of juvenile delinquency. Journal of Social Issues, 14, 38–51. MaCoun, R., & Reuter, P. (1991). Are the wages of sin $30 an hour: Economic aspects of street-level drug dealing. Crime and Delinquency, 38, 477–491. Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merry, S. (1981). Urban danger: Life in a neighborhood of strangers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Morenoff, J. D., Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2001). Neighborhood inequality, collective efficacy, and the spatial dynamics of urban violence. Criminology, 39, 517–560. Pattillo, M. E. (1998). Sweet mothers and gangbangers: Managing crime in a black middle-class neighborhood. Social Forces, 76, 747–774. Pattillo-McCoy, M. (1999). Black picket fences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1–24. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 227, 918–923. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1969). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simcha-Fagan, O., & Schwartz, J. E. (1986). Neighborhood and delinquency: An assessment of contextual effects. Criminology, 24, 667–703.

Neurology and Crime Sullivan, M. L. (1989). Getting paid: Youth, crime, and work in the inner city. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Venkatesh, S. A. (1997). The social organization of street gang activity in an urban ghetto. American Journal of Sociology, 103, 82–111. Warner, B. D., & Wilcox Rountree, P. (1997). Local social ties in a community and crime model: Questioning the systemic nature of informal social control. Social Problems, 44, 520–536. Wilkinson, D. L. (2007). Local social ties and willingness to intervene: Textured views among violent urban youth of neighborhood social control dynamics and situations. Justice Quarterly, 24, 185–220. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears. New York: Knopf.

Neurology

and

Crime

The beginning of the search for the neurological basis of crime can be traced back to Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist and physician who provided one of the most influential arguments that criminals are born with a nature favorable to crime. Although no direct means exists to examine in vivo the brain anatomy of criminals at the time, Lombroso managed to identify several distinct physical features, which he called “stigmata.” This included a slanting forehead, long/no ear lobes, a large jaw with no chin, heavy supraorbital ridges, excessive/absent hair on the body, and an extreme sensitivity/ insensitivity to pain. According to Lombroso, the possession of multiple physical abnormalities indicated that the individual was less developed, a “born criminal,” and thus could not adjust to the rules of modern society. Although Lombroso’s argument was less than sound, the idea that criminal behavior is influenced by biological predispositions has endured and gained significant interest since then. With the development of brain imaging, the emphasis has since shifted to establish the connection between disruptions in the neural system and elevated criminal behavior. Criminal behavior, especially aggression, can be observed even in toddlers at the age of 1 to 2 years, when the brain is far from mature to allow full control over behavior. As

661

the neural systems mature, children learn to deal with their aggressive impulses in a socially appropriate manner, and aggressive behavior diminishes as a result. Therefore, it has been predicted that if development of the neural system were interrupted (e.g., prenatal or postnatal damage to the brain), the maldeveloped, immature brain would be unable to function properly in behavior control and moral reasoning and continue to use aggressive behavior as a means to obtain goals. Several theories have been proposed to further explain the association between neurological deficits and criminal offending. Among them, three major theories have been most widely accepted and intensively tested: Terrie Moffitt’s developmental theory, Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, and Jeffrey Gray’s dual biological model. Below, each hypothesis and the supporting evidence for it is reviewed. The discussion is extended by drawing additional evidence for these hypotheses from individuals with traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) to demonstrate the high prevalence of neuropathology in criminal offenders. This entry concludes by assessing the hypothesized links between neurology and crime and by discussing implications for future studies.

Theories on Neurology and Crime Moffitt’s Developmental Theory of Crime

This theory was developed based on Moffitt’s 1993 groundbreaking work indicating that signs of persistent deviant behavior during adolescence can be detected as early as the preschool year and are influenced by the behavior of peer groups. This theory identified two groups of delinquents—the life-course-persistent (LCP) and the adolescentlimited (AL) offenders—based on their ages of onset and trajectories of conduct problems. The AL group may only be engaging in criminal activities as a way of expressing their adolescent rebellion and usually desist from any pathway toward crime. By contrast, the LCP group precociously escalates into serious criminal offenses as a way of expanding the versatility of their antisocial tendencies and usually maintain a lifestyle of repeated criminal offending. According to the theory, the LCP offenders may suffer prenatal and perinatal disruptions in neural development that contribute

662

Neurology and Crime

to their persistent criminal behavior. These neurological deficits, which in most cases were too subtle to require clinical remediation, often manifested as behavioral problems such as inattention, hyperactivity, irritability, and impulsivity. Thus, neurological deficits in the LCP offenders may put them at higher risk for early-onset conduct disorders, which often escalate to persistent delinquent behaviors when interacting with an unsupportive environment. Moffitt’s developmental theory has received strong support from neuropsychological studies confirming that LCP offenders may indeed have neurocognitive impairments that reflect underlying neurological disturbances. For example, one study found that LCP offenders show lower intelligence, impaired spatial memory, and poor performance on tasks targeting frontal functions such as the continuous performance task. Findings from these studies suggest that neuropsychological impairments are especially prominent in LCP offenders. However, the lack of empirical studies assessing the structural and functional integrity in the neural system in these individuals prevent direct testing of the neuropathology in LCP offenders predicted by this hypothesis. Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis

The somatic marker hypothesis, formulated by Damasio in 1994, argues that emotion could guide or bias the decision-making process through the neural system of the somatic marker mechanism. This theory, although developed based on findings of patients with brain lesions, represents a complementary theory that readily applies to the neurological basis of criminal behavior. Damasio suggested that in real life, decision making involves both cognitive and emotional processing to assess the reward value of the various behavioral options available in any particular situation. When the situations are complex and conflicting, the reward values of the actions are uncertain and ambiguous, which induce physiological affective states (e.g., changes in skin conductance levels) followed by the forming of action-outcome associations (i.e., somatic markers). The somatic markers from all previous experiences are summed to produce a net somatic state to assist future decision making in similar situations by directing the selection of an appropriate action to achieve the most beneficial outcome. This process allows healthy individuals to categorize and learn from negative

experiences. Because the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is the essential component of this somatic marker hypothesis, damage to this structure may disrupt the mechanism and prevent the individual from experiencing the feedback necessary for producing somatic markers to avoid future aversive consequences. Such failure in the process will likely predispose to the inability to learn from punishment thus recidivate during conflict situations. This hypothesis received a great deal of support from subsequent lesion studies. Patients with bilateral damage to the VMPFC often suffer from behavioral disinhibition, social dysfunction, emotional deficiency, poor decision making, and a lack of insight into their behavioral problem, which may lead to criminal offending. One such case is that of Phineas Gage, a railway foreman who had an iron stake blown through his frontal lobe in an accident involving explosives. Gage survived the injury, recovering his physical and intellectual abilities, but his personality changed dramatically and he became markedly antisocial. In general, the social, emotional, motivational, and behavioral dysfunction of these patients with damage to the VMPFC was often accompanied by a change in personality, which put them at greater risk for criminal offending. Further­more, it was observed that these patients show aggressive behavior that is exclusively impulsive in nature (Anderson et al., 1999; Grafman et al., 1996), which reflects a limitation of this theory: it cannot account for some types of criminal offending, particularly instrumental aggression (Blair et al., 2005). Gray’s Dual Biological Model

Gray proposed a dual biological model, which at the core are two competing motivational systems: the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and the behavioral activation system (BAS) (Fowles, 1988; Gray, 1982). The BIS represents an inhibitory system for withholding behavior in ambiguous threatening situations, whereas the BAS is the underlying system for impulsivity. The two systems are located in different parts of the brain. The BIS is in the septo-hippocampal region and the BAS is in the basal ganglia, thalamic nuclei, and the ventral tegmental area (Gray, 1994). This theory has been employed specifically for explaining aggression by Angela Scarpa and Adrian Raine, who suggested

Neurology and Crime

that violent behavior is a function of an underactive BIS, an overactive BAS, or a combination of both. This pattern of weak BIS and possibly a strong BAS in this dual biological mechanism has also been referred to when explaining clinical conditions for which criminal recidivism is a core symptom, such as psychopathy (Fowles, 1988). Therefore, it may be predicted that individuals with criminal tendencies would show behavioral features of decreased anxiety, increased impulsivity, and a reward-driven decision-making process due to neuro­biological impairments in septo-hippocampal, basal ganglia, thalamic nuclei, and ventral tegmental structures. Although no study to date has simultaneously examined these behavioral and neurobiological characteristics in criminal offenders, this theory has received considerable support from socio-behavioral and neuroimaging studies separately. For example, significantly high in impulsivity and low in anxiety compared to controls has been found in a group of violent offenders. With regard to neuroimaging literature, studies to date have provided some evidence for deficits in the neural system underlying the BIS system, particularly in the hippocampus, which may contribute to the weakness of this system in antisocial, criminal individuals. For example, it has been demonstrated that violent offenders with APD and type-2 alcoholism show reduced volume in the right hippocampus. In addition, an exaggerated structural hippocampal asymmetry (right > left) has been found in criminal psychopaths. Functional imaging studies also showed reduced blood flow in the hippocampus in violent offenders and murderers However, the integrity of the neural system underlying BAS remains to be examined.

Supporting Evidence From Traumatic Brain Injuries Although different mechanisms were proposed, all three major theories on neurology and crime predict that neurological deficits in several brain regions, through impairing the processes of attention, decision making, and impulse control, may result in the elevation of criminal behavior. This argument is consistent with findings showing higher rates of traumatic brain injuries in criminal offenders. Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), ranging from subclinical to fatal in severity, are one of the leading

663

causes of morbidity and mortality in children and adolescents in the United States. Most TBIs were suffered during a fall, motor vehicle accident, assault, or suicide attempt, and put the individuals at higher risk for developing functional impairments. Evidence has been accumulated suggesting a high correlation between violent crime and neurological brain damage. For example, in a study of 15 death-row inmates, it was found that all violent offenders had a history of severe head injury and 5 had major neurological impairment. Several investigations on delinquent youths also reported similar associations between TBI and antisocial behavior. For example, one study found half of the delinquent youths in their sample had experienced one or more TBIs, and one third of those with TBI histories reported diminished ability in regulating behavior and emotion, sustaining attention, and performing in social and school settings as a result of their TBIs. In a large study of 279 Vietnam veterans, it was found that veterans who suffered penetrating head injuries during their service had higher ratings of violence, aggression, anger, and hostility than those without brain injury. Similarly, one study reported that 27.7 percent of the delinquent youths they studied had suffered significant head injury involving loss of consciousness/amnesia with ongoing cognitive or social impairment. The severity of antisocial criminal behavior in individuals with TBI not only fails to improve but also becomes greater over time. For example, in a longitudinal study, it was found that the frequency of aggressive behavior and severity of temper bursts in a group of TBI patients increased over time, and the aggressiveness was reported by caregivers as moderate or severe in 31 percent of cases by 2 years post-injury. Similar patterns were documented in a 5-year study following 42 patients with severe TBIs. They exhibited a significant increase in threats of violence at 5 years after the injury (54 percent) compared to 15 percent at 1 year post-injury. They also noted that 7 percent of their sample had been in trouble with the law during the first year post-injury, and that the rate increased to 31 percent at 5 years post-injury. The arrest and conviction rates of individuals with TBIs were especially alarming when compared to the rate of 2 percent of the general population arrested annually. In addition, the increasing arrest and incarceration rates over the years post-injury

664

Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory

raise concerns about the long-term effects of traumatic brain injuries. These findings consistently show that individuals with TBI are more likely to misperceive elements of a situation (e.g., interpret other’s sarcasm as a threat), make poor social judgments, overreact to provocative stimuli, and lack the communication skills to verbally dissolve the conflict, especially when the neural damage involves the frontal lobe. As a result, these emotional and behavioral dysfunctions associated with TBIs may increase the likelihood that one would resort to antisocial, criminal behavior when encountering complicated and conflicting situations. The supporting evidence from TBI studies provide strong evidence for a neurological basis of crime and support the theories in connecting deficits in the neural system including the frontal cortex and hippocampus to deviant behavior and violent offending.

Conclusion The increasing evidence from lesion and brain imaging studies has confirmed the association between neurological deficits and crime, and has prompted the development of several theories including Moffitt’s developmental theory, Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, and Gray’s dual biological model. Although supported by a number of empirical studies, these theories fall short in accounting for the wide range of criminal offending. These theories have provided empirically based explanations for impulsive, aggressive types of criminal behavior. However, they are unable to predict the neural mechanisms underlying other types of offending such as instrumental aggression. Future theories incorporating findings from genetic imaging, neuropsychological, and brain imaging methods, while addressing the distinct neurological etiology underlying subgroups of criminal offenders, are needed for the development of a more comprehensive theory on neurology and crime. Yaling Yang and Adrian Raine See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Ellis, Lee: Evolutionary Neuroandrogenic Theory; Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-CoursePersistent Offending; Psychophysiology and Crime

References and Further Readings Anderson, S. W., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (1999). Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 1031–1037. Blair, R. J., Mitchell, D, & Blair, K. (2005). The psychopath: Emotion and the brain. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error and the future of human life. Scientific American, 271, 144. Damasio, A. R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 351, 1413–1420. Fowles, D. C. (1988). Psychophysiology and psychopathology: A motivational approach. Psychophysiology, 25, 373–391. Grafman, J., Schwab, K., Warden, D., Pridgen, A., Brown, H. R., & Salazar, A. M. (1996). Frontal lobe injuries, violence, and aggression: A report of the Vietnam Head Injury Study. Neurology, 46, 1231–1238. Gray, J. A. (1982). The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gray, J. A. (1994). Nature, nurture, and psychodarwinism. Nature, 367, 591. Lombroso, C. (1876). L’uomo delinquente. Milan, Italy: Turin. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and lifecourse-persistent antisocial behavior: a developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Scarpa, A., & Raine, A. (1997). Psychophysiology of anger and violent behavior. The Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 20, 375–394. Yang, Y., Glenn, A. L., & Raine, A. (2008). Brain abnormalities in antisocial individuals: implications for the law. Behavioral Science and the Law, 26, 65–83.

Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory The concept of “defensible space” was first explicated by Oscar Newman in a 1972 book by the same title. The concept, which contains elements of a theory of crime as well as a set of urban design principles, became popular in the 1970s as urban crime problems continued to rise. Defensible space

Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory

was discussed, utilized, and critiqued widely by criminologists and other social scientists, as well as urban planners, law enforcement officials, and architects. The design concepts have also been implemented in numerous communities in the United States and around the world. Later works by Newman, including Community of Interest and Creating Defensible Space provide further elaboration of his ideas. Newman states that defensible space is a model that can inhibit crime in residential environments. These environments might be specific buildings, projects, or entire neighborhoods. His earliest writings focused on urban public housing projects, in particular, the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. Newman was a professor of architecture and city planning at Washington University in St. Louis when he noted that many of the public spaces in the housing project were crime ridden, vandalized and dirty while more private spaces were much better maintained. Newman later extended his ideas to urban residential neighborhoods. He argued that it was possible to design the physical environment of these areas in such a way to decrease crime levels by affecting the behavior of both residents and potential offenders and thus lead to lower levels of crime. More specifically, it was possible to create physical layouts of residential areas that allow residents to better control the areas. It was also possible to create physical layouts that would discourage or deter potential criminals from committing their offenses in these areas. There are four key concepts in his theory and design principles: territoriality, surveillance, image, and milieu. Newman suggests that physical space can be designed to create areas of territorial influence. Physical elements or markers can be used to define private or semi-private spaces that encourage residents to assume more responsibility for the areas than they would if the areas were fully public spaces. Physical subdivisions that create smaller spaces can encourage occupants to adopt proprietary attitudes which serve as deterrents to crime. Residents will come to see these areas are their own spaces, be more concerned for them, and exert more control over the activities occurring in them. The same elements or markers, whether real (e.g., fences, gates) or symbolic (e.g., signs, plantings) can deter or discourage outsiders from intruding into the areas to commit crime.

665

Newman also suggests that the physical layout can be designed to improve natural surveillance opportunities for residents. The ability of residents to casually and regularly observe the public areas in one’s environment is an important factor in reducing crime in these areas and in lessening residents’ fear of crime when they use these public areas. This idea is similar to the argument offered by Jane Jacobs that buildings should be oriented to provide natural surveillance of the street. Specific physical designs that improve surveillance opportunities include the following: the placement of internal public areas such as hallways, lobbies, and elevators in such as way that they can be observed from outside the building; the location of external public areas such as parks and playgrounds so that there are clear sight lines from traffic on surrounding streets; and the provision of adequate lighting to make surveillance possible at night. Newman points out that ensuring opportunities for surveillance does not guarantee that residents will respond to events that they do observe. Here he notes the importance of the interplay between territoriality and surveillance opportunities. Residents will be more likely to intervene when they can observe the area and when they feel some sense of responsibility for what goes on in the area. Newman’s discussion of image and milieu focuses primarily on his analysis of public housing projects. He argues that the image of high-rise public housing projects contributes to a stigmatization of the project and its residents. The large group of high-rise buildings that usually stand out as significantly different from the surrounding community create an image of these areas as “easy hits” for criminality. The image of these areas is also linked to the social characteristics of the residents and to serious design flaws that create the conditions for high crime rates. He suggests that the location of public housing projects within the broader community milieu will have an effect on the level of safety within the project. Specifically, he recommends that these projects should not be built in areas that are already high crime areas; rather, they should be located adjacent to safe activity areas. These areas would include alongside busy public streets and near government offices and institutional areas. Newman reiterates that image and milieu do stand alone in reducing crime but that they must be linked to designs that encourage territoriality and surveillance.

666

Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory

Although aspects of Newman’s designs have been implemented in various projects and neighborhoods around the United States and the world, both his theory and his claims about the effectiveness of his design principles in reducing crime have been the subject of much criticism. The broadest challenge to the theory is the claim that it is a form of physical determinism, that is, that the physical environment determines human behavior. While Newman denies that he is making that argument, in his later work he does admit being troubled by his failure to clearly communicate his ideas about both the physical and the social bases of his theory. His writings evolve over time both to revise his original ideas and to incorporate more considerations from other perspectives. Studies seeking to evaluate the defensible space program would also reveal a number of other conceptual difficulties with Newman’s writing. New­ man suggests that the theory of defensible space can explain, and that the design principles can reduce, crime. However, he consistently refers to crime in very broad terms. He does not distinguish between very different types of criminal offenses that afflict residential areas. He does not recognize that his theory and design principles might apply more appropriately to some types of crimes than others. Another criticism is that Newman’s arguments sometimes appear to be contradictory. For example, in some places, Newman argues that making spaces more private can reduce outsiders’ access to these areas and hence improve safety. But he also argues that closing off streets through housing projects can lead to an increase in crime by reducing the natural surveillance that comes with busy thoroughfares. The results of the many studies of the defensible space designs reveal inconsistent findings. Some of the discrepancies may be due to the varying methodological approaches used to test the theory. Some focus on the building level, while others focus on the block or neighborhood level. Some examine the impact on residents’ territoriality and surveillance, while others directly study offender patterns. Some of the studies were conducted in sites where the only difference between communities, or the only change in a community over time, was in the physical design of the area. In other places, the changes in the physical environment were part of a broader, multifaceted plan to reduce

crime. In these cases, it is difficult to distinguish the effects of the changes in physical design from the effects of the other elements in the plan. A number of studies question Newman’s assertions about physical design and territoriality. They suggest that there is not a clear, consistent relationship between the physical design of an area and territoriality or informal social control. These studies suggest that the relationship between physical design and territoriality may vary across communities and across different populations. For example, Sally Merry’s study in a public housing project found that defensible space designs had very limited influence on the residential social climate. On the other hand, Floyd Fowler and Thomas Mangione’s study in one urban neighborhood reported that defensible space features were related to increased territoriality and informal social control, and that in the short term, there was a lower rate of crime in the area. A study by Patrick Donnelly and Charles Kimble examined the effectiveness of a Newman-directed plan that created small, distinct mini-areas in one urban neighborhood by closing off streets that significantly reduced cut-through traffic. Newman argued that these mini-neighborhoods would see less crime since these areas would become more private, neighbors would get to know each other better, and look after their neighbors more closely. Both property crime and violent crime went down dramatically immediately after the plan went into effect. The decline was not due to increased residents’ territoriality or surveillance. There was no change in residents’ territoriality or informal social control after the plan was implemented. The plan appears to have a direct effect on offenders since the large reductions in crime were due primarily to reductions in crimes committed by persons who lived outside the neighborhood. The street closing plan reduced outsiders’ opportunity to become familiar with the area by reducing access to the area. It may also have increased the perceived risks of being caught by reducing potential exit routes from the area after crimes were committed. It also led to a decrease in unpremeditated, opportunistic crimes by reducing routine drive-through traffic. Many later approaches to criminological theory and crime prevention incorporate ideas and concepts presented by Newman. Over the last three decades, there has been a growing acceptance of

Nutrition and Crime

the significant role that the physical environment plays in shaping crime. The field of environmental criminology (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1991) emphasizes the importance of place. Routine activity theory focuses on three factors—availability of suitable target, the lack of a suitable guardian to prevent the crime, and the presence of a likely offender—all of which are affected by physical design, territoriality, and surveillance (Felson, 1998). Rational choice theory assumes that offenders weigh the potential benefits and costs of their offenses. They weigh the likelihood of their offense being observed and interrupted and of their being caught. Again, each of these factors are affected by their perception of the physical environment (Cornish & Clark, 1986). Finally, the crime prevention through environmental design and situational crime prevention approaches provide a broader perspective on the physical environment than Newman’s original work (Clarke, 1997; Jeffery, 1971). Patrick G. Donnelly See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Jeffrey, C. Ray: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design; Physical Environment and Crime

References and Further Readings Brantingham, P. J., & Brantingham, P. L. (Eds.). (1991). Environmental criminology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Clarke, R. V. (Ed.). (1997). Situational crime prevention: Successful case studies (2nd ed.). New York: Harrow and Heston. Cornish, D., & Clarke, R. V. (1986). Introduction. In D. Cornish & R. V. Clarke (Eds.), The reasoning criminal (pp. 1–16). New York: Springer-Verlag. Donnelly, P. G., & Kimble, C. E. (1997). Community organizing, environmental change, and neighborhood crime. Crime and Delinquency, 43, 493–511. Felson, M. K. (1998). Crime and everyday life: Insight and implications for society. Thousands Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Fowler, F., & Mangione, T. (1986). A three-pronged effort to reduce crime and fear of crime. In

667

D. P. Rosenbaum (Ed.), Community crime prevention: Does it work? (pp. 87–108). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage. Jeffery, C. R. (1971). Crime prevention through environmental design. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Merry, S. E. (1981). Urban danger: Life in a neighborhood of strangers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Newman, O. (1972). Defensible space: Crime prevention through urban design. New York: Macmillan. Newman, O. (1980). Community of interest. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Newman, O. (1996). Creating defensible space. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Reynald, D. M., & Ellfers, H. (2009). The future of Newman’s defensible space theory. European Journal of Criminology, 6, 25–46.

Nutrition

and

Crime

In the past, the majority of research on crime tended to focus on social factors, such as socioeconomic status, or home environment. However, as criminologists and other researchers began to recognize the enormously complex nature of the causes of crime, other factors—including biological—became increasingly important to study and explore. Nutrition is one of those factors that fairly recently began to receive attention as a contributing factor to crime and violence. Scientific studies are suggesting an intriguing link between nutrition and antisocial behavior. Early signs of malnutrition correlate with increased antisocial and aggressive behavior, while nutritional interventions have been shown to alleviate antisocial behavior. More in-depth research would especially be helpful for developing new interventions to reduce antisocial behavior and crime. There are many popular myths—some right, some wrong—about how food can affect one’s behavior. One example is the infamous “Twinkie Defense” originated from the trial of Dan White for the murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. The alleged rumor was that the defendant’s lawyers argued that Dan White committed the murder

668

Nutrition and Crime

while on a sugar rush. The controversial verdict drew a lot of attention and debate. Contrary to the popular belief, the lawyers who defended Dan White used a legal defense of diminished capacity, rather than “Twinkie Defense” (Pogash, 2003). However, the term “Twinkie Defense” was not completely groundless. According to a review by David Benton, individual differences in glucose tolerance levels may be relevant to behavioral changes, including irritability and aggression. Although the nutritional factor turned out to be irrelevant in the Dan White case, it nonetheless demonstrates the strong interest in linking nutrition to crime and violence.

The Link to Violence: Observational Studies Several studies have shown a connection between malnutrition and antisocial behavior. Given the obvious ethical barriers, it is almost impossible to conduct an experimental study that could show causal effects of malnutrition on human subjects. However, a number of observational studies have taken place, and they effectively show a correlation between malnutrition and antisocial behavior. One study by Jianghong Liu and colleagues is especially noteworthy because of its longitudinal nature. This study drew participants from a birth cohort on the island of Mauritius. The participants’ signs of malnutrition were assessed at age 3, and they were followed up at ages 8, 11, and 17 to measure the extent of their antisocial and aggressive behavior. Children with signs of malnutrition at age 3 were more aggressive and hyperactive when they were 8-year-olds, had more “externalizing problems” at age 11, and had more conduct disorder and excessive motor activity when aged 17.

Omega-3: A New Area of Increasing Promise Among numerous nutritional factors, omega-3 has recently been found to show promise as a new field of study. Several studies have examined the possible link between omega-3 deficiency and increased antisocial/aggressive behavior in both humans and animals. Joseph Hibbeln examined the relationship between fish consumption and homicide mortality rate across countries. This cross-national data showed a clear inverse relationship between increasing seafood consumption and decreasing homicide mortality rate. For example, out of the

countries examined, Bulgaria had the highest homicide mortality rate of 10.3 per 100,000 and the lowest seafood consumption, while Japan had the lowest homicide mortality rate of 1.8 per 100,000 and the highest seafood consumption. The link between low levels of omega-3 and increased levels of aggression is also observable in animal studies. Simona Re and colleagues found that canines with low levels of omega-3 were more aggressive. Another study by James DeMar, Jr., and colleagues experimentally placed male rats on either an omega-3-deficient diet, or an omega-3-adequate diet for 15 weeks. At the end of the 15 weeks, the omega-3-deficient group was more aggressive on the isolation-induced resident-intruder test. Although numerous studies seem to suggest that a lack of omega-3 contributes to increased aggression, it must be recognized that observational studies only establish a relationship. In order to assume a causal relationship, intervention studies need to be conducted.

Treatment Studies: Possible Interventions to Reduce Crime It is certainly more difficult to conduct controlled experiments than observational studies with nutrition, given the obvious ethical reasons and possible unpredictable side effects that intake of certain nutrition can have on humans. However, several notable intervention studies nonetheless have been conducted, and they help demonstrate a causal relationship between nutrition and aggression and antisocial behavior. In one intervention study conducted by Adrian Raine and colleagues, 100 children from Mauritius at age 3 were randomly assigned into an experimental enrichment program that provided better nutrition, cognitive stimulation, and more physical exercise. They were matched with a control group who had the normal experience of a Mauritian child at that age, and were followed up at ages 17 and 23 on conduct disorder and crime. The enrichment reduced the crime outcome at age 23 by 34 percent. Of interest, however, was a significant enrichment-by-nutrition interaction for conduct disorder at age 17, showing that conduct disorder was particularly reduced in those who had poor nutritional status prior to the beginning of the intervention. In contrast, there was no significant

Nutrition and Crime

effect of the intervention in reducing conduct disorder in those with normal nutritional status. This suggests, but does not prove, that nutrition was the active ingredient in the intervention that reduced later conduct disorder. Because children in the intervention had two to three extra meals of fish per week compared to controls, the authors suggested that increased omega-3 may have accounted for the beneficial effects of the enrichment. C. Bernard Gesch and colleagues conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled trial on 231 young adult prisoners. The subjects were randomly allocated into two groups. One group received vitamin/ mineral supplements, while the other received only placebo. The daily supplements consisted of four capsules that contained 1,260 mg linolenic acid, 160 mg gamma leinolenic acid, 80 mg eicosapentaenoic, and 44 mg docosahexaenoic acid, while the placebo simply consisted of vegetable oil. After a minimum of 2 weeks of supplements intake, they found an average of 35.1 percent reduction in offense in the vitamin/mineral supplements group. The authors suggested that even greater behavioral improvements could be achieved with the provision of a formulation that includes more omega-3 fatty acids. Although this intervention study seems to support a causal link between increased omega-3 and reduced antisocial behavior, as recognized by the authors this study also has limitations. Behaviors in institutions are “untypical,” and therefore, there could be possible problems with broadening the experimental result and interpretation to the wider lay population. Furthermore, omega-3 was not the only component of the supplements. Although it is highly likely that the omega-3 intake contributed to the decrease in offenses at least in this study, findings need to be replicated and extended to other populations. Interestingly, the study by Gesch and colleagues has been recently replicated in the Netherlands. According to “The Links Between Diet and Behaviour: The Influence of Nutrition on Mental Health,” published by the Associate Parliamentary Food and Health Forum in January 2008, preliminary results of the Dutch study supported the Gesch study findings. This study conducted randomized, placebo-controlled experiments in eight Dutch correctional institutions. Similar to the Gesch study, 221 young adult offenders were given either the supplements that contained omega-3, omega-6, and

669

other 25 vitamins and minerals, or the placebo for approximately 2.5 months. Strikingly, the supplement group showed a 34 percent drop in the total number of incidents reported. Both the Gesch study and the Dutch replication study are noteworthy because they bolster the potential of nutritional intervention to possibly curb aggression and crime, both in prisons and in the community.

Conclusion As indicated by the above review, malnutrition is associated with antisocial and aggressive behavior. In addition, nutritional interventions have shown initial promise in reducing antisocial behavior even in prison populations. Although several studies have effectively demonstrated a link between nutrition and antisocial behavior, more studies— especially both prospective longitudinal studies as well as randomized controlled trials—need to be conducted to further explore this field. Some of the possible studies could involve examining the regional differences, long-term effects of nutrition/ malnutrition, as well as possible intervention methods to help reduce crimes. Furthermore, with many recent observation and intervention studies demonstrating positive effects of omega-3 on violence and aggression, understanding and exploring of the precise mechanisms by which omega-3 achieves its effects in reducing crime is a particularly important avenue for future research. Ji Yoon Chung See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Physical Environment and Crime

References and Further Readings Benton, D. (2007). The impact of diet in anti-social, violent, and criminal behavior. Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews, 31, 752–774. British Associate Parliamentary Food and Health Forum. (2008). The links between diet and behavior: The influence of nutrition on mental health. London: Author. DeMar, J. C., Jr., Ma, K., Bell, J. M., Igarashi, M., Greestein, D., & Rapoport S. I. (2006). One generation of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid deprivation increases depression and aggression test scores in rats. Journal of Lipid Research, 47, 172–180.

670

Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency

Gesch, B. C., Hammond, S. M., Hampson, S. E., Eves, A., & Crowder, M. J. (2002). Influence of supplementary vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids on the antisocial behaviour of young adult prisoners. British Journal of Psychiatry, 181, 22–28. Hibbeln, J. R. (2001). Seafood consumption and homicide mortality. World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, 85, 41–46. Hibbeln, J. R., Davis, J. M., Steer, C., Emmett, P., Rogers, I., Williams, C., et al. (2007). Maternal seafood consumption in pregnancy and neuro­developmental outcomes in childhood (ALSPAC study): An observational cohort study. The Lancet, 369, 578–585. Liu, J., Raine, A., Venables, P. H., & Mednick, S. A. (2004). Malnutrition at age 3 years and externalizing behavior problems at ages 8, 11, and 17 years. American Journal of Psychiatry, 161, 2005–2013. Pogash, C. (2003, November 23). Myth of the “Twinkie defense”: The verdict in the Dan White case wasn’t based on his ingestion of junk food. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved May 6, 2009, from http://www .sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/11/23/ INGRE343501.DTL Raine, A., Mellingen K., Liu, J., Venables, P., & Mednick, S. A. (2003). Effects of environmental enrichment at ages 3–5 years on schizotypal personality and antisocial behavior at ages 17 and 23 years. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 1627–1635. Re, S., Zanoletti, M., & Emanuele, E. (2008). Aggressive dogs are characterized by low omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid status. Veterinary Research Communications, 32, 225–230.

Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency In 1958, F. Ivan Nye published Family Relationships and Delinquent Behavior, a study of how family structures and parent-child relationships influence the occurrence of juvenile delinquency. Based on a cross-sectional survey of high school students in three small cities in Washington and relying on simple cross-tabular analyses, the study might seem ordinary and limited by modern multivariate standards. However, the book made several important contributions to theory and research on delinquent behavior and still counts as an important milestone of modern criminology.

One contribution was its innovative use of selfreport measurement of delinquency in a general survey of ordinary high school students when most delinquency research in 1958 relied on samples of adjudicated delinquents and used police records to measure their illegal behaviors. These “official delinquency” data reported on serious criminal acts committed by mostly lower-class, socially marginal youths from dysfunctional families in poor neighborhoods. Although self-report delinquency measures had been introduced in the 1940s, Nye’s work (with James F. Short) provided the first systematic use of this procedure for theoretically meaningful research and showed that selfreport measures would yield reliable and valid assessments of illegal behavior. Even though the Nye-Short delinquency scale was noticeably weighted toward minor property crimes and “status offenses,” it established a foundation for later uses of self-reports to measure more serious forms of criminal behaviors. A second contribution was to modify the available received wisdom about juvenile delinquency based on studies of official delinquents. Nye’s selfreport data showed that acts of juvenile delinquency were frequent and common occurrences; and these involved mostly ordinary and minor forms of misbehavior committed by a larger, diverse collection of adolescents at all social levels. Such behaviors did not seem to involve any special forms of social learning or pathological motivations, but rather were common actions carried out by most adolescents for ordinary reasons of convenience or fun. While inconsistent with traditional accounts of delinquency as seriously antisocial behaviors, these findings were subsequently confirmed in numerous surveys after Nye. A third contribution of Nye’s book was to criminological theory—namely, its explication of social control theory. Although some elemental ideas had been identified by other delinquency researchers—for example, Albert Reiss and Jackson Toby—Nye’s book provided the first full description of social control theory as a systematic theoretical framework for explaining delinquency and crime. In the introductory chapter, Nye provided a brief (barely five pages) but explicit description of the essential concepts and premises of a social control theory, and indicated how this approach differs from the then-dominant theoretical frameworks of

Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency

social disorganization, subcultural deviance, strain, culture conflict, and personality maladjustment. In Nye’s formulation, most delinquent behavior involves ordinary acts that do not require unusual forms of specialized learned behaviors or psychotic states. A small amount of delinquency may represent abnormally learned behaviors or express pathological motives, but these are comparatively rare. Most delinquent acts involve behaviors learned from parents, siblings, and peers through the same socialization process by which conforming behaviors are learned. They also are oriented to the satisfaction of common adolescent needs—for example, excitement, fun, recognition, esteem, acceptance, approval, accomplishment. In this view, most delinquency occurs not when adolescents develop abnormal motivations or habits, but when ordinary social controls are weak and fail to inhibit adolescents from seeking their ordinary goals through socially disapproved activities. Nye observed that delinquent behaviors often provide a quicker and easier means to satisfy common adolescent needs than strict adherence to the rules does. Nye identified four distinctive forms of social control for insuring law-abiding behavior. These included (1) direct control, or behavioral compliance gained by punishments, rewards, threats, and bribes—what might also be termed coercive control; (2) indirect control, or behavioral conformity due to concern about what others think or by adherence to the expectations of valued social memberships— what might also be termed control by identification; (3) internalized control, or conformity that has been incorporated into a person’s own values, attitudes, and habits through education, conditioning, or indoctrination—what might be termed control by socialization; (4) availability of need satisfaction, or behavior controlled by shaping the behavioral options or alternatives available to people to achieve their personal needs and goals—what today would be called opportunity control. Arguably the most familiar contribution of Nye’s 1958 study was its empirical analysis of the impact of family conditions and relationships on juvenile delinquency. Although Nye’s description of social control was quite general in scope, his analysis of the high school delinquency data was a much more limited application of the theory; it singularly focused on the family as the primary institution of adolescent social control. Other

671

relationships, contexts and experiences outside the family (such as schools, peers, jobs, neighborhoods) were not explicitly included in this analysis or in the data collection, although Nye acknowledged that many other non-family factors could be important sources of all forms of social control. Nye’s analysis first examined the impact of family structure on delinquent behaviors, confirming that family locations and configurations do matter but not as much as earlier research on official delinquents has suggested. In Nye’s data, family socioeconomic level was not consistently and significantly related to adolescent self-reports of delinquent behavior (in contrast to the strong social class differentials appearing in official delinquency). Also contrary to studies of official delinquents, Nye reported that “broken homes” (i.e., families where a parent is missing due to divorce or loss) were not strongly associated with self-reported delinquent behaviors. For self-reported delinquency, parental absence proved only weakly correlated with children’s involvement in delinquency and primarily in “ungovernability” or “acting out” behaviors rather than serious criminal acts. Distinguishing between “legally broken” families (by physical absence of one parent through divorce or death) and “psychologically broken” families (by conflict and animosity between parents), Nye found that delinquent behaviors were significantly more frequent in psychologically broken (but intact) families than in legally broken families. The latter had slightly higher rates of delinquency than intact families (due to some loss of direct control). Nye’s data analyses confirmed that delinquent behaviors were slightly higher in larger families, among later-born children, in urban families, and in families that moved frequently (as measured by the number of different schools children attended). The effects of mother’s employment on children’s delinquency were more complex, showing a slight overall correlation with delinquent behaviors. By itself, mother’s employment led to a slight loss of direct and indirect control, but this correlation was modified by a number of other factors such as the nature of the mother’s job, the reasons for mother’s employment, size of the family, rural-urban location, and the socio-economic status of the family. According to these results, the correlation between working mothers and children’s delinquency was

672

Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency

small and non-significant when other social factors were held constant. The remainder of Nye’s analysis focused on interactional, rather than structural, characteristics of families. In contrast to prior studies of parental control, Nye’s analysis notably emphasized the two-way nature of the relationships between parents and children, showing that how children perceived and felt about their parents was just as important as parental feelings (i.e., of rejection or approval) toward children. Specifically, children’s feelings of respect, attachment, or rejection toward their parents operated as strong moderators of the impact of all forms of parental control efforts. For example, the effectiveness of parents’ direct control efforts was contingent on their children’s perceptions of fairness and their feelings about their parents’ disciplinary efforts. Nye found that social control efforts were most effective (and delinquency rates lowest) when parent-child respect and attachment were mutual. Noting that prior studies of juvenile delinquency had heavily emphasized strong parental discipline for controlling delinquent behaviors, Nye reported that the relationship was more complicated. When parental efforts at discipline were viewed as excessive, unfair, selective, or rejecting, the impact of discipline were attenuated or reversed. Also, rather than inverse or linear, strictness of parental discipline showed a J-shaped or U-shaped correlation with delinquency, where moderate levels of supervision and punishment exerted the greatest control over delinquent behavior. This also applied to the obverse process of relinquishing control—that is, degree of freedom, autonomy, and responsibility allowed to adolescent children—which also had a J-shaped or U-shaped association with delinquent behavior. Thus, across a variety of different indicators of direct control, moderate (“middle way”) levels of discipline and freedom consistently correlated with the least delinquent behavior. Beyond the traditional focus on direct control through discipline, Nye’s analysis strongly emphasized the various forms of indirect and internalized controls for reducing delinquency. The data confirmed the importance of parents and children doing things together in mutually meaningful activities, including regular church attendance as a family, as well as a variety of recreational activities such as sports, amusements, trips, and picnics. The analysis also considered how a variety of less obvious aspects

in parent-child relationships might be correlated with control of juvenile delinquency, such as children’s perceptions of how their parents’ looked, dressed, or acted in public, and the accompanying feelings of adolescent embarrassment. Perceptions of parents’ general social dispositions (e.g., cheerfulness, nervousness, irritability, fussiness) and their ethical habits (e.g., truthfulness, honesty) were consistently correlated with adolescents’ delinquent behaviors, especially for boys. Value agreement between children and parents on a variety of social issues was also consistently and significantly correlated with lower levels of delinquent behavior. Nye noted that such interpersonal connections were much more important for indirect and internalized controls, while their effects on direct control of delinquency by parents were weaker and less consistent. The final part of the data analysis focused on the importance of parents as practical resources to their children. Generosity with money and allowances to children did not have a consistent linear effect on their delinquent behaviors, but rather was U-shaped or J-shaped. Children who viewed their parents as stingier than most had higher rates of delinquent behavior; at the same time, however, children who received more money than most other adolescents (through higher allowances or jobs) also were more delinquent. In contrast, parents as social and informational resources were consistently and strongly (and linearly) related to delinquent behavior. Children who frequently sought advice, information, or help from parents (including schoolwork, jobs, dating, religion, future plans, or sex) were less likely to commit delinquent behaviors. According to Nye, parental resources influenced children’s behavior mostly through indirect and internalized controls, rather than direct or disciplinary controls. In all, Nye’s study of family-based controls over children’s delinquent behavior examined 313 different cross-tabular comparisons of a variety of family variables with self-reported delinquent behaviors, each selected to evaluate some predictable pattern of social control theory. Nye reported that all except seven comparisons were consistent with social control theory. Such a “shotgun” methodology did not provide a rigorous test of definitive or comparative hypotheses of social control theory; however, Nye’s results did provide a very plausible

Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency

empirical demonstration of the overall ability of a social control framework in its ability to make researchable predictions. Later advances in statistical procedures enabled much more sophisticated and multivariate forms of analysis than the simple cross-tabulations used by Nye. Nonetheless, the conclusions from Family Relations and Delinquent Behaviors have proven quite durable and, on the whole, have been substantially replicated by numerous survey studies over the ensuing decades. Edward L. Wells See also Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social

673

Controls and Delinquency; Toby, Jackson: Stake in Conformity; Wells, Edward L., and Joseph H. Rankin: Direct Controls and Delinquency

References and Further Readings Britt, C. L., & Gottfredson, M. R. (Eds.). (2003). Control theories of crime and delinquency. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nye, F. I. (1958). Family relationships and delinquent behavior. New York: Wiley. Vold, G. B., Bernard, T. J., & Snipes, J. B. (2002). Theoretical criminology (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

O motivation, David Matza and Gresham Sykes’s subterranean values, Martin Gold’s delinquency as a pickup game, and Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s situational inducements to crime. The many studies that have investigated offending and time use provide strong support for Osgood and colleagues’ position. The routine activity perspective also views the ordinary activities of everyday life as an explanatory bridge between individuals’ positions in the larger social structure and important outcomes such as crime. Research also has proved Osgood and colleagues’ individuallevel version of the approach to be useful for accounting for the connection between individuals’ positions in the social structure (e.g., age, sex, class, and neighborhood or school) and deviance (Osgood et al., 1996; Osgood & Anderson, 2004). The situational explanation of crime found in routine activity theory (sometimes also referred to as lifestyle theory) draws attention to the ways that ordinary, everyday activities can contribute to crime by enhancing opportunities for crime. For instance, Cohen and Felson pointed out that women’s growing participation in the labor force after World War II may have contributed to a rise in daytime burglaries by increasing the number of homes that were unoccupied during the day. Prior to Osgood and colleagues’ article, applications of the theory had largely been limited to explaining aggregate crime rates and victimization patterns. Their version applied the routine activity perspective both to individual-level offending and to a broader range of deviant behaviors. Felson had often discussed the implications of the routine

Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, Jerald G. Bachman, Patrick M. O’Malley, and Lloyd D. Johnston: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior In their 1996 article, “Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior,” D. Wayne Osgood, Janet K. Wilson, Jerald G. Bachman, Patrick M. O’Malley, and Lloyd D. Johnston extended the routine activity explanation of crime, first developed by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson and by Michael Hindelang and colleagues, to account for individual-level crime and deviance. They theorized that people will commit more deviant and illegal behaviors if they spend more of their time engaged in unstructured socializing with peers in the absence of authority figures. Following the logic of routine activity theory, such activities present many opportunities for offending because the presence of peers makes deviance easier and more rewarding, the absence of authority figures reduces the chances of getting into trouble, and the lack of structure leaves time available. Osgood and colleagues’ viewpoint was built from insights provided by previous studies of time use and deviance, and their theoretical logic combines routine activity theory with several key concepts from previous theoretical work on delinquency, such as Scott Briar and Irving Piliavin’s situational 675

676

Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, et al.: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior

activity perspective for individual offending, and Osgood and colleagues followed this lead by altering and broadening the theory so that it would not presume a strictly internal motivation for crime and would not be limited to predatory offenses.

An Individual Level Routine Activity Theory Osgood and colleagues considered two previous theoretical views of the relationship of individuals’ time use with crime and deviance and found them wanting. Travis Hirschi’s social control theory hypothesized that delinquency would be reduced by the social bond of involvement, which entails spending time in conventional, non-deviant, activities. He reasoned that the more time youths spent in this way, the less time they would have available for delinquent activities, as in the old saying “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Unfortunately, research fails to support this broad prediction, finding instead that, while some non-deviant activities are associated with less delinquency, at least as many others are unrelated or coincide with more delinquency, rather than less. Osgood and colleagues also concluded that it was not useful to focus on how much time people spend in activities that are part of a deviant subculture. Any connection of such activities to deviance presents a problem of theoretical indeterminacy because it can be readily explained by a variety of theories, such as social learning or social control, rather than as consequences of spending time in that fashion. Revising the Three Elements of Crime

Osgood and colleagues turned to routine activity theory for its emphasis on opportunities for crime arising in the course of ordinary, everyday activities. Cohen and Felson’s routine activity theory is built on their conception of crime as comprised of three elements: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardians. Osgood and colleagues revised each of these elements to better suit their goal of extending the theory. Cohen and Felson merely presumed, rather than explained, the existence of motivated offenders. Though that view was consistent with the typical routine activity focus on the contribution of situational factors to crime rates and victimization,

it meant that this version of the theory was not well suited to explaining why some people offend more than others. Osgood and colleagues solved this problem by substituting Briar and Piliavin’s proposition that the motivation for delinquency typically stemmed from the opportunities presented by the situation, rather than from deepseated motives deriving from experiences deep in the person’s past. Though Briar and Piliavin had presented this concept of situational motivation as the basis for a social control explanation of delinquency, Osgood and colleagues observed that it was well suited to a routine activity explanation as well. If some types of time use present more situational inducements to deviance than others, then the way people spend their time could account for whether and how often they offend. In placing the motivation for offending in the situation rather than the person, Osgood and colleagues assumed that most people are susceptible to at least some of the temptations they encounter. They noted that this position was consistent with several prominent threads of delinquency theory. Matza’s theory of drift holds that delinquents do not reject conventional values, but rather that they temporarily suspend those values in favor of values supportive of delinquency. Subterranean values— such as values for excitement, conspicuous consumption, and toughness—are also part of the general culture, implying that almost anyone would violate the law in the right circumstance. Emphasizing the situational contribution to motivation for deviance also fits Gold’s analogy of delinquency to a pickup game of basketball or baseball, which portrays deviance as typically casual and spontaneous. Like pickup games, in order to take part in delinquency one only needs “to be there when the opportunity arises and when others are willing” (1970, p. 94). Similarly, though Gottfredson and Hirschi emphasize the stable trait of self-control, their theory is founded on a situational conception of motivation in which the immediate gains provided by a crime serve as motivation for that act. Finally, Osgood and colleagues noted that the idea of situational motivation is also a good match to emphasis on gains versus costs at the heart of the rational-choice perspective. Osgood and colleagues felt that the second of Cohen and Felson’s three elements, a suitable target, unnecessarily limited the scope of the theory to

Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, et al.: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior

predatory offenses that involve tangible objects to steal or damage and specific victims who suffer loss or injury. In order to expand the scope of routine activity theory to encompass a broader range of deviance, Osgood and colleagues substituted the more general notion of situations in which a deviant act is possible and rewarding. Building on the conception of motivation stemming from the situation, they argue that the inducement to deviance would be a function of the ease of the deviant act and the extent of the symbolic and tangible rewards it provides. The relevant situational inducements will depend to some degree on the particular offense. Attending a party where others are smoking pot would be a situational inducement to doing so yourself, while receiving income that is not reported to the government would be a strong opportunity for tax fraud. Osgood and colleagues’ focus, however, was activities likely to present situational inducements for a broader range of deviance. Cohen and Felson’s last element, guardianship, is the notion that predatory crime is unlikely when someone is present who would intervene or call the authorities. To extend this idea to other deviant acts, such as substance use or disorderly conduct, Osgood and colleagues substituted the proposition that there is more inducement to deviance in situations where no authority figure is present. They do not limit the term authority figure to people such as parents or teachers, but rather apply it to anyone whose role in the situation would require them to take action if trouble arose. For instance, this includes sales people or ticket takers whose work roles would obligate them to respond to fights, theft, or pot smoking. In this theory, the social control function for these authority figures rests on their position in the situation, not on the potential offenders’ social bonds. They illustrated this idea by stating, “Whether you like or dislike your father, it will be more convenient to smoke marijuana when he isn’t around” (Osgood et al., 1996, p. 640). What Activities Present Situations Conducive to Deviance?

Osgood and colleagues focused on a pattern of activities that previous research had indicated was most strongly associated with a variety of deviant or problem behaviors. These activities shared three

677

features: socializing with peers, a lack of structure or organization, and an absence of authority figures or supervision. They proceeded to argue that situations conducive to deviance would be especially prevalent during such activities. The presence of peers can make deviance easier in concrete and tangible ways and make it more rewarding in symbolic ways. As examples of how peers make deviance easier, Osgood and colleagues pointed to friends as a common source of illicit drugs, the company of friends reducing the danger of entering a fight, and the presence of a partner to serve as a lookout being an aid to theft. They felt that the presence of friends was even more important for making deviance appealing as a potential route to gaining status and reputation, noting that peers can provide an appreciative audience for deviant exploits. Whether activities take place in the presence of authority figures directly reflects one of the three elements of situations conducive to deviance. This element was also one reason that Osgood and colleagues focused on socializing with peers, which they contrasted with settings like work, school, and family, where young people are subordinate to supervisors, teachers, and parents. In this vein, routine activity scholars had always emphasized that the risk of crime would be lower during time at home versus elsewhere and (for adolescents) with parents versus apart from them (Felson, 2002; Felson & Gottfredson, 1984). Activities that lack structure are more likely to present situations conducive to deviance for two reasons. First, Osgood and colleagues note that organized activities typically include individuals in positions of authority, such as coaches at athletic events, officers of organized clubs, and employees at restaurants and theaters. Second, the logic of routine activity theory is that the likelihood of deviance is a function of how much time one is exposed to opportunities. The less flexible agendas of structured activities mean that time will be spent in specific ways, leaving relatively little time available for deviance. Though Hirschi’s notion of involvement in social control theory predicts that spending time in organized activities will reduce delinquency, from a routine activity perspective that reduction depends on the organized activities leading to a decline in time spent in activities conducive to delinquency, and as Felson had noted, the opposite may well

678

Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, et al.: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior

occur. For instance, participation in varsity sports may bring more chances to hang out with team friends after practice and more invitations to unsupervised parties.

Empirical Support Findings from a broad range of studies provide empirical support for individual-level routine activity theory’s central prediction that, when people spend more time in unstructured socializing with peers away from authority figures, they will engage in more deviant behavior. This pattern has been found in studies of samples ranging in age from childhood to the late twenties, for both males and females, for multiple race/ethnicity groups, and for many nations and cultures. Evidence of this relationship extends to a broad range of deviant behaviors including property offenses, violence, illicit drug use, alcohol consumption, and dangerous driving. In addition, the theory is also a good fit to several other well-established findings in criminology, such as the partying lifestyle of serious offenders that Richard Wright and Scott Decker have written about, the huge amount of time that gang members spend hanging around together in unsupervised public places, as noted by Malcolm Klein, and the wide-ranging wandering characteristic of seriously delinquent youths, which Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck pointed out. Furthermore, the connection between deviance and this type of time use is not readily explained by other factors because it holds even when controlling for many other prominent correlates of crime and deviance, and for within-­individual comparisons over time that control for all stable differences between people. Finally, Dana Haynie and Osgood demonstrated that delinquency goes with unstructured socializing, regardless of how deviant one’s friends are, indicating that this association is not an indirect result of social learning or differential association. A central theme of the routine activity perspective is that individuals’ everyday activities can help explain the connection between positions in the social structure and important outcomes like crime and deviance. Accordingly, Osgood and colleagues showed that unstructured socializing can account for a substantial share of the associations of age, sex, and social class with deviance. The developmental trends are especially strong, with unstructured

socializing rising dramatically from childhood through adolescence, and declining thereafter, closely matching the age-crime curve (see Osgood et al., 2005). Osgood and Amy Anderson also showed that unstructured socializing accounts for much of the variation in delinquency across schools, partly from the basic individual-level relationship and partly from an additional context effect.

Conclusion Osgood and colleagues’ application of routine activity theory to individual deviance has had considerable influence, as evidenced by over 200 citations to date, and unstructured socializing with peers is now widely recognized as a likely contributor to delinquency and other problem behaviors. Though evidence supporting the theory is stronger than for most criminological theories, important questions still remain. An experimental test of the causal influence of unstructured socializing would be especially valuable. Also, it would be useful to test the specific opportunity processes hypothesized by the theory through a fine-grained examination of time use surrounding specific offenses. Finally, a good topic for future work would be to develop and test policy implications of the theory for designing crime prevention policies and programs that target time use. D. Wayne Osgood See also Briar, Scott, and Irving Piliavin: Delinquency, Commitment, and Stake in Conformity; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: SelfControl Theory; Hindelang Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift

References and Further Readings Briar, S., & Piliavin, I. (1965). Delinquency, situational inducements, and commitment to conformity. Social Problems, 13, 35–45. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Felson, M. (2002). Crime and everyday life (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Osgood, D. Wayne, Janet K. Wilson, et al.: Routine Activities and Individual Deviant Behavior Felson, M., & Gottfredson, M. (1984). Social indicators of adolescent activities near peers and parents. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 46, 709–714. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1950). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. New York: Commonwealth Fund. Gold, M. (1970). Delinquent behavior in an American city. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole. Haynie, D. L., & Osgood, D. W. (2005). Reconsidering peers and delinquency: How do peers matter? Social Forces, 84, 1109–1130. Hindelang, M. J., Gottfredson, M. R., & Garofalo, J. (1978). Victims of personal crime: An empirical foundation for a theory of personal victimization. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. Klein, M. W. (1995). The American street gang: Its nature, prevalence, and control. New York: Oxford University Press. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New York: Wiley.

679

Matza, D., & Sykes, G. M. (1961). Juvenile delinquency and subterranean values. American Sociological Review, 26, 712–719. Osgood, D. W., & Anderson, A. L. (2004). Unstructured socializing and rates of delinquency. Criminology, 42, 519–549. Osgood, D. W., Anderson, A. L., & Shaffer, J. N. (2005). Unstructured leisure in the after-school hours. In J. L. Mahoney, R. W. Larson, & J. S. Eccles (Eds.), Organized activities as contexts of development: Extracurricular activities, after-school and community programs (pp. 45–64). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Osgood, D. W., Wilson, J. K., Bachman, J. G., O’Malley, P. M., & Johnston, L. D. (1996). Routine activities and individual deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 61, 635–655. Wright, R. T., & Decker, S. H. (1997). Armed robbers in action: Stickups and street culture. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

P along with the social need of deterrence of crime. However, Parmelee was skeptical of the theoretical and practical relevance of the doctrine of moral responsibility, and he thought that the fundamental weakness of this perspective is that it fails to see the abnormal and pathological nature of criminal behavior. In his opinion, rather than making a priori assumptions about “free will,” criminologists need to study the individual and social pathologies inherent in a criminal person and need to assume a holistic perspective that encompasses the psychological, physical, and sociological aspects of acts of crime. However, acknowledging the variation that exists between the various perspectives, he asserted in The Principles of Anthropology and Sociology in Their Relations to Criminal Procedure that criminologists should consider some of the essential elements of criminal acts, such as defiance of prevailing morality, social and individual harm as well as the penal reaction from the society without trying to formulate a single definition that may fail to acknowledge the complexity of these various elements. Parmelee was influenced by the works of Cesare Lombroso and the Positivist School. While Parmelee acknowledged some of the criticisms leveled against the inherent biological determinism of Lombroso’s theory, he praised Lombroso’s effort to establish a science of criminology. Parmelee was particularly influenced by the works of Lombroso’s follower Enrico Ferri, who called for an integration of different branches of knowledge including anthropology, psychology, statistics, and penology in the new science of “criminal sociology.” Parmelee asserted that the sociological and biological perspectives are

Parmelee, Maurice Maurice Parmelee was one of the early pioneers in American criminology. He was trained as a sociologist, and throughout his career he held a number of positions in the academia and the government. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1909 and began his teaching career in University of Kansas before moving to University of Missouri. He left academia for the government in 1918, when he was appointed at the War Trade Board in London. He also worked for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Treasury, and Interior. He was appointed to the Bureau of Economic Warfare in 1941 but was forced to resign after being investigated for alleged socialist leanings. Throughout his long career, Parmelee wrote several books on a wide range of sociological topics including monographs on poverty, alcoholism, and human behavior. He also wrote some of the first texts in American criminology: The Principles of Anthro­ pology and Sociology in Their Relations to Criminal Procedure and Criminology. Parmelee believed that in order to understand criminal behavior, it was necessary to synthesize discoveries of both natural sciences and social sciences. He asserted that lawyers, jurists, and philosophers had hitherto dominated discussions on crime and there was little scientific understanding of this social phenomenon. Parmelee praised the Classical School in criminology as exemplified by the works of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham in its effort to devise a penal system in preserving the fundamental rights and liberties of the individual 681

682

Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World

very similar in their pursuit of scientific explanations for the “natural causes” of criminal behavior and should be effectively combined in the criminological discourse. The search for these so-called natural causes is manifested in Parmelee’s propensity to essentialize criminal behavior as inherently deviant, and his belief that psychopathic and demented individuals dominate the ranks of criminals. Some of his statements regarding the innate inferiority of female criminals are viewed as reflecting contemporary prejudices, and may come across as seriously misinformed in our time. Parmelee was interested in the practical and policy implications of criminology as well. Indeed, he claimed that it is necessary to reorganize the institutions and practices of law enforcement on the basis of scientific knowledge. He asserted that the most crucial task of the criminal justice system is to balance the need for safeguarding individual liberty and defending the society from the harm of crime, which could be achieved through the aid of modern science. He was particularly appreciative of certain institutional innovations in Europe in this regard, including efforts by the Italian government to propagate training in scientific policing methods, the Bertillon method of anthropometric criminal identification in France, and dactyloscopy or the fingerprint identification system used by the British police. He argued that, while the contemporary American criminal justice system strongly emphasizes a humanitarian instinct of reforming the prisoner by an “individualized” penal regime through the use of indeterminate sentences and parole, there is a need to incorporate the advances of modern scientific expertise in the judicial and penal process in order to effectively control crime and rehabilitate the criminal. Saran Ghatak See also Beccaria, Cesare: Classical School; Bentham, Jeremy: Classical School; Ferri, Enrico: Positivist School; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

References and Further Readings Craig C. (Ed.). (2007). Sociology in America: A history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibbon, D. C. (1974). Say, whatever became of Maurice Parmelee anyway? Sociological Quarterly, 15, 405–416.

Parmelee, M. (1908). The principles of anthropology and sociology in their relations to criminal procedure. New York: Macmillan. Parmelee, M. (1909). Inebriety in Boston. New York: Eagle Press. Parmelee, M. (1913). The science of human behavior. New York: Macmillan. Parmelee, M. (1918). Criminology. New York: Macmillan. Turner, S. (2007). A life in the first-half century of sociology: Charles Ellwood and the division of sociology. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Sociology in America: A history (pp. 115–154). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World The first half of the 20th century may have been one of the bloodiest and most influential in the history of organized human civilization. Shortsighted despots and courageous heads of state vied for control of a world that was becoming increasingly unpredictable and violent. The nationalistic behavior exhibited by some citizens fostered a great deal of unity amongst like-minded (and similarly situated) individuals. Conversely, the latent fear and insecurity created by the tenuous grasp on freedom often manifested itself as aggression toward groups of individuals that were outside the norm or fundamentally different in some arbitrarily defined manner. As a trained sociologist and a professor of sociology at Harvard University, Talcott Parsons was likely aware of this phenomenon. He had traveled extensively in Nazi Germany prior to the genesis of World War II and had observed first-hand the fervent nationalism being generated by the National Socialist Party. Not long after the war had ended, Parsons penned one of his most important and most frequently overlooked pieces of scholarly work. The substance of this article, titled “Certain Primary Sources of and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World,” was influenced by Parsons’s experience as a scholar objectively observing the behavior of individuals involved in large-scale conflicts. As a result of spending time in the 1920s translating The

Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, his later work was heavily influenced by Max Weber’s concept of “rationalization.” Sparked by a curiosity about the putative origins of aggressive behavior, Parsons endeavored to develop a grand theory about the manifestation of that aggression in the Western world. His theory not only was relevant for the times but also resonated with some of his more notable contemporaries in criminology. Scholars such as Albert Cohen and David Matza expanded upon and applied Parsons’s paradigm to the concept of delinquency and the organization of youth gangs. Nevertheless, the ideas espoused by Parsons have received scant attention in the subsequent criminological literature. Francis Cullen argues that this is an egregious oversight because “Parsons’s work showed much more awareness of the socially structured character of deviant behavior than many other deviance theorists” (p. 90). Regardless of the position taken by criminologists about the relative importance of his paradigm for understanding deviant behavior, the theory warrants a more meticulous explanation than has previously been provided in the literature. This entry outlines the particulars of Parsons’s theory and explores its relevance for modern criminological theory and practice. Also, bear in mind that when Parsons refers to aggressive behavior, he is not exclusively concerned with the dispositions of youthful offenders. This interpretation has contributed to the tendency for some criminologists to ignore the theory.

Structured Aggression Any discussion of Parsons’s theory has to begin with the unique paradigm through which he examined human behavior. First, his primary concern was with the dynamics of “power relationships.” He envisaged aggression as occurring within the context of vast institutional change. According to Parsons’s logic, deviant behavior must have a socially structured character. This is because aggression is prevalent throughout society. The proliferation of this potentially “negative” tendency is inversely related to the ability of a society to maintain effective control over its citizenry (Cullen, 1984). Furthermore, behavior cannot be understood apart from the context in which it occurs and

683

the motivations of the individual involved. In other words, it is difficult to appreciate behavior without taking into account the kinds of goals and objects that may be attached to a particular individual in a particular situation. The form that aggression takes will likely be determined by factors that are unique to the situation of the involved parties. Parsons considered this kind of within-group variation to be much more pervasive (and relevant) than any putative differences between ethnic groups. He goes on to say that “aggression grows more out of weakness and handicap than biological strength” (p. 168). This purported weakness leads to a decrease in the “security” associated with vital human relationships. This is especially true for children, for whom the stability and the relative quality of maternal warmth are quite significant. Ostensibly, children are expected (by their parents) to behave in a manner that reflects positively upon the family unit. While these values may be arbitrarily defined by each individual family, there are some relatively common societal goals that are ubiquitous enough to be considered desirable norms by a preponderance of families. However, because each child is different, there is variation in terms of his or her ability to live up to these goals. According to Parsons, significant problems arise when children fail to meet expectations or conform to common behavioral standards. Such failures have the potential to create a sense of inadequacy or perhaps even an overwhelming feeling that life is unfair. The former is more likely to occur when one is expected to perform a task that he or she is incapable of performing. The sense of inadequacy is generally exacerbated when others in the group with whom one is in competition succeed in similar endeavors. The latter component becomes more ensconced as the individual becomes increasingly convinced that he or she is being persecuted unjustly or not being given his or her “just due.” Once again, this “condition” is often seen as the result of competition between similarly situated individuals, according to Parsons.

The Direction of Aggressive Impulses Parsons assumes that aggression is the inevitable result of the strain and frustration associated with various stages of human development. The kinds of social and psychological processes experienced

684

Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World

during these “stages” serve to direct deviant impulses (Cullen, 1984, p. 90). On the other hand, the stressors, however powerful, engendered in particular moments cannot account for the form that the deviation takes. Viewed through this lens, aggression can be seen as a “master stress” that can manifest itself in various ways (delinquency being just one). Without an adequate enhancement of one’s personal sense of security, defensive patterns developed to combat personal attacks, perceived or not, may become entrenched. Another possibility is that aggressive impulses are stifled because they come into conflict with the moral norms of family and society. This latent aggression may be repressed until a proper outlet is discovered. According to Parsons, this often occurs in symbolic form as displacement on a scapegoat. In this instance, a symbolically appropriate proxy is targeted and the impulse is indirectly gratified. For the perpetrator to avoid being shamed by the rest of the group, the proxy target must come from outside the circle of people who are required to be loved (i.e., mother, father, etc.). In the Western world, which is the primary focus of Parsons’s narrative, the dominant feature is the “relatively isolated conjugal family that is primarily dependent upon the income and status of one member, the husband and father” (p. 170). The unique character of this entity comes from the fact that the status achieved by the household is almost entirely contingent upon the achievements of one individual. Though this idea does not necessarily resonate with the modern world where women are regularly employed outside of the home, the suggestion that a mother’s love may be contingent upon the child’s objective performance is still a uniquely Western quality. Aggression is much more likely to be repressed because this affection is necessary in order to ensure that the child is properly socialized. Parsons makes it clear that the immediate family is not the only factor influencing a child’s aggressive tendencies. In fact, there are a variety of external stressors that produce high levels of insecurity that are structured in reasonably explicit and standardized ways. Whether a stressor is internal or external, because of the father’s absence, the mother remains the primary agent of socialization for both girls and boys. Not surprisingly, in the early stages of life, both boys and girls tend to emulate the behaviors exhibited by the mother.

According to Parsons, the “father is not immediately available and his contributions (i.e., work) are intangible and difficult for the child to comprehend” (p. 171). As a result, boys develop early feminine identification. As they grow older and come into contact with outside influences, they experience tangible role confusion. Good behavior comes to be seen as a feminine trait and thus not worthy of reverence. In order to counteract the aforementioned feminine identification problem, boys often overcompensate with hyper-masculine behavior, which Parsons refers to as reaction formation. As the reaction becomes more normalized, the behavior may become a sort of family tradition or identifying character trait. Women face a different kind of problem when they come to realize that males are considered superior in the adult world, which is in direct contrast to what they saw as a child where the mother was the proverbial center of their world. Their sense of having been deceived by both men and women also leads to direct and indirect expressions of aggressive behavior. Despite being subjected to a different kind of role ambivalence, the general rules about the expression of aggressive behavior being hindered by the need to conform to both youthful and adult social norms also apply to women.

The Emergence of Repressed Aggression Regardless of gender, these antisocial tendencies are often spawned by intra-familial conflict. However, because the child is hesitant to upset the family structure and be denied affection, these impulses are often repressed or expressed indirectly toward an out-group. Since moral norms preclude most forms of direct expression of aggressive behavior in youths, the bulk of the potential hostile impulses remain bottled. This repression fosters what Parsons refers to as free-floating aggression, which is often taken out on scapegoats that are outside of the immediate kinship group. Ostensibly, aggressive responses are much more likely to be expressed when an individual is either hypersensitive to suggestions of inferiority or vulnerable to distorted beliefs about their own superiority. The latter state of mind is useful in the sense that it tends to allay a hypersensitive individual’s anxiety about their own inadequacy. Conversely, such distorted views of reality tend to increase disillusionment and repressed

Parsons, Talcott: Aggression in the Western World

aggression. This makes an individual much more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior during inherently non-hostile situations, according to Parsons. In a social sense, the indirect expression of aggressive behavior onto a group outside of the circle of comfortable insiders is much less dangerous. As the child matures, their participation in the occupational structure (i.e., the adult world) will produce different stressors. For example, since the most important feature of the Western occupational structure is the concept of functional achievement, a hyper-competitive work environment flourishes. The fact that the “system” is relatively new and ever changing suggests that adherence to traditional norms and values is often impractical. This hypothesis still makes sense today when one considers how quickly technology, especially electronics, evolves and becomes obsolete. The ever-shifting workplace forces employees to constantly adapt to new “moral” standards. Refusing to conform and adapt will likely lead to workplace dissatisfaction, which almost certainly will produce resentment (i.e., aggression). Similar to the situation associated with the family unit, few direct outlets for aggressive impulses are permitted in the “adult” world. As employees are forced to continuously adapt they develop an ever-increasing quantity of stifled aggression. According to Parsons, “the kinship and occupational spheres represent a mutually reinforcing system of forces operating on the individual to generate large quantities of aggressive impulses.” This repressed aggression is eventually expressed through processes like the aforementioned displacement on a scapegoat (p. 177). The bottom line is that the situation often dictates whether aggression will be overtly destructive or more subtly manipulative. This paradigm helps to explain the tendency for people to become unusually nationalistic in certain contexts. For example, Parsons asserts that the inevitable process of change that takes place within cultural units disrupts established social norms and symbolic systems. An easy-to-understand example of how this process plays out can be seen by examining the rise of Nazism in Germany after World War I. The National Socialist Party, and Adolf Hitler more specifically, exploited the lingering resentment felt by Germans after the loss in the aforementioned conflict in order to induce citizens to act on behalf of the nation. However, because of sanctions

685

placed on Germany by the Allied powers in the Treaty of Versailles, they were limited in their ability to act overtly. Such postwar oppression is the kind of situation that is ripe for exploitation by a charismatic leader. Hitler targeted “outside” ethnic groups (mostly Jews) in order to foster the kind of nationalism it would require to galvanize the nation to go to war. This is an extreme example of what Parsons called displacement on a scapegoat. This kind of rationalization tends to structure the direction of both the actual and potential expression of hostile behavior. In more traditional societies, this process is most disruptive to the social order where social norms are thoroughly entrenched and people are highly resistant to change. Conversely, a fundamentalist reaction to such an infringement is difficult to defend against because the elements that constitute such a position tend to be inextricably linked to the informal solidarity of the group. Knowing this, it is not difficult to envisage why a “foreigner” is an easy target for enterprising nationalistic groups to exploit.

Conclusion For criminologists, Parsons’s main contribution is the postulation that “not only is aggression socially structured, but so also are all other forms of deviant behavior” (Cullen, 1984, p. 94). Deviance can thus be viewed as a hyper-masculine coping mechanism designed to counterbalance mixed role messages received during childhood. That being said, this paradigm is not lacking in practical shortcomings. First, it is often considered highly abstract and only applies to the Western world at one particular point in time. Additionally, since the system is malleable, Parsons could not possibly capture each and every variation within subunits of the population. Finally, the analysis applies unequally to different segments of the population. More specifically, Parsons is mostly evaluating the plight of the urban middle class. Despite these issues, this paradigm is useful for criminological scholars looking for a creative way to interpret social situations and the origins of deviant impulses. The theory should not, however, be viewed as either deterministic or as a paradigm that is only useful for examining juvenile delinquency. Taylor Trimboli

686

Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime

See also Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Cohen, Albert K.: Deviance and Control; England, Ralph W.: A Theory of MiddleClass Delinquency; Matza, David: Becoming Deviant; Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization

References and Further Readings Cohen, A. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. New York: Free Press. Cullen, F. T. (1984). Rethinking crime and deviance theory: The emergence of a structuring tradition. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld. Gerhardt, U. (2002). Talcott Parsons: An intellectual biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Manfred, F. B., Feldman, G. D., & Glaser, E. (Eds.). (1998). The treaty of Versailles: A reassessment after 75 years. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Parsons, T. (1947). Certain primary sources and patterns of aggression in the social structure of the western world. Psychiatry, 10, 167–181. Weber, M. (1905). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Scribner’s.

Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime Gerald R. Patterson is known for his groundbreaking work formulating both a theory of antisocial development in children—coercion theory—and practical family interventions and parent training techniques for reducing child and adolescent aggression. His research has resulted in the publication of more than 225 articles, book chapters, and books dating back to 1953, and has had an immeasurable influence on explaining the etiology of juvenile delinquency from a social psychological perspective. In 1977, he co-founded the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC) in Eugene, Oregon, where he continues to research and publish as a Senior Scientist. Patterson’s coercion theory assigns a primary etiological role to inadequate parental skills in explaining juvenile delinquency. Coercion theory

is a social learning perspective, though it is considered a second-generation extension of Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. To clarify, Bandura emphasized the role of the initial learning of aggression through imitation, reinforcement, and punishment contingencies, each assumed to be mediated by cognitive processes. In comparison, coercion theory focuses on the maintenance of the behavioral performance (rather than the learning) of aggressive behavior. Further, constructs in the coercion model are observed in realtime, real-world settings, using multiple sources (e.g., parents, siblings, peers, teachers) and methods, which contrasts with the laboratory settings and methods used to formulate Bandura’s social learning theory (Larzelere & Patterson, 1990).

The Oregon Model and Coercion Theory In the early 1960s, Patterson was among a group of researchers at the University of Oregon’s Psychology Department interested in developing methods to alter a variety of child behaviors, including aggression. In the early years of his research, Patterson and his colleagues began to discover the critical role operant conditioning played in shaping children’s behavior, including reinforcement and behavioral contingency procedures. The research team also realized that their initial research strategy of using rigid laboratory settings created too many methodological limitations, and subsequently began conducting meticulous moment-to-moment, microsocial natural observations in children’s family environments as they were happening in real time. The rigorous, detailed observation methods developed by Patterson and his team fostered the discovery of the specific mechanisms by which global risk factors (e.g., poor parental discipline) function to facilitate developmental pathways of antisocial behavior. The collection of hundreds of home observations of parent and child interactions formed the basis of coercion theory, formally outlined by Patterson in his book, Coercive Family Process, published in 1982. Coercion theory provides a model of behavioral contingencies that explains the mutually reinforcing process that occurs between parents and children that fosters childhood aggression. Parents and children essentially “train” or

Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime

“coerce” each other to behave in ways that increase the likelihood that (1) children will develop antisocial behavior and (2) parents will decrease control over these behaviors. Consider the following behavioral exchange that characterizes the coercive interactions among families of antisocial children frequently observed by Patterson and his fellow scientists: A mother demands behavioral compliance of the child. The child refuses, and responds coercively (e.g., with whining). The mother continues to demand compliance, which escalates the child’s coercive behavior (e.g., with temper tantrums). After a short time, the child’s coercion becomes exceedingly frustrating to the mother, at which point she surrenders control and allows the child to escape behavioral compliance. For the time being, the child’s aversive behavior ceases. Coercion is referred to as “the contingent use of aversive behaviors of another person” (Patterson, 2002, p. 25). At the heart of coercion theory is the concept of contingency, which implies that one event is determined by a preceding event. In the common behavioral exchange described above, the theory focuses on the connection between the child’s behavior and the mother’s reaction, as well as on the subsequent reaction of the child to the mother’s capitulation. In operant conditioning terms, because the child’s defiant behavior is negatively reinforced (by escaping behavioral compliance and punishment), the probability of the child engaging in coercive behavior again in the long run increases. Moreover, the mother is reinforced by receiving some momentary peace from the tantrum, which increases the chance of withdrawing control during future aversive encounters with her child. The dyadic reactions demonstrate that behavior is partially influenced by immediate contingent events. These mutually contingent microsocial exchanges between parent and child form the foundational elements for developing early childhood aggression. One particularly pivotal work by James Snyder and Patterson answered the critical question “How well does coercion work during family conflict episodes compared to everything else the child does during the family conflict episode?” In other words, what is the relative rate of reinforcement for child coercive behavior during family conflict episodes? Snyder and Patterson demonstrated that deviant behavior could be reliably explained by knowing how often child coercive behavior was

687

reinforced among family conflicts. Relative reinforcement for coercion and density of family conflict have also significantly predicted juvenile arrests after 2 years (Snyder et al., 1997). Coercion theory is embedded within a social interactionist view that emphasizes that “the child is an active participant whose behavior is a reaction to the behavior of the other family members” (Patterson, 1982, p. 196). “If we are to change aggressive childhood behavior, we must change the environment in which the child lives. . . . The problem lies in the social environment” (Patterson et al., 2002, p. 21). Because the child is reacting to stimuli in his or her environment (e.g., parental demands of compliance), it is the environmental stimuli that must be altered rather than the child’s internal attributes or personality. In the mid-1970s, this belief was fundamentally at odds with current trends in the psychological sciences, namely the progression toward cognitive psychology. At the time, the psychology department at the University of Oregon was interested in refocusing their mission on developing the new cognitive sciences. Because the behavioral work of Patterson’s team was becoming less valued in the academic setting, the team chose to abandon the psychology department in favor of the Oregon Research Institute, a non-profit research corporation. It proved to be a beneficial move and eventually facilitated the founding of their own non-profit research center as the Oregon Social Learning Center in 1977.

A Developmental Model of Antisocial Behavior In the early 1980s, it became apparent to Patterson’s team that future funding of their research hinged on their ability to intercede and explain delinquent behavior. In 1983, the team was awarded a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) 2-year pilot study with fourth-grade boys and their families in Eugene, Oregon. This was the beginning of what was to become the longitudinal Oregon Youth Study (OYS). Data from the OYS were used to test their developmental model of antisocial behavior and various parenting interventions detailed in Antisocial Boys written by Patterson, John Reid, and Thomas Dishion in 1992. Using early stimulus control studies and the OYS, Patterson demonstrated empirically that, over time,

688

Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime

microsocial coercive family interactions become the fundamental building blocks through which aggression emerges and is maintained throughout child and adolescent development. Empirical evidence supported the hypothesis that chronic delinquency could be reliably predicted by a series of behavioral deficiencies across the developmental stages between early childhood through early adolescence. During early childhood, ineffective parenting skills and techniques (poor parental monitoring, harsh and inconsistent discipline, excessive nagging, limited positive reinforcement for prosocial behavior) are seen as determining factors for childhood conduct disorders. This, according to Patterson, is the so-called training ground where children (and unskilled parents and siblings) learn the short-term functionality of their coercive behavior, gradually progressing the severity of coercive tactics from noncompliance, to temper tantrums, and finally to physical aggression. While learning the repertoire of antisocial behaviors, the child also fails to learn appropriate prosocial problem solving skills. Together, these deficiencies put the child at a significant social disadvantage when entering the school years. Rejection from prosocial peers and academic struggle are common outcomes experienced by conduct-disordered children during middle childhood. Patterson’s model demonstrated the importance of peer rejection and academic failure as precursors to both deviant peer group membership and delinquency. As a model of reinforcement, Patterson and colleagues argued that an aggressive child’s selection of friends depends on the immediate payoffs of the relationship. Peers who reinforce the child for his or her antisocial behavior are much more likely to be chosen as friends than those who reject such behavior. Patterson characterized this behavior as “shopping” for friends based on the maximum amount of social reinforcement received using the least amount of social energy. Patterson’s developmental model was formally introduced to the criminological community in an article that appeared in Criminology co-authored with Dishion. Here, the authors revealed the direct and indirect contributions of both families and peers on delinquency. The model revealed that a lack of parental monitoring and social skills deficits directly increased the likelihood of the child’s association with deviant peers. Further, poor parental

monitoring, deviant peers, and academic struggles directly increased the chances of engaging in self-reported and officially documented delinquency.

Two Paths to Juvenile Delinquency: Early and Late Starters As Patterson and his fellow scientists continued to expand their developmental model of juvenile delinquency, they began to realize that two distinct trajectories were necessary to explain delinquent behavior. The first trajectory characterized “early starters” who began with antisocial behavior during the preschool years, arrest at an early age (prior to age 14), chronic juvenile delinquency, followed by adult career offending. The second trajectory reflected “late starters” who did not have the early childhood training of antisocial behavior, whose first arrest was in mid- to late adolescence (age 14 or older), whose delinquency patterns were transient rather than chronic, and who were no more likely to engage in adult criminal behavior than juvenile nonoffenders. An early age onset of delinquency has consistently been shown to be a predictor of adult criminal behavior, beginning with Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s research. Additionally, other researchers studying developmental models of delinquency have similarly concluded that there may be several paths to juvenile delinquency with varying criminal outcomes as adults. The early-onset trajectory assumes a systematic progression of child behaviors as a result of a breakdown in parenting skills. This process begins with high rates of overt antisocial behavior as a toddler, advancing to more covert aggression during middle childhood. Later stages progress to include early arrest, chronic juvenile offending, young adult arrest, and adult chronic offending. Such a trajectory has been supported by data from the OYS (Patterson et al., 1998), where boys with early childhood antisocial behavior were 13.6 times more likely to be arrested at an early age compared to boys with little to no early antisocial history. Moreover, with an early arrest, the boys’ chances of engaging in chronic juvenile delinquency (three or more juvenile arrests) was nearly 40 times greater than for boys not identified as having an early onset. Lastly, the likelihood of an adult arrest for early starters was significantly greater in comparison to late-starters (.65 vs. .29),

Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime

and 71 percent of the late-starter boys desisted by having no adult arrest through the age of 23 (Patterson & Yoerger, 2002). Three qualitative distinctions are made between the two trajectories. The first, and perhaps most important, is the developmental timing in the demonstration of antisocial behavior. Patterson’s delinquency model asserts that the early-onset path begins during the preschool years whereas the lateonset path begins during mid-adolescence. Second, disruptive parenting and peer processes are assumed to occur at much higher levels with early-onset children. The family dynamic of earlystarters is typically characterized by ineffective discipline techniques by parents who are oftentimes antisocial themselves. This is much less frequently the case with late starters. Additionally, there is cursory evidence among the OYS sample that earlyonset boys tend to be of low socioeconomic status (SES). However, according to Robert Larzelere and Patterson, the role of SES appears to have an indirect influence on delinquency through ineffective parental management processes. The role of deviant peers is manifested distinctly across the trajectories as well. The deviant peer group is much more of a critical factor in the development of antisocial behavior for late-onset adolescents, whereas deviant associates become an important maintenance mechanism for early-onset adolescents who already exhibit firmly established antisocial tendencies. Third, early-onset boys are characterized as having more significant social deficits than lateonset boys. An inability to accurately detect and interpret social cues from others (i.e., social referencing) is one of the critical deficits observed among early starters. The social competencies of late-onset delinquents are assumed to be stronger than that of early-onset delinquents but weaker than nondelinquents. Although the two trajectories are distinct, the model assumes the same underlying process toward antisocial behavior, namely the operant coercive and reinforcement process. Timing, level of disadvantage and disruption among contextual variables (e.g., SES, parental divorce), and level of social deficits are the distinguishing factors across the two trajectories. However, aggression and antisocial behavior for both groups are determined by the relative amount of reinforcement received from the social environment for engaging

689

in such antisocial acts. Thus, Patterson’s coercion theory assumes a single model can explain how the delinquency process begins, what maintains it, and what determines progression from one developmental stage to the next. From a criminological context, coercion theory, as with all social learning theories, has fundamentally contrasting assumptions with other criminological perspectives, particularly control theories. Control theories assume that individuals are naturally inclined to engage in antisocial behavior; control mechanisms (e.g., social bonds, self-­control, informal social control) must be in place to reduce antisocial behavior and crime. Social learning perspectives, on the other hand, maintain that antisocial behavior is learned over time, similar to any other behavior. Therefore, interventions must disrupt the antisocial learning process and replace them with alternative prosocial skills. Accordingly, poor parenting techniques and harsh discipline are primary treatment targets in the Oregon delinquency model. In fact, Patterson developed timeout, a now widely used punishment intervention strategy, specifically to disrupt child coercive behavior. Conversely, the poor parental skills described in Patterson’s coercive theoretical model are viewed by control theorists as poor controls over children’s behavior which reduce the child’s social bonds and self-control.

Conclusion The work of Patterson and his colleagues from the OSLC in explicating a developmental model of antisocial behavior continues to be supported by independent criminologists, and has served as a critical foundation to the development of highly effective delinquency prevention interventions, including Scott Henggeler’s Multisystemic Therapy and the OSLC’s Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care. Perhaps Patterson’s most important contribution is the identification of the micro-level processes through which aggression and antisocial behavior is shaped and maintained through daily interactions with parents, peers, teachers, and siblings. The coercive, reinforcement process provides the missing link that longitudinal, risk-factor research cannot: It is one thing to know that poor parental discipline and association with deviant peers are predictive factors for delinquency, and

690

Peacemaking Criminology

quite another to know exactly how these risk factors function in the day-to-day interactions of children and adolescents. Patterson’s most recent work with Isabela Granic significantly advances his theory by placing it within a dynamic systems perspective. Doing so provides a more thorough and complex explanation, merging two separate, yet interacting, time scales: the micro-level, real-time interactions and the macro-level, global, risk factors that develop over longer time periods. Indeed, his theoretical contributions will continue to have a significant impact on both causal explanations of delinquency and crime and practical applications for preventing and reducing antisocial behavior. Emily J. Salisbury See also Bandura, Albert: Social Learning Theory; Farrington, David P.: The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential Theory; Harris, Judith Rich: Why Parents Do Not Matter; Loeber, Rolf, and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber: Pathways to Crime; Moffit, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-CoursePersistent Offending

References and Further Readings Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Granic, I., & Patterson, G. R. (2006). Toward a comprehensive model of antisocial development: A dynamic systems approach. Psychological Review, 113, 101–131. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Larzelere, R. E., & Patterson, G. R. (1990). Parental management: Mediator of the effect of socioeconomic status on early delinquency. Criminology, 28, 301–323. Patterson, G. R. (1982). Coercive family process. Eugene, OR: Castalia. Patterson, G. R. (1992). Developmental stages in antisocial behavior. In R. D. Peters, R. J. McMahon, & V. L. Quinsey (Eds.), Aggression and violence throughout the life span (pp. 52–82). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Patterson, G. R. (1993). Orderly change in a stable world: The antisocial trait as a chimera. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 61, 911–919.

Patterson, G. R. (2002). The early development of coercive family process. In J. B. Reid, G. R. Patterson, & J. Snyder (Eds.), Antisocial behavior in children and adolescents: A developmental analysis and model for intervention (pp. 25–44). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Patterson, G. R., DeBaryshe, B. D., & Ramsey, E. (1989). A developmental perspective on antisocial behavior. American Psychologist, 44, 329–335. Patterson, G. R., & Dishion, T. J. (1985). Contributions of families and peers to delinquency. Criminology, 23, 63–79. Patterson, G. R., Forgatch, M. S., Yoerger, K., & Stoolmiller, M. (1998). Variables that initiate and maintain an early-onset trajectory for juvenile offending. Development and Psychopathology, 10, 541–547. Patterson, G. R., Reid, J. B., & Dishion, T. J. (1992). Antisocial boys. Eugene, OR: Castalia. Patterson, G. R., Reid, J. B., & Eddy, J. M. (2002). A brief history of the Oregon model. In J. B. Reid, G. R. Patterson, & J. Snyder (Eds.), Antisocial behavior in children and adolescents: A developmental analysis and model for intervention (pp. 3–21). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Patterson, G. R., & Yoerger, K. (2002). A developmental model for early- and late-onset delinquency. In J. B. Reid, G. R. Patterson, & J. Snyder (Eds.), Antisocial behavior in children and adolescents: A developmental analysis and model for intervention (pp. 147–172). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Reid, J. B., Patterson, G. R., & Snyder, J. (2002). Antisocial behavior in children and adolescents: A developmental analysis and model for intervention. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Snyder, J. J., & Patterson, G. R. (1995). Individual differences in social aggression: A test of a reinforcement model of socialization in the natural environment. Child Development, 57, 1257–1268. Snyder, J. J., Schrepferman, L., & St. Peter, C. (1997). Origins of antisocial behavior: Negative reinforcement and affect dysregulation of behavior as socialization in family interaction. Behavior Modification, 21, 187–215.

Peacemaking Criminology Peacemaking criminology is a relatively recent and novel approach to understanding both crime and, perhaps more importantly, public and personal

Peacemaking Criminology

reactions to crime. In fact, criminology as peacemaking can be understood as a response to criminal justice policies that were first enacted during the 1960s such as President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. These broad executive and legislative proposals heralded the War on Crime, a law-andorder, get-tough, and war-making response to criminal and delinquent behavior. As Jonathan Simon observes, the “war on crime” has even transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear by which politicians now govern. Peacemaking criminology was born out of disenchantment with the repressive and socially conservative agenda that gave rise to the war-on-crime political movement. According to Ronald Akers and Christine Sellers, peacemaking criminology advances a utopian, crime-free society with a justice system that focuses on peaceful conflict resolution, the restoration of offenders within the community, and the absence of corporal and capital punishments (p. 262).

Origins Richard Quinney, a Marxist criminologist who rose to acclaim for his conflict theory contained in The Social Reality of Crime and his Critique of Legal Order, is considered to be the father of peacemaking criminology. Much of the development of peacemaking criminology is wrapped up in the evolution of Quinney’s thought from Marxist theory to Buddhist philosophy. Indeed, religious teachings (e.g., peace is the way, turn the other cheek, love thy neighbor, let those without sin cast the first stone) are core principles of peacemaking criminology. In addition to Quinney, other scholars have greatly contributed to peacemaking criminology; included among them is Harold E. Pepinsky. Pepinsky’s early scholarship was influenced by the anarchist tradition, but his later work incorporated concepts from peace studies, feminism, and even chaos theory (McEvoy, 2003). Together, Quinney and Pepinsky co-edited Criminology as Peacemaking; this single volume is probably the most recognizable collection of essays devoted to fleshing out peacemaking criminology as a bona fide theoretical orientation in the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice.

691

In defining crime, Quinney, in “The Way of Peace,” noted, “Human existence is characterized by suffering; crime is suffering” (p. 4). However, he seemed to eschew further elaborations on the nature of crime, maintaining, “The path to the ending of suffering is through compassion rather than through the theories of science and the calculations of conditioned thought” (p. 9). Instead, Quinney emphasized the relationship between peacemaking and social justice, and he also suggested that nonviolence is the primary guiding philosophy of peacemaking criminology. Quinney critiqued the criminal justice system in the United States by pointing out that violence is the foundation of the domestic legal system. Many crimecontrol policies, such as corporal and capital punishment, are based on ideas of retribution and violence. Peacemaking criminology rejects any criminal justice policy that inflicts suffering on the victims or the perpetrators of crime. As mentioned, peacemaking criminology has origins in religion and critical theory, which might seem to make odd bedfellows. In addition to religion and Marxism, Pepinsky suggested that feminism and women’s experiences are also integral to peacemaking criminology. The relationship seems to be reciprocal; that is, feminism and peacemaking reinforce one another. According to Pepinsky, peacemaking criminology must embrace womanhood because “people whose men have honored and respected rather than subdued womanhood have been relatively nonpunitive, peaceful societies” (p. 309). He goes on to say, “In a world free of repression, there isn’t much need for manhood at all” (p. 309). Gender is important to peacemaking criminology because it can represent an obstacle to social justice when women as a social class are disenfranchised and denied the power to make decisions for themselves. John Fuller and John Wozniak summarize the three major intellectual traditions of peacemaking criminology as religion/humanism, feminism, and critical theory (i.e., Marxism).

Core Themes Fuller and Wozniak demarcate six grand themes that inform peacemaking criminology: nonviolence, social justice, inclusion, correct means, ascertainable criteria, and the categorical imperative. Nonviolence is the apex principle in peacemaking

692

Peacemaking Criminology

criminology. Social justice maintains that “only by promoting the welfare of all, including those without power, can a society develop a long-term atmosphere of cooperation and commitment” (Fuller & Wozniak, 2006, p. 261). With inclusion, both the victim and the perpetrator are involved in the criminal justice process (e.g., trial and sentencing). Inclusion promotes forgiveness, conciliation, and restoration. In regard to correct means, Fuller and Wozniak note that the criminal justice system must arrive at solutions to crime in “an ethical and moral way” (p. 262). The theme of ascertainable criteria involves the notion of transparency and education of laypersons in the “language” of the criminal justice system. Lastly, the categorical imperative is the Kantian philosophy of determining the morality of an action based on its applicability to future scenarios, and they advocate a socially just application of this categorical imperative, regardless of class, race, and gender. Taken together, Fuller and Wozniak claim that these six concepts form a cohesive “peacemaking pyramid” with intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional/ societal, and global international implications. In addition to the peacemaking pyramid advanced by Fuller and Wozniak, Michael Braswell and Jeffrey Gold identify three metatheoretical themes that guide peacemaking criminology. These are mindfulness, connectedness, and caring. Mindfulness means “to move from the passion of single-minded self-interest to a growing sense of compassion that includes others and their needs”; connectedness involves a social context where humans realize that their actions have consequences for others; and lastly caring is akin to the love that a parent has for her/his child (p. 34). These themes went largely unspecified for some time, until John Whitehead, Wayne Gillespie, and Braswell mapped them onto three analytic levels with the ethic of care occupying a cultural level, connectedness signifying a social structural or institutional level, and then mindfulness representing the micro, individual, inter- or intra-personal level of analysis. Fuller and Wozniak have also sought to further develop their theoretical model of peacemaking criminology by first conceptualizing the theory as a Venn diagram comprising four interlocking circles representing social structure, crimes, social harms, the criminal justice system, and peacemaking alternatives. They also enumerate a number of

core peacemaking criminology variables at three empirical levels: personal justice, criminal justice, and social justice. Personal justice variables include crime, positive peace, social harms, peacemaking, responsiveness, dignity, needs, mindfulness, connectedness, right understanding, and peacemaking teaching. Criminal justice variables include mainstream criminology, peacemaking criminology, theoretical perspectives, and peacemaking alternatives. Social justice variables are safe community, social inequality, power relations, social structures, and social transformation.

Applications Peacemaking criminology continues to be applied to different aspects of the criminal justice system, including policing, courts, and corrections. For instance, Paul Jesilow and Deborah Parsons link the practice of community policing with peacemaking criminology as a method of introducing peacemaking to a traditional policing culture. Another example of peacemaking principles applied to criminal justice practice is Pono Kaulike, a Hawaii criminal court that provides restorative justice practice for healing relationships (Walker & Hayashi, 2007). Yet, perhaps the best known advocacy of applying peacemaking criminology to the criminal justice system is Braswell, Fuller, and Bo Lozoff’s integration of restorative justice into the correctional subsystem. They illuminate a variety of peacemaking alternatives to incarceration, including community corrections and faith-based correctional practices. As Braswell et al. conclude, “A bridge of compassion recognizes the harms and fear shared by offenders and victims, but also offers a way back into the community for each as well. Community justice is a context where much restoration can take place” (p. 152). In addition to the application of peacemaking criminology in the criminal justice system, Kieran McEvoy explores the global relevance of peacemaking, particularly to paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland. She outlines several criteria for a “new” peacemaking criminology. First, McEvoy suggests that “the predominant focus of peacemaking criminology should be upon areas where actual political or ethnic conflict are occurring” (p. 334). Her next point is guided by praxis where “peacemaking criminology should be about a

Peacemaking Criminology

693

better understanding of the criminological object of study and its relationship to the conflict in order to try to make a difference” (p. 334, emphasis in the original). Third, peacemaking criminology must be parallel to human rights speech; moreover, peacemaking criminology should be engaged in advancing human rights on a global level. Lastly, McEvoy raises the possibility of expanding measures of assessment to transcend the technocratic methods of evaluation that are currently popular in the criminal justice field. Taken together, these suggestions from McEvoy are designed to reconfigure the focus of peacemaking criminology from the domestic to the global; by doing so, it reconstitutes peacemaking as a viable method of conflict transformation.

from peacemaking criminology, but at this point it remains a philosophy rather than a theory” (p. 262).

Conclusion

Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2009). Criminological theories: Introduction, evaluation, and application (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Braswell, M., Fuller, J., & Lozoff, B. (2001). Corrections, peacemaking, and restorative justice: Transforming individuals and institutions. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Braswell, M. C., & Gold, J. (1998). Peacemaking, justice and ethics. In Justice, crime and ethics (3rd ed., pp. 23–40). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Fuller, J. R., & Wozniak, J. F. (2006). Peacemaking criminology: Past, present, and future. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Vol. 15, pp. 251–273). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Jesilow, P., & Parsons, D. (2000). Community policing as peacemaking. Policing and Society, 10, 163–182. McEvoy, K. (2003). Beyond the metaphor: Political violence, human rights and “new” peacemaking criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 7, 319–346. Pepinsky, H. E. (1991). Peacemaking in criminology and criminal justice. In H. E. Pepinski & R. Quinney (Eds.), Criminology as peacemaking (pp. 229–327). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pepinsky, H. E., & Quinney, R. (1991). Criminology as peacemaking. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Quinney, R. (1991). The way of peace: On crime, suffering, and service. In H. E. Pepinsky & R. Quinney (Eds.), Criminology as peacemaking (pp. 3–13). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the War on Crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. New York: Oxford University Press.

Peacemaking criminology, while a newer perspective on the theoretical landscape, has not been greeted without criticism. Akers and Sellers point out several inconsistencies in advocating peacemaking as criminology, including its ties to religion, feminism, and Marxism. For instance, peacemaking criminology draws heavily from religious teachings, but many religious edicts are violent or they have violent repercussions. Furthermore, consider feminism, which offers an idea of a liberated, independent woman who is not forced to conform to traditional roles of motherhood and nurturer. The peacemaking variant of feminism looks to the “natural” care that mothers display toward their children as a general model for caring. Motherhood, from many feminist perspectives, is a social construction that has been used in the past to subjugate the interests of women to the interests of men. Lastly, Marx advocated violence as a means to emancipate the working class from the shackles of bourgeois hegemony. Peacemaking never advocates violence as an alternative to solve social structural problems. The disconnection between peacemaking criminology and its proposed counterpart theoretical positions (e.g., religion, feminism, and Marxism) thus raises questions about the logical consistency of the peacemaking perspective. Akers and Sellers also criticize peacemaking criminology for being tautological; that is, the cause of crime and its definition (i.e., suffering) are one and the same. They went on to say, “It may be possible to construct a testable, parsimonious, and valid theory

Wayne Gillespie See also Abolitionism; Anarchist Criminology; Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven: Coercion, Social Support, and Crime; Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime; Cultural Criminology; Drennon-Gala, Don: Social Support and Delinquency; Left Realism Criminology; Postmodern Theory; Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology; Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory

References and Further Readings

694

Peers and Delinquency

Walker, L., & Hayashi, L. A. (2007). Pono Kaulike: A Hawaii criminal court provides restorative justice practices for healing relationships. Federal Probation, 71, 18–24. Whitehead, J. T., Gillespie, W., & Braswell, M. (2008). The future of the peacemaking perspective. In J. F. Wozniak, M. C. Braswell, R. E. Vogel, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Transformative justice: Critical and peacemaking themes influenced by Richard Quinney (pp. 231–250). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Wozniak, J. F., Braswell, M. C., Vogel, R. E., & Blevins, K. R. (Eds.). (2008). Transformative justice: Critical and peacemaking themes influenced by Richard Quinney. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Peers

and

Delinquency

Most Americans are probably familiar with the concept of a delinquent “gang.” Most would probably picture a collection of young males who share a common territory, have some organizational structure (e.g., ranks like “warlord” or “lieutenant”), conduct initiation rites, and display common signs of membership (e.g., colors, “tats,” or “inks”). Most might also realize that gangs are responsible for only a small (though not trivial) fraction of crime in the United States. What many Americans might not realize, however, is that gangs exemplify one of the most consistently documented features of delinquent behavior. Most delinquent offenses are not committed by a lone offender but rather by a group of youths. To be sure, these groups are usually a far cry from large, organized gangs. Most are small, disorganized, and spontaneous groups that resemble childhood play groups. But they are groups nonetheless, and that means that all of the social processes that occur in human social groups— status competition, loyalty and disloyalty, factionalization, ingratiation, and so on—take place in delinquent groups as well. Some criminologists see little theoretical significance in the group nature of delinquency. Others, however, see the “groupiness” of delinquency as a potential key to unlocking its causes. This entry reviews the history of research on the group nature of delinquency and the role of peer influence in explaining delinquent behavior.

History As early as 1931, two famous sociologists at the University of Chicago, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, discovered that more than 80 percent of juveniles appearing before the Chicago Juvenile Court had accomplices. Similar findings drawn from police data were routinely reported by scholars from the 1920s through the 1960s. As self-report methods gained acceptance in the 1960s and 1970s, evidence for the group nature of delinquency swelled. Martin Gold, for example, reported that 75 percent of the 2,490 chargeable delinquent offenses reported by his sample of Flint youths were committed in the company of others, and less than 20 percent of respondents in Lyle Shannon’s survey of Racine youths said that they had acted alone. Today, the group nature of delinquency is widely accepted as fact by criminologists, and it appears to hold even in countries outside the United States. As the group nature of delinquency became increasingly apparent during the 20th century, so too did the features of these groups. Nearly all studies show the typical size of delinquent groups to be small—usually two to four members. It appears that group size diminishes with age; groups of four or more are common in late childhood and early adolescence but gradually give way to triads and dyads in middle and late adolescence. Apart from their size, it is also well established that delinquent groups are predominantly unisexual (although males are more common in female groups than vice versa), and they appear to be relatively age homogeneous as well. It is important to bear in mind, however, that small differences in age can hold great significance to adolescents— older adolescents have significantly more privileges than younger ones—and the “instigator” in delinquent groups is often older (and almost never younger) than other group members. It appears that the small groups that commit most delinquent acts are often subsets of a larger group or clique, which may include a gang. Delinquent groups are neither highly stable nor highly organized. Offenders do not ordinarily stay with the same accomplices over long periods of time, and they often belong to multiple offending groups or cliques at the same time. Within delinquent groups, role definitions and role assignments appear to be unclear and unstable, and shifting

Peers and Delinquency

membership makes these groups intrinsically unstable. Albert Reiss has argued that the membership of delinquent groups is continually subject to change as a consequence of residential mobility, the incarceration of members, and shifts to conventional careers. The sociologist Lewis Yablonsky once described delinquent groups as “near groups” to capture their fleeting and disorganized character, and his assessment appears to be accurate.

Delinquent Friends As evidence of the group nature of delinquency accumulated during the 20th century, a parallel pattern was emerging in other research. As early as the 1950s, criminologists noticed that delinquent youths tended to have friends who were delinquent too. In fact, one of the strongest predictors of delinquent behavior known to criminologists today is the number of delinquent friends an adolescent has. The correlation between delinquent behavior and delinquent friends has been documented in scores of studies from the 1950s up to the present day, using alternative kinds of criminological data (self-reports, official records, perceptual data) on subjects and friends, alternative research designs, and data on a wide variety of criminal offenses. Few, if any, empirical regularities in criminology have been documented as often or over as long a period of time as the association between delinquency and delinquent friends. Delinquent friends are distinctive in certain ways from “straight” friends. They tend, for example, to be “secret” friends, meaning that parents usually know little or nothing about these friends because their children conceal them and their relationships. Mark Warr has also described delinquent friends as “sticky friends”; once acquired, they are not quickly lost. This may be true because hanging out with the “wrong” crowd, once it becomes known, tends to limit opportunities for friendships with non-delinquent youth. As a rule, delinquent friends share a dislike of school and have low educational aspirations. In fact, this disdain for school appears to be one of the unifying characteristics that draw delinquent youths together at school and elsewhere. Another common characteristic that seems to unite delinquent youths and their friends is conflict with and low attachment to parents. For some youths, this

695

weak attachment is probably a result of their parents’ awareness and disapproval of their friends.

Peers and the Origins of Delinquency Faced with compelling evidence of the social nature of delinquency, some social scientists have turned to this fact when attempting to explain the origins of delinquent behavior. To many modern criminologists, the very idea of peer influence is synonymous with Edwin Sutherland and his famous theory of differential association. The first explicit statement of Sutherland’s theory appeared in 1939 in the third edition of his Principles of Criminology, a popular textbook of the time. A revised and final version appeared in the fourth edition in 1947, 3 years before Sutherland’s death. The latter statement of the theory took the form of nine propositions, each followed by brief elaborations or clarifications. The nine propositions were as follows: 1. Criminal behavior is learned. 2. Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication. 3. The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups. 4. When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple; and (b) the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes. 5. The specific direction of motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favorable or unfavorable. 6. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law. 7. Differential association may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity. 8. The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning. 9. While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values since noncriminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values.

696

Peers and Delinquency

Sutherland’s theory was in its time a radical theory of criminal behavior. It eschewed popular biological theories of crime, for example, and by situating the origins of crime in the everyday interaction of ordinary people, it favored a strongly sociological and naturalistic explanation of crime. Perhaps its most radical feature was that it treated criminal behavior like any other form of human behavior (sexual behavior, language, food customs), that is, as behavior learned from others. Research on differential association theory has been generally supportive, although some specific precepts of the theory have been called into question. For example, Warr examined the effects of priority and duration on self-reported delinquency at age 17 using data from the National Youth Survey. His analysis indicated that these two dimensions of friendship are not entirely independent. Why? Because adolescents who acquire delinquent friends tend to retain them (remember the “sticky friends” phenomenon), and thus those who acquire such friends at younger ages (greater priority) tend to have longer histories of delinquent friendships (greater duration). Hence, the two elements cannot be regarded as entirely independent components of differential association. Further analysis by Warr indicated that duration has a substantial and statistically significant effect on delinquency. The effect of priority was also significant for three of the four offenses he examined, but in all four cases the effect was negative, with recent rather than early exposure having the greatest effect on delinquency. That is, one’s current friends appear to be more influential than one’s friends at earlier ages. This is exactly the opposite of Sutherland’s prediction, although it is quite consistent with social learning theory. There is another aspect of Sutherland’s theory that has consistently failed to receive support from research. Sutherland argued that individuals become delinquent because they acquire “definitions” (or attitudes) favorable to the violation of law through differential association. In essence, Sutherland was arguing that delinquency is the result of attitude transference, whereby the attitudes of one individual are adopted or absorbed by another. A number of studies over the last three decades, however, have consistently indicated that attitude transference is not the process by which differential association operates. For example,

after noting that behavior and attitudes are not always consistent, Mark Warr and Mark Stafford reported that the effect of friends’ attitudes on adolescents is small in comparison to that of friends’ behavior, and the effect of friends’ behavior is largely direct, meaning that it does not operate through changing attitudes. Consequently, it seems that adolescents are much more sensitive to the behavior of their friends than their attitudes. Social Learning Theory

In 1966, Robert Burgess and Ronald Akers published an important paper in which they restated Sutherland’s theory of differential association in the terminology of operant conditioning, a rapidly developing branch of behavioral psychology associated with B.F. Skinner that emphasized the relation between behavior and reinforcement. In the intervening years, Akers has devoted his career to developing and testing a social learning approach to the explanation of crime, an approach that, like operant conditioning, emphasizes the role of reinforcement (both positive and negative) in criminal behavior: Whether individuals will refrain from or initiate, continue committing, or desist from criminal and deviant acts depends on the relative frequency, amount, and probability of past, present, and anticipated rewards and punishments perceived to be attached to the behavior. (Akers, 1998, p. 66)

Social learning theory benefits from and builds upon the enormous theoretical and empirical development that took place in behavioral psychology during the second half of the 20th century. As its name implies, what most distinguishes social learning theory from other learning theories is its sensitivity to the social sources of reinforcement in everyday life. Capitalizing on the work of Albert Bandura, Akers, and others, social learning theory emphasizes interpersonal mechanisms of learning such as imitation (modeling or mimicking the behavior of others) and vicarious reinforcement (observing how other people’s behavior is rewarded), as well as direct reinforcement, in the acquisition of behaviors. Thus, adolescents may adopt the delinquent behavior of their friends (e.g., smoking, theft, drug sales) through imitation,

Peers and Delinquency

because they observe the adult status it confers on them in the eyes of others their age (vicarious reinforcement), because it brings rewards like sexual attractiveness and money (direct reinforcement), and because participating in those activities gains them the admiration and respect of their friends (direct reinforcement). This example is a bit of an oversimplification, because social learning theory focuses on the precise schedules, quantities, and probabilities of both reward and punishment, which can act in complex ways. But it suffices to illustrate the theory. The empirical evidence supporting social learning theory is extensive and impressive. However, it is disproportionately concentrated on tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use, and on relatively minor forms of deviance (e.g., cheating). The evidence for the theory, consequently, can best be described as positive and promising but somewhat limited in scope. Companions in Crime

In a recent book titled Companions in Crime, Warr identified a number of possible mechanisms of peer influence. What follows is a brief description of some of those mechanisms. Fear of Ridicule

Ridicule is an expression of contempt or derision for the actions, beliefs, or features of another. Although it is often expressed verbally, ridicule may be conveyed through facial expressions, gestures, laughter, or writing. Often, to ridicule another is to call into question the person’s fitness for membership in a group (a family, a club, a gang, a clique of friends). Fear of ridicule can lead adolescents (and sometimes adults) to join others in behavior that they would never engage in if they were alone, behavior they might find morally repugnant and even dangerous. Ruth Beyth-Marom and colleagues, for example, asked adult and adolescent subjects to list possible consequences of either accepting or declining to engage in risky behaviors (e.g., smoking marijuana, drinking and driving). The reaction of peers was the most frequently cited consequence (mentioned by 80 to 100 percent of respondents across situations) of rejecting a risky behavior (e.g., “They’ll laugh at me”), but was much less

697

salient as a reason for performing the behavior (“They’ll like me”). Avoiding ridicule, it seems, is a stronger motivation for deviance than a desire to ingratiate. For adolescents, the sting of ridicule is heightened by the fear of rejection that plagues many youths, and the enormous importance that adolescents place on peer acceptance. It is through peers that young persons first establish an identity independent of their family of origin, an identity whose very existence ultimately rests in the hands of other people. By risking ridicule, adolescents are in effect risking their very identity, a prospect that few would wish to entertain. If maintaining that identity entails an occasional foray onto the other side of the law to avoid peer rejection, it may seem a small price to pay to maintain such a valuable possession. In the modern world, ridicule is often transmitted by adolescents via text messaging, e-mail, cell phones, and other electronic media, and these communications sometime have the added feature of being anonymous, hiding not only the source of the messages but the number of people transmitting them. Such messages can be especially disturbing to recipients because they imply organized and widespread disapproval by others. The shift of peer relations onto the Internet and other electronic media (e.g., massive online gaming) is part of what Warr has dubbed the “virtual peer group.” Loyalty

Loyalty is a virtue and an element of friendship that is readily appreciated by most people. To remain steadfast to a friend when there are strong pressures to defect is a cultural motif as old as the Last Supper. There is reason to believe that loyalty plays a particularly important role in interpersonal relations among adolescents. Adolescent friendships are formative friendships, the first tentative efforts to define an identity outside the family, an identity that may be of enormous importance to a youngster emerging into a new phase of life and a new social world, and an identity whose very newness makes it fragile. When asked to define friendship, adolescents typically cite loyalty—along with intimacy—as the principal features of genuine friendship. When it comes to delinquency, loyalty means more than simply not “ratting” on one’s friends.

698

Peers and Delinquency

It often means engaging in risky or illegal behavior in which one would not otherwise participate in order to preserve or solidify a friendship. Loyalty can be a potent means of demonstrating friendship, and sharing risky behavior provides an excellent opportunity to prove one’s loyalty and seal a friendship. In a study using national survey data from young people, Warr found that adolescents were more likely than other age groups to say that they would lie to the police to protect their friends. Loyalty also provides a form of moral cover for illegal conduct. It invokes a moral imperative that supersedes or nullifies the moral gravity of the criminal offense. “Yes, I took part in the robbery, but I did so out of loyalty to Sonny, who would have done the same for me.” As a universally recognized virtue, loyalty imparts legitimacy to otherwise illegitimate acts and confers honor on the dishonorable. Status

The term status denotes prestige or respect within a group. Like other primates, human beings generally enjoy and seek status. Richard SavinWilliams, for example, found that young males randomly assigned to a summer camp cabin formed a stable dominance hierarchy within hours after meeting, and that contests over status declined rapidly once that hierarchy was established. Other research corroborates the claim that status hierarchies form rapidly in human groups, and it appears that one of the primary objectives of people when participating in groups is to avoid status loss. In one of the earliest and most influential efforts to understand gang delinquency, James Short and Fred Strodtbeck provided numerous accounts of how gang members in Chicago sought to acquire status in the gang or fend off threats to their existing status. For example, a gang leader who had been away in detention for some time reestablished his status upon returning to the gang by intentionally provoking a fight with members of a rival gang. In another instance, an influential gang member, after losing a prestigious pool tournament to another clique of the gang, robbed and assaulted a stranger along with some of his team members. The offense seemed to defy any economic or other explanation at the time, but because robbery was a source of status within the gang, Short and Strodtbeck concluded that the

action was an attempt to reassert status in the gang. The importance of status in explaining delinquency can only be appreciated by realizing how precious and fragile a commodity status is among adolescents. Industrial societies deny adult status and its perquisites to adolescents until long after physical maturation has occurred, creating what Terrie Moffitt has called a “maturity gap” that persists for years. For many adolescents, the only potential source of status in their lives lies in the world of their age-peers, and the use of violence or other forms of delinquency to attain or maintain that status may appear well worth the potential costs. If adolescence carries with it a general problem of status deficiency, imagine what it means to be an adolescent and a member of a minority group and to live in an economically depressed area. That is the social world described so eloquently and chillingly by Elijah Anderson in his book Code of the Street, an account of the social rules of the ghetto. In the inner city world he describes, where status is virtually the only possession that many young persons can claim, there is no greater affront than “dissing” (disrespecting) another, especially in front of others, and the penalty for doing so is often immediate injury or death. Even the most subtle signs of disrespect (e.g., staring) can produce savage results. This helps to explain why homicides and assaults are so often provoked by seemingly trivial matters (e.g., an argument over a small amount of money, or cutting into a line). Other Mechanisms of Peer Influence

In addition to the foregoing, Warr identified several other mechanisms of peer influence. These include the relief from boredom that peers often supply for adolescents, the role of drugs in encouraging youth to hang together and engage in deviance, a reliance on peers for protection in environments that are dangerous (e.g., schools or neighborhoods where violence is ubiquitous), the sense of anonymity that groups afford, and the moral codes that groups often establish. Some of Warr’s mechanisms can be logically subsumed under social learning theory. For example, status is a nearly universal reinforcer for humans, just as ridicule is a negative reinforcer (or punishment). Viewed this way, much of Warr’s work can

Perceptual Deterrence

be seen as adding greater specificity or detail to the general principles of social learning theory.

Conclusion Delinquent behavior is predominantly social behavior. Most youthful offenders have accomplices when they violate the law, and most also have delinquent friends who may or may not be among those accomplices during any given delinquent event. The social character of delinquency, as we have seen, forms the foundation for several etiological theories of delinquency. To critics and proponents of other theories, this evidence is not persuasive. Yes, they argue, delinquent youths have accomplices in delinquency, but they have “accomplices” in almost everything they do—dating, sports, driving, or just hanging out. Yes, delinquent youths have delinquent friends, but this is merely homophily (i.e., the tendency of people to make friends with people like themselves), not evidence of peer influence. Some critics even doubt the companionate nature of delinquency itself, arguing that it is merely an artifact of the way criminologists measure crime. All of these arguments have been countered with empirical evidence by proponents of peer influence, but the search for answers about the social aspects of delinquency remains one of the most vital areas of research in contemporary criminology. Mark Warr See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization; Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Matsueda, R. L., & Anderson, K. (1998). The dynamics of delinquent peers and delinquent behavior. Criminology, 36, 269–308.

699

Reiss, A. J., Jr. (1986). Co-offender influences on criminal careers. In A. Blumstein, J. Cohen, J. Roth, & C. Visher (Eds.), Criminal careers and “career criminals” (pp. 121–160). Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Warr, M. (2002). Companions in crime. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Perceptual Deterrence Deterrence is a process in which threatened or actual sanctions discourage criminal acts. There are official sanctions, such as incarceration or probation. There are also non-legal punishments; for example, people may refrain from offending to avoid disapproval from others. Three dimensions of punishment are believed to affect crime. In the aggregate, crime rates should diminish as the certainty, severity, and celerity (swiftness) of punishments increase. And, the likelihood that an individual will commit a given crime should relate negatively to that individual’s perceptions of the certainty, severity, and celerity of punishment for that crime. Various approaches have been taken to estimate the existence and size of deterrent effects. Research has investigated the association between crime rates in a place and the authorized punishments in that place. Authorized punishments are the behavioral restrictions authorities are empowered to enforce. They consist of criminal statutes and other behavioral regulations. For example, Radha Iyengar found that mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence increased intimate partner homicide, but decreased ‘‘other family’’ homicides. And David McDowall, Colin Loftin, and Brian Wiersema have investigated the impact of both mandatory sentencing laws and concealed firearms laws on crime rates. Studies have also related crime rates to indicators of actual police activity or enforced punishments. The most prominent examples of this approach model crime rates as a function of the arrest clearance ratio; this ratio consists of the number of arrests divided by the number of crimes known to the police. While highly informative, these approaches do not directly address perceptual deterrence, the subject of this entry. Authorized or actual punishments are expected to reduce criminal activity

700

Perceptual Deterrence

through their impact on individual perceptions. Thus, perceptual deterrence entails two linkages: threatened or actual punishments must affect perceptions of sanction risk, and in turn, these perceptions must affect decisions to commit or refrain from crime. As for the first linkage, perceptions must be predictably malleable. That is, a deterrence initiative must logically elevate at least one of the three deterrence perceptions (certainty, severity, or celerity); and the net impact of the deterrence initiative on perceptions must be that the targeted individuals are less crime prone.

Sanctions and Perceptions There is little evidence that sanctioning effects changes in perceptions of informal sanctions or changes in perceptions of the severity or celerity of legal sanctions. However, research has tested how sanctioning affects the perceived certainty of legal punishments. Such research has taken one of two approaches. One approach has been to relate an individual’s perception of the certainty of punishment to any consequences that individual has experienced from past offending. Mark Stafford and Mark Warr theorized that being punished for a crime should increase and avoiding punishment for a crime should reduce an individual’s estimate of the certainty of punishment for that crime. Another approach to studying deterrence perceptions has been to test the relationship between indicators of sanctioning in a place (typically a county) and residents’ perceptions of sanctioning in that place. In testing these expectations, Gary Kleck, Brion Sever, Spencer Li, and Marc Gertz found that individuals’ estimates of total arrests per 100 offenses known to the police for homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and burglary for 1988–1998 in their county of residence were uncorrelated with the actual clearance rate for their counties. Lance Lochner produced similar null results. However, in the most recent application of this approach, using a national sample of school students, Robert Apel, Greg Pogarsky, and Leigh Bates reported a positive association between the objective and perceived risk of being disciplined in school for transgression. All told, some evidence suggests that individuals indeed update their perceptions of sanction certainty based on past punishment experiences, as the perceptual deterrence framework predicts.

Perceptions and Offending Research has also addressed the second linkage in perceptual deterrence; that perceptions of the certainty, severity, and celerity of legal punishments should relate negatively to the probability of offending. This is an inherently individual-level proposition. Investigating it requires data on individuals’ perceptions about the risks of criminal justice punishments and indications of their offending propensity and/or behaviors. There have been two basic approaches to this general question. One involves scenario or vignette studies. Individuals read fairly detailed scenarios outlining potential crime opportunities and then answer questions based on the scenario. Among the information respondents provide are their perceptions about the risk of punishment and projections of the likelihood they would offend. This approach tends to show that the perceived certainty of legal punishment is a more potent deterrent of criminal activity than the perceived severity or celerity of legal punishment is. Among the advantages of this approach are that respondents give context-specific information, as offending decisions are believed to be unique and dependent on situational features. Another advantage of the scenario approach is that both perceptions and projections of offending probability are elicited contemporaneously (rather than at distinct points in time). This is important because perceptual deterrence is viewed as a contemporaneous process (Grasmick & Bursik, 1990), meaning that behavior is a function of perceptions existing at the time such behavior is contemplated and imminent. There are, however, weaknesses in the scenario approach. One is that the outcome measure is an individual’s projection of his or her future, hypothetical behavior, rather than actual offending behavior. Also, the approach most often uses college student and other non-criminally experienced samples. Another approach to studying the second linkage in perceptual deterrence—offending as a function of perceived sanction risk—uses longitudinal data on perceptions of sanction risk and offending behavior from a sample of individuals at repeated points in time. Thus, assume that data are gathered at n points in time (t1, t2, . . . tn). Offending between t1 and t2 is modeled as a function of risk perceptions at t1, offending between t2 and t3 is modeled

Perceptual Deterrence

as a function of risk perceptions at t2, and so on. Recent applications of this approach have produced strong evidence that offending relates negatively to perceptions of the certainty of punishment. Unlike the scenario approach, the outcome variable in longitudinal perceptual deterrence research is actual offending behavior. However, this approach does not estimate the contemporaneous relationship between perceptions and behavior; it measures, rather, the relationship between perceptions at the outset of a time period and criminal behavior occurring during that time period. Perceptual deterrence research identifies individual perceptions of sanction risk as the key intervening variables that determine the impact of deterrence initiatives on the behavior of citizens. Even studies that find empirical relationships consistent with the perceptual deterrence perspective (e.g., individuals who experience punishment elevate their perceptions of sanction certainty) do not explain a large amount of variation in perceived sanction certainty. Beyond this, there are significant unaddressed research questions on perceptual deterrence. These involve the formation and updating of severity and celerity perceptions. As well, perceptual deterrence research has yet to fully explore the potential applicability of heuristics and biases from the judgment and decision making literature and the role of emotion in contemplative criminal behavior (Nagin, 2007). Greg Pogarsky See also General Deterrence Theory; Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; Incarceration and Recidivism; Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence; Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime; Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect; Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory; Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory; Williams, Kirk R., and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and Non-Legal Sanctions

References and Further Readings Apel, R., Pogarsky, G., & Bates, L. (2009). The sanctions-perceptions link in a model of school-based deterrence. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 25, 201–226. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Nagin, D. (1978). Deterrence and incapacitation: Estimating the effects of criminal

701

sanctions on crime rates. Panel on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitative Effects, National Research Council. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. Bridges, G. S., & Stone, J. A. (1986). Effects of criminal punishment on perceived threat of punishment: Toward an understanding of specific deterrence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 23, 207–239. Dugan, L., Nagin, D. S., & Rosenfeld, R. (2003). Exposure reduction or retaliation? The effects of domestic violence resources on intimate partner homicide. Law and Society Review, 27, 169–198. Grasmick, H. G., & Bursik, R. J., Jr. (1990). Conscience, significant others, and rational choice: Extending the deterrence model. Law and Society Review, 24, 837–861. Horney, J., & Marshall, I. H. (1992). Risk perceptions among serious offenders: The Role of crime and punishment. Criminology, 30, 575–594. Iyengar, R. (2007). Does the certainty of arrest reduce domestic violence? Evidence from mandatory and recommended arrest laws (NBER Working Paper No. 13186). National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. Kleck, G., Sever, B., Li, S., & Gertz, M. (2005). The missing link in general deterrence research. Criminology, 43, 623–659. Lochner, L. (2007). Individual perceptions of the criminal justice system. American Economic Review, 97, 444–460. Matsueda, R. L., Kreager, D. A., & Huizinga, D. (2006). Deterring delinquents: A rational choice model of theft and violence. American Sociological Review, 71, 95–122. McDowall, D., Loftin, C., & Wiersema, B. (1992). A comparative study of the preventative effects of mandatory sentencing laws for gun crimes. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 83, 378–394. McDowall, D., Loftin, C., & Wiersema, B. (1995). Easing concealed firearms laws: Effects on homicide in three states. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 86, 193–206. Nagin, D. S. (2007). Moving choice to center stage in Criminological research and theory: The American Society of Criminology 2006 Sutherland Address. Criminology, 45, 259–272. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1993). Enduring individual differences and rational choice theories of crime. Law and Society Review, 27, 467–496. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1994). Personal capital and social control: The deterrence implications of a

702

Perceptually Contemporaneous Offenses

theory of individual differences in criminal offending. Criminology, 32, 581–604. Nagin, D. S., & Pogarsky, G. (2001). Integrating celerity, impulsivity, and extralegal sanction threats into a model of general deterrence: Theory and evidence. Criminology, 39, 404–430. Piliavin, I., Thornton, C., Gartner, R., & Matsueda, R. L. (1986). Crime, deterrence and rational choice. American Sociological Review, 51, 101–119. Pogarsky, G. (2007). Deterrence and individual differences among convicted offenders. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 23, 59–74. Pogarsky, G. (in press). Deterrence and decision-making: Research questions and theoretical refinements. In M. D. Krohn, A. J. Lizotte, & G. P. Hall (Eds.), Handbook on crime and deviance. New York: Springer. Stafford, M. C., & Warr, M. (1993). A reconceptualization of general and specific deterrence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 123–135. Wright, B. R. E., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., & Paternoster, R. (2004). Does the perceived risk of punishment deter criminally prone individuals? Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 41, 180–213. Zimmerman, G. M. (2008). Beyond legal sanctions: The correlates of self-imposed and socially imposed extralegal risk perceptions. Deviant Behavior, 29, 157–190.

Perceptually Contemporaneous Offenses Studies of the fear of crime have consistently shown women to be more afraid of crime, although men are more likely to be victims of crime. Similarly, some measures of fear reveal that the elderly also have fear levels that are disproportionate with their low victimization risk. To explain these discrepancies, in 1984, Mark Warr introduced the theoretical concept “perceptually contemporaneous offenses.” A perceptually contemporaneous offense is a crime that is linked to another crime because of a perceived belief that one crime may lead to another more serious crime. Fear of a specific crime is a trigger for fear of several other crimes. For example, the elderly may fear crimes like begging more than younger

individuals because of the perceptually contemporaneous offense of assault. Another example given by Warr is that women may fear assault, burglary, or homicide more than men because of the tendency to link these crimes to the additionally fearproducing possibility of rape. Although perceptually contemporaneous offenses may apply to many different groups in society—including men, women, and the elderly— the majority of the work in this area has focused on how the term applies to women. Warr (1984, p. 700) reasoned that rape is a “master offense” and that for women “fear of crime is fear of rape.” Theoretically, the notion of perceptually contemporaneous offenses is consistent with feminist work on fear of crime. Scholars such as Esther Madriz, and Margaret Gordon and Stephanie Riger explained that women’s socialization includes education on the threat of rape and on related dangerous spaces and people. In the United States and throughout the world, women’s lives tend to be more structured by fear than their male counterparts because of this threat of rape. The irony of this perceived vulnerability and danger is that women tend to fear strangers and places outside their homes and the homes of their friends, while most sexually related crimes occur in familiar places and are not perpetrated by strangers. In 1995, Kenneth Ferraro added to the literature on perceptually contemporaneous offenses by describing a “shadow of sexual assault” that was produced by women’s tendency to associate all crimes with sexual assaults. Ferraro used the shadow hypothesis to predict that the fear of rape would be more influential to fear of crimes such as assault and murder and less influential to fear of crimes like car theft and financial cons, because of the likelihood that women would associate crimes in each group with the “contingency of rape.” More recently, in the context of studying fear of gang crime, Jodi Lane and James Meeker have argued that fear of physical harm is a perceptually contemporaneous offense that shadows over many other crimes for both men and women.

Empirical Support Studies of fear of crime have discovered and corrected numerous measurement issues that can muddy the water in terms of interpreting the

Perceptually Contemporaneous Offenses

results of fear of crime studies and understanding perceptually contemporaneous offenses. First, global, single-item measures of fear of crime (such as the General Social Survey question: How safe do you feel walking alone at night?) present respondents with unrealistic hypothetical situations that may themselves be fear producing and lump quite divergent crimes together into a single question. More refined sets of multiple fear of crime questions, which can later be used to create a fear of crime index, do not include hypothetical situations, and allow the respondent to differentiate between fear levels for different crimes. Similarly, perceived risk or the perceived likelihood that a respondent will be a victim of specific given crimes is a conceptual distinct predictor of fear of crime. Including perceived risk allows researchers to separate cognitive estimations of victimization from more emotional responses to crime such as fear or terror. In order to adequately test the hypothesis that perceptually contemporaneous offenses explain differences between men and women, it is necessary to control for perceived risk and measure both fear of a master offense such as rape and fear of crime, more generally. Theoretically, perceptually contemporaneous offenses suggest that an individual will emotionally reference a more serious crime (e.g., rape) when contemplating being the victim of a less serious crime (e.g., mugging), which will in turn elevate the perceived seriousness of the less serious crime and result in higher levels of fear of crime. Controlling for measures of perceived risk and fear of a master offense should theoretically eliminate group differences. Several of the seminal studies testing the validity of the notion of perceptually contemporaneous offenses are reviewed below. Warr conducted the first empirical tests of perceptually contemporaneous offenses. Using mail survey data from Seattle residents in 1981, Warr (1984) found that both women and the elderly differed from men and younger individuals in terms of the perceived seriousness of several crimes. Controlling for fear of several other crimes and using an omnibus measure of fear significantly reduced group differences between men and women and between the elderly and younger respondents for several individual measures of fear of crime. This study showed indirect support for the notion of perceptually contemporaneous offenses, particularly

703

for women where rape was predicted to be a master offense. Later, using the same Seattle survey data, Warr (1985) directly tested rape as a perceptually contemporaneous offense for women. In this study, Warr regressed fear of rape on fear of several other types of crime. The results demonstrated that the shadow of the fear of rape was cast over numerous other circumstances and crimes. In the book Fear of Crime: Interpreting Victimization Risk, Ferraro uses 1990 data from the Fear of Crime in America Survey, which surveyed more than 1,000 respondents by telephone, to investigate the effect of fear of rape on fear of non-sexual crimes. Supporting Ferraro’s shadow hypothesis, sex was not a significant predictor of fear of crime when fear of rape was included as a control. Furthermore, a sex-disaggregated analysis found that for women, fear of rape was the strongest predictor of fear of non-sexual crimes. Ironically, the study also reported that changing one’s behavior (taking protective measures) because of fear of rape increases fear of crime. In 1996, Ferraro again analyzed the Fear of Crime in America Survey to test the shadow of sexual assault hypothesis on crime specific measures and found similar results. Fear of rape was a significant predictor of personal crimes—including murder, robbery, assault, and burglary while at home—and its inclusion in regression models either significantly reduced or eliminated the effect of gender on fear. Although fear of rape was a significant predictor of the nonviolent crimes of car theft, burglary, cheat/con, vandalism, and panhandling, the effect was much weaker than the violent crime models and did not have a major effect on gender differences in the model. It appears that women are much more likely to associate the master offense of rape with the threat of face-toface victimization than with nonviolent crimes. Using 1997 data from the Mississippi High School Youth Survey, David May extended past tests of the shadow of victimization hypothesis by analyzing a sample of 725 juveniles. The findings of this study were consistent with past studies and supported the notion of perceptually contemporaneous offenses. The fear of sexual assault was the strongest predictor of nonsexual crimes among adolescents. This effect was found in both male and female samples but was stronger for females. May suggests that both adolescent males and

704

Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The

females feel a “shadow of powerlessness,” which is a function of both gender and age and contributes to juveniles associating sexual assault with nonsexual assault. Finally, in a study of fear of gang crimes, Lane and Meeker test the “shadow of powerlessness” hypothesis on both men and women using a 1997 survey of 1,000 Orange County, California, residents. Specifically, they control for the master offense of rape that is suggested by feminist theory and the master offense of assault that Warr and others have suggested may also be an important perceptually contemporaneous offense. Regression results indicate that the fear of rape is a significant predictor of fear of graffiti, gang harassment, carjacking, home-invasion robbery, and drive-by shooting for both women and men, but the effect is significantly stronger for women than men. Fear of assault was also a significant predictor of fear of all the above listed crimes. When both measures, fear of rape and fear of assault, were included in the same equation, fear of assault had stronger effects for both men and women, although fear of rape remained a significant predictor of fear of crime in all specific crime models. This study established that, at least for fear of gang-related crime, assault is the primary perceptually contemporaneous offense, and fear of rape is the secondary perceptually contemporaneous offense. As the aforementioned studies show, there is consistent support for the shadow hypothesis and the existence of perceptually contemporaneous offenses. Consistent with feminist theory, rape operates as a master offense for women. For many women it leads to their taking precautionary behaviors such as restricting travel, work, and socializing to avoid being out in the evenings or alone, to their avoiding places commonly associated with sexual assault such as dark alleys, bars, parks, and large cities, and to their staying clear of strangers. While these behaviors may provide some degree of protection from stranger rape, it does little to protect women from more common forms of sexual assault committed by intimates or acquaintances. Ironically, as Ferraro’s 1995 study found, precautionary behaviors tend to increase fear of crime rather than decrease it because these behaviors require additional time and effort spent focusing on violent crime. A review of the perceptually contemporaneous offense literature also reveals that fear of rape is

not exclusive to females. Men, particularly juveniles, also fear rape and associate this threat with numerous other crimes. Furthermore, rape is not the only master offense; assault also casts a “shadow of powerlessness” on several other crimes and similarly affects both men and women. Sarah Britto See also Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model; Rape Myths and Violence Against Women; Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk

References and Further Readings Ferraro, K. (1995). Fear of crime: Interpreting victimization risk. New York: State University of New York Press. Ferraro, K. (1996). Women’s fear of victimization: Shadow of sexual assault. Social Forces, 75, 667–690. Gordon, M. T., & Riger, S. (1989). The female fear: The social cost of rape. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lane, J., & Meeker, J. (2003). Women’s and men’s fear of gang crimes: Sexual and nonsexual assault as perceptually contemporaneous offenses. Justice Quarterly, 20, 337–371. Madriz, E. (1997). Nothing bad happens to good girls: Fear of crime in women’s lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. May, D. (2001). The effect of fear of sexual victimization on adolescent fear of crime. Sociological Spectrum, 21, 141–174. Warr, M. (1984). Fear of victimization: Why are women and the elderly more afraid? Social Science Quarterly, 65, 681–702. Warr, M. (1985). Fear of rape among urban women. Social Problems, 32, 238–250.

Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The Criminology is a field rich with explanatory theories and sophisticated empirical tests of research hypotheses drawn from these theories. In this deductive process of theory testing, theory precedes the observations of data. Equally important to understanding crime and criminal justice is the inductive analytical process, which begins with

Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The

observations of data and concludes with theory as the outcome of the research. This is an iterative process that benefits from replication. The goal of inductive research is being able to make inferences about the data that can be generalized beyond the immediate subjects. In the inductive process of theory development in criminology, the Philadel­ phia Birth Cohorts have been among the most important bodies of data. These data have provided the foundation for understanding many key relationships of frequent or chronic offending and for understanding the transitions between adolescence and adulthood that involve crime and criminal justice interventions, such as the age at onset of offending, crime specialization, escalation in severity, desistance to law-abiding behavior, and the effects of arrests, probation, and incarceration. Research findings from the Philadelphia cohorts also contributed to the development of theories of crime, including the subculture of violence and the life-course theory or developmental perspective. The impetus for the Philadelphia Birth Cohorts came from Thorsten Sellin, an early criminologist well known for a long career devoted to measuring crime, helping to establish the Uniform Crime Reports, developing culture conflict theory of crime, and research on sentencing and the death penalty. During Sellin’s extensive travels, he became familiar with Nils Christie’s 1960 dissertation research on a birth cohort in Sweden and appreciative of the opportunities to observe temporal sequencing of events that such longitudinal data allow. He and his former student, Marvin Wolfgang, advocated with several federal agencies to support a birth cohort study in the United States. With initial funding in 1963, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania began retrospective data collection for the 1945 Philadelphia Birth Cohort. For the next 25 years and with considerable support from the National Institute of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Insurance Company of North America, data were collected for cohorts of 9,946 men born in 1945 and 27,160 men and women born in 1958.

Research Designs and Methodology The 1945 cohort was defined as the population of boys who resided in Philadelphia at least from

705

their 10th to their 18th birthdays. They were born during the final year of World War II and were eligible for, or at risk of, delinquency involvement from 1955 through 1962. Subjects and information about them were identified in an extensive investigation of student files maintained by all public, private, and parochial schools in Philadelphia, juvenile records of both formal arrests and informal remedial referrals from the Philadelphia Police Department, and the roster of names in the Selective Service Systems for males born in 1945. Of the original 14,313 boys, 4,368 subjects were excluded because they had not been Philadelphia residents for the entire period. The considerable effort required to secure agreements with agencies and to coordinate data collection, coding, and analyses, made this the largest study in criminology at the time. The longitudinal design covering 8 years in the life of the 9,945 cohort members enabled the researchers to examine the association between some demographic characteristics and delinquency, the prevalence and incidence of juvenile crime, as well as transitions over time including the age of the first arrest, escalation of seriousness and specialization of offending, frequency and pace of offending, and desistance. The research adapted the measurement index of offense seriousness developed by Sellin and Wolfgang in 1964 and Markov stochastic modeling techniques that were popular at the time in other scientific fields for analyzing event transitions to view specialization or escalation of offending. The chief product of this research was publication of Delinquency in a Birth Cohort by Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin. Like most research, the results of the initial study helped to inspire new and additional questions. Many of the questions arose from the study findings because of the time and data limitations of the original design. First, concluding data collection when subjects reached age 18 provided rich information about the nature and extent of their juvenile offending, but also stimulated curiosity about what sort of adults they became, and particularly those with adult criminality. Second, reliance on official records of crime and delinquency meant that “the dark figure of crime” unknown to police was also unknown to investigators, and this missing dimension was an issue of significant debate generally in criminology during the 1970s.

706

Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The

The school and police data also did not tap other dimensions of the lives of the subjects. To overcome these difficulties, data collection of the 1945 Philadelphia Birth Cohort ultimately extended to age 30 for a 10 percent sample of 975 subjects. (Note that the 10 percent random sample was originally selected from a 1973 dissertation on middle-class delinquency by Albert Cardarelli. But when a university fire destroyed files of the original cohort population, identifying information remained only for Cardarelli’s sample.) Official records of adult crime were collected from the Philadelphia Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Most of the adult arrests, approximately 93 percent, were identified by the Philadelphia police records. Face-to-face structured interviews were conducted at age 26 for 567 subjects, a completion rate of 58.2 percent with attrition problems due primarily to inability to locate other men in the sample rather than unwillingness to participate. With the follow-up data, the 1945 Philadelphia Birth Cohort became the first study to have official police contact and arrest records, self-report offense, and victimization information for the same subjects. Moreover, these data were all longitudinally based to enable the experiences of subjects to be tracked over time. Findings from the follow-up efforts are reported chiefly in Wolfgang et al.’s From Boy to Man, From Delinquency to Crime. In addition to results from the principal investigators, this volume includes University of Pennsylvania dissertation findings from George S. Bridges, James J. Collins, Edna Erez, Alicia Rand, S. Bernard Raskin, Simon I. Singer, and Paul E. Tracy, Jr. The 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort was a replication of the original design extended to include females. Both of these elements make the 1958 cohort very important to the field of criminology. First, criminology is quite young as a social science and researchers often neglect replication in favor of testing something new. Fortunately, the principal investigators of the 1958 cohort recognized the value of replication in building theory and extending knowledge about crime; they wrote, “When a methodology, like the birth cohort approach, is demonstrated to be important both to theory development and empirical application, and when this method produces a new set of important findings, it should be reiterated in order

to determine whether it is possible to buttress consistency and to affirm the observed findings with other data and with different study populations” (Tracy et al., 1990, pp. 1–2). Born 13 years later, the second Philadelphia cohort was at risk for delinquency from 1968 through 1975. Very different than the at-risk period of the 1945 cohort, the adolescence of the 1958 cohort was a time of conflict and social change in the United States that included civil unrest, escalating involvement of young people with illicit drug use, and the Vietnam conflict. Otherwise, there was considerable consistency in the statutory codes, policies, and procedures followed by the Philadelphia criminal justice agencies, all of which helpto affirm the same research setting for both cohorts and thereby facilitate the replication efforts. Results of the comparisons between the 1945 and 1958 Phila­ delphia Birth Cohort males are published in Tracy et al.’s Delinquency Careers in Two Birth Cohorts. The inclusion of 14,000 females in the 1958 cohort, approximately half of the total 27,160 subjects, signaled a major step forward in measuring criminality and criminal justice experiences of girls and women, who until this time were virtually ignored by research in criminology. Several dissertations chronicled the experiences of females in the 1958 birth cohort, including their delinquency (Facella, 1983), violence compared to males (Piper, 1983), and juvenile offending compared to the males (Otten, 1985). Finally, there also was a follow-up data collection effort for the 1958 cohort through age 26. Official records were retrieved from case files maintained by the Municipal and Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia, which contained both police reports and the criminal history of interventions. A survey was administered to a sample chosen via a stratified quota design based on race, ethnicity, sex, and delinquency status. In 1986, adult offending of the men were examined by P. Tontodonato, and delinquency and crime patterns including stability and changes between the transitions from juvenile and adulthood among both women and men were examined by Kimberly Kempf. The primary publication of findings from follow-up of the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort is Tracy and Kempf-Leonard’s Continuity and Discontinuity in Criminal Career. All data sets

Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The

also have been used in secondary analyses by many researchers, and most are accessible through the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) collections.

Major Research Findings The most significant findings of the 1945 Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study came from being able to observe both prevalence and incidence of offending among the subjects. Of the 9,945 subjects, one third had some contact with police as juveniles. Those 3,475 boys accumulated 10,214 police contacts and arrests. Among them, 46 percent (1,613) had only one encounter with police, but 54 percent (1,862) had multiple arrests. Of those recidivists, 627 boys had been arrested five or more times. These chronic recidivists, who accounted for only 18 percent of the delinquents in the cohort and only 6 percent of the entire cohort, were responsible for 52 percent of all the known offenses. Findings of chronic offenders were similar for the 1958 cohort, with 7.5 percent of cohort, or 23 percent of the delinquents, responsible for 61 percent of all offenses and police contacts. The finding that a small proportion of the population became chronic offenders who committed the majority of all crime, including serious violence has been replicated widely and found to be robust. Offenders in the 1958 cohort were both more active and more serious, overall. Compared to the 10,214 offenses committed by the first cohort, the second cohort had 15,248 recorded delinquent acts, with the rates being 1,159 per 1,000 subjects compared to 1,027 for the boys born in 1945. The differences are even larger for serious crimes. The rate of UCR index offenses for the 1958 cohort (455 per 1,000 subjects) was 1.6 times higher than the 1945 cohort rate (274). For only violent index crimes, the ratio escalated over 3 to 1. Although the 1958 cohort was responsible for more crime, the age at which the offending began was similar in both studies. The proportions of youths who had their first contact with police by age 9 was about 6 percent in both cohorts; between ages 10 to 14 it was 56 percent in the 1945 cohort and 46 percent in the 1958 cohort; and 47 percent of both cohorts were late starters with first offenses at ages 15, 16, or 17.

707

Race and socioeconomic status were measured in both of the cohort studies, although the precision of the indicators was not ideal. Race distinguished white and nonwhite subjects, the majority of whom were black. Socioeconomic status assigned each subject a value based on a composite index score of various economic indicators for the census tract in which he or she resided. Race was more evenly distributed in the 1958 cohort with 53 percent nonwhite subjects, compared to only 29 percent nonwhite boys in the 1945 cohort. Both cohorts had slightly less than half of the subjects classified as low socioeconomic status. The racial distribution of socioeconomic status was similar in both cohorts too; low socioeconomic status was classified for 30 percent of white and 84 percent of nonwhite subjects in the 1945 cohort and 31 percent of the white and 73 percent of the nonwhite subjects in the 1958 cohort. A significant race disparity in delinquency was shown in the 1945 cohort, but declined in the second cohort. In the 1945 cohort, police contacts were identified for 50 percent of the nonwhite boys and 29 percent of the white boys, for a difference of 21 percent. In the 1958 cohort, the race difference in prevalence of offending was 19 percent, with a decline to 42 percent among nonwhite youths and an increase to 23 percent among white youths. The incidence disparity in the first cohort was also pronounced. White delinquents were more likely to have only one offense (55 percent compared to 35 percent for nonwhites) and less apt to be chronic offenders (10 percent, compared to 29 percent). The difference was less pronounced in the second cohort, with white and nonwhite percentages of 52 and 37 for one-time offenders and 15 and 27 for chronic offenders. Thus, chronic delinquency increased for white offenders but declined for nonwhite offenders between the two cohort studies. The prevalence of delinquency among females was very different than that of males in the 1958 cohort. Of the 14,000 girls, only 1,972 or 14 percent had at least one police encounter before age 18. The boys were two and one-half times more likely to be delinquent, and three times more likely to be chronic offenders than the girls. Despite gender differences in prevalence of offending, the correlates of offending were similar for girls and boys. Nonwhite youths and those classified with lower

708

Philadelphia Birth Cohorts, The

socioeconomic status were nearly twice as likely as other youths to become delinquent, and one and a half times as likely to offend repeatedly. Several techniques have been applied to identify cohort subjects who may have specialized in a type of offending or increased in the severity of crimes they committed as they progressed as offenders, and to determine when and who were more likely to quit or desist from crime. Similar findings for these offense patterns were observed in both cohort studies. The most important result regarding offense transition patterns is that the next most likely state for all subjects was to be a nonoffender. No offense was the most likely transition in all types of “criminal careers,” and “lifecourse trajectories.” This surprising finding was true even for chronic offenders and those who committed the most heinous crimes. There is some evidence of offense specialization in both cohorts, and it was even more evident among offenders with many arrests. Findings also suggest escalation in offense severity. Both specialization and escalation patterns differed by gender and race. Finally, subjects who specialized or escalated in the severity of their offending while they were juveniles were more likely to continue offending as adults. The ways in which the criminal justice system responded to youths following their initial police contact, called dispositions, were also examined in the two cohort studies. The disposition system allowed for graduated levels of sanctions along with treatment for juveniles, extending from the lowest remedial warning, to arrest, informal disposition, formal probation, institutionalization, and waiver into the adult system. Findings show that interventions were largely based on appropriate legal criteria, including the youths’ offender status and nature of the offenses, but that also due to extra-legal criteria some youths were treated more formally. In the 1945 cohort, results showed both race and socioeconomic effects on police decisions to arrest. Differential processing was less evident in the 1958 cohort, although dispositions for the females rarely extended to formal court interventions. The most important finding was the relationship identified between type of disposition and subsequent offending, which was counter to that desired by an effective criminal justice system. The higher the level of disposition—including both

probation and incarceration—the more likely the youths were to reoffend.

Legacy of the Studies Although many implications can and have been drawn from the Philadelphia Birth Cohort studies, two are the most noteworthy. First, the most significant discovery of the research was the chronic offender. The amount of crime attributed to the highest rate offenders, led the principal investigators to advise the appropriate direction for formal crime control in their executive summary to the U.S. Department of Justice as follows: A juvenile and criminal justice policy that focuses on the few at the most propitious time has the greatest likelihood of effecting change. Social intervention applied to those few need not be merely restrictive and depriving of liberty; it can also be healthful for, and helpful to, those who are under control. (Tracy et al., 1990, p. 26)

The impact of the chronic offender discovery is very evident in the National Academy of Sciences’ 1986 volumes on Criminal Careers and “Career Criminals.” For over two decades, policy makers have focused the most restrictive punishments on the most dangerous offenders. Most recently, the legacy of these studies, particularly the second recommendation of the researchers, can be seen in prevention efforts across the country to improve the situations for at-risk youth and at-risk neighborhoods. The second legacy of the Philadelphia Birth Cohort studies is widespread acceptance, indeed the prominence, now attributed to longitudinal investigations of crime and criminality. There has been such an exponential growth in the number of longitudinal studies that they are now called lifecourse studies, most of which adhere to various developmental perspectives of crime. Although the principal investigators of the Philadelphia cohort studies collaborated on a 1970 birth cohort in Puerto Rico (Nevares et al., 1990) and compared findings with contemporary longitudinal research projects in Stockholm, London, Copenhagen, and Racine, Wisconsin, they also had to withstand considerable criticism from naysayers about the time, expense, and even the potential yield of longitudinal

Phrenology

research in studying crime. The prominence attributed to longitudinal study among criminologists today is due in large part to the success achieved by the Philadelphia Birth Cohort studies. Kimberly Kempf-Leonard See also Criminal Career Paradigm; Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime

References and Further Readings Cohen, J., Roth, J. A., Visher, C. A., & Blumstein, A. (Eds.). (1986). Criminal careers and “career criminals” (Vols. 1–2). Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Facella, C. S. (1983). Female delinquency is a birth cohort. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1986) The true value of lambda would appear to be zero: An essay on career criminals, criminal careers, selective incapacitation, cohort studies, and related topics. Criminology, 24, 213–234. Kempf, K. (1986). Constancy and change in the criminal career. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Nevares, D., Wolfgang, M. E., & Tracy, P. E. (1990). Delinquency in Puerto Rico: The 1970 birth cohort study. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Otten, L. (1985). A comparison of male and female criminality in a birth cohort. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Piper, E. (1983). Patterns of violent recidivism. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sellin, T., & Wolfgang, M. E. (1964). The measurement of delinquency. New York: Wiley. Tontodonato, P. (1986). Criminal career patterns on a cohort of young adult males. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Tracy, P. E., & Kempf-Leonard, K. (1996). Continuity and discontinuity in criminal careers. New York: Plenum. Tracy, P. E., Wolfgang, M. E., & Figlio, R. M. (1990). Delinquency careers in two birth cohorts. New York: Plenum. Wolfgang, M. E., Figlio, R. M., & Sellin, T. (1972). Delinquency in a birth cohort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

709

Wolfgang, M. E., Thornberry, T. P., & Figlio, R. M. (1987). From boy to man, from delinquency to crime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Phrenology Developed in the late 1700s and popularized throughout the early to mid-19th century, phrenology is the study of analyzing and predicting certain psychological traits based on the physical features of the skull. According to Franz Joseph Gall’s original work, the basic tenets of phrenology are as follows: First, the brain is an organ of the mind. Second, the brain is composed of 27 distinct organs which function independently. Third, the size of the brain is formed by the various organs. Fourth, the more active or powerful the organ, the greater the size. Fifth, the surface of the skull can be examined to gain the relative size of each organ. Sixth, this provides a description and prediction of physiological functioning and disposition.

Development The study of phrenology was the result of two major contributions of 18th-century psychology. Physiognomy, founded by Johan Kaspar Lavater, was the assessment of an individual’s character through the individual’s outer appearance, specifically through the face. Another major contributor was the concept of moral insanity, which was used to explain uncontrollable criminality. This concept was discussed by American psychiatrist Benjamin Rush who proposed that the mind is composed of independent facilities, and that crime is the result of partial insanity in which one facility of the brain stops working. These concepts, along with physiological research, led Gall, a Viennese physician, to develop the early concepts of phrenology. Gall’s interest stemmed from his childhood observations of differences in verbal memory relating to prominent features. He received his medical doctorate from Vienna in 1785. In the 1790s, he began developing a system of organology and brain anatomy. Along with his assistant and later collaborator, the physician Johann Gaspar

710

Phrenology

Spurzheim, Gall palpated the heads of psychiatric patients, artists, and criminals whenever he could obtain their skulls. Many of Gall and Spurzheim’s subjects were suspected of being obtained through an association with local deputy of police, Graf Saurau. They performed hundreds of dissections on the brains of various animals and human cadavers to link the internal anatomy of the brain to the external features of the skull (Gall, 1835). In Gall’s original work, The Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts, he proposes that the brain is an organ of the mind that is composed of 27 distinct organs that function independently. He believed that the brain and shape of the skull were formed by the size of these organs, so by analyzing the contours of the skull one could make predictable assumptions of physiological traits and attitudes of the individual. With 27 organs stipulated in the beginning, 19 of which were shared with animals, additional researchers elaborated by adding others. In 1815 Spurzheim added 5 to reach 32; in 1834, George Combe added 3 more totaling 35; and in 1844, H. Lundie added 4 more for a total of 39 organs. The size, or power, of these organs were believed to define abilities in a variety of behavioral characteristics—parental love, benevolence, and self-esteem. Although originally conceived as a deterministic approach, most phrenologists argued that the brain is malleable and plastic; therefore conditions could be managed or resolved with the help of outside influence, specifically psychological or environmental interventions.

Popularizing Phrenology Phrenology is thought to have two different stages: a scientific phase dating from 1800 to 1830 and a fashionable stage dating from 1820 to 1850. From the early developments by Gall, other researchers took interest and began to lecture and write heavily on the subject. The relationship between Spurzheim and Gall ended by 1813. Gall settled in France and continued to develop his system and write until his death in 1828. Spurzheim settled in England where he wrote Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim, which gained more popularity than Gall’s original book. He continued to lecture and demonstrate the Gall system until his unexpected death in Boston in 1832. Other fervent supporters include George and Andrew Combe in the Scottish

city of Edinburgh, where the first phrenology society was created in 1820, and the Fowler brothers in the United States. Many of these researchers, mainly psychiatrists and physicians, were attempting to replace the older metaphysical and theological explanations, ideas that criminals were evil or insane, with a more systematic approach which emphasized the scientific method. Overlapping with the development of phrenology as a science, a second stage occurred where the study was seen as a fad. Social clubs and traveling marketers appeared throughout several regions in the world with appeal to various social classes. Some practiced phrenology out of interest, while others for financial gain. There was also speculation that many became involved in phrenology to gain social status and authority, not purely for scientific pursuit or reform. By the mid-19th century, heavy debates were being waged in regard to the validity and accuracy of the science. By the 1850s, phrenology was largely defunct and had been discredited, although the Phrenological Association was not disbanded until 1967.

Historical Perspective: Enlightenment and Reform The development and popularizing of phrenology occurred simultaneously with the Age of Enlight­ enment, which emphasized reason and logic as the primary source of authority and legitimacy. Through its use of empirical observation, induction, and deduction, phrenology offered many practitioners and members of society a way to look at behaviors, specifically criminality, more scientifically. During this time, the rational choice philosophy, which emphasized crime as a result of free will, was often argued. However, there was growing debate due to the lack of meaningful results stemming from the alleged deterrent effects of punishment. Other sources were being questioned as the cause of criminal behavior. Adolphe Quetelet’s statistical analysis on crime seemed to suggest that deviance resulted from societal and economic conditions. Phrenologist became active in this debate, arguing that crime was the result not of free will but of abnormal brain organization, originating from issues such as poor health, environment, or disease. They argued that according to the philosophy of punishment, which emphasized the ideas that

Phrenology

no harm should come to the individual and that proportionate punishment should be allotted, many criminals should not be held responsible because their lack of facilities was no fault of their own. Also coinciding with the penitentiary movement in the United States, many phrenologists argued that criminals should be held from society for the immediate purpose of safety but should also be reformed and balance should be restored to their brains. Phrenologists were common visitors to prisons, working with administrators to develop policies. The debate had an impact on many prison practices through both the addition of treatment during incarceration as well as the use of rewards systems to assist in the reformation of prisoners. Many suggest, in a widely argued debate not discussed here, that the main contribution of phrenology was the reform policies developed from the findings that individuals should not be held responsible for crimes due to damage of their brains.

Phrenology’s Contribution As discussed, prior to the development of phrenology and other similar studies, those who displayed behaviors defined as criminal were thought to be evil or insane. Punishment was often swift and severe. Phrenology brought a new way to look at behaviors through biology that had important implications for treatment and punishment. Although looked on contemporarily as a pseudoscience, phrenology had lasting effects on many fields. The Gall and Spurzheim method of dissection is still considered an excellent teaching aid in the field of neuroscience. In addition, neurologists have a better understanding of how grey matter relates to nerve fibers and increased knowledge into visual field defects thanks to phrenologists (Simpson, 2005). Specific to the study of crime, evolutionary psychology borrows on the ideas that criminal behaviors can be traced to evolutionary causes, such as brain deficiencies inherited or evolved from certain regions. Biosocial criminology contends that genes interact with the environment, which in turn predisposes some individuals to criminogenic attitudes and behaviors. Specific to policy, phrenologists propagated the idea of punishment away from deterrence and retribution to one of rehabilitation. They were one of the first to recommend indeterminate

711

sentencing and the separation of criminals into treatment groups according to specific characteristics for more effective treatment purposes. These advancements in our understanding stem from ideas developed through the study of phrenology and other biological theories of the 19th century.

Conclusion Our knowledge has grown immensely from the unconventional ideas and approaches of the phrenological pioneers. Contemporary biological theories of crime, deemed the new phrenology, attempt to explain criminal behavior through brain imaging and genetics. As with any science, early ideas often seem asinine. But these early ideas are the foundation of science as we know it today. The notion that the Earth was flat was once embraced as a fact. The tenets of phrenology are no different. At a time when society was stepping away from religious and supernatural explanations of the world, phrenology was a solid attempt to understand human behavior by using science. Perhaps phrenology is a forgotten and obsolete science, but its impact on criminology and other fields can still be seen today. Bobbie Ticknor See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Garofalo, Raffaele: Positivist School; Goring, Charles: The English Convict; Kretschmer, Ernst: Physique and Character; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man; Neurology and Crime; Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques

References and Further Readings Gall, F. J. (1835). On the functions of the brain and of each of its parts (W. Lewis, Jr., Trans.). Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lynn. Rafter, N. (2005). The murderous Dutch fiddler: Criminology, history and the problem of phrenology. Theoretical Criminology, 9, 65. Rafter, N. (2008). The criminal brain: Understanding biological theories of crime. New York: New York University Press. Rosset, N. (2007). Popular philosophy in early nineteenth-century Scotland. Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 27(2), 150–169.

712

Physical Environment and Crime

Simpson, D. (2005). Phrenology and neurosciences: Contributions of F. J. Gall and J. G. Spurzheim. ANZ Journal of Surgery, 75, 475–482. Van Wyhe, J. (2002–2009). The history of phrenology on the Web. Retrieved March 13, 2009, from http://www .historyofphrenology.org.uk Van Wyhe, J. (2004). Phrenology and the origins of Victorian scientific naturalism. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Van Wyhe, J. (2004). Was phrenology a reform science? Towards a new generalization for phrenology. History of Science, 42, 313–331.

Physical Environment and Crime Connecting physical environment, crime, and crime prevention is a huge topic. Broader literature reviews appear in the Annotated Further Readings of this volume. This entry narrows the focus by concentrating on the question of causal impacts at the neighborhood or streetblock level, as well as contextual impacts on individuals or households. Further, this entry notes problems with inferring causal impacts of physical environment features. It also highlights difficulties in clearly demonstrating ecological connections between features of physical environment—or other features of neighborhood fabric, for that matter—and hypothesized mediating social, behavioral, or psychological processes taking place at the small group or community level. The focus of the current entry is a response to questions raised by Robert Sampson, Per-Olof Wikström, and others about whether, despite the many recent statistical and methodological advances in communities and crime research, criminologists are actually any closer to demonstrating neighborhood effects on crime which are causal in nature. A case can be made that conclusive demonstrations of causal neighborhood effects involving physical environment features affecting crime, delinquency, or victimization have not yet appeared and are extremely unlikely to ever appear. At least since the mid-1800s, hopes have run high that changes in the physical environment of a neighborhood or a street would reduce social problems, including delinquency, offending, and victimization rates. Tearing down a neighborhood

of slum housing in the early 20th century, or destroying blocks of alley housing as part of mid20th-century urban renewal, or dynamiting highrise public housing communities at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, have clearly had effects on the social problems, offending, delinquency, and victimization rates in those locations. The location-based rates have shifted in part because the original households were no longer there, and the replacement households often had different household structures, held different positions in the broader structure of society, and were more spread out spatially. Although the drastic changes in the physical environment were clearly a precondition for the other structural changes, parsing out how much of the social problem rate reductions in those places arose from physical environment changes per se, as compared to the other changes including population shifts, is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible. Estimating physical environment impacts when physical environment changes are less dramatic, or are ongoing, are similarly difficult. The sections below explain in more detail why. These controversies were highlighted in a trio of articles authored by Jens Ludwig, Susan ClampetLundquist and Doug Massey, and Robert Sampson in the July 2008 issue of the American Journal of Sociology. The authors debated whether a recent randomized experiment involving the relocation of households eligible for subsidized housing had or had not demonstrated an impact on delinquency, victimization, and related outcomes. No consensus emerged.

Meta-Theoretical Issues When thinking about physical environment and crime, the interest may be in ecological outcomes, such as neighborhood delinquency rates, or on individual-level outcomes, such as individual levels of delinquent involvement. Regardless of whether the interest is in individual-level or ecological outcomes, a host of challenges get in the way of concluding that the physical environment impacts are causal in nature. Challenges include, among others, controlling for adjacency effects; controlling for compositional effects; the need to analyze predictors, mediating processes, and outcomes using a lagged longitudinal framework operationalizing

Physical Environment and Crime (a) Ecological Impact

Nbhd Physical Feature

Neighborhood Effect

Nbhd Physical Feature

(b) Nbhd Rate - Offending - Delinquency - Victimization

Nbhd Process

(a)

713

Nbhd or Subgroup Process (c)

Individual Characteristics

Individual Intermediate Outcome

Individual Outcome - Offending - Delinquency - Victimization

Figure 1   Ecological Impacts and Neighborhood Effects Note: Nbhd = neighborhood effects.

changes; and lack of information about the time horizon for changes of key individual or ecological mediating processes. If the focus is on ecological outcomes, the research is open to alternative interpretations unless the researcher empirically establishes the superior strength for his or her posited theory compared to plausible competing theories of the following: the contextual impacts making the macro-to-micro link where macro represents context and micro represents individuals; the microto-macro link whereby individuals contribute to ecological changes; and the relevant micro-tomicro level mediating dynamics. If the focus is on individual-level outcomes, the research is open to alternative interpretations unless the researcher establishes that the macro-tomicro links are stronger for his or her theory than they are for competing theories; and that the micro-to-micro links capturing mediating processes are similarly stronger. Researchers very rarely establish these points. Indeed, those interested in ecological outcomes rarely investigate the macro-to-micro and micro-tomacro links for their own theories, let alone for alternative competing theories. Those interested in individual-level outcomes rarely examine alternative

dynamics and explanations for contextual impacts in the macro-to-micro level link.

Which Neighborhood or Streetblock Level Physical Features? Which neighborhood or streetblock level physical features are linked to crime, victimization or delinquent acts depends on which broad framework is adopted. Four relevant perspectives include the rational offender perspective, a behavioral geographic crime pattern orientation, human territorial functioning, or the incivilities thesis. The rational offender perspective considers how design, siting, and land use mix all might shape entrance and exit speeds; offender salience or detectability; presence, density, or visibility of attractive targets; or surveillability by others of potential targets or offense locations. A crime pattern orientation highlights how design features like non-residential land use uses, route structures and mix, and images of regions shape potential offender travel patterns, activity spaces, and search spaces. These in turn alter offending, delinquency, and victimization probabilities. Territorial functioning concentrates on resident- and user-generated signs of investment, potential involvement, and oversight, whose

714

Physical Environment and Crime

presence and patterning depend on and contribute to physical features of locale. Part of the incivilities thesis focuses on physical aspects of the environment that reflect either a lack of resident-based supervision over local spaces (e.g., graffiti which is not painted over or removed) or a lack of local leader or agency effectiveness (e.g., burned out cars which are not towed), or general disinvestment in the locale (e.g., abandoned houses). Any of these might suggest to potential offenders that if they should engage in specific crime or delinquent acts others will not interfere with them. More recently, however, some scholars have highlighted the situational and subcultural dependency of how incivilities are interpreted.

Which Processes Mediate Physical Crime Impacts? The same specific physical environment features may be of interest to multiple frameworks for multiple reasons involving different dynamics. For example, the presence of specific non-residential land uses, such as bars or check cashing outlets, may be relevant to models based on the rational offending perspective, the incivilities perspective, the crime pattern perspective, and the territorial perspective. If researchers seek to promote one theoretical framework over another they need to empirically demonstrate several points. 1. Mediating process indicators for the preferred perspective must correlate strongly with one another and also be discriminable from indicators relevant to other perspectives at the level of aggregation where the dynamics are posited. 2. The connections between the relevant physical environment features and the preferred mediating process should be stronger than the corresponding link for non-preferred mediating processes. 3. The preferred mediating processes should connect more strongly with the outcome than do other potential mediators.

Regrettably, there is little research investigating links between the physical environment and crime that meets these criteria. Consequently, little is known about the relative relevance of different sociological, social psychological, or psychological mediating

processes that can be shaped by physical environment features, or how relative relevance may depend on context or outcome. To put the point more strongly, when thinking about physical environment and crime, the middle of the model is a muddle.

Challenges in Demonstrating Causal Neighborhood Effects Traditionally, several challenges must be overcome to demonstrate causal neighborhood effects. 1. Compositional characteristics of residents or households must be removed. Usually this is done through partialling on key individual or household demographic factors. 2. Ecological-level fundamental demographic structure also should be taken into account. 3. Spatial adjacency effects should be explored and, if significant patterns of spatial autocorrelation appear, a spatially lagged outcome variable should be constructed and entered as a predictor. 4. The predictors must not be endogenous—that is, predictor scores cannot correlate with the error component of the outcome. This can happen when simultaneous relationships (e.g., offending rates increase abandoned housing rates, abandoned housing rates increase offending rates) are not modeled properly, or when a third, unobserved variable not included in the model influences both a predictor and an outcome (e.g., recent changes in the local political economy affect both abandoned housing rates and local offending rates). This concern can sometimes be handled with individual or indexed (2SLS) instrumental variables, but recent econometric work raises concerns about these approaches. 5. Most troubling are biases arising from nonrandom selection of individuals or households into neighborhoods. Much work on neighborhood effects recognizes the difficulty of taking selection effects into account but either puts it aside, calls for capitalizing on experimental and quasi-experimental data availability where causality questions may be less clouded, or accepts it as part of ongoing processes of neighborhood differentiation. Another approach suggested is to document specific theoretically relevant processes taking place subsequent to an individual or household entering a neighborhood, but the resources needed for obtaining such indicators may be beyond most study resources.

Physical Environment and Crime

715

Consider a longitudinal study that finds impacts of changes in neighborhood physical factors— perhaps only perceived—on changes in heavy drinking, as Terrence Hill and Ronald Angel did in 2005. Consider further, building on Alison Sherley’s 2005 article, that changes in the heavy drinking are likely to lead to changes in chances of being victimized. The concern with non-random neighborhood selection suggests that some pre-existing features of individuals or households, not identified in the current causal model, led those individuals or households to take up residence in neighborhoods where physical deterioration would later be increasing. For example, individuals who moved into a neighborhood where physical deterioration later increased may have been men who recently became unemployed, or women who recently became divorced or separated. The problems that result are twofold. Statistical estimates of parameters will not reflect the broader population, since the groups in the neighborhoods are nonrandom samples. In addition, neighborhood features, or even changing neighborhood features, are treated as having exogenous impact when it would be more accurate to model them as endogenous— reflecting in part the processes of individuals or households selecting neighborhoods.

physical environment causal impacts might be moderated by important features of context will never be comprehensively understood. So criminologists do not, and probably will not, know enough about the independent causal impacts of physical environment features at the neighborhood or streetblock levels to propose clear, acontextual prevention principles; nor do they or will they know enough to develop systematic guidelines for physical environment and prevention in different types of contexts. Physical and social features of the residential environment intertwine; are embedded in and shaped by particular social, economic, cultural, and political contexts; are interpreted differently by different groups and individuals; and change over time in complex ways. Therefore, the most to which researchers, prevention and policy advocates, and resource personnel for community constituencies can aspire is to collaborate with key stakeholders in a specific locale at a specific point in time to develop a contextualized problem-­oriented approach, and include in this approach clear ideas about how physical environment features in that instance might be contributing independently to offending, delinquency, or victimization.

Conclusion

See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Newman, Oscar: Defensible Space Theory; Wikström, Per-Olof H.: Situational Action Theory; Wilcox, Pamela, Kenneth C. Land, and Scott A. Hunt: Multicontextual Opportunity Theory

In the United States, there never will be, nor should there ever be, research studies in which large numbers of non-poor individuals or households from many different types of locations are randomly assigned to live in physically different neighborhoods or streetblocks, with individual or areal offending or victimization or delinquency rates assessed before and after. Nor will there ever be sufficient resources to empirically track delinquency, victimization, and self-reported offending among large numbers of individuals and households over time in many different types of locations as they move through changing neighborhood contexts. Therefore, given the challenges described above, criminologists will never conclusively demonstrate causal ecological impacts of neighborhood or streetblock physical environment features on individual or collective crime, delinquency, or victimization outcomes. Further, the important ways that

Ralph B. Taylor

References and Further Readings Clarke, R. V. (1983). Situational crime prevention: Its theoretical basis and practical scope. In M. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and justice: An annual review of research (Vol. 4, pp. 225–256). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clarke, R. V. (1992). Situational crime prevention. Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston. Crowe, T. D. (1991). Crime prevention through environmental design: Applications of architectural design and space management concepts. London: Butterworth-Heinemann.

716

Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime

Fowler, E. P. (1992). Building cities that work. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press. Hill, T. D., & Angel, R. J. (2005). Neighborhood disorder, psychological distress, and heavy drinking. Social Science & Medicine, 61(5), 965–975. Innes, M. (2004). Signal crimes and signal disorders: notes on deviance as communicative action. British Journal of Sociology, 55, 335–355. Sampson, R. J. (2006). How does community context matter? Social mechanisms and the explanation of crime rates. In P.-O. Wikström & R. J. Sampson (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms, and development (pp. 31–60). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sherley, A. J. (2005). Contextualizing the sexual assault event: Images from police files. Deviant Behavior, 26(2), 87–108. St. Jean, P. K. B. (2007). Pockets of crime: Broken windows, collective efficacy, and the criminal point of view. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, R. B. (1987). Toward an environmental psychology of disorder. In D. Stokols & I. Altman (Eds.), Handbook of environmental psychology (pp. 951–986). New York: Wiley. Taylor, R. B. (1988). Human territorial functioning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, R. B. (1998). Crime in small scale places: What we know, what we can do about it. In Research and evaluation conference 1997 (pp. 1–20). Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. Taylor, R. B. (2001). Breaking away from broken windows: Evidence from Baltimore Neighborhoods and the nationwide fight against crime, grime, fear and decline. New York: Westview Press. Taylor, R. B. (2002). Physical environment, crime, fear, and resident-based control. In J. Q. Wilson (Ed.), Crime: Public policies for crime control (pp. 413–434). Oakland, CA: Institute for Contemporary Studies. Taylor, R. B. (2005). Crime prevention through environmental design: Yes, no, maybe, unknowable, and all of the above. In R. Bechtel & A. Churchman (Eds.), Handbook of environmental psychology (pp. 413–426). New York: Wiley. Taylor, R. B., & Gottfredson, S. D. (1986). Environmental design, crime and prevention: An examination of community dynamics. In A. J. Reiss & M. Tonry (Eds.), Communities and crime (pp. 387–416). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, R. B., & Harrell, A. V. (1996). Physical environment and crime. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.

Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime In 1968, Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary S. Becker laid out an economics-based theory of crime in an article titled “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach.” To Becker, the theory “simply extend[ed] the economist’s usual analysis of choice,” which involves a calculated weighing of the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action, to criminal decision making (p. 170). He also went on to argue with the economics-based theory of crime in hand, it was now possible to “dispense with special theories of anomie, psychological inadequacies or inheritance of special traits” (p. 170). Thus, to Becker the economic approach to crime that he pioneered could stand alone without appeal to any sociological or psychological constructs. Becker’s neoclassical economic model of crime argued that people calculate the expected utility of criminal and non-criminal actions and choose the one with the greatest value. Components of expected utility included the costs of crime such as the probability of getting caught and punished, the severity of the punishment, and the gains from criminal and noncriminal actions (e.g., expected income from these two respective sources). The framework can be extended to include social costs such as loss of the good opinion of one’s friends if one is apprehended, and the intangible benefits of crime and non-crime such as prestige among fellow offenders and the good opinion of conventional people, respectively. However, in practice, the focus of the economic model is the tangible costs and benefits of the crime and non-crime alternatives. One of the important features of the neoclassical economic expected utility model is that decision makers are assumed to be immune to epiphenomena such as psychological or emotional states (Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003). In short Homo economicus is a calculating, unemotional being motivated only by self-interest, whose interests or preferences are assumed rather than examined as to their source. The economic model also assumes that human beings have an unbounded capacity for calculation and rationality and are not motivated by altruism. There is an enormous body of evidence

Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime

that individuals do not make choices in a way that conforms with the assumptions of the neoclassical economic model. Thus, human decision makers do not always carefully collect and accurately weigh information before making decisions, they frequently are influenced by shortcuts and biases, and they are more loss averse than the theory can explain. Real human beings also depart from Homo economicus in that they frequently fail to make the “best” choice because they have problems with self-control: they spend too much money, drink too much alcohol, and engage in other actions that are immediately pleasurable but have long-term costs. Finally, although the neoclassical economic model assumes that the primary motive for behavior is self-interest, humans frequently behave in the real world as if fairness and morality matter. For example, people will turn down free money if they think they are not getting their fair share, they tip in restaurants they will never visit again, and they refuse to do some behaviors even though it would be personally beneficial and they could “get away with it.” Behavioral economics emerged to provide the neoclassical economic model with a more realistic psychological and to a much lesser extent sociological foundation to improve it as a descriptive theory about how people actually make decisions (Camerer et al., 2004). Over the past 20 years a great deal of empirical research has accumulated that has applied the principles of behavioral economics to specific areas of inquiry such as finance, public economics, wage determination, and organizational economics. Greg Pogarsky and his collaborators have been pioneers in bringing the insights of behavioral economics to the study of criminal decision making.

The Complexity of Decision Making One of Pogarsky’s most important contributions involves how contact with the criminal justice system affects offender perceptions of sanction risks. Rational decision makers are supposed to systematically and rationally update their prior beliefs based on information provided by current experience. For example, if there is a massive recall of Toyota automobiles, a rational decision maker should incorporate that information by lowering their prior estimate as to how reliable a car a Toyota is. Analogously, criminal offenders who commit a

717

crime and are caught and punished should update their perceptions of the risk of criminal activity by increasing the perceived certainty of punishment and perhaps the perceived severity. There is some evidence that such Bayesian updating of perceptions takes place (Lochner, 2007). However, in 2003, Pogarsky and Alex Piquero found that offenders do not update according to the economic model and, indeed, do just the opposite of what it predicts. They found that some people decrease the perceived certainty of punishment after getting caught. They call this perceptual distortion resetting. Similar to a gambler who may think that the probability that a roulette ball will fall on red is higher after falling on black several consecutive times, Pogarsky and Piquero argue that offenders who have just been caught decrease their perception that they will get caught in the future because they mistakenly think that it would be uncharacteristically unlucky to be caught again. In other words, much like a gambler’s fallacy, they think that they suffered bad luck by just getting caught in crime and are “due” to have a streak of good luck. The resetting effect, if correct, represents an important departure from the economic model of updating perceptions based on experience. Another decision-making bias uncovered by behavioral economists is called self-serving bias. Just as all the children in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon are above average, survey evidence shows that individuals overestimate their abilities and contributions. The vast majority of people rate themselves in the top 50 percent of drivers (Svenson, 1981), ethics (Baumhart, 1968), productivity (Cross, 1977), health (Weinstein, 1980), and a variety of other desirable skills. Another interesting example of self-serving bias comes from surveys of married couples in which each married partner is asked what percentage of the housework he or she does. The percentages routinely sum to more than 100 percent (Ross & Sicoly, 1979). In an application of the self-serving bias to criminology, Daniel Nagin and Pogarsky (2003) conducted an experiment in which student-subjects were given an opportunity to score better on a class quiz by cheating. Experimental conditions manipulated the certainty and severity of possible sanctions for cheating. They found that those with a strong self-serving bias (measured as a tendency to see situations in a light favorable to themselves)

718

Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime

were more inclined to cheat than others. In part this was because they believed themselves less likely than others to get caught for cheating. Another assumption of the neoclassical economic model is that persons consciously weigh the costs and benefits of each possible line of action and choose the alternative that maximizes utility. This model does not, however, take into consideration what has been described as the “self-control” problem. Although the economic model assumes that people choose what is best for themselves, the reality is that we sometimes are unable to resist immediate temptations, with the result that we make decisions that we know are harmful for our long-term selfinterest even as we are making them. For example, in deciding whether to buy a high-definition television (HDTV), Homo economicus is assumed to weigh the immediate and longer term advantages of having an HDTV against the cost which often includes long-term credit card debt and associated interest and penalty charges. The self-control problem arises when the immediate benefit of having an HDTV, for example watching the Super Bowl on a large HD screen, overwhelms all the other relevant criteria such as how often one will actually use the TV over the long term and, perhaps most importantly, the financial challenge of having to pay for the HDTV in credit card installment payments. Behavioral economists have demonstrated that some people resist an immediate impulse to spend money because they are “tightwads” who experience a strong and immediate “pain of paying” (sharp guilt in spending money) that allows them to defeat the immediate appeal of the HDTV. Others who experience less or no pain of paying are more tempted by the immediate pleasures and act like “spendthrifts” (Prelec & Lowen­stein, 1998). Based on this line of reasoning, Pogarsky (2002) argues that the threat of criminal sanctions will depend on self-control because the benefits of offending are generally immediate and the costs of sanctions are generally delayed. Hence, some people fail to solve the self-control problem because they are relatively unaffected by the long-term costs of committing crimes, while others who have stronger self-control are predicted to be more affected by the long-term costs of their behavior. Consistent with this prediction, Pogarsky found that both the certainty and severity of punishment acted as an effective deterrent for those with a

moderate strength of self-control. He labeled these individuals the “deterrables.” However, sanction threats were ineffective for those who had not solved the self-control problem and thereby were overwhelmed by immediate pleasures of crime. This finding was replicated with a different antisocial act in Nagin and Pogarsky (2003) and in a sample of serious offenders in Pogarsky (2007). Pogarsky’s theory of the interaction of self-control and deterrence implies that the effectiveness of crime prevention based on the deterrent “bite” of formal sanctions will depend upon the self-control of the targeted population. For example, his theory suggests that enhanced penalties directed at repeat offenders, such as those targeted by “three-strikes”– type laws, will have a negligible impact because repeat offenders likely have very low self-control.

Fairness and Morality In positing the primacy of self-interest, the neoclassical economic model pays insufficient attention to considerations of fairness or morality in decisionmaking processes. For example, results from experiments based on “ultimatum games” consistently demonstrate that persons are concerned about fairness at least as much as clear economic gain. The ultimate game involves two parties dividing a fixed amount of money between themselves. One party, the proposer, proposes a division of the sum and the other party, the responder, either accepts the proposed division or rejects it. If the proposal is rejected neither party gets anything. For the responder, the sum offered by the proposer is pure gain. Accordingly, a purely self-interested actor in the tradition of the neoclassical economic model should accept any share greater than zero. In fact, however, in numerous experimental studies responders are unwilling to accept an amount below what they think is fair. The finding from behavioral economics that considerations of fairness and morality can trump instrumental concerns accord with a substantial body of research showing that perceptions of morality are not only a robust predictor of a wide range of antisocial behaviors but also that perceptions about what is “morally right” are independent of perceived utility. Consistent with the influential role of morality in crime decision making, Pogarsky et al. (2005) found that an

Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime

actor’s updating of perceptions based on his or her personal experiences with offending were nullified in the presence of strong moral feelings. The failure to consider the role of fairness or morality in decision making reflects a more general limitation of the neoclassical economic model that focuses only on tangible risks and rewards—its neglect of the role of emotions in decision making, which in the view of some criminologists is a critical omission in crime decision making. Behavioral economics has brought the study of persons’ emotions back into the neoclassical economic model to explain some important departures from the predictions of that model. (The word back is used because early economists were keenly interested in emotions as evidenced by Adam Smith’s work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.) One example is the standard neoclassical economic model’s prediction that people will put off dreaded outcomes as long as possible and attempt to enjoy pleasurable outcomes as soon as possible. George Loewenstein, however, found that experiencing a feeling of dread motivated people to get the bad experience over as quickly as possible while feelings of savoring motivated them to delay a good outcome. Consistent with Lowenstein’s arguments, Nagin and Pogarsky (2001) found that individuals with a desire to get unpleasant events over with sooner rather than later were the most deterrable. More generally, emotions of dread may lead criminal offenders to “cop a plea” as quickly as possible or to sell a stolen “hot” item too quickly, even when such a bargain might not be in their longterm interest.

Conclusion Behavioral economics emerged as a separate subdiscipline in order to provide the neoclassic economic model with a more realistic understanding of economic behavior. Armed with the empirical and theoretical insights provided by behavioral economists, Pogarsky and colleagues have begun to modify the rational choice tradition in criminology to include the insights of behavioral economists. The areas where a possible integration of behavioral economics and criminology can be fruitful are too numerous to discuss in this short essay, but additional areas not mentioned above include the consideration of prospect theory–based

719

utility models, hyperbolic time discounting, as well as an elaboration of such issues as the role of emotional states and heuristics and biases in decision making. As Pogarsky’s work demonstrates, criminologists can learn much from a careful study of the behavioral economics literature. Its many intriguing insights can greatly enrich our understanding of criminal decision making. Daniel S. Nagin and Raymond Paternoster See also Becker, Gary S.: Punishment, Human Capital, and Crime General Deterrence Theory; Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; Incarceration and Recidivism; Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence; Perceptual Deterrence; Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect; Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory; Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory; Williams, Kirk R., and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and Non-Legal Sanctions

References and Further Readings Baumhart, R. (1968). An honest profit. New York: Prentice Hall. Becker, G. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76, 169–217. Camerer, C. F., Loewenstein, G., & Rabin, M. (2004). Advances in behavioral economics. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Cross, P. (1977). Not can, but will college teaching be improved? New Directions for Higher Education, 17, 1–15. Lochner, L. (2007). Individual perceptions of the criminal justice system. American Economic Review, 97, 444–460. Loewenstein, G., & Lerner, J. (2003). The role of affect in decision making. In R. J. Dawson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective science (pp. 619–642). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Nagin, D. S. (2007). Moving choice to center stage in criminological research and theory: The American Society of Criminology 2006 Sutherland Address. Criminology, 45, 259–272. Nagin, D. S., & Pogarsky, G. (2001). Integrating celerity, impulsivity, and extralegal sanction threats into a model of general deterrence: Theory and evidence. Criminology, 39, 865–892. Nagin, D. S., & Pogarsky, G. (2003). An experimental investigation of deterrence: Cheating, self-serving bias, and impulsivity. Criminology, 41, 167–193.

720

Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect

Paternoster, R., & Simpson, S. (1996). Sanction threats and appeals to morality: Testing a rational choice model of corporate crime. Law and Society Review, 30, 549–583. Pogarsky, G. (2002). Identifying “deterrable” offenders: Implications for research on deterrence. Justice Quarterly, 19, 431–450. Pogarsky, G. (2007). Deterrence and individual differences among convicted offenders. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 23, 59–74. Pogarsky, G. (in press). Deterrence and decision-making: Research questions and theoretical refinements. In M. D. Krohn, A. J. Lizotte, G. P. Hall (Eds.), Handbook on crime and deviance. New York: Springer. Pogarsky, G., Kim, K., & Paternoster, R. (2005). Perceptual change in the National Youth Survey: Lessons for deterrence theory and offender decision making. Justice Quarterly, 22, 1–29. Pogarsky, G., & Piquero, A. R. (2003). Can punishment encourage offending? Investigating the “resetting” effect. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40, 95–120. Prelec, D., & Loewenstein, G. (1998). The red and the black: Mental accounting of savings and debt. Marketing Science, 17, 4–28. Rick, S., & Lowenstein, G. (2008). The role of emotion in economic behavior. In M. J. M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 138–156). New York: Guilford Press. Ross, M., & Fiore, S. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 322–336. Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica, 9, 143–148. Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 806–820.

Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect Individual or specific deterrence rests on the assumption that punished individuals will refrain from engaging in subsequent criminal behavior out of fear or the upward revision of sanction threat perceptions. However, a number of studies have found

that individuals may actually be more likely to lower their perceptions of detection and apprehension and therefore continue to offend following punishment. Two competing explanations emerge for this “positive punishment effect.” Under one explanation, individuals with the lowest expectations for punishment are also the most committed offenders who have increased exposure to and experiences with punishment. Greg Pogarsky and Alex R. Piquero provide an alternative explanation— which they call resetting—that draws on a judgment and decision-making bias called the gambler’s fallacy. Under resetting, offenders decrease or “reset” their perceptions of apprehension following punishment, believing they would have to be extremely unlucky to be apprehended again (p. 96). Resetting provides a causal explanation for the seemingly counterintuitive positive punishment effect.

The Gambler’s Fallacy The resetting effect is based on a psychological decision-making bias called the gambler’s fallacy, or the Monte Carlo fallacy. The gambler’s fallacy, as described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahne­ man, is the unfounded belief that variations from the expected in one direction are likely to be evened out by future variations in the other direction. This is commonly referred to as being “due.” For example, card players may increase their wages following a loss believing they are due to win; baseball players may believe they are due for a hit following a slump; and lottery players may play specific numbers that have not been selected, or avoid numbers that have been selected, in previous draws. The gambler’s fallacy stems from the belief that things should “even out” (a psychological heuristic called the representative heuristic). That is, individuals incorrectly project long-term expectations to short-term random events, falsely interpreting independent events as interdependent. Consider flipping a (fair) coin. Since flips of a coin are independent, the probability of obtaining a head (or tail) on any single flip is 0.5. Further, the probability of obtaining 1 tail after 10 consecutive heads and the probability of obtaining another head following 10 heads are equally rare: P = 0.511 = 1 in 2,048. Thus, one is equally likely to obtain a head after 10 previous heads as one is to obtain a tail. There is no reason to think that things must even

Pogarsky, Greg, and Alex R. Piquero: The Resetting Effect

out. The gambler’s fallacy describes the situation in which an individual’s belief in consistency results in a disproportionate propensity to pick tails in the preceding scenario. It is the false belief that the extremely rare event of obtaining 10 heads in a row is unlikely to be followed by another flip of heads.

Resetting and Offending Resetting applies the gambler’s fallacy to perceptual deterrence. According to deterrence theory, individuals are more likely to offend when they perceive the risks of punishment to be low. Pogarsky and Piquero note that offenders may also believe, like gamblers and lottery players, that extremely rare events (e.g., punishment) are unlikely to reoccur. This is consistent with Frank P. McKenna’s finding that individuals have a tendency to think that bad things are relatively unlikely to happen to them. Jack Gibbs noted that it is also consistent with the “law of averages,” under which previously punished individuals may believe that their luck will even out and subsequent violations of the law will not result in punishment. As a result, individuals may “reset” or reduce their sanction threat perceptions following punishment, which in turn, makes them more likely to engage in criminal behaviors in the future, according to Bruce Jacobs. To test the resetting hypothesis, Pogarsky and Piquero identified individuals prone to the gambler’s fallacy by asking them to indicate the likely outcome (heads, tails, or equally likely) of a coin flip after four previous, consecutive flips resulted in heads. Individuals identifying the next coin flip as “tails” were considered to have even-out reasoning consistent with the gambler’s fallacy. Using this probabilistic proxy for the interdependence of random events, Pogarsky and Piquero found partial evidence for the resetting effect. After dichotomizing their sample into high-risk (committed) and low-risk (naïve) offenders, analyses showed that perceptions of punishment certainty were significantly lower for low-risk offenders who had previously been punished. Further, lower perceptions of punishment certainty were highly correlated with the gambler’s bias (as measured above). There was no evidence of resetting, however, for high-risk offenders. According to Pogarsky and Piquero, high-risk offenders may be less likely to consider potential deterrents to punishment (Pogarsky, 2002),

721

or resetting may simply be confined to low-risk offenders. Still, without more empirical research on resetting, its application to deterrence theory remains largely theoretical.

Conclusion Pogarsky and Piquero proposed resetting, an application of the gambler’s fallacy to deterrence theory, as a possible explanation for the positive punishment effect. Under resetting, when relatively rare events occur (e.g., being arrested or pulled over while driving), individuals consider it unlikely that they will reoccur, at least in the short run. Individuals may therefore reduce their perceptions of apprehension, rather than increase them, following a rare occurrence like punishment. Resetting provides a credible explanation for a somewhat counterintuitive finding, yet needs a more substantial base of empirical support to be considered viable. Pogarsky and Piquero found partial support for the hypothesis, but researchers have failed to replicate and develop new tests of resetting. Thus, there is a general lack of empirical support for the hypothesis. Still, by extending a judgment and decisionmaking bias in probabilistic reasoning to criminal decision making, the resetting effect represents an extension of the theoretical boundaries of deterrence theory. Much like the flexibility of deterrence theory to incorporate extralegal sanctions, perceptions, visceral influences, and enduring individual differences in the propensity to offend, resetting symbolizes the willingness of deterrence researchers to integrate ideas from various domains of research and criminological theories. Gregory M. Zimmerman See also Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence; Pogarsky, Greg: Behavioral Economics and Crime; Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory; Williams, Kirk R., and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and Non-Legal Sanctions

References and Further Readings Andenaes, J. (1974). Punishment and deterrence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

722

Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender

Clotfelter, C. T., & Cook, P. J. (1993). The “gambler’s fallacy” in lottery play. Management Science, 39, 1521–1525. Gibbs, J. P. (1975). Crime, punishment, and deterrence. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gilovich, T. (1983). Biased evaluation and persistence in gambling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 1110–1126. Jacobs, B. A. (1996). Crack dealers and restrictive deterrence: Identifying narcs. Criminology, 34, 409–431. McKenna, F. P. (1993). It won’t happen to me: Unrealistic optimism or illusion of control? British Journal of Psychology, 84, 39–50. Paternoster, R., & Piquero, A. R. (1995). Reconceptualizing deterrence: An empirical test of personal and vicarious experiences. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 32, 251–286. Piquero, A. R., & Paternoster, R. (1998). An application of Stafford and Warr’s reconceptualization of deterrence to drinking and driving. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 35, 3–39. Piquero, A. R., & Pogarsky, G. (2002). Beyond Stafford and Warr’s reconceptualization of deterrence: Personal and vicarious experiences, impulsivity, and offending behavior. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 39, 153–186. Pogarsky, G. (2002). Identifying “deterrable” offenders: Implications for research in deterrence. Justice Quarterly, 19, 431–452. Pogarsky, G., & Piquero, A. R. (2003). Can punishment encourage offending? Investigating the “resetting” effect. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40, 95–120. Sherman, L. W. (1993). Defiance, deterrence, and irrelevance: A theory of the criminal sanction. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 445–473. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131. Zimring, F. E., & Hawkins, G. J. (1973). Deterrence: The legal threat in crime control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender The majority of criminologists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries were primarily focused on explaining male offending patterns. The exclusion

of the examination of female offending is not unique to criminology. Other academic disciplines (e.g., medicine) have historically excluded females from research investigations. Criminologists of these eras attributed criminal behavior to biological or social factors that were beyond the control of an individual. However, the focus was on explaining male criminality. The failure to explore female criminality may be attributed to the fact that those putting forth theories of offending were male criminologists or that, since male criminality was more prevalent, criminologists focused their attention on these offenders. In 1950, Otto Pollak asserted that the criminality of women is a neglected field of research and proposed his own explanations for female offending. This entry devotes discussion to theoretical precursors to Pollak’s explanations for female offending, his theory, empirical support for his propositions, and criticisms levied against it.

Theoretical Precursors The early examinations of female offending were conducted at the end of the 19th century into the mid-20th century. Those prominent researchers offering explanations of female criminality include Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, W. I. Thomas, Sigmund Freud, and Otto Pollak. These early theorists’ ideas about female offending were consistent with the Positivist School of criminology, which held that crime was due to some individual difference (i.e., biologically determined) as opposed to a rational choice. Lombroso and Ferrero stated that the explanation for both male and female offending is due to atavistic traits or the denigration in evolutional human development. Essentially, involvement in criminality was due to their biology—that is, these criminals were born this way. The researchers posited that females who committed crimes were masculine and exhibited an excess of male characteristics (e.g., excess body hair, moles, broad shoulders). In a departure from a biological explanation for female offending, Thomas claimed that females committed crime for the thrill or excitement and the yearning for new experiences. According to Thomas, due to societal expectations of monogamy, females have pent-up sexual energy and this sexual tension is released in the commission of criminal acts. Freud,

Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender

like Thomas, viewed female offending as being linked to female sexuality. He asserted that females have a masculinity complex due to penis envy. Those females who cannot resolve their penis envy overidentify with the male identity and will commit crimes. In sum, theorists prior to Pollak attributed female criminality to biology or their sexuality. Additionally, there were relatively few theories that provided any explanation for female offending prior to the publication of Pollak’s work.

The Hidden Female Offender In 1950, Pollak published The Criminality of Women in which he summarized previous research on women and crime, challenged the extent of involvement in crime by females, discussed the types of crimes committed by females, and explained female offending as being attributed to a mix of biological, psychological, and sociological factors. Pollak begins his discussion of female offending by asserting that the true nature of female crime is masked. He points to the use of official statistics, which are misleading and do not account for the true extent of female criminality. Pollak suggests that many of the crimes that females commit are underreported, and that when females offend, they often are detected less than when males commit similar crimes. Additionally, he notes that when apprehended, females are treated more leniently in the criminal justice system. After all, Pollack states that law enforcement officials tend to be men who are brought up to be chivalrous. Thus, law enforcement officials are more lenient toward female criminals (i.e., less likely to arrest), which results in fewer females being captured in criminal statistics. Pollak notes that there are differences in the methods of crime commissions and asserts that there are two characteristics of female crime: (1) female offenders are deceitful, and (2) females victimize those that they have personal ties to such as children, family members, and friends. In regard to the first characteristic, Pollak claims that women are adept at hiding crimes they commit due to their biology. He asserts that women have become accustomed to deceiving men (e.g., hiding discomfort from menstruation and faking orgasms). Thus, the ability to deceive comes almost naturally for women. Pollak states that females choose victims that they know, because of social customs which

723

dictate that females should not initiate contact with strangers. In other words, females are socialized not to fraternize with strangers, which propels them to target acquaintances, family, and friends for victimization. Pollak discusses the many crimes that women commit against the person including homicide, baby farming, infanticide, aggravated assault, false accusations, and sex offenses against children. He states that when females commit homicide, they are more likely to use poison. As homemakers, preparer of meals, and nurturers to the sick, females are in the perfect social role to utilize poison to carry out their crimes. Pollak admits that the true number of aggravated assaults committed by females is unknown; however, when women do commit the crime, the victim is someone they know. Since females are deceitful according to Pollak, they are more prone than men to resort to false accusations. Females who make false accusations tend to be young, and the accusations may take place in the atmosphere of race antagonism. That is, a Caucasian female may make a false rape accusation against an African American man to avoid social ostracism if it is discovered that she is having a romantic relationship with this individual or to avoid any consequences of an illicit sexual encounter. As for the commission of sexual offenses against children, Pollak asserts that many of these crimes that females commit never reach the attention of the law. After all, females’ social roles as teachers or governesses allow them to commit the crime with relatively little detection (i.e., unless the offender passes a sexually transmitted disease to the victim). Pollak describes the many crimes that women commit against property, including robbery, burglary, larceny, blackmail, and fraud. He argues that their participation in these crimes is underreported in official criminal statistics. For the crimes of robbery and burglary, Pollak explains that females use their sex roles not only to “bait” the victim but also to avoid detection. For example, females may work with a male accomplice to carry out these crimes by distracting the victim with her sexuality and allowing the male accomplice to commit the criminal act. This technique allows females to commit these crimes more effectively and to avoid detection more easily. The sex mores of society, Pollak argues, provide females with many opportunities to commit blackmail. For instance, a female may pretend

724

Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender

to be pregnant in order to elicit monies from her male victim. For the married male victim, payment to the female is necessary so that his wife does not discover his adulterous ways. According to Pollak, the emancipation of women in society that has allowed them to pursue occupations and assume greater roles in society has resulted in more opportunities for females to commit crime. Thus, he claims that female crime has increased. In sum, Pollak posits that females are committing a wide range of crimes against persons and property and are using their sex roles and social roles not only to carry out their crimes but also to remain undetected.

Empirical Support Although Pollak makes several assertions about female offending, there has not been one direct empirical test of his theory. Rather, researchers have explored several aspects of his propositions. One of his propositions that has been examined most frequently has been termed the leniency the­ ory. This refers to Pollak’s assertion that female offenders are treated more leniently in the criminal justice system due to the chivalrous attitudes held by law enforcement and court officials. The research on the leniency proposition has been mixed. Some researchers assert that the notion that a chivalrous criminal justice system exists is a myth. On the other hand, several researchers have found that females are indeed more likely to be treated leniently in the criminal justice system (e.g., less likely to be arrested and convicted). In 2004, Lisa Stolzenberg and Stewart D’Alessio found that females had a lower probability of being arrested for a variety of crimes, including kidnapping, forcible fondling, simple assault, and intimidation compared to their male counterparts. There is some debate in the field as to whether females receive shorter sentences than male offenders when similar crimes are committed and when prior arrests and convictions are controlled. In a 2007 study where sentencing data from the U.S. Sentencing Com­ mission were examined, researchers found that females were indeed sentenced more leniently. The average sentence that females received was two years less than the sentences that males received for similar offenses. Other researchers disagree with such findings. They contend that, while many

studies have found that females may be treated more leniently (e.g., less likely to be convicted), when sentenced, female offenders actually receiver harsher punishments than their male counterparts. After all, females are expected to conform to societal roles (i.e., nurturers, caregivers), and when they deviate from these socially prescribed roles, they are treated more harshly when sentenced. Meda Chesney-Lind states that females have disproportionately received harsher sentences for drug offenses than males. More research is needed to ascertain the full extent of sentencing disparity.

Critique Several researchers have critiqued Pollak’s explanation for female criminality. Frances Heidensohn states that Pollak does not explain why some female deviance and criminality surfaces and is processed in the criminal justice system. Instead, Pollak focuses on the discussion of female criminality being a hidden phenomenon. Heidensohn also criticizes Pollak for his failure to explain what functional needs of society are being fulfilled by allowing females to engage in criminality. That is, if female crime is being ignored, how is this assisting in the functioning of society at large? Carol Smart critiques Pollak for his failure to recognize that a double standard exists for females within the criminal justice system. While it may be true that female offenders might be treated more leniently by police or in the court system, he ignores the fact that many female offenders (e.g., prostitutes) are negatively discriminated against (i.e., more likely to be arrested and charged) by the criminal justice system. Smart also criticizes Pollak’s interpretation of state and federal statistics. She asserts that the statistical data and the comparisons he used to make his points about the involvement of females in various criminal acts are inaccurate and misleading. Finally, Smart contends that Pollak’s claim that female criminality is influenced by biological and sociological factors is a perpetuation of stereotypes of female offenders first promulgated by Lombroso and Ferrero. Since the publication of Pollak’s book, many criminologists have explored the factors of why females commit crime, and modern criminologists have further refined the understanding of female criminality. Criminologists today assert that prior

Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal

sexual abuse is a predominant factor as to why females begin a pathway into criminality. It is proposed that for females, early sexual abuse explains both onset into and persistence in criminality. Elaine Gunnison See also Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime; Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman; Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime; Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology; Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl

References and Further Readings Anderson, E. A. (1976). The “chivalrous” treatment of the female offender in the arms of the criminal justice system: A review of the literature. Social Problems, 23, 350–357. Chesney-Lind, M. (1997). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton. Heidensohn, F. M. (1968). The deviance of women: A critique and an enquiry. British Journal of Sociology, 19, 160–173. Lombroso, C., & Ferrero, W. (1895). The female offender. London: Fisher Unwin. Pollak, O. (1950). The criminality of women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Smart, C. (1976). Women, crime, and criminology: A feminist critique. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thomas, W. I. (1923). The unadjusted girl. Boston: Little, Brown.

Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal When the extent of the savings and loan crisis came to light in the late 1980s, most economic and financial experts claimed that economic forces and poor business decisions brought down the industry. Skeptical, Henry N. Pontell, an experienced whitecollar crime researcher, and Kitty Calavita, a sociology of law scholar, obtained funding from the Academic Senate at the University of California,

725

Irvine and later, a grant from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to study the crisis. Over 3 years they interviewed 105 government policymakers, prosecutors, enforcement officials, and regulators from a wide variety of agencies including the Resolution Trust Corporation, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Office of Thrift Supervision in Washington, D.C., and its in-field offices. In Washington, D.C., they interviewed individuals from the General Accounting Office (GAO, now the Government Accountability Office), the Office of the Comp­ troller of the Currency, and the congressional staff of the House and Senate Banking Committees. They also reviewed published reports and congressional hearing and analyzed data from the Resolution Trust Corporation, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorney. Using these data, Pontell and Calavita meticulously documented the role of savings and loan insiders, who deliberately defrauded depositors, stole from their own institutions, and gambled on risky ventures with government-insured funds, and documented the vast network of outsiders who made these “crimes possible, delayed their prosecution, and multiplied their costs” (Calavita, Pontell, & Tillman, 1998, p. 170). Systematic political collusion, they concluded, was essential for the continuous perpetration of the frauds. Calavita and Pontell examined the role of the insurance industry, regulators, prosecutors and the state in the crisis, issues of organizational and organized crime, and the impact of system capacity. They also addressed critics by testing alternate hypotheses. In all, they produced 13 articles and a book: Big Money Crime. Robert Tillman of St. Johns University shared authorship of the book and of four of the articles. William K. Black, a former savings and loan regulator and now on the Economics and Law faculty of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, coauthored an article with Pontell and Calavita.

History In the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent run on banks, the federal government created the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) in 1932 to encourage savings and home ownership. The FHLBB had responsibility for promulgating and enforcing regulations and for

726

Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal

examining and supervising savings and loan associations. The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) to insure savings and loan deposits. In return for deposit insurance, the federal government restricted savings and loans to providing fixed-rate home loans, limited the interest savings and loan associations could pay depositors and charge lenders, and prevented them from having branch offices. Despite these restrictions, savings and loan associations generated consistent profits by paying 3 percent interest on savings accounts and issuing home mortgages at 6 percent until the 1970s when the economy entered a period of high interest rates (reaching 13.3 percent in 1979) and low economic growth. Making matters worse, middle-income savings and loan depositors, who now had access to high-interest-bearing financial instruments such as money market accounts, withdrew their funds from low-interestbearing savings and loan accounts. With Regulation Q prohibiting them from paying more than 5.5 percent interest on deposits, savings and loan associations could not compete because their money was tied up in long-term low-interest fixed mortgages. By 1980, 85 percent of the country’s savings and loan associations were losing money (Calavita & Pontell, 1990). The deregulatory policies initiated after Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration appeared to address the savings and loan associations’ problems. Congress passed two major laws, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Mon­ etary Control Act of 1980 and Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act in 1982. The laws phased out limits on interest rates and permitted savings and loan associations to deemphasize their historic mission of granting home mortgages for the working class by allowing them to engage in unsecured commercial lending, issue consumer loans and credit cards, invest in a wide range of high-risk/high-yield ventures, and make direct investments in their own property. Congress increased federal deposit insurance from $40,000 to $100,000 per account. This, together with changes in accounting practices and a new rule that allowed a single stockholder to own a federally insured savings and loan, provided opportunities for speculative and fraudulent activities without perpetrators having to risk their own money.

Contrary to being a panacea, deregulation created new problems. Calavita and Pontell (1990) called deregulation the “cure that killed,” and it played a central role in the crimes that were the hallmarks of the savings and loan crisis. Deregulatory laws that permitted savings and loan associations to offer higher interest rates created frenzied competition for deposits. Still burdened with low-interest long-term mortgages, deregulation of interest rates led to even more debt as the spread between what savings and loan associations took in and paid out increased. Deregulation also decreased the number of regulators to safeguard the industry and limited their role. Under the principles of laissez-faire capitalism, regulators should be unnecessary because businesses would suffer the consequences of imprudent or self-destructive acts. Unfortunately, the $100,000 federal insurance on deposits provided a safety net that allowed savings and loan operators to take undue risks without concern, because they were gambling with other people’s money. The number of insolvent savings and loan associations grew during the 1980s. By 1986, FSLIC was insolvent. Lacking the funds to cover the growing number of insolvent savings and loan associations, it was slow to react and allowed insolvent savings and loan associations to continue to operate. In 1988, industry losses totaled $7.5 billion. FSLIC closed or sold 220 savings and loans that year; however, it left another 300 insolvent institutions operating. Over 2,900 banks and savings and loan associations failed or needed government assistance between 1980 and 1994 (FDIC, 1998, p. 4). The failures cost taxpayers $150 to $175 billion dollars, which made it the costliest white-collar crime scandal up to that time (Calavita, Pontell, & Tillman 1998, p. 1). If one includes interest payments on government bonds over 30 years, the cost approaches $500 billion. A GAO study of the 26 most costly savings and loan failures found that every one of these institutions was a victim of insider fraud and abuse. Furthermore, a 1989 GAO report indicates that criminal activity was a primary factor in 70 to 80 percent of the savings and loan failures. In 1987, the FHLBB referred over 6,000 cases to the Justice Department for prosecution and another 5,000 cases in 1988 (Pontell, Calavita, & Tillman, 1994). By October

Pontell, Henry N., and Kitty Calavita: Explaining the Savings and Loan Scandal

1988, FSLIC sued the officers of 51 failed savings and loan associations for misconduct.

The Crimes Pontell and Calavita found savings and loan fraud generally involved a complicated network of industry insiders and outsiders who worked together. They classified directors, officers, shareholders, and employees of the savings and loan associations as insiders. Account holders, borrowers, and hired guns—brokers, agents, and appraisers—were considered outsiders. Interested in lucrative contracts, appraisers, accountants, and lawyers frequently became co-conspirators that made savings and loan scams possible. Calavita and Pontell identified three main categories of savings and loan crimes that often overlap: collective embezzlement or looting, hot deals, and covering up. The category “hot deals,” used in Big Money Crime, was called “desperation dealing” or “unlawful risk-taking” in many of their articles. Hot deals provided the cash that was siphoned from savings and loans and the transactions that disguised the crimes. The four types of insider dealings within the hot deals category—land flips, nominee loans, reciprocal lending, and linked financing—ignore underwriting practices and generally need the assistance of outsiders, such as accountants and appraisers. While deregulation made it permissible for savings and loan associations to engage in non-traditional high-risk activities, hot deals dealing went beyond allowable limits. Land flips are real estate transactions in which land is transferred back and forth among parties with the intention of fraudulently inflating its value. The land is then used as collateral for loans. Nominee lending involves the use of a straw borrower to represent the real borrower inside the thrift who did not want to be identified. This tactic is used to circumvent restrictions on insider borrowing and loan-to-one borrower regulations. Reciprocal lending also evades insider lending restrictions. Insiders at two or more institutions agree to make loans to each other contingent upon receiving a comparable loan in return. An institution making a loan to an insider of another institution is not illegal. Making these loans on a reciprocal basis without underwriting

727

is fraud. Reciprocal loans involving multiple participants and institutions become a daisy chain. Linked financing or loans occur when there is an explicit understanding that deposits, generally large brokered deposits, are made so the depositor/borrower with credit problems will receive a loan. It is illegal to offer a loan contingent upon receipt of a deposit. Collective embezzlement is analogous to “robbing one’s own bank.” It is the looting of an institution for personal gain at the expense of the institution with either the implicit or explicit consent of its management. This is believed to be the most costly category of savings and loan crimes. Covering up is used to paint a misleading picture of the institution’s health and disguise illegal activity, which is generally accomplished through manipulation of savings and loan books and creation of fictitious entities. All 26 failed savings and loan associations studied by the GAO were cited for accounting deficiencies.

Criminal Justice Response Despite the unprecedented scale of the financial crisis, the government’s response was limited by resource constraints, interagency coordination difficulties, and the complexity of the frauds. As a result, the government focused on containing the crisis rather than on punishing offenders. In the end, a relatively high proportion of those charged were convicted and a significant number received prison sentences, unusual for white-collar offenders. Pontell and Calavita argue that the reason these individuals received prison sentences while most white-collar offenders do not is because of the threat they posed to the economy.

Conclusion Pontell and Calavita contribute their unique talents and perspectives as they unravel the complexity of the scandal. Their work is well respected and many of their articles appear in anthologies. However, NIJ, which funded their research, never published their final report. Using theories of state, Calavita and Pontell provide an understanding of the role of government in the events. The instrumentalist perspective expects those with economic power to use that

728

Postmodern Theory

power to gain political currency. Clearly, political leaders, dependent upon campaign contributions, intervened on behalf of several savings and loan operators. Notably the Keating Five—Senators Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, John McCain, Donald Riegle—received $1.3 million in campaign contributions from Charles Keating and met with regulators on his behalf. According to the structural perspective, while the state often finds it in its own interest to assist business, it has a vested interest in protecting the nation from threats to its economy and therefore should work to contain collective embezzlement. Calavita and Pontell coined the term collective embezzlement to describe a previously unobserved phenomenon in which an institution, in this case a savings and loan association, is both the weapon used to perpetrate the crime and is the victim of the crime. Collective embezzlement is now part of white-collar-corporate crime vernacular. Pontell and Calavita drew four fundamental conclusions from the scandal: 1. The primary cause of the savings and loan crisis was deliberate insider fraud that was facilitated by systematic political collusion. 2. Deregulation, increased federal insurance, and lenient treatment of offenders created a criminogenic environment that facilitated, if not encouraged, these crimes. 3. The typical corporate crimes perpetrated in the industrial sector are committed on behalf of the corporation with the intent of increasing profits. Financial crimes perpetrated during the savings and loan crisis, however, were against the institution itself and almost destroyed the American financial system. 4. Financial capitalism and the casino economy, where profits are increasingly made from manipulating money, create new opportunities for white-collar crime because the amount of money that can be garnered from financial fraud is virtually endless.

Susan Will See also Capitalism and White-Collar Crime; Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals; Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime; Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Black, W. K. (2005). The best way to rob a bank is to own one. Austin: University of Texas Press. Calavita, K., & Pontell, H. N. (1990). “Heads I win, tails you lose”: Deregulation, crime and crisis in the savings and loan industry. Crime and Delinquency, 36, 309–341. Calavita, K., Pontell, H. N., & Tillman, R. (1997). Big money crime: Fraud and politics in the S&L crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (1998). Managing the crisis: The FDIC and RTC experience 1980–1994. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Pontell, H. N., Calavita, K., & Tillman, R. (1994). Corporate crime and criminal justice system capacity. Justice Quarterly, 11, 383–410.

Postmodern Theory In the 1980s, postmodern theory gained prominence in the field of criminology. Prior to this time, understanding about criminal phenomena was exclusively informed by empirical inquiry. Methods developed and advanced in order to make sense of the physical world were utilized in an attempt to comprehend human conduct but from within the realm of the social world. This orientation, known as the modern, is based on the assumptions that human behavior is rational and predictable and that truth is discernable and absolute. Thus, the conditions, causes, and control of crime are capable of being explained. Postmodern theory rejects these contentions and challenges the positivist notions underlying much of contemporary society. Drawing primarily upon the work of French scholars, postmodernism as applied to criminology asserts that conventional understanding about truth and knowledge fails to adequately account for the inconsistencies and contradictions of human behavior and social life. For the postmodernist, there is no finite truth or privileged knowledge. Indeed, it is in this way that everyone is considered an expert. Although this perspective has garnered criticism, its influence on how we make sense of crime and the society in which it occurs continues to grow.

Postmodern Theory

It is first worth noting that postmodernism, as a theory of dissent, resists comprehensive and convenient delineation. In other words, while most criminological theories offer something approximating a cohesive framework, postmodernism consists of a diverse and, as some claim, infinite number of positions. Although each position articulates the theory in distinct and perhaps somewhat conflicting ways, they share a commonality in their criticism of the modern. Modernity is a term used to describe the period following the Middle or Dark Ages. However, during what is commonly known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, a philosophical shift occurred. Prior to this time, social life was understood within the context of theologically based concepts. That is, the belief was that human nature and behavior were guided by a higher power, and an external struggle between good and evil persisted. Following the Enlightenment, reason triumphed over the divine. Rather than behavior influenced by the sacred and prophetic, humans were considered to be rational beings capable of assuming responsibility, employing free choice, and pursuing hedonistic desires (Best & Kellner, 1991). This turn to reason combined with ever-advancing scientific methods provided the foundation for the modern era and, correspondingly, a number of criminological theories. For example, rational choice theory and social bond/self-control theory both presume that the criminal is rational and engages in self-satisfying behavior. With rational choice theory, the criminal decides whether or not to commit a crime based on a calculation of the benefits and costs. With social control theory, the youthful offender fails to appropriately socialize (bond) or engages in delinquent social learning yielding a lack of self-control that, in adulthood, makes the person prone to criminal behavior. The justice system’s reliance upon deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation can be traced to these and many other modernist ideas. As the prefix post suggests, postmodernism follows modernity. The theory developed in two phases. Among those comprising the first and second stages, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Julia Kristeva each played a distinct and significant role in cultivating and advancing postmodern thought. Some, such as

729

Foucault, did not label themselves as postmodernists. Nevertheless, their collective work is widely credited with helping to establish the theory’s leading principles. The positions taken by most first and second wave postmodernists can be linked directly to the work of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Drawing upon the concept that describes people as desiring and unfulfilled human subjects rather than as unitary and self-contained individuals, Lacan proposed how discourse analysis could help to account for this. For Lacan, subjects and their sense of reality are shaped by and through communication and the specialized meaning (desire) attached to and embedded within the language they employ when interacting or conversing. This meaning is often referred to by postmodernists as a regime of signs. Thus, a regime of signs such as the law (or legalese) conveys circumscribed meaning (desire) leaving outside the scope of consideration alternative ways of speaking. When replacement forms of conveying meaning integral to the identity of a person are declared “irrelevant,” “immaterial,” or “prejudicial,” then the subject’s true self (being) is similarly dismissed, according to Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic. These Lacanian assertions are discernable in poststructuralist theory, the science of semiotics, and deconstructive methodology. Each notion has served as a foundation for a number of postmodernist principles. Poststructuralists argue that the meaning of “texts,” which includes written and spoken communication, can never be deciphered in such a way that absolute truth is discernible. Semioticians examine words, phrases, and gestures as signs that represent something more or other than what is purposely communicated. As a discursive method of analysis, deconstructionism maintains that human interactions and social phenomena are interconnected. As such, they can be disassembled and reassembled to ensure that minority and alienated “voices” are included, according to Bruce Arrigo. Based on these shared concepts, postmodernists challenge the modernist idea that humans possess categorical knowledge; rather, they embody certain types of knowledge or levels of certainty. According to Milovanovic, claims of knowing a particular truth revealed through seemingly objective scientific methods are typically understood as

730

Postmodern Theory

establishing or maintaining oppressive power relations. As such, postmodern theorists dismiss the idea of absolute or categorical knowledge and truth. Instead, truth is conditional, positional, and relational. It exists for individuals or groups based on specific and often unique circumstances. Post­ modernists allege that, because truth is not absolute, scientific inquiry fails to fully reveal reality. In other words, positivist science offers a way of understanding, but it does not provide the sole method for comprehending human behavior and social phenomena.

Postmodern Applications in Criminology Since its emergence, the logic of postmodern theory has increasingly been applied to a number of crime and justice problems. One example is the way in which the courts consistently seek to determine an offender’s competency. A system of psycholegal discourse exists that specifies what mental health or wellness is. If the individual communicates in a manner consistent with the established rhetoric, he or she will be deemed fit for trial, incarceration, or even execution. However, if the individual deviates in any way from the system-supporting language, normalization follows through disciplinary control within correctional or other related regulatory institutions. Thus depathologization—cleansing or sanitizing a subject’s psychiatric status by utilizing system-maintaining language—may ultimately hinder individuals from experiencing their own linguistic reality, their own recovery or healing. In response, postmodernists endeavor to deterritorialize desire (privileged standpoints) within and throughout (criminal justice) control apparatuses. From the modern perspective, individuals are expected to assume socially responsible roles and exist as stable beings. However, postmodernism asserts that these activities merely serve to create identities based on “either/or” categories. In other words, people are characterized as “deviants or conformists; law violators or law abiders; villains or heroes” (Arrigo, 1995, p. 454). Rather than linguistically proscribing static identities, postmodernists maintain that a more complete (and honest) portrayal of the human subject would include diverse opportunities for role negotiation; multiple standpoints or epistemologies; and fluid renditions of truth, reason, progress, and identity.

Deleuze and Guattari refer to this subject as a “body without organs” or “BwO.” “The full BwO is that person who escapes repetition . . . and mobilizes [a] greater range of potentialities” (Arrigo et al., 2005, p. 47). For example, postmodern feminist scholars raise concerns regarding role formation and what they term the “gendered” subject. From their perspective, the extant grammar utilized to describe women and minorities is exclusively “malestream” and misogynous. In other words, the status of the feminine in society is defined in masculine terms. As such, the identities of women and minorities are reduced and repressed, particularly through criminal, legal, and correctional practices. To illustrate, some postmodernists question the education and employment opportunities available to females serving time in prison. Skills such as “mothercraft” along with sewing, cooking, and cleaning are commonly taught or offered for pay. From these “regimes of femininity,” the traditional identity of a white, middle-class heterosexual woman is forced upon those incarcerated. However, through these expressions of “identity politics,” the insistence on such a traditional feminine image inadvertently creates possibilities for resistance and agency. Indeed, within these spaces women can reject the correctional powers that attempt to proscribe (name) female identity. As a response, some incarcerates may assume roles that challenge the traditional image of a woman, including the pursuit of lesbian relationships. Another example of postmodernism’s application to criminology can be found in the increasing number of “jailhouse lawyers.” These are individuals who, while serving time in a correctional institution, educate themselves about the law and practice it within the confines of the facility. As Jim Thomas and Milovanovic described them, jailhouse lawyers are like “primitive rebels” who are more concerned with doing rather than pursuing a chosen political agenda. While they may be perceived as revolutionaries representing the downtrodden and demoralized, their resistance may be attributed to the realization that they must seek an identity that enables them to survive within the conditions of their confinement. In other words, as Arrigo and Milovanovic argue, the incarcerated subject selfcreates an identity while also raising opposition to the power exercised by the correctional system.

Postmodern Theory

Postmodern theory and its application to criminology incite debate among scholars in the field. Those who challenge the postmodern perspective typically raise three prominent criticisms. Critics comprising the first camp argue that if society accepts that absolute truth or knowledge cannot be established, then ultimately nothing can be determined about the human condition or society itself. Critics comprising the second group argue that postmodernism seeks only to deconstruct social phenomena rather than offering novel ways to effectively improve society. Those within the third cluster argue that postmodern analyses are often dense and that this opaqueness may disguise an underlying political agenda. Collectively, naysayers conclude that postmodern theory fails to adequately inform and advance our understanding of the issues presented with crime and punishment. In other words, opponents charge that postmodern theory is of limited utility when addressing the distinct needs of criminals, victims, and the justice system. For example, some detractors maintain that discourse analysis lacks an adequate theoretical foundation. As such, it does not grow our knowledge or serve as a means to explain such matters as crime causality and how it can be controlled. Other critics, such as Martin Schwartz and David O. Friedrichs, argue that the postmodern approach is fundamentally extraneous to crime and justice studies; thus, it should not be considered within the realm of criminological thought.

Future Directions Despite these criticisms, postmodern advocates maintain that its theoretical variants and its assemblage of principles are not only worthwhile, but also critical to realizing social change. However, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome. Those who endorse a postmodern approach to justice propose an alternative set of questions when considering the crime problems present in society. In the past, criminological scholars have pondered such questions as What is crime? Under what conditions do crimes occur? Who creates the law? On what conditions is the law created? As noted previously, these and other rational-based inquiries have for years guided empirical investigation that have informed numerous modern criminological theories. For the postmodernist, these

731

theories constitute the unwitting foundation for a criminal justice system that exacts power and ultimately, harm, over the human subject. According to postmodernists, future inquiry must first seek to determine what the political, economic, cultural, or other conditions are that facilitate the formation of these (rather than other) questions. In this way, scholars, practitioners, and students within the criminological field will have the opportunity to undertake probing and deliberate introspection. This sort of critical engagement is necessary if the goal is to discern and to prevent (unknowing) contributions to the oppression of others through the prevailing discourse in use. Equipped with a new line of questioning, postmodernists assert that crime must be reconceived as the power to harm others through reduction and repression. As Henry and Milovanovic explained, “This is not necessarily an evil individual or the passive product of social forces. Rather, the criminal and potential purveyor of harm is found to be a believer in the omnipotence of reality, truth, and certainty; an excessive investor in the representation of reality; and an investor in the power to frame others’ realities in ways that mangle their creative souls” (p. 241). Therein is the principal challenge to postmodernism and to those who advocate its inclusion within criminology. Beyond this barrier, postmodernism continues to face criticism regarding its efficacy in responding to practical matters such as predicting and controlling crime. Proponents of the theory interpret this overly deterministic and reductionistic desire to specify and “correct” deviancy as a struggle for power over the subject’s increasingly territorialized body. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrated, the subject’s body within contemporary society is typically static and imprisoned by a discourse that demands status quo role taking. From a postmodern perspective, this is a person whose voice is silenced and who is harmed by unspoken but felt forces of reduction and repression. Further, in recent years, several alternative approaches to justice have emerged that challenge conventional retributive responses to crime. For example, restorative justice programs now exist that aim to foster healing and understanding by engaging the victim, the offender, and often members of the community in dialogue. Critics of restorative justice programs charge that the discourse

732

Prenatal Influences and Crime

employed is still within the linguistic framework of reduction and repression. Thus, post­­­­­modernists argue for “replacement discourses.” These are methods of communicating and interacting that potentially are transformative. How and to what extent replacement discourses can be provisional, positional, and relational in diverse sites of meaning-making contestation is the source of future postmodern exploration.

Conclusion Although challenges lie ahead, postmodernists continue to advocate transformation within the criminological field and society at large. To be successful, the social change that this orientation seeks must hurdle the modernist perspective as operating within contemporary social systems and institutions. For those who advance a postmodern society, the belief is that change will only come when these linear, static systems of thought and action embrace the nonlinear and the unpredictable dimensions of human social existence. Thus, what must be resisted are constructions of “new and different” hierarchical conceptions of truth, justice, law, or crime that subsequently function in rigid and totalizing ways. Instead, postmodernism seeks ongoing change; one that emancipates both the human subject and the social order to which such subjects are intimately bound through the medium of evolving discourse. Under conditions such as these, human actors and agents within the criminal justice field (e.g., offenders, victims, police officers, judges, attorneys, and correctional institution administrators) and those outside of it (the general public) will increasingly experience their freedom, their humanity. This is a freedom that extols rather than dismisses irony, contingency, discontinuity, incompleteness, and disorder as dimensions of social life. This is the ever-changing path to reassembling a more compassionate society constructed in languages of possibility. These are methods of communicating and strategies for interacting in which all human subjects are more fully emancipated from harms of repression and reduction. Bruce A. Arrigo and Heather Y. Bersot See also Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime; Peacemaking Criminology; Quinney, Richard:

Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology; Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems

References and Further Readings Arrigo, B. A. (1995). The peripheral core of law and criminology: On postmodern social theory and conceptual integration. Justice Quarterly, 12, 448–472. Arrigo, B. A., & Milovanovic, D. (2009). Revolution in penology: Rethinking the society of captives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Arrigo, B. A., & Milovanovic, D. (Eds.). (2010). Postmodernist and post-structuralist theories of crime. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Arrigo, B. A., Milovanovic, D., & Schehr, R. C. (2005). The French connection in criminology: Rediscovering crime, law, and social change. Albany: SUNY Press. Arrigo, B. A., & Williams, C. R. (Eds.). (2006). Philosophy, crime and criminology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Best, S., & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern theory: Critical interrogation. New York: Guilford Press. Bosworth, M. (1999). Engendering resistance: Agency and power in women’s prisons. Sydney, Australia: Ashgate. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Henry, S., & Milovanovic, D. (1996). Constitutive criminology: Beyond postmodernism. London: Sage. Milovanovic, D. (2002). Critical criminology at the edge: Postmodern perspectives, applications, and integrations. Westport, CT: Praeger. Schwartz, M., & Friedrichs, D. O. (1994). Postmodern thought and criminological discontent: New metaphors for understanding violence. Criminology, 32, 221–246. Thomas, J., & Milovanovic, D. (1999). In S. Henry & D. Milovanovic (Eds.), Constitutive criminology at work: Applications to crime and justice (pp. 227–248). Albany: SUNY Press.

Prenatal Influences and Crime Over the past 20 years, researchers have made considerable progress in uncovering various social, psychological, and biological risk factors that

Prenatal Influences and Crime

predispose to criminal behavior. One area in particular that has received increasing attention has been the role of early health risk factors in contributing to antisocial behavior. A large body of research has now convincingly demonstrated that several prenatal risk factors—including malnutrition, birth complications, and prenatal nicotine and alcohol exposure—significantly increase risk for antisocial and criminal behavior across the lifespan. Research has increasingly revealed that childhood externalizing behavior, such as conduct disorder, aggression and hyperactivity, represents a major predisposition to adult crime and violence. Thus, insight into the etiology of childhood antisocial behavior is critical to attempts to understand, and possibly prevent, adult criminality. Research on prenatal influences on crime has generally focused on four main domains: minor physical abnormalities, prenatal nicotine and alcohol exposure, birth complications, and malnutrition.

Minor Physical Abnormalities Minor physical abnormalities (MPAs) have been associated with pregnancy disorders and are considered to be indicators of fetal neural maldevelopment near the end of the first trimester (Firestone & Peters, 1983). Since the epidermis and the central nervous system (CNS) have shared embryological origins, MPAs are seen as indirect markers of atypical CNS and brain development. MPAs consist of fairly minor physical abnormalities such as low-seated ears, adherent ear lobes, and a furrowed tongue. Although there may be a genetic component to MPAs, they may also be caused by environmental factors that affect the fetus, such as anoxia, bleeding, and infection (Guy et al., 1983). Several studies have found a relationship between elevated numbers of MPAs and increased antisocial behavior in children, adolescents, and adults. In particular, MPAs have been linked to violent as opposed to nonviolent offending. For instance, Arseneault, Tremblay, Boulerice, Seguin, and Saucier showed that MPAs measured at age 14 in 170 males predicted violent but not nonviolent delinquency at age 17. The authors reported that these effects were independent of childhood physical aggression or family adversity. In another study by Kandel, Brennan, Mednick, and Michelson, an increased level of MPAs was

733

associated with recidivistic violent criminal behavior. The authors assessed MPAs in 265 11- to 13-year-old Danish children, and found that recidivistic violent offenders had a greater number of MPAs compared with subjects with one or no violent offenses, according to police records of criminal behavior when the subjects were 20 to 22 years of age. These studies suggest that prenatal insults toward the end of the first 3 months of pregnancy may increase risk for violent behavior as a result of abnormal brain development. A number of studies have also reported that MPAs interact with social factors in predisposing to violent and antisocial behavior. A 1988 study by Mednick and Kandel measured MPAs in 129 boys during visits to a pediatrician at age 12. The authors found that MPAs were associated with violent crime, but not nonviolent property offenses, when the subjects were 21 years old. Interestingly, however, when the authors divided subjects into those from unstable, nonintact families and those from stable families, they found that MPAs only predicted later criminal involvement for those reared in unstable, nonintact homes. A similar finding was reported by Brennan, Mednick, and Raine, who evaluated adult violent offenses in a sample of 72 male offspring of parents with psychiatric diagnoses. The authors found particularly high rates of adult violent crime in individuals who had both family adversity and MPAs compared to those who had only one of these risk factors. In another study, Pine, Shaffer, Schonfeld, and Davies investigated the interaction of MPAs and environmental risk factors, such as low socioeconomic status, spousal conflict, and marital disruption, in predicting later disruptive behavior disorders. The authors found a significant interaction between MPAs and environmental risk, such that individuals with both increased MPAs and environmental risk, assessed at age 7, were at greater risk for disruptive behavior in general and for conduct disorder, in particular, at age 17. These three studies suggest that MPAs interact with adverse environmental experiences such that psychosocial factors lead to antisocial and violent behavior more strongly, and sometimes only, among individuals with high biological risk. Neurological abnormalities such as MPAs thus appear to increase susceptibility to psychosocial risk factors for antisocial and violent behavior.

734

Prenatal Influences and Crime

Prenatal Nicotine and Alcohol Exposure Extensive evidence has now established beyond a reasonable doubt that children who are exposed to maternal smoking during pregnancy are at increased risk for later antisocial behavior that extends over the life course. Maternal prenatal smoking has been shown to predict conduct disorder, delinquency, and adult criminal and violent offending. Several studies have also reported a dose-response relationship between the extent of maternal smoking during pregnancy and the extent of later antisocial behavior in offspring. In addition to nicotine exposure, it has long been established that fetal alcohol exposure significantly increases risk for antisocial behavior in adolescents and adults. Heavy alcohol consumption while pregnant can result in fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), which is characterized by a host of cognitive, behavioral, social, and physical deficits. However, Schonfeld, Mattson, and Riley have observed deficits even in those who have been prenatally exposed to alcohol who do not meet diagnostic criteria for FAS. For instance, research has found high rates of delinquency in children and adolescents with heavy fetal alcohol exposure, even if they do not have FAS. In addition, studies have shown that adolescents who were prenatally exposed to alcohol are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. One study by Fast, Conry, and Loock revealed that 3 percent of adolescents in a juvenile inpatient forensic psychiatry unit were diagnosed with FAS, and 22 percent were diagnosed with fetal alcohol effects. Another study by Streissguth et al. reported that 61 percent of adolescents, 58 percent of adults, and 14 percent of children between the ages of 6 and 11 with fetal alcohol exposure had a history of trouble with the law. Several studies have documented interactions between maternal prenatal smoking and psychosocial risks in the prediction of later violence. These studies are notable for their large sample sizes, assessment of long-term outcomes, prospective data collection, and control for potential confounds such as parental antisocial behavior, drug use, and low socioeconomic status. For instance, Brennan, Grekin, and Mednick examined the number of cigarettes smoked daily during pregnancy by the mothers of 4,169 males born between

1959 and 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The authors found a dose-response relationship between the extent of prenatal maternal smoking and the extent of nonviolent and violent crime when the subjects were 34 years of age. Moreover, these effects were specific to persistent criminal behavior, rather than that confined to adolescence. Among subjects whose mothers smoked 20 cigarettes a day while pregnant, there was a twofold increase in adult violent offending, according to arrest records. However, the authors found that when maternal prenatal smoking was combined with delivery complications, there was a fivefold increase in adult violent offending; in contrast, prenatal nicotine exposure without delivery complications did not lead to increased violence in offspring. In another study, Rasanan et al. reported that the offspring of women who smoked during pregnancy had a twofold increase in violent crime at age 26, and that, when prenatal nicotine exposure was combined with being raised in a singleparent family, there was an 11.9-fold increase in recidivistic violent offending. Moreover, prenatal nicotine exposure led to a 14.2-fold increase in recidivistic violence when combined with four psychosocial risk factors: teenage pregnancy, singleparent family, unwanted pregnancy, and developmental motor delays. In this study, as in the one above, risk was particularly increased for persistent violent offending, rather than violence in general or property crime. Finally, a 2000 study by Gibson and Tibbetts documented an interaction between prenatal nicotine exposure and parental absence in predisposing to early onset of antisocial behavior and offending.

Birth Complications In addition to MPAs and prenatal nicotine and alcohol exposure, research has also focused on birth complications, such as premature birth, low birth weight, placement in a neonatal intensive care unit, forceps delivery, Cesarean section, anoxia, resuscitation needed after delivery, preeclampsia in the mother, and low Apgar score. A number of well-designed studies have demonstrated that obstetric complications interact with psychosocial risk factors in predicting conduct disorder, delinquency, and impulsive crime and violence in adulthood. For example, Werner found

Prenatal Influences and Crime

that birth complications combined with a disruptive family environment (which included such experiences as maternal separation, illegitimacy, marital discord, parental mental health problems and paternal absence), predisposed to delinquency over and above either biological or psychosocial risk factor independently. Two prospective longitudinal studies by Raine, Brennan, and Mednick in 1994 and 1997 also provide evidence of the importance of biosocial interactions in predicting violent crime. In the first of these studies, Raine et al. evaluated whether the early experience of extreme maternal rejection (e.g., unwanted pregnancy, attempts to abort the fetus, and institutional care of the infant during the first year of life) interacted with birth complications in predisposing to adult violent crime in a sample of 4,269 males born in Copenhagen, Denmark, between 1959 and 1961. The authors found that birth complications significantly interacted with maternal rejection in predisposing to violent crime at 18 years of age. The importance of this finding is highlighted by the fact that while only 4 percent of the sample experienced both birth complications and maternal rejection, this group was responsible for 18 percent of the violent offenses perpetrated by the whole sample. In a subsequent study, the same authors followed up this sample to age 34 to reassess criminal violence. The authors replicated the biosocial interaction for violent but not nonviolent crime. In addition, they found that the results applied specifically to serious violence, rather than violent threats, and to early-onset as opposed to late-onset violence. Similar biosocial interactions between obstetric complications and various psychosocial risk factors (e.g., parental mental illness, poor parenting, familial adversity) have been reported in studies using large samples from around the world. In contrast to this, two studies failed to find an interaction between birth complications and environmental risk factors: a 2002 study by Cannon et al. and a 2000 study by Laucht et al. However, there are several notable differences between these studies and those cited above. In the first of these studies, the sample consisted of 601 individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders; thus, there may have been other differences in brain functioning in this population that obscured findings related to violence. In the second of these studies,

735

follow-up of a small sample of 322 children was limited to age 8. Some authors have suggested that CNS insults resulting from perinatal complications may be especially related to life-course-persistent antisocial behavior rather than to child antisocial behavior. Thus, the vast majority of the evidence suggests that birth complications combined with psychosocial risk factors predispose to violent crime. While not a birth complication per se, evidence from Ikaheimo et al. also suggests that a high body mass index (BMI) and small head circumference at age 12 months are associated with a substantially increased risk of violent but not non-violent offending in adulthood. Interestingly, the authors found that measures of BMI at age 1 were stronger predictors of violent behavior than measures of BMI at age 14, which they argue implicates genetic and early environmental factors, rather than social learning, in accounting for the relationship between BMI and violence.

Malnutrition There is growing recognition that along with other early health risk factors, malnutrition represents an important risk factor for the development of antisocial behavior in children and adults. Research on malnutrition has focused on both macromalnutrition, such as protein-energy malnutrition, and malnutrition caused by micronutrient deficiencies, such as iron and zinc micromalnutrition. Epidemiological studies have documented associations between increased aggressive behavior and vitamin and mineral deficiency (Werbach, 1992). Further support for the link between malnutrition and antisocial behavior comes from a study by Neugebauer, Hoek, and Susser. They demonstrated that the male offspring of nutritionally deprived pregnant women had 2.5 times the normal rate of antisocial personality disorder in adulthood when malnutrition occurred during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy—the period of time when brain growth is most rapid. While the links described above are intriguing, they do not provide conclusive evidence of a relationship between malnutrition and antisocial behavior. More compelling evidence that malnutrition leads to antisocial behavior comes from a number of experimental studies in both children

736

Prenatal Influences and Crime

and adults. Although not focused specifically on the prenatal period, a recent longitudinal prospective study by Liu et al. presents a particularly powerful illustration of how early childhood mal­ nutrition may predispose to antisocial behavior later in life. In this study, Liu et al. demonstrated that children with iron, zinc or protein deficiencies at age 3 had greater externalizing behavior problems at ages 8, 11, and 17. In comparison to control subjects, malnourished children at age 3 were more aggressive or hyperactive at age 8, had more externalizing behavior at age 11, and had greater conduct disorder and excessive motor activity at age 17. Behavior problems were measured with three different instruments at each age, suggesting that findings were largely invariant to the nature of measurement. Findings were also independent of psychosocial adversity and not moderated by gender. Moreover, Liu et al. found a dose-response relationship between the extent of malnutrition at age 3 and the extent of behavior problems at ages 8 and 17, suggesting that malnutrition was an important factor in predisposing to antisocial behavior. Effects of early nutritional interventions on later behavior have also been found. Although not specific to nutritional enrichment, one highly successful early intervention for criminal and antisocial behavior consisted of home visits by nurses to mothers in which nutritional guidance was a major component. A randomized controlled trial by Raine et al. in 2003 also demonstrated that an enrichment program consisting of nutrition, education, and physical exercise from ages 3 to 5 significantly reduced antisocial behavior at age 17 and criminal behavior at age 23. Moreover, the authors found that the beneficial effects of the intervention were greater for children who exhibited signs of malnutrition at age 3, suggesting that the nutritional components of the intervention were the active elements in the enrichment program. Prevention, intervention, and treatment studies focused on malnutrition thus represent a promising direction for future research.

Conclusion A substantial body of evidence suggests that several prenatal risk factors predispose to adult antisocial behavior and violence. Research has

specifically linked minor physical anomalies, in utero nicotine and alcohol exposure, birth complications and malnutrition to later aggression and crime. Supporting evidence comes from a range of studies using diverse methodologies, including intervention approaches, early childhood enrichments, and prospective longitudinal designs. This methodological diversity, in addition to the experimental nature of some studies, lends further support to the relationship between health risk factors and antisocial behavior. The studies detailed above suggest that prevention efforts aimed at increasing maternal prenatal health and childhood nutrition and interventions designed to reduce birth complications and other causes of brain dysfunction may represent viable approaches for reducing violent crime. Melissa Peskin and Adrian Raine See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Environmental Toxins Theory; Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-Course-Persistent Offending; Nutrition and Crime; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

References and Further Readings Arseneault, L., Tremblay, R. E., Boulerice, B., Seguin, J. R., & Saucier, J. F. (2000). Minor physical anomalies and family adversity as risk factors for violent delinquency in adolescence. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157, 917–923. Brennan, P. A., Grekin, E. R., & Mednick, S. A. (1999). Maternal smoking during pregnancy and adult male criminal outcomes. Archives of General Psychiatry, 56, 215–219. Brennan, P. A., Mednick, S. A., & Raine, A. (1997). Biosocial interactions and violence: A focus on perinatal factors. In A. Raine, P. A. Brennan, D. Farrington, & S. A. Mednick (Eds.), Biosocial bases of violence (pp. 163–174). New York: Plenum. Cannon, M., Huttenen, M. O., Tanskanen, A. J., Arseneault, L., Jones, P. B., & Murray, R. M. (2002). Perinatal and childhood risk factors for later criminality and violence in schizophrenia. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180, 496–501. Fast, D. K., Conry, J., & Loock, C. A. (1999). Identifying Fetal Alcohol Syndrome among youth in the criminal

Prenatal Influences and Crime justice system. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 20, 370–372. Firestone, P., & Peters, S. (1983). Minor physical anomalies and behavior in children: A review. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 13, 411–425. Galler, J. R., & Ramsey, F. (1989). A follow-up study of the influence of early malnutrition on development. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 26, 23–27. Gibson, C. L., Piquero, A. R., & Tibbetts, S. G. (2000). Assessing the relationship between maternal cigarette smoking during pregnancy and age at first police contact. Justice Quarterly, 17, 519–542. Guy, J. D., Majorski, L. V., Wallace, C. J., & Guy, M. P. (1983). The incidence of minor physical anomalies in adult male schizophrenics. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 9, 571–582. Ikaheimo, P., Rasanen, P., Hakko, H., Hartikainen, A., Laitinen, J., Hodgins, S., et al. (2007). Body size and violent offending among males in the Northern Finland 1966 birth cohort. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 42, 845–850. Kandel, E., Brennan, P. A., Mednick, S. A., & Michelson, N. M. (1989). Minor physical anomalies and recidivistic adult criminal behavior. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 79, 103–107. Laucht, M., Esser, G., Baving, L., Gerhold, M., Hoesch, I., Ihle, W., et al. (2000). Behavioral sequelae of perinatal insults and early family adversity at 8 years of age. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 39, 1229–1237. Liu, J., Raine, A., Venables, P., & Mednick, S. A. (2004). Malnutrition at age 3 years predisposes to externalizing behavior problems at ages 8, 11 and 17 years. American Journal of Psychiatry, 161, 2005–2013. Mednick, S. A., & Kandel, E. S. (1988). Congenital determinants of violence. Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 16, 101–109. Neugebauer, R., Hoek, H. W., & Susser, E. (1999). Prenatal exposure to wartime famine and development of antisocial personality disorder in early adulthood. Journal of the American Medical Association, 4, 479–481. Pine, D. S., Shaffer, D., Schonfeld, I. S., & Davies, M. (1997). Minor physical anomalies: Modifiers of environmental risks for psychiatric impairment? Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 36, 395–403. Raine, A. (2002). Biosocial studies of antisocial and violent behavior in children and adults: A review. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 30, 311–326.

737

Raine, A., Brennan, P., & Mednick, S. A. (1994). Birth complications combined with early maternal rejection at age 1 year predispose to violent crime at age 18 years. Archives of General Psychiatry, 51, 984–988. Raine, A., Brennan, P., & Mednick, S. A. (1997). Interaction between birth complications and early maternal rejection in predisposing individuals to adult violence: Specificity to serious, early-onset violence. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 1265–1271. Raine, A., Mellingen, K., Liu, J. H., Venables, P. H., & Mednick, S. A. (2003). Effects of environmental enrichment at 3–5 years on schizotypal personality and antisocial behavior at ages 17 and 23 years. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 1627–1635. Rantakallio, P., Laara, E., Isohanni, M., & Moilanen, I. (1992). Maternal smoking during pregnancy and delinquency of the offspring: An association without causation? International Journal of Epidemiology, 21, 1106–1113. Rasanen, P., Hakko, H., Isohanni, M., Hodgins, S., Jarvelin, M. R., & Tiihonen, J. (1999). Maternal smoking during pregnancy and risk of criminal behavior among adult male offspring in the northern Finland 1996 birth cohort. American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 857–862. Scarpa, A., & Raine, A. (2007). Biosocial bases of violence. In D. J. Flannery, A. T. Vazsonyi, & I. D. Waldman (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of violent behavior and aggression (pp. 151–169). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schonfeld, A. M., Mattson, S. N., & Riley, E. P. (2005). Moral maturity and delinquency after prenatal alcohol exposure. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 66, 545–554. Streissguth, A. P., Barr, H. M., Kogan, J., & Bookstein, F. L. (1996). Understanding the occurrence of secondary disabilities in clients with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and fetal alcohol effects (FAE). Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wakschlag, L. S., Pickett, K. E., Cook, E. C., Benowitz, N. L., & Leventhal, B. L. (2002). Maternal smoking during pregnancy and severe antisocial behavior in offspring: A review. American Journal of Public Health, 92, 966–974. Werbach, M. R. (1992). Nutritional influences on aggressive behavior. Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, 7, 45–51. Werner, E. E. (1987). Vulnerability and resiliency in children at risk for delinquency: A longitudinal study from birth to young adulthood. In J. D. Burchard & S. N. Burchard (Eds.), Primary prevention of psychopathology (pp. 16–43). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

738

Prison Insurgency Theory

Prison Insurgency Theory It is commonly expected that prisons are violent places, given the nature of the individuals housed within them. Some prison violence takes place at the individual level, which consists of violence between inmates or between inmates and correctional staff. Besides interpersonal violence, prisons across the United States and the world have also experienced collective violence (i.e., group violence) or riots. There are estimates of over 1,000 prison riots having occurred in the United States in the 20th century. From just 1950 to 1960 more than 100 riots transpired in American prisons. However, some of the most infamous riots, readily known to the public because of their extreme amounts of violence, took place from 1970 through 1993. Among these were the uprisings at Attica in New York, Joliet in Illinois, the New Mexico State Penitentiary in Santa Fe, and Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio. Penologists have examined many of these events and provided multiple theoretical explanations for their occurrence. One such explanation is the prison insurgency theory. This theory views the prison riot as being similar to an action of civil disobedience or unrest (i.e., a collective uprising against the state or civil authority). This theoretical explanation of prison riots blends elements of authoritative action/inaction and breakdown/disorganization of prison conditions with tenets of social revolution theories. Penologists who study prison riots agree that no two riots are exactly alike. In fact, prison riots can take on many different forms and have multiple lasting effects upon a correctional institution. Because the conditions that produce prison riots are present in some prisons but not in others, the best way to investigate the underlying causes of prison riots is to look for commonalities or similarities between these unique events. It was in that light, that prison insurgency theory sought to explain the etiology of prison riots.

The Beginning Stages The earliest articulation of prison insurgency theory began with Bert Useem and Peter Kimball’s landmark book titled States of Siege: U.S. Prison

Riots, 1971 to 1986. To begin, the authors adopted a unique definition of a prison riot. They put forth the notion that “a prison riot occurs when authorities lose control of a significant number of prisoners, in a significant area of the prison, for a significant amount of time” (p. 4). Using this definition, they suggested that riots do not take place in all prisons rather in prisons with a particular “pathology” (p. 218). To explore this idea, they used archival data from nine prison riots as well as interviews with inmates, prison staff, and prison administrators to develop the first underpinnings of prison insurgency theory. From their analysis, Useem and Kimball concluded that the “key factor has not been the organization of the inmates but the disorganization of the state. The riot-prone system is characterized by certain ailments which, on one hand, sap the ability of the state to contain disturbances and, on the other hand, convince inmates that imprisoning conditions are unjust” (p. 218). These two important elements served as precursors to riotous behavior and were typically found in prisons that experienced “a breakdown in administrative control and operation of the prison” (p. 218). Some specific examples of this breakdown included scandals, escapes, inconsistent rules for inmates and guards, weak administrators, public dissent among correctional officers, disruption of everyday routines for eating, work, and recreation (p. 219). In total, Useem and Kimball saw prison riots as a result of the disorganization of the state, rather than the organization and mobilization of resources by inmates. When administrative control broke down, Useem and Kimball suggested the occurrence of two profound effects. First, inmates experienced an increase in their feelings of deprivation. This increase in deprivation usually followed a worsening of prison conditions, when compared to previous standards as subscribed to by prison officials or outside members of society. Essentially, inmates felt they were living in substandard conditions as compared to earlier conditions. An example of this was found in the New Mexico riot of 1980. Just prior to the riot, a new warden took over the facility, inmates lost educational and recreational programs, there was an increase in inmate-on-inmate violence, and prison officials initiated a “snitch” system where inmates reported other inmate behavior to

Prison Insurgency Theory

correctional personnel (Useem, 1985). All of these conditions were perceived as more deprived than the conditions inmates faced in the years prior, thus serving to increase their contempt for prison administrators. In conjunction with the sense of increased deprivation was the perceived legitimacy of prison administrators and guards. Useem and Kimball (1989) suggested that when administrators and staff appeared more powerful, the inmates perceived the prison conditions as more legitimate. So, the combination of increased deprivation and a weak administrative staff fostered the likelihood of riotous behavior. Just because prison conditions were bad did not guarantee a riot: there had to be interplay between worsening conditions and staff legitimacy. Useem and Kimball found that a second negative effect of administrative breakdown was a lapse in prison security. They pointed to several occasions of security failures in prisons just prior to riotous behavior. For example, at Attica, steel gates broke and there were no radios; at New Mexico State Penitentiary, guards left the doors open and “unbreakable” glass was not. These glaring security problems increased the likelihood that inmates would take legitimate collective action because they saw the compound as vulnerable. The combination of deprivation and breakdown theories by Useem and Kimball was seen as a great contribution to the explanation of prison riots. However, they never really provided an adequate definition of administrative breakdown. They thoroughly discussed its precursors and effects, but failed to provide an actual conceptualization of the term.

A New Twist Several years after the aforementioned work, Useem polished his theory of administrative breakdown into a theory of social revolution/social protest to explain prison riots. This state-centered theory of administrative breakdown as the cause of prison riots directly parallels theories of revolution that have overturned governments and monarchies. The work of Jack Goldstone and Useem saw prison riots as “rebellions against power” (p. 987). They teased out several similarities between prison riots and revolutions: frequency of the event, the occurrence of these events in waves, variability in form and function of riots and revolutions, and that both

739

of these types of unrest lead to substantial social change. Goldstone and Useem used archival data from 13 major prison riots, from 1952 to 1993, to assess their state-centered theory of prison riots. All of the prisons in their sample were either medium-security or high-security facilities. Again, the authors suggested that “prison riots are not random events,” but rather “there appears to be a syndrome or set of circumstances that typically prefigures a prison riot” (p. 999). They contend five specific conditions serve as precursors to prison riots, all of which are borrowed from state-centered theory of revolutions. Those five circumstances are 1) fiscal stress or other conditions that undermine the balance between a prison administrations resources and capacities and its administrative burdens, eroding the effective administration and implementation of prison policies; 2) dissention between the warden and corrections officers or internal conflicts among the corrections officers, which prevent the prison staff from supporting and advancing warden’s policies; 3) grievances among the prison inmates about the warden’s or staff’s actions, or about their inaction or inability to ameliorate material conditions, that depict the warden or staff as ineffective or unjust, providing a motivation for protest against the prison administration; 4) the spread of ideologies of protest or rebellion, indicating that grievances and a desire for change are widely shared among prison inmates; and 5) warden or staff actions, taken in response to expressions of grievances, that are seen as excessive, arbitrary, unjust, ineffective or precluding peaceful reform, therefore turning efforts by aggrieved parties to seek remedy into attempts to create a prison riot. (pp. 1002–1003)

The authors contended that these conditions often combine together to create institutional breakdown, thus increasing the probability of a riot. Goldstone and Useem provided specific examples of their five predictors of riot behavior, which were drawn from interviews and records gathered during their research. In addition to qualitative proof, the authors also presented statistical analysis to support their theory of prison insurgency. Only 8 of the 13 prison riots had all of the conditions present. Three of the sample prisons had four

740

Psychophysiology and Crime

conditions present and two prisons had three of the conditions present. Overall, riots happened most often when all five conditions were present and could happen if only three or four conditions were present. Most important was the fact that when the five revolutionary conditions were absent, so too were riots in the majority of cases. If even three of the conditions were absent, riots were less likely to occur. Goldstone and Useem also specified which of the five factors were most prevalent prior to the occurrence of a riot. Fiscal stress (factor 1) and the spread of ideologies of protest and rebellion (factor 4) were present in all 13 riots. The dissention between wardens and correctional officers (factor 2) and grievances among inmates about warden or staff actions (factor 3) were present in 11 of the riots. Factor 5, warden or staff actions taken in response to grievances by inmates, was present in 11 of the riots. Thus, it appeared that, while some of these conditions stood alone as important determinants of collective behavior, when taken in combination with one another they had an even stronger impact on riot potential.

Conclusion Prison insurgency theory (i.e., the state-centered approach) is still being examined as an explanation for prison riots. Overall, this theory seeks to explain collective violence from the perspective of administrative and institutional breakdown rather than focusing on the temperament of inmates themselves. There have been several challengers to this perspective including the inmate-balance theory, administrative control theory, threshold theory, and deprivation theory. All of these theories explain certain elements of prison riots, but prison insurgency theory seems to provide the most robust explanation for the majority of riotous behavior. Prison insurgency theory is successful because it places its focus on maintaining social order in prisons, rather than on just monitoring “bad” inmates. Given this, it is certainly possible that new fiscal constraints on state and federal governments combined with a plethora of institutional problems (e.g., crowding, loss of programs, lack of staff) could create a situation of more collective violence via institutional and administrative breakdown. The extreme cost of prison riots, in

the form of structural damage, loss of life, and so on, will fuel the continued examination of prison insurgency theory as the preeminent explanation of collective violence behind bars. Karen F. Lahm See also Colvin, Mark: Social Sources of the New Mexico Prison Riot; DiIulio, John J., Jr.: Prison Management and Prison Order; Sykes, Gresham M.: Deprivation Theory; Toch, Hans: Coping in Prison

References and Further Readings Goldstone, J. A., & Useem, B. (1999). Prison riots as microrevolutions: An extension of state-centered theories of revolution. American Journal of Sociology, 104, 985–1029. Skopcol, T. (1979). States and social revolutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Useem, B. (1985). Disorganization and the New Mexico prison riot of 1980. American Sociological Review, 50, 677–688. Useem, B., & Goldstone, J. A. (2002). Forging social order and its breakdown: Riot and reform in U.S. prisons. American Sociological Review, 67, 499–524. Useem, B., Graham-Camp, C., & Camp, G. M. (1996). Resolution of prison riots: Strategies and policies. New York: Oxford University Press. Useem, B., & Kimball, P. A. (1987). A theory of prison riots. Theory and Society, 16, 87–122. Useem, B., & Kimball, P. A. (1989). States of siege: U.S. prison riots, 1971–1986. New York: Oxford University Press. Useem, B., & Reisig, M. D. (1999). Collective action in prisons: Protests, disturbances, and riots. Criminology, 37, 735–759.

Psychophysiology

and

Crime

Psychophysiological research has contributed to a significant empirical understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying crime. There is now little scientific doubt that genes play a significant role in antisocial behavior. With the advantages of ease of data collection (especially heart rate) and their noninvasive features, psychophysiological measures have proved to be valuable in filling the gap between genetic risk for crime and the brain

Psychophysiology and Crime

abnormalities that give rise to antisocial, violent, and psychopathic behavior in some people. Most psychophysiological research has assessed autonomic and central nervous system functioning at a baseline level or in response to external stimuli using measures such as skin conductance activity, heart rate, startle blink, electroencephalography (EEG), and event-related potentials (ERPs). The psychophysiological correlates of criminality are summarized in the following sections: autonomic arousal, orienting, fear conditioning, emotion modulation, and EEG/ERPs. In each section, empirical findings are first summarized and followed by theoretical interpretations. Finally, important issues including biosocial interactions, protective factors, and crime prevention/intervention are briefly described.

Autonomic Arousal Empirical Findings

Skin conductance is measured from electrodes placed on the fingers or palm of the hand and is controlled exclusively by the sympathetic nervous system. Skin conductance activity captures small fluctuations in the electrical activity of the skin, with enhanced conductivity (i.e., activity) elicited by increased sweating. It reflects both arousal (levels and number of non-specific skin conductance responses) and responsivity (e.g., reactivity to neutral or emotional stimuli). Heart rate measures the number of heart beats per minute. It includes resting levels and phasic activity (reactivity to external stimuli) and reflects the complex interactions between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity. Studies on both criminal and community populations have generally indicated that antisocial individuals are characterized by autonomic underarousal as indicated by low skin conductance activity and low resting heart rate. Fewer nonspecific skin conductance responses and reduced skin conductance levels have been found in nonpsychopathic antisocial individuals in comparison to the normal controls. In 1993, Adrian Raine conducted a review of arousal studies conducted since 1978 and reported that 4 of 10 studies conducted found significant effects for lower skin conductance levels and/or fewer non-specific

741

responses among antisocials. Specifically, a 1992 prospective study by Kruesi et al. has also shown that in a sample of behavior disordered children, low skin conductance levels measured at age 11 years predict institutionalization at age 13 years. In sum, although not all studies reveal skin conductance underarousal in antisocials, there is some evidence associating low skin conductance activity with general antisocial behavior. Of all psychophysiological research on antisocial behavior, the best replicated finding appears to be that of lower resting heart rate in noninstitutionalized antisocial populations (Ortiz & Raine, 2004), particularly in children and adolescents. This low heart rate–antisociality association is found to be unique and robust. No other psychiatric condition—such as alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, and anxiety—is characterized by reduced heart rate. In addition, studies have generally indicated that this association is not confounded by factors such as physical size, exercise and sports activity level, excess motor activity and inattention, substance abuse, intellect and academic achievement, and various forms of psychosocial adversity. This low heart rate–antisocial behavior relationship has also been found across countries and cultural contexts. Finally, longitudinal studies have suggested that lower resting heart rate as early as age 3 years may be an early risk factor for the later development of aggressive and antisocial behavior (Raine et al., 1997). Theoretical Interpretation

Stimulation seeking and fearlessness theories have been proposed to interpret autonomic underarousal in antisocials. The stimulation seeking theory assumes that there are individual differences in arousal levels and that arousal levels are consistently lower in criminals than in non-criminals. These antisocials bring their arousal to an optimal level by engaging in pathological stimulation-seeking behaviors, including aggressive and antisocial behavior. Alternatively, fearlessness theory proposes that higher heart rate and skin conductance levels indicate fearfulness and higher anxiety. Fearlessness or lack of anxiety is argued to be a prerequisite for engaging in disruptive behavior because fearless individuals are less concerned about negative

742

Psychophysiology and Crime

outcomes from their actions. In this framework, lack of fear or anxiety, indicated by autonomic underarousal, may reduce the effectiveness of punishment, impede socialization processes, and eventually predispose individuals to antisocial behavior.

Orienting Empirical Findings

Orienting responses deficits have also been implicated in antisocial individuals. When presented with a novel stimulus in one’s environment, an individual normally shows an orienting response (a “what is it” response) together with increased autonomic activity (e.g., enhanced skin conductance levels). This skin conductance orienting response has been considered to indicate the degree of information processing in that larger skin conductance reactivity is associated with better attention allocation and information processing—and thus with better functioning of the nervous system in response to an external stimuli. Evidence has linked orienting response deficits with antisocial behavior, especially in psychopathic, antisocial, and criminal subjects who also exhibit schizotypal features, such as paranoia, reduced emotionality, and inability to make close friends. The cognitive deficits indexed by reduced orienting responses may contribute to fear conditioning deficits discussed later. Lack of attentional processing to initially neutral stimuli that warn of impending punishment would be expected to result in poorer conditioning. Similarly, lack of orienting may also partly account for underarousal, since arousal reflects tonic levels of activity, which may in part be a function of moment-to-moment responsivity to events in the environment. Theoretical Interpretation

Prefrontal deficits may contribute to both reduced skin conductance orienting responses and antisocial behavior. Brain imaging studies have revealed decreased skin conductance orienting responses in relation to reduced prefrontal cortex volume and function. Together with evidence of prefrontal deficits in antisocial and schizophrenic individuals as uncovered by brain imaging and neuropsychological research (Raine & Yang, 2006), this prefrontal abnormality may give rise to

both autonomic orienting deficits and antisocial behavior, especially in the violent individuals with schizotypal features.

Fear Conditioning Empirical Findings

Fear conditioning is a form of Pavlovian conditioning through which individuals learn the social significance of previously neutral stimuli through a process of association. In a typical classical conditioning paradigm, the neutral stimulus initially elicits no emotional reaction. However, after repeated pairings with the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS) and obtains the potential to elicit a conditioned response (CR). Normally, after a number of trials, the CS signals the UCS onset and induces emotions associated with the anticipation of the aversive UCS. For example, stealing cookies (CS) or even the thought of stealing cookies will eventually elicit distress (UCR) after repeatedly paired with punishment (UCS) in children and this distress or fear is thought to deter them from stealing. In this context, conditioning deficits may result in the failure to associate punishment and disruptive behavior and predispose individuals to antisocial behavior. Fear conditioning in humans has been most frequently studied using skin conductance measures. When classical conditioning is assessed using skin conductance, a neutral, non-aversive tone (CS) is presented to the subject, followed a few seconds later by either a loud tone or an electric shock (UCS). The key measure is the size of the skin conductance response elicited by the CS after a number of CS-UCS pairings. The larger the response to the CS after pairing with the UCS, the better the conditioning. Empirical studies have consistently shown that poor skin conductance fear conditioning is associated with aggressive and antisocial behavior in children and adult populations. Specifically, one longitudinal study by Yu Gao et al. has also revealed that poor skin conductance conditioning at age 3 years is linked to more aggressive behavior at age 8 years and also predispose individuals to criminal behavior at age 23 years. In sum, poor conditioning may play a significant role in the development of antisocial behavior.

Psychophysiology and Crime

Theoretical Interpretation

Reduced classical fear conditioning has been a key concept in theories of aggressive/antisocial behavior and crime. Hans Eysenck conceptualized a conscience as a set of classically conditioned emotional responses that is developed relatively early in life, and that there are individual differences in the degree to which individuals develop a conscience. Individuals with good fear conditioning develop a conscience that deters them from antisocial and aggressive behavior. In probabilistic terms, the greater the individual’s capability to develop conditioned fear responses, the greater the conscience development and the lower will be the probability of becoming aggressive and antisocial. The somatic marker hypothesis was initially proposed by Antonio Damasio in 1994 to account for the poor social decision making observed in antisocial, sociopathic individuals. Based on this theory, the individual’s ability to generate emotions is manifested as alterations in physiological state and registered in the brain as changes in somatosensory region activation. Damasio posited that conditioned emotional responses facilitate enhanced decision making by reducing the number of options from which to choose. The reduction occurs when an individual experiences uneasy feelings conditioned during prior negative experiences with that option, resulting in their intuitively or deliberately deciding to eliminate it from further consideration. As a result, inappropriate decisions are generally ex­­cluded, and cognitive resources—particularly frontal functions such as planning flexibility and working memory—are freed up to evaluate only those options that are viable to that individual. The risk for antisocial behavior is elevated when an individual cannot generate or does not appreciate the significance of somatic markers. The findings of deficient skin conductance conditioning in aggressive individuals, and the enhanced autonomic functioning observed in atrisk individuals who avoid crime, fit particularly well within this model. Low resting heart rate in antisocial individuals may similarly reflect disruption in the somatic marker network and consequently increase risk-related behavior.

Emotion Modulation Emotion modulation deficits have been mainly examined using startle blink measures. Startle

743

blink activity measures the automatic eye-blink response that occurs to a startling probe stimulus such as a loud noise or a puff of air to the eye. The magnitude of the startle blink response varies with the valence of an ongoing emotional state; presentation of pleasant stimuli is typically found to attenuate and unpleasant stimuli to potentiate the startle response compared with presentation of neutral stimuli. Moreover, because the startle response is a reflex, it is thought to index emotional reactions at a very basic and primitive level. Startle potentiation (i.e., increased startle magnitude) is thought to reflect defensive reactivity, negative affect, and temperamental differences in negative emotionality. Startle potentiation deficits have been found in criminal and non-criminal male psychopathic samples as well as in women with psychopathy. For example, in 1993 Patrick, Bradley, and Lang conducted a study of criminals who were classified according to their level of antisocial behavior and emotional detachment; in this study criminals with high emotional detachment (including psychopaths) exhibited reduced startle potentiation while anticipating an aversive stimulus, whereas criminals with low emotional detachment exhibited robust startle potentiation. These findings suggest that psychopaths display a core emotional deficit in fear potentiation and defensive response modulation. This has been interpreted as suggesting that the core personality traits of psychopathy are associated with the temperamental predisposition of reduced responsivity to emotional cues, especially if they are aversive or threatening.

EEG and ERPs EEG and ERP are two frequently used psychophysiological measures in studies of central nervous system functioning in antisocial individuals. Slow-Wave EEG and Underarousal

EEG data are collected by putting a standardized array of surface electrodes on an individual’s scalp, and reflect regional electrical activity of the brain. The different power bands—delta, theta, alpha, beta—are associated with increasing degrees of consciousness or arousal. For example, individuals with high levels of cortical activity show a

744

Psychophysiology and Crime

predominance of fast alpha and beta wave whereas in individuals with low cortical activity, theta and delta waves are predominant. A large number of studies have implicated EEG abnormalities in criminal individuals. The most commonly reported findings are more slow-wave (i.e., theta and delta) EEG—reflecting underarousal—especially in frontal and temporal regions of the brain. Specifically, evidence has emerged that increased slow-wave EEG activity in adolescence predicts official criminal convictions later in life (Raine et al., 1990). This excessive slow-wave EEG may indicate cortical immaturity resulting in impaired inhibitory control, or cortical underarousal that predisposes toward compensatory stimulation seeking, which eventually gives rise to emotional and behavioral dysregulation in those prone to criminal behavior. Frontal Asymmetry

Another line of research concerns frontal EEG asymmetry in antisocial individuals. Frontal asymmetry has been widely used as a measure of underlying approach-related or withdrawal-related behavioral tendencies and affective style in children and adults. In general, relatively greater left frontal activity (i.e., relatively reduced left alpha power) is suggested to be associated with positive affect and/or approach motivation and behavior, whereas relatively greater right frontal activity (i.e., relatively reduced right alpha power) is related to negative affect and/or withdrawal motivation and behavioral patterns. Some studies, such as Santesso et al., have associated atypical frontal asymmetry with externalizing behavior in children and with anger proneness and aggressive traits in adults. These associations, however, may vary based on gender and social factors. In general, atypical frontal EEG asymmetry may indicate abnormal emotional reactivity and affective style that give rise to the disruptive behavior seen in antisocials and criminals. ERPs

The ERP refers to averaged changes in the electrical activity of the brain in response to external stimuli. The most consistent association has been found for abnormal P300. This is a positive-going waveform occurring approximately 300 milliseconds

after a stimulus, which is thought to represent deployment of neural resources to task-relevant or novel information. Reduced P300 amplitude and longer P300 latency are characteristics of nonpsychopathic antisocials. In contrast, the findings on P300 and psychopathy have been inconsistent. In fact, P300 deficits have also been associated with other externalizing behavior problem, including drug abuse, child conduct disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (Patrick, 2008). Therefore, it is possible that the P300 abnormality may be a psychophysiological indicator of the broad externalizing behavior characterized by impulse control problems.

Important Issues Biosocial Interaction

Although psychophysiological research has enabled scientists to uncover various biological underpinnings of antisocial and violent behavior, it is critical to bear in mind that it is the complex interplay among a variety of factors—including biological, environmental, and social influences— that predispose some individuals to engage in antisocial behavior. For example, it has been reported that boys with a low resting heart rate are more likely to be rated as aggressive by their teachers if their mother was pregnant as teenager, if they were from a low social class family, or if they were separated from a parent before age 10. They are also more likely to become adult violent criminals if they also have a poor relationship with their parents and come from a large family, according to David Farrington. Alternatively, a number of studies have found that psychophysiological factors, particularly measures of skin conductance and heart rate, reveal stronger relationships to antisocial behavior in those from benign social backgrounds that lack the classic psychosocial risk factors for crime (Raine, 2002). For example, studies have shown that poor skin conductance conditioning is a characteristic for antisocial individuals from relatively good social backgrounds (Hemming, 1981; Raine & Venables, 1981). Specifically, low heart rate at age 3 years has been found to predict aggression at age 11 years in children from high but not low social classes (Raine et al., 1997). These findings, as argued by the “social push” hypothesis, suggest

Psychophysiology and Crime

that psychophysiological risk factors may assume greater importance when social predispositions to crime are minimized. In contrast, social causes may be more important explanations of antisocial behavior in those exposed to adverse early home conditions (Raine, 2002). Protective Factors

Some studies have focused on psychophysiological correlates as protective factors against antisocial and criminal behavior. For example, in a prospective longitudinal study, 15-year-old antisocial adolescents who did not become criminals by age 29 showed higher resting heart rate levels, higher skin conductance arousal, and better skin conductance conditioning when compared to their antisocial counterparts who became adult criminals (Raine et al., 1995, 1996). In Brennan et al.’s study on adolescents who had criminal fathers and thus were at higher risk for antisocial outcomes, those who desisted from crime had higher skin conductance and heart rate orienting reactivity in comparison with those who eventually became criminals. There­fore, enhanced autonomic nervous system functioning, as indexed by higher levels of arousal, better conditioning, and higher orienting responses, may serve as biological protective factors that reduce the likelihood that an individual will become an adult criminal. Crime Prevention and Intervention

Efforts have been made to integrate biological findings into prevention and intervention programs. One line of research concerns directly altering one’s psychophysiological functioning. For example, in one longitudinal study, better nutrition, more physical exercise, and cognitive stimulation from ages 3 to 5 years was shown to produce long-term psychophysiological changes 6 years later at age 11 years, including increased skin conductance level, more orienting, and a more aroused EEG profile. This environmental enrichment was also found to reduce criminal offending at age 23 years (Raine et al., 2003; Raine et al., 2001). Future prevention and intervention programs could be improved by acknowledging the importance of biological moderators and differentiating subgroups based on their psychophysiological char­ acteristics. For example, Stadler et al. found that a

745

cognitive-behavioral intervention program for children with disruptive behavior problems (aggression, delinquency, and attention problems) was of greater benefit to children with high heart rate levels compared to those with low heart rate levels. Similarly, in a pilot study on adolescents at high risk for drug abuse, conducted by Fishbein et al., individuals who are unresponsive to interventions demonstrated fewer skin conductance responses to two boring and tedious tasks (continuous performance test and delay of gratification) and higher skin conductance responses to the risky choices in a more stimulating task, relative to those who had better responses to the intervention program.

Conclusion In general, antisocial individuals are characterized by (1) autonomic underarousal as indicated by reduced skin conductance non-specific responses, lower skin conductance levels, and lower resting heart rate; (2) poor skin conductance fear conditioning; (3) more slow-wave EEG and atypical frontal EEG asymmetry; and (4) abnormal P300 patterns as reflected by reduced P300 amplitude and longer P300 latency. Skin conductance orienting deficits in antisocials may be more specific to those who also have schizotypal features, whereas the emotion modulation deficits as indicated by impaired startle potentiation are associated with psychopathic traits, especially the emotional de­­ tachment feature. Psychophysiological risk factors interact with psychosocial variables in predisposing certain individuals to antisocial and criminal behavior. Meanwhile, evidence of psychophysiological protective factors against the development of antisocial behavior has emerged. Finally, prevention and intervention programs aimed at reducing antisocial behavior would benefit enormously by targeting their efforts on selected individuals based on their psychophysiological characteristics or by directly improving their psychophysiological functioning. Certain psychophysiological measures, including heart rate activity, can be recorded relatively easily (e.g., using portable equipment or taking a pulse), and as such they are especially valuable to the criminologists who are attempting to explore the biological etiology of crime. Yu Gao and Adrian Raine

746

Psychophysiology and Crime

See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Fishbein, Diana H.: Biosocial Theory; Hare, Robert D.: Psychopathy and Crime; Lahey, Benjamin B., and Irwin D. Waldman: Developmental Propensity Model; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Neurology and Crime; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

References and Further Readings Brennan, P. A., Raine, A., Schulsinger, F., KirkegaardSorensen, L., Knop, J., Hutchings, B., et al. (1997). Psychophysiological protective factors for male subjects at high risk for criminal behavior. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 853–855. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam. Farrington, D. P. (1997). The relationship between low resting heart rate and violence. In A. Raine, P. A. Brennan, D. P. Farrington, & S. A. Mednick (Eds.), Biosocial bases of violence (pp. 89–106). New York: Plenum Press. Fishbein, D., Hyde, C., Coe, B., & Paschall, M. J. (2004). Neurocognitive and physiological prerequisites for prevention of adolescent drug abuse. Journal of Primary Prevention, 24, 471–495. Gao, Y., Raine, A., Venables, P. H., Dawson, M. E., & Mednick, S. A. (2010). Association of poor childhood fear conditioning and adult crime. American Journal of Psychiatry, 167, 56–60. Gao, Y., Raine, A., Venables, P. H., Dawson, M. E., & Mednick, S. A. (in press). Reduced electrodermal fear conditioning from ages 3 to 8 years is associated with aggressive behavior at age 8 years. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Harmon-Jones, E. (2003). Clarifying the emotive functions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activity. Psychophysiology, 40, 838–848. Hemming, J. H. (1981). Electrodermal indices in a selected prison sample and students. Personality and Individual Differences, 2, 37–46. Kruesi, M. J. P., Hibbs, E. D., Zahn, T. P., Keysor, C. S., Hamburger, S. D., Bartko, J. J., et al. (1992). A 2-year prospective follow-up study of children and adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders. Archives of General Psychiatry, 49, 429–435. Lorber, M. F. (2004). Psychophysiology of aggression, psychopathy, and conduct problems: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 531–552. Ortiz, J., & Raine, A. (2004). Heart rate level and antisocial behavior in children and adolescents: A

meta-analysis. Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 43, 154–162. Patrick, C. J. (1994). Emotion and psychopathy: Startling new insights. Psychophysiology, 31, 319–330. Patrick, C. J. (2008). Psychophysiological correlates of aggression and violence: An integrative review. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 363, 2543–2555. Patrick, C. J., Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (1993). Emotion in the criminal psychopath: Startle reflex modulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 102, 82–92. Raine, A. (1993). The psychopathology of crime. London: Academic Press. Raine, A. (1996). Autonomic nervous system activity and violence. In D. M. Stoff & R. B. Cairns (Eds.), Aggression and violence: Genetic, neurobiological, and biosocial perspective (pp. 145–168). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Raine, A. (2002). Biosocial studies of antisocial and violent behavior in children and adults: A review. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 30, 311–326. Raine, A., Brennan, P. A., Farrington, D. P., & Mednick, S. A. (1996). Biosocial bases of violence. New York: Plenum Press. Raine, A., Mellingen, K., Liu, J., Venables, P. H., & Mednick, S. A. (2003). Effects of environmental enrichment at ages 3–5 years on schizotypal personality and antisocial behavior at ages 17 and 23 years. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 1627–1635. Raine, A., & Venables, P. H. (1981). Classical conditioning and socialization—A biosocial interaction. Personality and Individual Differences, 2, 273–283. Raine, A., Venables, P. H., Dalais, C., Mellingen, K., Reynolds, C., & Mendrek, A. (2001). Early educational and health enrichment at age 3–5 years is associated with increased autonomic and central nervous system arousal and orienting at age 11 years: Evidence from the Mauritius Child Health Project. Psychophysiology, 38, 254–266. Raine, A., Venables, P. H., & Mednick, S. A. (1997). Low resting heart rate age 3 years predisposes to aggression at age 11 years: Evidence from the Mauritius Child Health Project. Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 36, 1457–1464.

Psychophysiology and Crime Raine, A., Venables, P. H., & Williams, M. (1990). Relationships between CNS and ANS measures of arousal at age 15 and criminality at age 24. Archives of General Psychiatry, 47, 1003–1007. Raine, A., Venables, P. H., & Williams, M. (1995). High autonomic arousal and electrodermal orienting at age 15 years as protective factors against criminal behavior at age 29 years. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152, 1595–1600. Raine, A., Venables, P. H., & Williams, M. (1996). Better autonomic conditioning and faster electrodermal halfrecovery time at age 15 years as possible protective factors against crime at age 29 years. Developmental Psychology, 32, 624–630.

747

Raine, A., & Yang, Y. (2006). Neural foundations to moral reasoning and antisocial behavior. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 203–213. Santesso, D. L., Reker, D. L., Schmidt, L. A., & Segalowitz, S. J. (2006). Frontal electroencephalogram activation asymmetry, emotional intelligence, and externalizing behaviors in 10-year-old children. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 36, 311–328. Stadler, C., Grasmann, D., Fegert, J. M., Holtmann, M., Poustka, F., & Schmeck, K. (2008). Heart rate and treatment effect in children with disruptive behavior disorders. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 39, 299–309.

Q population as a military secret. The French Revolution served as a turning point for these concerns. As some of the revolutionary governments came into power, the public was given access to census data. The application of statistics to social data was in its infancy in the social sciences, and research on criminal behavior was conducted via description rather than measurement. This was the context in which Quetelet’s ideas were formed. As a young man, Quetelet was interested in the arts and literature. At approximately 20, his interests took an abrupt turn when he met a mathematician who influenced him to study mathematics. After receiving his doctorate, Quetelet began to teach mathematics and became interested in starting an astronomical observatory in Brussels. In 1923, he was sent to Paris to learn what equipment would be needed for the observatory. While in Paris, he met Joseph Fourier and Pierre-Simon Laplace, two French mathematicians, and learned of their work with probability theory. Both these mentors had previously worked with social data in addition to astronomical data. Quetelet immediately began to think about how he could apply statistics to the measurement of the human body. From these efforts, he developed the body mass index (BMI) for measuring obesity which is still used today. The finding of a regularity measure across individuals set the stage for his application of statistics to social data.

Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques Adolphe Quetelet was one of the first to explore official data on populations and crime. He is best known in criminology for his application of statistics and maps to describe crime patterns and trends in locations and the characteristics of offenders (using the term social mechanics). His important findings regarding the spatiotemporal distribution of crime provide the foundation for criminologist’s interest in crime and place. Finally, as Terence Morris notes, his shift in emphasis from criminal motivation to crime as primarily a socioeconomic phenomenon with individual behavior as one element set the stage for the development of opportunity-based theories of crime such as routine activity theory and environmental criminology.

Quetelet in Context Quetelet made his contributions to criminology before the discipline officially existed. He was born in Belgium and worked in 1820s France/Belgium during a period of social unrest that culminated in the French Revolution. When he began his career, information on social phenomena was almost nonexistent. Paul Lazarsfeld notes that two major barriers to coordinated, state-sponsored data collection existed: a populace who viewed attempts to conduct a census as precursors to increased taxes, and governments who treated any data about their

Applying Statistics to Social Phenomena Quetelet believed that general causes could be identified for human behavior just as they were used to 749

750

Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques

identify laws for physical behavior. His involvement in the planning of the Belgian population census provided the basis for his explorations of population and crime statistics. In the course of investigating social data from the census, he began to notice patterns in both the rates and the distribution of characteristics across a population. The distribution closely resembled the error distributions that he had learned about from Fourier and Laplace. He began to apply the law of error being used to measure physical phenomena in astronomy to social characteristics. In doing so, he became the first to apply probability theory to social phenomena. As a result of this application he also recognized the power of using the normal curve to understand empirical distributions rather than as only an error law. Based on his findings he created a new field of analysis, social mechanics, which focused on mapping and analyzing physical and social characteristics of people. George B. Vold and colleagues note this term most likely was drawn from celestial mechanics, which studies regularities in data describing the physical environment. To inform his investigations he collected and analyzed a variety of characteristics from several countries. At first, he concentrated on describing the physical characteristics of the population. He “calculated the average weight and height of his subjects, cross-tabulated these with sex, age, occupation, and geographical region and then submitted these correlations to the perturbational influence” of social class and other factors (Beirne, 1987, p. 1151). In doing so, he demonstrated the regularities found in the physical world also existed in the physical characteristics of humans and in the social world when large numbers of empirical observations were used. The more observations used, the greater the accuracy of the average in describing the population. These findings led him to believe that, given enough data, he could develop representative portraits of the typical “average man” for each country and for all humans. In his classic work Research on the Propensity for Crime at Different Ages, Quetelet states, “If the average man were ascertained for one nation, he would present the type of that nation. If he could be ascertained according to the mass of men, he would present the type of the human species altogether” (p. 3, emphasis in the original). Piers Beirne says Quetelet saw this portrait of the average man across all nations as

analogous to the center of gravity in the physical sciences. At the same time, Quetelet was careful to point out general laws which hold true for large groups cannot be applied to individuals. This was an important distinction later empirically demonstrated by William Robinson. While Quetelet began social mechanics with physical characteristics, he soon branched out to include social phenomena such as suicide, marriage, and crime. These social phenomena, termed moral statistics, were already being studied by other Franco-Belgian statisticians most notably André-Michel Guerry.

Quetelet on Crime In 1827, the first statistical information on crime was published in the Comte général de administra­ tion de la justice criminelle en France (General Administration of Criminal Justice in France). When data about crime became available, Quetelet was able to analyze it and conclude that crime followed the same type of patterned behavior as physical phenomena. Quetelet also discovered relative constancy across time in “the ratios of the number of accused to convicted and of accused to inhabitants, and of crime against persons to crimes against property” among others (Beirne, 1987, p. 1153). This finding was not in agreement with what the classical and neoclassical traditions of crime causation. They held that people possess free will and their decisions are rationally based. However, if crime was a result of free will there should have been far more variability in crime rates. In this way, Quetelet’s research findings began to place him in the center of a heated, long-term debate between those who subscribed to free will and those who subscribed to social determinism. Quetelet on Criminal Propensity and the Correlates of Crime

Having established the stability of crime rates across time, Quetelet began to examine the characteristics of offenders. He found individuals who were young, male, poor, uneducated, or unemployed were the most likely to be arrested and convicted of a crime. At the same time, some of the lowest crime areas were those with the highest concentrations of poverty and unemployment. In combination, these findings led him to conclude

Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques

the residents of these areas were traveling to wealthier areas to commit their crimes. His integration of opportunity into the discussion of crime presaged the later appearance of opportunitybased theories of the late 20th century. Characteristics such as education and poverty were less important to causing crime because their effects were contingent on other factors. For example, Quetelet believed that it was not poverty that drove criminal behavior but inequality. More specifically, it was situations in which great wealth and great inequality existed in the same place that produced more crime. Where all were poor but still able to survive, crime remained low. He also found that increased education did not uniformly decrease crime. More highly educated individuals tended to commit violent crime while less educated individuals committed property crime. Quetelet identified the two most important factors in the propensity toward crime as sex and age. Males were four times as likely to be involved in crime. Digging deeper, he noted that the difference in the ratio of women to men for crimes against persons was much greater than for property crimes. Further investigation of the ages of criminals revealed an early version of Darrell Steffensmeier and colleagues’ now-familiar age-crime curve. Criminal propensity was highest between ages 21 and 25 and then dropped off slowly at first and more rapidly with increasing age. Again the significance of these patterns was in identifying stable characteristics associated with criminal behavior. These findings led him to make his most famous and controversial statement. Given the stability of crime types and the characteristics of individual’s committing them, Quetelet saw crime as a relatively constant outcome of social conditions and thus society in general. “The crimes which are annually committed seem to be a necessary result of our social organization. . . . Society prepares crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is executed” (Quetelet, 1831/1984, p. 108, as quoted in Beirne, 1987, p. 1158, emphasis in the original). With this statement Quetelet was only expressing his acknowledgment of the influence of both individual and social factors on criminal behavior. However, free-will adherents were outraged. They interpreted his statement as a rejection of individual decision making. Quetelet frequently tried to explain his position—that

751

individuals make decisions that are influenced by individual and social conditions—so as to quell these complaints. But he enjoyed little success. In his later work, Quetelet increasingly relied on the normal distribution. Based on the normal distribution, he inferred “every man, therefore has a certain propensity to break the laws” (Quetelet, 1831/1984, p. 94) but that these propensities were rarely acted on. He moved beyond averages and began using the normal distribution to calculate the upper and lower bounds of “normal” changes in the values. Values within these limits were considered to be normal while those outside were classified as deviant. This led him to see the average man as law-abiding with a particular moral disposition that included moderate alcohol consumption, investments, and saving regularly. Those outside the statistical limits for the average man were the opposite (e.g., drunkards, gamblers, unemployed). Beirne notes that since Quetelet saw low moral values as one of the causes of crime his policy recommendations were to continue the implementation of Cesare Beccaria’s suggestions for reform but also to improve education related to morals and address social ills. Later in his career, Quetelet increasingly mentioned biological origins of the individual and social facts that were correlated with criminal behavior. In this way, his research (along with others) became the basis for Cesare Lombroso’s later work on biological causes. Quetelet also discussed the twin roles of temptation and opportunity in determining whether an individual will commit a crime. The number of crimes committed is related to the number of individuals who are exposed to favorable circumstances “whether through the existence of objects suitable to excite temptation or through the ease of committing crime. It is not sufficient, in fact, that man had the intention to do evil. It is necessary, besides, that he have the opportunity and the means for it” (Quetelet, 1831/1984, p. 16, emphasis in the original). These factors would form the basis for the rational choice perspective and more general opportunity theories of crime. Contributions to Theoretical Development of Place-Based Criminology

In addition to his contributions to the development of sociology, Quetelet’s mapping of crime

752

Quetelet, Adolphe: Explaining Crime Through Statistical and Cartographic Techniques

data, along with that of Guerry and others, is widely acknowledged to have set the stage examining the place-based aspects of crime. Quetelet was instrumental in originating what Kevin Courtright and Robert Mutchinick have identified as the cartographic school of criminology and David Weisburd and colleagues have called place-based criminology. The making of maps was a key development because it allowed the exploration of the spatial pattern of crime. Specifically, maps enabled researchers to ask questions such as Is crime spread evenly throughout France or is it concentrated in only a few areas? If some places have more crime than others, what might explain those differences? Maps also allowed Quetelet to make associations between major water transportation routes and criminal activity. Additionally, Quetelet examined the influence of climate on the propensity for criminal activity. By using the total number and rate of crime in “departments” (roughly the size of counties in the United States), he created maps of the distribution of crime across France. Darker shading on the map represented places where the number of crimes committed was above the average for France. Lighter shading represented places which were below the average rate of crime. By mapping the data, he was able to deduce general patterns in the geographical variation in the number of both crimes against persons and crimes against property. Crimes against persons were highest in the south of France and in Corsica. Crimes against property were highest in the northern part of France. As Paul and Patricia Brantingham note, the mapping of the early 19th century provided a set of consistent findings which formed the foundation for place-based criminology. First among these was that crime is concentrated in a few areas rather than uniformly distributed. Second as evidenced by the distribution of property and person crime, different crimes have different spatial patterns. Third, the concentrations of crime are related to social characteristics. Fourth, spatial patterns of crime were relatively stable over time. Quetelet may be surprised at the progression of criminological theory since his time. David Weisburd and Tom McEwen observe that difficulties in collecting additional data and challenges in map making proved to be significant technical obstacles to further development of cartographic criminology. At the same time, a general movement

toward positivism shifted the focus to individual and biological causes of crime. Until the Chicago School of the 1920s, there was very little development in the analysis of the spatial/place-based elements of crime. In the 1920s and 1930s, members of the Chicago School began studying the ecology of juvenile delinquency but at a much smaller level of analysis, the neighborhood. Like Quetelet, they examined both temporal stability and spatial distributions. Unlike Quetelet, they focused on the distribution of juvenile delinquents’ home addresses across the neighborhood of a single city. Chicago School theorists such as Ernest Burgess and Robert Park resurrected the study of place and crime and extended it to show how the morphology of the growth cities was related to the patterns of crime that occurred. Because of the emphasis on similarities between growth and change in organisms and growth and change in cities, this line of inquiry became known as ecological criminology. In addition to showing a link between social characteristics of neighborhoods and juvenile delinquency, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay also found that delinquency was concentrated in relatively few neighborhoods rather than spread throughout the city. Also similar to Quetelet, their data showed that levels of juvenile delinquency in neighborhoods tended to be relatively stable over time. However, their work added the knowledge that the stability of crime patterns persisted even if the people living within those neighborhoods changed. Although they were studying different countries, at different scales and in different centuries, Shaw and McKay’s findings reinforced the major findings of Quetelet from 100 years prior. Despite these revolutionary findings, ecological influences on criminal behavior fell out of favor, and the discipline of criminology returned to a focus on individuals rather than places. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s when researchers such as Terence Morris, Calvin Schmid, and Sarah Boggs began to look once again at ecology and the spatial patterns of crimes and criminals. Perhaps the final contribution of Quetelet that remains to be recognized (although it was alluded to earlier) is as a foundation for the development of opportunity theories of crime. In the early 1970s, Paul and Patricia Brantingham began to examine the role of human behavior patterns as they related to crime. At the same time, C. Ray

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

Jeffrey and Oscar Newman began studying how changes in the physical design could prevent crime. Ronald Clarke’s situational crime prevention grew out of these efforts. All of these perspectives are based upon the assumption that opportunity is the foundation for crime patterns. Thus, they draw directly from Quetelet’s earlier observations about the roles of opportunity and temptation in fostering crime events. It was the theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions of Quetelet which provided the basis for the development of place-based criminology in the late 21st century. Elizabeth R. Groff See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Cornish, Derek B., and Ronald V. Clarke: Rational Choice Theory; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Lombroso, Cesare: The Criminal Man

References and Further Readings Beirne, P. (1987). Adolphe Quetelet and the origins of positivist criminology. American Journal of Sociology, 92(5), 1140–1169. Brantingham, P. J., & Brantingham, P. L. (1991). Environmental criminology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. (Original work published 1981) Courtright, K. E., & Mutchnick, R. J. (2002). Cartographic school of criminology. In D. Levinson (Ed.), Encyclopedia of crime and punishment (pp. 175–177). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1961). Notes on the history of quantification in sociology—trends, sources and problems. Isis, 52, 277–333. Morris, T. (1957). The criminal area. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. O’Connor, J. J., & Robertson, E. F. (2009). Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet [Electronic version]. Retrieved April 1, 2009, from http://www-groups.dcs .st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Quetelet.html Quetelet, A. J. (1842). A treatise on man and the development of his faculties (T. Smibert, Trans.). New York: Burt Franklin. Quetelet, A. J. (1969). A treatise of man. Gainesville, FL: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints. (Original work published 1842) Quetelet, A. J. (1984). Research on the propensity for crime at different ages (S. F. Test Sylvester, Trans.).

753

Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. (Original work published 1831) Vold, G. B., Bernard, T.J., & Snipes, J. B. (2002). Theoretical criminology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Weisburd, D. L., Bruinsma, G., & Bernasco, W. (2008). Units of analysis in geographic criminology: Historical development, critical issues and open questions. In D. Weisburd, W. Bernasco, & G. Bruinsma (Eds.), Putting crime in its place: Units of analysis in spatial crime research (pp. 3–31). New York: Springer-Verlag. Weisburd, D. L., & McEwen, T. (1997). Introduction: Crime mapping and crime prevention. In D. L. Weisburd & T. McEwen (Eds.), Crime mapping and crime prevention: Crime prevention studies (Vol. 8, pp. 1–26). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology Richard Quinney is a sociologist who gained international renown as a radical criminologist. In various writings, he drew attention to the relationship between capitalism and crime and also analyzed crime and its control from a number of perspectives. Quinney’s notoriety and progression as a criminologist can be discerned through an examination of five standpoints including his (1) characterization by scholarly peers, (2) biography and career stages, (3) movement of writings from perspective to perspective to perspective, (4) focus on social transformation and peacemaking criminology, and (5) legacy of work for the field of criminology. A key theme of this entry is that, during the major stages of his intellectual career, Quinney laid the foundation for his articulation of a peacemaking criminology. Thus, this perspective represents a growth in his way of thinking rather than a rejection of his earlier criminologies.

Characterization by Scholarly Peers Quinney is known as one of the 15 pioneers in criminology (Martin et al., 1990). Quinney’s criminological writings began in the 1960s and spanned each decade into the 1990s. He retired as a professor emeritus in 1998. His work continues to be

754

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

discussed in prominent introductory sociology and criminology textbooks as an example of how a conflict theory approach can be applied to the study of crime. Recent crime theory textbooks also have attributed the origins and development of Marxist criminology and peacemaking criminology to his writings. Further illustrative of his impact, Quinney ranked in 2000 among the top 10 most-cited scholars in criminology (Wright, 2000, p. 119). In 1984, he received the Edwin H. Sutherland Award from the American Society of Criminology. This annual award recognized his outstanding contributions to criminological theory. Also, from the American Society of Criminology, he was presented the Major Achievement Award by the Critical Criminology Division in 1998. In 1986, he earned the Fulbright Lecture and Research Award from the Department of Political Science and Sociology at University College in Galway, Ireland. In 1992, he obtained the President’s Award from the Western Society of Criminology. In 2009, he attained the Sullivan Tifft Vanguard Award from the Justice Studies Associ­ ation for his “outstanding service to the academic discipline of criminology for the past 40 years.” The next part of this entry discusses Quinney’s biography and career stages. After that, his movement from perspective to perspective to perspective is delineated in relation to his career stages.

Biography and Career Stages Several writings have provided reflections and accounts about the life of Quinney (Wozniak, in press). When such writings are examined as a whole, basic tendencies become apparent in the biography and career stages of this prominent criminologist. First, these accounts of his life emphasized the importance of his growing up during the Great Depression on his family farm in Walworth County, which is 5 miles from Delavan, Wisconsin (near the state capital, Madison). Second, his childhood experiences were typical for the times such that he performed farm chores and helped in the breeding of pigs; played trombone in the high school band; and wrote and took pictures for the school newspaper. Third, during Quinney’s grade school and high school years, a quality of his personal character began that persisted for the rest of his life. This quality is that he tended to emerge among his peers as a leader. For example, during the eighth grade, he

agreed to give the commencement speech; during high school, he formed a musical band to play at school dances; and he was elected as the president of the student body at Carroll College. As an undergraduate student at Carroll College, Quinney again took some typical paths. For instance, he joined a fraternity and worked during the summer months as a hospital orderly. This latter job was pursued to gain firsthand work experience in keeping with his plan to become a hospital administrator. In fact, he majored both in biology and sociology to blend his educational interests toward a future hospital administration career path. However, during another summer employment as a hospital bill collector in Chicago, he disliked calling patients to pay their bills. As a result, upon graduating with a bachelor of science degree from Carroll College in 1956, Quinney decided to pursue graduate sociology studies at Northwestern University. He was greatly encouraged by the sociology department chair, Kimball Young, to study sociology at an advanced level. There, he assisted in the teaching of a criminology course, which was his initial exposure to the sociological study of crime (Trevino, 1984). Again, emerging as a leader among his peers, Quinney received his master’s degree in sociology in 9 months. This took place upon his completion of his master’s thesis, which was a study of the growth of a city and the complexity of its human relations titled Urbanization and the Scale of Society. After completing his master’s degree, Quinney embarked on doctoral studies in sociology. In 1957, he was awarded a research assistantship in the rural sociology program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Providing insight into directions his academic career would take over the next three decades, Quinney commented in his Auto­ biographical Reflections about his times as a sociology doctoral student. He wrote about himself in the third person and referred to himself as “Earl,” which is his first name; he changed his name to “Richard” in the 1960s: In those graduate school days, students were encouraged to dabble in fields of study outside sociology. Earl took courses in the philosophy of science, physical and cultural anthropology, American history, social and intellectual history, and archaeology, as well as the full range of courses

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

in sociology. He spent days of complete abandonment in a carrel in the university library and in the State Historical Society library. Gradually he began to focus on the relation of social institutions, especially religious and legal institutions, to the larger social and economic order. At a time in the 1950s when most graduate students were not exposed to Marxist ideas, it began to occur to him that the world was dominated by those with money and power. (p. 47)

As a sociology doctoral student, Quinney shifted his main interests from rural sociology to social theory and chose to complete one of his comprehensive exams on criminology. Notably, he was planning to conduct his dissertation research on religion with Howard Becker as his supervisor, who died unexpectedly at the beginning of this dissertation project (Martin et al., 1990). In 1960, Quinney took a temporary Instructor of Sociology position at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. There, he began again to undertake a dissertation project about crime and asked Marshall Clinard to serve as his supervisor. Under Clinard’s direction, he completed his dissertation, Retail Pharmacy as a Marginal Occupation: A Study of Prescription Violation. He received a Ph.D. in sociology in 1962. Quinney’s dissertation was conventional and mainstream in nature. According to Martin et al., Quinney’s dissertation “was based on a functionalist perspective” (p. 386). After completing his doctorate, Quinney served as a sociology professor at nine other universities in the United States. First, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky from 1962 to 1965. Second, he was employed as an associate professor at New York University from 1965 to 1970 and as a professor from 1970 to 1973. Third, in the years between those latter two appointments, he had a sabbatical and research and writing leaves from New York University from 1971 to 1974. He spent his sabbatical and these leaves at the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Fourth, he was a visiting professor at the City University of New York (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center) from 1974 to 1975. Fifth, he was a visiting professor at Boston University during the fall of 1975. Sixth, he was a visiting professor at Brown University from 1975 to 1978 and an

755

adjunct professor from 1978 to 1983. Seventh, he was a distinguished visiting professor at Boston College from 1978 to 1979 and an adjunct professor from 1980 to 1983. Eighth, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee during spring 1980. Ninth, he was a professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University from 1983 until his retirement in 1998.

Movement of Writings From Perspective to Perspective to Perspective As noted, Quinney’s doctoral dissertation involved a mainstream sociological analysis of prescription violation in the retail pharmacy occupation. He published various journal articles from his dissertation research. His working relationship with his dissertation supervisor, Marshall Clinard, also embellished his early academic career. They coauthored a well-received book that formulated an expansive typology of criminal behavior systems. So, what happened in Quinney’s academic life and research work that led him to be known as a key American spokesperson for radical criminology and as a sharp critic of the relationship of capitalism to crime? Before addressing this question in terms of his specific career stages, some related observations can be made. First, as mentioned earlier, Quinney, during his youth, displayed an ability to be a leader among peers. Thus, he adopted more of a stance of an innovator in criminology rather than a follower in this field. Second, Quinney’s upbringing tended to influence his analysis of how crime comes to be experienced by people in contemporary society and his notions of populism (i.e., a focus upon the interests of the common people). Third, according to Anderson (2008), Quinney’s journey in criminology was “to, through, and beyond Marxism” and involved work that entailed a sense of empathy with individual suffering and the oppressed (p. 3). Fourth, as discussed earlier, Quinney was encouraged as a sociology doctoral student to “dabble in fields outside sociology.” Not only did he take courses at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in anthropology, in archaeology, in American, social, and intellectual history, and in the philosophy of science, but he also widely read in other disciplines throughout his academic career in the 1960s to 1990s. He was trained as a

756

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

sociologist who focused upon criminology, but his writings commonly extended beyond the borders of the disciplines of sociology and criminology. In contrast, there have been thoughts among criminologists that Quinney’s continued shift from perspective to perspective to perspective in criminology was generally a jumbled, incoherent collection of writings that were somewhat out-of-step with the ongoing theories and research of mainstream criminology. In fact, after Quinney delivered his acceptance speech for his 1984 Edwin H. Sutherland Award, a discussion arose among those in the audience about whether “Quinney was saying goodbye to criminology” because he had a new focus on a prophetic, religious orientation in his analysis of society (Martin et al., 1990, p. 398). However, a different interpretation of Quinney’s career work in criminology can be offered. When his career stages were examined with his criminology writings as a whole, there was much more of a pattern, rather than a discontinuity, in his intellectual enterprise. Importantly, as discussed below, his intellectual stages were highly cohesive, deeply humane in orientation, and socially progressive in many respects. Thus, the remainder of this section first lays out when and where Quinney produced his varying perspectives in criminology. Second, the discussion also indicates how his experiences with social activism and socially progressive groups played an important role in his development of crime analysis from perspective to perspective to perspective. Third, this section identifies each of the theoretical perspectives that he applied to crime and his core writings linked to each of these perspectives. Fourth, this section shows that each perspective and set of writings were consistent with Quinney’s call for the development of peacemaking criminology. Furthermore, it is instructive to note that Quinney authored Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice in which he commented upon and provided illustrations of his writings from the 1960s through the 1900s. In the preface of this book, he made three sets of observations, which presented an inter-connected rationale about why he moved from perspective to perspective to perspective in his writings in keeping with ever-changing developments of the United States in the latter 1900s. First, Quinney wrote the following about his initial years as a sociology professor:

When I began graduate school in 1956, the dominant stance in the social sciences—in sociology in particular—was the acceptance of existing social conditions. Perhaps because of my background, on the edge of two worlds, town and country, I became an observer and critic of the status quo. . . . Enough to say here that as I studied sociology I became greatly interested in the social problems endemic to the country. Asking, of course, Why? And how could things be different? (p. x)

Second, in regard to the political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s and how it was linked to the development of Marxist and radical criminology, Quinney stated, Clearly, what was defined as crime was a product of the economic and political life of the country. Criminal laws were constructed to protect special interests and to maintain a specific social and moral order. This understanding of law and order was evident in the turmoils of the time: the civil rights movement for radical equality, the protests against the war in Vietnam, and the revolts within the universities. At the same time, there was emerging a legal apparatus, called the criminal justice system, to control threatening behavior and to preserve the established order. Critical criminology developed with an awareness of these events and conditions. By many names—radical, Marxist, progressive—a critical criminology was created to understand and to change the direction of the country. (p. x)

Third, Quinney stipulated that his writings from perspective to perspective to perspective were commonly linked as follows: My own travels through the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s were marked by a progression of ways of thinking and acting: from the social constructionist perspective to phenomenology, from phenomenology to Marxist and critical philosophy, from Marxist and critical philosophy to liberation theology, from liberation theology to Buddhism and existentialism. And then to a more ethnographic and personal mode of thinking and being. It is necessary to note that in all of these travels nothing was rejected or deleted from the previous stages; rather, each new stage of development incorporated what had preceded it. Each

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

change was motivated by the need to understand crime in another or more complex way, in a way excluded from a former understanding. Each stage incorporated the changes that were taking place in my personal life. There was to be no separation between life and theory, between witnessing and writing. (pp. x–xi)

In this light, Quinney’s criminological writings over the course of his career can be visualized (as he also tended to view it) as “artifacts of one social theorist who is trying to make sense of the world, who is bearing witness to the sufferings in the world, and who is hoping at the same time for a better world” (p. x). Another lens to distinguish the genesis of Quinney’s writings is to view his academic career as falling into five periods: 1960–1965. Canton, New York, and Lexington, Kentucky—first teaching jobs. Civil rights movement begins. Criminal Behavior Systems, empirical research, first articles. 1965–1971. New York City. Antiwar protests. Counter-culture, The Problem of Crime, The Social Reality of Crime, radical sociology, photography. 1971–1974. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sabbatical leaves from NYU. Resigns from full professor position. Socialist community, Critique of Legal Order. Beginning of Class, State, and Crime. 1974–1983. Providence, Rhode Island. Part-time teaching positions. Marxism, theology, spiritual search, revision of The Problem of Crime, writing of Providence, Buddhism. 1983–2000. Return to the Midwest. DeKalb, Illinois. Ethnography of everyday life, keeping of journals, photography, teaching environmental sociology, teaching peace and social justice, personal essays, Criminology as Peacemaking, For the Time Being, Borderland.

During each of these periods, Quinney’s academic work was coupled with an active and direct involvement in various political (civil rights movement, antiwar protests, socialist community meetings) and interpersonal growth (spiritual search, study of Buddhism, ethnographic writings, photography) interests and activities. Relatedly, at the

757

height of development of Marxist and radical theories and research of the Department of Criminology at the University of California, Berkeley, he traveled there to become acquainted firsthand with socially progressive ideas emerging about crime, evolving from criminology professors and students at the Berkeley campus and community. Again, in Quinney’s way of thinking, each of his criminological writings was done to “make sense of the world” in hope “for a better world.” For example, in his coauthored book Criminal Behavior Systems, he played a key role in applying a functionalist analysis of crime that was unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and scope. That is, no other criminology book or research during that period of time examined nine types of criminal behavior (violent personal, occasional property, public order, conventional, political, occupational, corporate, organized, professional) in terms of five categories (legal aspects, criminal career, group support, legitimate behavior, societal reaction, and legal processing). It was also during his New York City stage of the 1960s that he spent long periods of time examining crime statistics on 23rd Street at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency Library. Hence, during his employment as a sociology professor in New York City, Quinney authored two books, both published in 1970. One was titled The Problem of Crime, which was essentially a textbook of five chapters covering the meaning of crime (e.g., nature, types, and sources of criminal law); the development of criminology (e.g., before the 1800s, the 1800s, the 1900s), contemporary study of crime (e.g., criminal statistics, causal and philosophical assumptions in crime data); crime in American society (e.g., urban crimes, public morality crimes, business crimes, political crimes); and the future of crime. Similar to his earlier book, The Problem of Crime provided a broad treatment of salient themes addressed in each chapter. In this work, he pinpointed the need to pay closer attention to the “politicality of crime” given that much of the behavior that society labels as criminal had a political character. In The Social Reality of Crime, Quinney’s intent was to shift attention away from searching for the causes of crime and toward a reorientation of the study of crime about how the justice system affects criminal behavior. Here, according to Martin

758

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

et al., he was concerned with how definitions of criminals were constructed and how they were applied. Adapting emphases of conflict theory and phenomenology in his analysis, he posited in the Social Reality of Crime that the relationship between crime and the social order could be understood in terms of six propositions: 1. Crime is a definition of human conduct created by authorized agents in a politically organized society. 2. Criminal definitions describe behaviors that conflict with the interests of segments of society that have power to shape public policy. 3. Criminal definitions are applied by segments of society that have power to shape the enforcement and administration of criminal law. 4. Behavior patterns are structured in segmentally organized society in relation to criminal definitions, and within this context persons engage in actions that have relative probabilities of being defined as criminal. 5. Conceptions of crime are constructed and diffused in the segments of society by various means of communication. 6. The social reality of crime is constructed by the formulation and application of criminal definitions, the development of behavior patterns related to criminal definitions, and the construction of criminal conceptions. (pp. 15–23)

Similar to The Problem of Crime and the Social Reality of Crime, both of Quinney’s books, published while he was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were conceived to address “how one becomes labeled a criminal” rather than to answer why an individual commits crime. That is, Critique of Legal Order: Control in Capitalist Society and Class, State, and Crime were designed to move beyond the basic tenets of conflict theory and phenomenology and toward a theoretical approach grounded more in Marxist theory. In Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice, Quinney stated that he began Critique of Legal Order with “a call for a critical understanding of crime and the legal system. With a critical Marxian philosophy, I suggested, we could demystify the existing social order and, at the same time, create a world that moves us beyond the exploitation and oppression of capitalism” (p. xii).

To build his arguments in Critique of Legal Order, Quinney reviewed how positivist, social constructionist, and phenomenological modes of thinking were inadequate to accomplish an understanding of the American legal order. Instead, a critical Marxist approach provided better insight about “how the capitalist ruling class establishes its control over those it must oppress” (Quinney, p. 36). Moreover, Martin et al. maintained that this book illustrated that a class analysis could be applied to criminal law and crime control. In essence, to revamp the social order, according to Quinney, it would require a transition from capitalism to socialism, which is further proposed in Class, State, and Crime. He used a structural Marxist approach to explain legal order in this latter book, which discussed crime and the development of capitalism. It is here that the often used depiction of Quinney’s work appeared, which is that a capitalist economy produced crimes of domination and repression (committed by owners and the state to maintain the economic status quo); crimes of accommodation and adaptation (offenses committed by the workers and the poor to deal with class position deprivations); and crimes of resistance (committed by workers and the poor who have developed a class consciousness). According to Quinney, “only by going beyond capitalism to socialism, could the contradictions that produce the crime problem be confronted. Crime will continue to be ‘inevitable’ as long as capitalist society exists” (1977, p. 126). Additionally, Class, State, and Crime was concerned with “the prophetic meaning of social justice” which involved “the urge toward justice in human affairs. This urge becomes the will of divine origin operating in history, providing the source of inspiration to all prophets and revolutionaries” (p. 29). Quinney further maintained, Our prophetic heritage perceives the driving force of history as being the struggle between justice and injustice. We the people—in a covenant with God—are responsible for the character of our lives and our society, for the pursuit of righteousness, justice, and mercy. The social and moral order is consequently rooted in the divine commandments; morality rests on divine command and concern rather than on the relativity of reasonableness. (pp. 29–30)

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

This assertion in Class, State, and Crime of a need to apply themes of religion and spirituality into analyses of crime stemmed from Quinney’s Marxist view that capitalist justice has an emphasis on human manipulation and control (i.e., workers are enslaved, that all things and human beings are transformed into objects, and that a demotion of our world into a mere environment; a demonic quality to our political state). Hence, Quinney expanded his application of notions of religion and spirituality into his discussion of Providence: The Reconstruction of Social and Moral Order. Quinney described his personal impetus for Providence: “More than ever before, I began to combine the spiritual and the material. . . . After twenty-five years of excluding religious questions from my life, I was returning to questions that were essentially religious” (2001, p. 38). Providence turned attention toward the religious response to capitalism and included a chapter on “a religious socialist order.” In keeping with his previous analysis, in Providence he pointed out that a prophetic imagination “reflects the presence of the divine in history. Things of the world have their meaning not so in themselves as in the spiritual, in the word of God revealed in the world” (p. 113). Quinney ended Providence with these imageries: “Our historical struggle is thus for the creation of a social and moral order that prepares us for the ultimate of divine grace—the Kingdom of God fulfilled. Peace and justice through the Kingdom of God” (p. 114).

Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology So far, this entry has examined Quinney as a criminologist through three standpoints. These are his characterization by scholarly peers, his biography and career stages, and his movement from perspective to perspective to perspective. This analysis revealed his tendencies to act as a leader among his peers; promote ideas reflecting his experiences with populism ideals; and link his sociological interests with concerns in other related fields of study. However, only some key books of Quinney were addressed in this entry. Space limitations do not permit further analysis of over 30 books and nearly 80 journal articles that he produced during his lifetime. Nonetheless, Quinney’s

759

work has an ongoing concern to promote the development of social transformation in our contemporary society. This concern for social transformation closely coincided with his call and support for a peacemaking approach to emerge in criminology. A first example of Quinney’s concern with social transformation is in Critique of Legal Order. In the first chapter of this book, he posited that there are types of philosophical approaches that could be used to understand the legal order: positivistic, social constructionist, phenomenological, and critical. He suggested that in his work, he passed through each of the first three phases and was in the fourth (i.e., critical) approach (Martin et al., 1990, p. 394). Upon demonstrating shortcomings of the first three approaches, he endorsed adopting a critical philosophy of the legal order so that a critical-Marxian analysis of crime control in capitalist society could be developed. According to Quinney, In critically understanding (and demystifying) our current historical reality, we are in a position to act in a way that will remove our oppression and create a new existence. Though we are subject to the objective conditions of our age, as human beings we are also collectively involved in transforming our social reality. Our praxis is one of critical thought and action—reflecting upon the world and acting to transform it. . . . We can free ourselves from the oppression of the age only as we combine our thoughts and our actions, turning each back upon the other. (1974, p. 197)

A second example of Quinney’s concern with social transformation is seen in Class, State, and Crime. He elaborated on the relationship between crime and capitalism and illustrated how the prophetic meaning of justice (as described earlier) affected the thinking of people in our society today. He spoke very positively about the latter: Through the prophetic tradition, a tradition that is present also in the prophetic voice of Marxism . . . , a meaning of justice that can transform the world and open the future is once again emerging. Marxism and theology are confronting each other in ways that allow us to understand our existence and consider our essential nature. (1977, p. 33)

760

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

A third example of social transformation in Quinney’s work is apparent in the third edition of his Problem of Crime, which included as its subtitle A Peace and Social Justice Perspective. In a chapter titled “Peace and Social Justice,” Quinney and John Wildeman observed, The peace and social justice perspective continues to develop in criminology. There are proposals and programs on mediation, conflict resolution, and reconciliation; there is the movement to abolish the death penalty; and there are humanist programs of rehabilitation and community organization. These are the practices of a criminology of peacemaking, a criminology that seeks to alleviate suffering and thereby reduce crime. . . . This is a criminology that is based necessarily on human transformation in the achievement of peace and justice. Human transformation takes place as we change our social, economic, and political structure. And the message is clear: Without peace within us and in our actions, there can be no peace and justice in our results. Peace is the way. (p. 110)

Moreover, Quinney and Wildeman recognized that changing the social structure needed to coincide with social transformation at the personal level. Thereby, they emphasized, Without inner peace in each of us, without peace of mind and heart, there can be no social peace between people and no peace in societies, nations, and in the world. To be explicitly engaged in this process, of bringing about peace on all levels, of joining ends and means, is to be engaged in peace­ making. . . . The radical nature of peacemaking is clear: No less is involved than the transformation of our human being. Indeed, we will be engaged in action, but action will come out of our transformed being. Rather than attempting to create a good society first and then trying to make ourselves better human beings, we have to work on the two simultaneously. The inner and the outer are the same. . . . The transformation of ourselves and the world becomes our constant practice, here and now. (1991, p. 117)

Further, on social transformation, Quinney and Wildeman concluded,

All of this is to say, to us as criminologists, that crime is suffering and that the ending of crime is possible only with the ending of suffering. And the ending both of suffering and of crime—the establishing of justice—can come only out of peace, out of a peace that is spiritually grounded in our very being. . . . To eliminate crime—to end the construction and perpetuation of an existence that makes crime possible—requires a transformation of our human being. We as human beings must be peace if we are to live in a world free of crime, in a world of peace. (pp. 118–119, emphasis in the original)

These latter three examples of Quinney’s analyses of social transformation generally linked with his views of peacemaking criminology (Wozniak, 2008). Overall, there are six peacemaking criminology writings by Quinney as follows: 1. “The Theory and Practice of Peacemaking in the Development of Radical Criminology” 2. The Problem of Crime: A Peace and Social Justice Perspective, Third Edition 3. “The Way of Peace: On Crime, Suffering, and Service” 4. “A Life of Crime: Criminology and Public Policy as Peacemaking” 5. “Criminology as Moral Philosophy, Criminologist as Witness” 6. “Socialist Humanism and the Problem of Crime: Thinking About Erich Fromm in the Development of Critical/Peacemaking Criminology”

His second peacemaking criminology writing was addressed above in terms of its visions of social transformation. His first peacemaking criminology writing on the “The Theory and Practice of Peacemaking in the Development of Radical Criminology” specified that peacemaking is a “criminology that seeks to alleviate suffering and thereby reduce crime” (p. 5). He added that crime is one form of suffering all around us along with other forms such as poverty, hunger, violence, homelessness and destruction of the environment. Moreover, our criminal justice system is founded on violence, according to Quinney, and is a system that assumes violence can be overcome by violence. In this social context, he suggested the need

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

for both social transformation (i.e., changing our social, economic, and political structure) and personal transformation (i.e., care given to the inner life of us). In Quinney’s view, no peace can result without peace within us and in our actions. In his “Way of Peace” chapter, Quinney identified a list of assumptions supporting a rationale for the development of peacemaking criminology. He again contended that inner and social peace must come together at the same time and social transformation pertained to “the transformation of our human being. Political and economic solutions without this transformation inevitably fail” (p. 4). Quinney’s fourth peacemaking criminology writing “A Life of Crime: Criminology and Public Policy as Peacemaking” challenged criminologists to re-examine their personal and professional agenda. Thereby, he suggested that criminologists would do well to support peacemaking criminology as a “compassionate criminology” that “recognizes the interrelatedness of everything; that everyone is connected to each other and to their environment”— while also recognizing that crime rates still remain high and that our justice system has limited success in its correctional settings (p. 3). In this article, he encouraged personal transformation. On social transformation, Quinney similarly recommended that the “objective is quite simple: to be kind to one another, to break down barriers that separate us from one another, to live moment-to-moment our connection to all that is . . . our oneness” (p. 6). Quinney dealt with social transformation in one other peacemaking article, “Socialist Humanism and the Problem of Crime: Thinking About Erich Fromm in the Development of Critical/Peacemaking Criminology.” Quinney noted that Fromm, as a lifelong activist for peace, posited that the establishment of peace is a central task of humanity. In regard to social transformation, Quinney stated, like he had done in his “A Life of Crime” article, in peacemaking criminology, “the objective is clear: be kind to one another, to transcend the barriers that separate us from one another and to live everyday life with a sense of independence” (p. 26). He concluded: “Positive peace exists when the sources of crime— poverty, inequality, racism, and alienation—are not present” (p. 28). Hence, punishment (negative peace) is not the way of peace; positive peace (i.e., striving to eliminate the structure of violence and crime) is the objective of peacemaking criminology.

761

Legacy of Work for the Field of Criminology This entry has demonstrated that the paths that Quinney had taken in becoming a peacemaking criminologist involved more patterns than discontinuities. Quinney’s upbringing as a young boy living with his family on a small Wisconsin farm induced him to have a focus on the interests of common people throughout his career as a sociology professor and criminologist. Although he was best known for applying conflict theory into the field of criminology, Quinney took many controversial stands in his criminological writings as a way to “make better sense of the world” in hope “for a better world.” Through his involvement in criminological perspectives ranging from functionalism to Marxist theory and critical philosophy to peacemaking criminology, he commonly brought socially progressive ideas into criminological discourse. Quinney produced his varied writings addressing perspective to perspective to perspective of criminology upon ongoing connection with people actively and directly involved in political and community movements and interpersonal growth interests and activities. Hence, his call for the development of a combined personal and social transformation was far from being an academic lip service. Indeed, he put his urging to develop this combined type of transformation into actual practice in his daily life. Quinney’s travels from his life on a Wisconsin farm to becoming a peacemaking criminologist enabled his academic writings to contribute a host of themes to be part of the teaching and research literature of criminology in the latter 1900s. His legacy for criminology was multiple and predicated upon compassion and sensitivity for those experiencing social harms and personal indignities. It seems reasonable to further suggest that no one in the field of criminology has addressed the study of crime in the constantly evolving, personally engaging, and socially uplifting ways that Quinney had done over the course of four decades. In illustration of this point, the following is a list of concerns that Quinney’s criminology writings brought into focus for past and current times: •• How justice systems affect criminal behavior. •• How definitions of criminals are constructed and applied.

762

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology

•• It is important to demystify the existing social order. •• There is a need to create a world that moves us beyond the exploitation and oppression of capitalism. •• Instead of attempting to resocialize the individual offender, we need to revamp the legal order. •• Concern should be directed toward the prophetic meaning of social justice. •• Views of crime need to combine the spiritual and material. •• It is useful to adopt a critical philosophy of the legal order. •• There is a need to reflect upon the world and act to transform it. •• Peacemaking is a criminology that seeks to alleviate suffering and thereby reduce crime. •• Social transformation involves inner peace and outer peace. •• Criminologists would do well to support peacemaking criminology as a “passionate criminology.” •• The objective is quite simple—to be kind to one another, to break down barriers that separate us, and to link moment-to-moment our connection to all.

In sum, these and other compelling themes in Quinney’s work have resulted from his travels to peacemaking criminology. Criminologists, with all in society, would do well to continue to address such themes now and in the future. In The Problem of Crime, Quinney and Wildeman state, “Without peace within us and in our actions, there can be no peace and justice in our results. Peace is the way” (p. 10). John F. Wozniak See also Abolitionism; Anarchist Criminology; Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime; Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Peacemaking Criminology

References and Further Readings Anderson, K. B. (2008). Richard Quinney’s journey: The Marxist dimension. In J. F. Wozniak, M. C. Braswell, R. E. Vogel, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Transformative justice: Critical and peacemaking themes influenced by Richard Quinney (pp. 33–41). Lanham, MD: Lexington.

Clinard, M. B., & Quinney, R. (1967). Criminal behavior systems: A typology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Martin, R., Mutchnick, R. J., & Austin, W. T. (1990). Criminological thought: Pioneers past and present. New York: Macmillan. Pepinsky, H. E., & Quinney, R. (Eds.). (1991). Criminology as peacemaking. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Quinney, R. (1963). Occupational structure and criminal behavior: Prescription violation by retail pharmacists. Social Problems, 11, 179–185. Quinney, R. (1970). The problem of crime. New York: Dodd, Mead. Quinney, R. (1970). The social reality of crime. Boston: Little, Brown. Quinney, R. (1974). Critique of legal order: Crime control in capitalist society. Boston: Little, Brown. Quinney, R. (1977). Class, state, and crime: On the theory and practice of criminal justice. New York: Longman. Quinney, R. (1980). Providence: Reconstruction of social and moral order. New York: Longman. Quinney, R. (1982). Leaving the country: A Midwest education in sociology in the 1950s. Wisconsin Sociologist, 19, 54–66. Quinney, R. (1984). Journey to a far place: The way of autobiographical reflection. Humanity and Society, 8, 182–198. Quinney, R. (1989, Winter). The theory and practice of peacemaking in the development of radical criminology. The Critical Criminologist, 1, 5. Quinney, R. (1991). Journey to a far place: Autobiographical reflections. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Quinney, R. (1991). The way of peace: On crime, suffering, and service. In H. E. Pepinsky & R. Quinney (Eds.), Criminology as peacemaking (pp. 3–13). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Quinney, R. (1993). A life of crime: Criminology and public policy as peacemaking. Journal of Crime and Justice, 16(2), 3–9. Quinney, R. (1998). For the time being: Ethnography of everyday life. Albany: SUNY Press. Quinney, R. (2000). Bearing witness to crime and social justice. Albany: SUNY Press. Quinney, R. (2000). Criminology as moral philosophy, criminologist as witness. In R. Quinney (Ed.), Bearing witness to crime and social justice (pp. 193–213). Albany: SUNY Press. Quinney, R. (2000). Socialist humanism and the problem of crime: Thinking about Erich Fromm in the development of critical/peacemaking criminology. In

Quinney, Richard: Social Transformation and Peacemaking Criminology K. Anderson & R. Quinney (Eds.), Erich Fromm and critical criminology: Beyond the punitive society (pp. 21–30). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Quinney, R. (2001). Borderland: A Midwest journal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Quinney, R., & Wildeman, J. (1991). The problem of crime: A Peace and social justice perspective (3rd ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. Trevino, J. (1984). Richard Quinney: A biography. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Cincinnati, OH. Wozniak, J. F. (2008). The relevance of Richard Quinney’s writings on peacemaking criminology: Toward personal and social transformation. In J. F. Wozniak, M. C. Braswell, R. E. Vogel, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Transformative justice: Critical and peacemaking themes influenced by Richard Quinney (pp. 167–190). Lanham, MD: Lexington. Wozniak, J. F. (2008). Toward a theoretical model of peacemaking criminology: An essay in honor of

763

Richard Quinney. In J. F. Wozniak, M. C. Braswell, R. E. Vogel, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Transformative justice: Critical and peacemaking themes influenced by Richard Quinney (pp. 141–166). Lanham, MD: Lexington. Wozniak, J. F. (in press). Becoming a peacemaking criminologist: The travels of Richard Quinney. In F. T. Cullen, C. L. Johnson, A. J. Meyer, & F. Adler (Eds.), The origins of American criminology (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 16). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Wozniak, J. F., Braswell, M. C. Vogel, R. E., & Blevins, K. R. (Eds.). (2008). Transformative justice: Critical and peacemaking themes influenced by Richard Quinney. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Wright, R. A. (2000). Recent changes in the most-cited scholars in criminology: A comparison of textbooks and journals. Journal of Criminal Justice, 28, 117–128.

R given population or geographic unit has been taken as the measure of racial threat. However, researchers have also measured the economic dimension of racial threat at the aggregate level with the ratio of black to white unemployment rates and black to white income inequality. Studies have assessed the political component of racial threat using the ratio of black to white voters. In recent years, macro-level formulations of racial/ethnic threat have included the relative size of Latino populations. Researchers using this theoretical perspective have increasingly made reference to ethnic or minority threat as opposed to the concept of racial threat, because the Latino population has grown much faster than other minority groups in the United States. Some who have studied minority threat in an international context have applied the concept to the size and distribution of immigrants in a given country or region. Empirical examinations of the response to illegal immigrants in the United States have made a similar application. Several researchers have suggested that perceived threat from racial or ethnic minorities may be as important as aggregate concentrations of populations in relation to the mobilization of social controls. Tests of this perspective have approached threat in terms of the perceived racial or ethnic composition of place or by means of a direct assessment of criminal threat presumably posed by racial or ethnic minorities. Studies have measured perceived economic threat by asking respondents to estimate the chances that a white person will not get a job or promotion while an equally or less qualified black person would.

Racial Threat and Social Control Racial threat refers to the real or perceived threat that minorities may pose to a dominant racial or ethnic group’s political power, economic well-being, or sense of personal safety. Theorists presume racial threat, sometimes termed minority threat, social threat, racial group threat, or simply group threat, to be the basis for the mobilization of various forms of social control by those who have the power to do so. As applied by researchers, racial threat in its economic, political, or personal safety aspect has helped account for such diverse forms of social control as laws supporting racial segregation, felon disenfranchisement, opposition to affirmative action, public lynching, and a range of measures related to the administration of justice. The latter is the context in which racial threat is particularly relevant for criminology. Criminologists have hypothesized that racial threat is consequential for such justice-related outcomes as the size and funding of police departments, rates of arrest, killings by police, civil rights complaints against the police, correctional expenditures, rates of incarceration, individual chances of imprisonment, the establishment of death sentences, and executions. In general, scholars have conceptualized racial threat at the aggregate or macro-level and have used the size or concentration of racial and ethnic minority groups as the principal indicators. In its theoretical origins and for most research to date, the relative proportion of African Americans in a 765

766

Racial Threat and Social Control

Some research into criminal justice decision making, especially as it relates to criminal sentencing, has conceptualized racial threat at the individual level. These examinations have tested the hypothesis that justice officials may perceive minority defendants, because of their race or ethnicity, to be more dangerous to the community and, on that account, to sentence them more harshly than whites.

Development of the Perspective The racial threat and social control perspective originated with conflict theory which characterizes society in terms of different groups competing for resources, position, and power. Herbert Blumer was one of the first to formally describe the conflict between racial groups in the context of threat from the minority group to the dominant group. He observed that, over time, dominant group members develop the view that certain resources are the exclusive privilege of their group. Blumer argued that one way in which dominant group members react to perceived challenges to those exclusive privileges is with racial prejudice. It is the “fear or apprehension that the subordinate racial group is threatening, or will threaten, the position of the dominant group” that provides one important impetus to racial prejudice (p. 4). He presumed such threats to include economic competition as well as challenges to the dominant group’s status, power, and other privileges. In his seminal work, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations, Hubert Blalock took racial threat theory a step further and hypothesized ways in which minority threat would be related to actions by the majority group that would have social control consequences. Blalock’s argument was that a growing or more mobilized black minority will lead to discrimination by the white majority because of the economic or political power threats posed to the latter. In Blalock’s formulation, the perception of threat on the part of the white majority was expected to increase as the size of the black minority grew. However, he predicted that whites’ discriminatory responses to perceived threats would vary depending on whether the threat was to their economic well-being or political power. Blalock expected activities designed to suppress economic threat and maintain economic dominance

to expand in volume as that threat was perceived to grow. However, he hypothesized this expansion would occur at a decelerating rate. This non-linear pattern presumed that initial activities designed to hinder the economic achievements of the black minority would be successful, making further controlling activities by the white majority less necessary. Blalock also predicted a non-linear relationship between perceived political threat and discriminatory controls on the part of majority whites, but here the anticipated pattern was one of accelerating discrimination. In short, it was hypothesized that in order to successfully maintain political power, white majority “mobilization” would have to increase at a faster pace than that of the increase in size of the black minority. Blalock discussed three types of discrimination that could develop in response to threat. The first of these was political discrimination, which could take a variety of forms. Historically, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, illiteracy tests, and white-only primaries were obvious attempts to circumvent the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, passed shortly after the Civil War, which prohibited denial of suffrage on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. In addition, there is substantial evidence that the potential threat of newly enfranchised African Americans played a significant role in the enactment of felon disenfranchisement laws in many states. Symbolic segregation was a second form of discrimination described by Blalock as a white response to racial threat. He listed as an example of symbolic segregation the enactment of various Jim Crow laws, which had the symbolic purpose of drawing lines between the dominant white majority and the threatening black minority. This took many forms, including the legally enforced separation of drinking fountains, restrooms, waiting rooms, and restaurants. While such measures had no direct economic or political consequence, they were seen as having symbolic value, especially for those whites “whose status claims are otherwise negligible” (p. 165). Finally, Blalock depicted a third form of discrimination involving the development of what he characterized as threat-oriented ideologies. These ideologies comprised “certain exaggerated beliefs concerning the threatening aspects of the Negro personality,” which in his view functioned “to

Racial Threat and Social Control

rally white sentiment and justify violent or extreme forms of social control” (p. 167). In the United States, the belief that young black men are predisposed to crime and violence has been a prominent threat-oriented ideology for some time. As discussed in the next section, the iconic representation of black criminal threat has become a salient and enduring feature of popular discourse and has been a clear focus of much recent research making use of the racial threat framework.

Criminal Threat and Social Control For the purpose of criminological inquiry, theorists have gradually expanded the presumed threat posed by blacks and other minorities from the political and economic dimensions emphasized by Blalock to include the threat or perceived threat of crime. Most criminological research dealing with the concept of racial or minority threat makes use of aggregate indicators of threat and social control (e.g., percent black and arrest rates). However, as Allen Liska and Mitchell Chamlin observed some time ago, the implicit and generally unmeasured predicate of such macro level relationships is the perceived threat of crime. Specifically, “the threat hypothesis . . . suggests that a high percentage of nonwhites produces an emergent property, ‘perceived threat of crime,’ which increases arrest rates by increasing pressure on police to control crime” (pp. 384–385). While the presumed association of crime with black men is well established in American culture, there is some evidence that it has grown substantially more conspicuous since the end of civil rights activism in the 1960s. Among the identified factors contributing to the growth of this conflation of race and crime are political strategies intended to mobilize electoral support by playing on white fear and media stereotypes that reinforce the putative connection between race and criminal threat. Scholars suggest that the connection between race and crime has become so well established in popular culture that, for some people, talking about crime and crime control is seen as a code for talking about race. Moreover, they argue that such coded language has become a staple of what Robert Entman termed modern racism. In the past 10 years, however, media and political discourse has noticeably shifted to encompass what is characterized as a growing threat of crime from Latino males,

767

particularly that involving drugs and violence. So the iconography of perceived criminal threat now clearly includes both a racial and ethnic dimension.

Conclusion Racial and minority threat theory has proven to be an increasingly visible stimulus for criminological research. For example, threat research has established that cities with higher minority percentages have larger police departments, higher arrest rates, and police who are more likely to use deadly force. States with larger concentrations of African Americans were the earliest to establish felon disenfranchisement laws and the slowest to abandon those measures. Studies have shown that such states have higher rates of incarceration, are more likely to have the death penalty, and are also more likely to carry out executions. Empirical examinations have linked both fear of crime and popular support for the death penalty to the racial composition of place. Evidence has also demonstrated that the perceived risk of criminal victimization rises with the proportion of the population that is either Latino or black. Finally, researchers have found that the more crime is associated with African Americans, the stronger the public support for harsh criminal justice punishments. It is clear that the range and diversity of research grounded in this perspective continues to grow as does the relevance of the threat perspective to the field. Justin Pickett and Ted Chiricos See also Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime; Chiricos, Ted: Racial Threat and Fear; Turk, Austin T.: The Criminalization Process; Vold, George B.: Group Conflict Theory

References and Further Readings Blalock, H. M. (1967). Toward a theory of minoritygroup relations. New York: Wiley. Blumer, H. (1958). Race prejudice as a sense of group position. Pacific Sociological Review, 1, 3–7. Chiricos, T., Welch, K., & Gertz, M. (2004). Racial typification of crime and support for punitive measures. Criminology, 42, 359–390. Entman, R. M. (1990). Modern racism and the images of blacks in local television news. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7, 332–345.

768

Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

Liska, A. E. (1992). Social threat and social control. Albany: SUNY Press. Liska, A. E., & Chamlin, M. B. (1984). Social structure and crime control among macrosocial units. American Journal of Sociology, 90, 383–395. Quinney, R. (1970). The social reality of crime. Boston: Little, Brown. Vold, G. B. (1958). Theoretical criminology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder Adrian Raine is one of the more prominent criminologists in modern times to examine the potential for psychological or psychiatric disorders to serve as the basis of criminal behavior. According to Raine, crime is linked with diagnoses found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, text revision (DSM-IV-TR) and/or neurophysiological deficits that are identifiable by medical science. While crime, in and of itself, is not considered a disorder, the possession of antecedent disorders are thought to be contributory factors associated with crime. In other words, crime may be symptomatic of a psychologically disordered state. Like many theorists who study crime from a mental health and/or psychological perspective, Raine often refers to crime as being antisocial behavior. Such a term encapsulates a variety of behaviors, including those that are not criminal but are problematic and/or perceived as odd within a given society. One key feature of Raine’s early research is his tendency to use psychometric measures and research that seems more consistent with the field of psychology than criminology. Indeed, this approach is reflected in a study conducted in 1985 in which Raine sought to find a connection between psychopathy and schizophrenia as well as borderline personality disorder. Raine utilized Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist as well as scales derived from the various DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenic and borderline personality disorders. Research prior to Raine’s 1985 study indicated connections between these disorders and criminal behavior. However, Raine found no support for such connections. This finding is important because, in many

cases, Raine tended to refute the research of other authors based on his own findings. Raine has conducted other studies that have also attempted to validate the findings of well known researchers such as Hans Eysenck. In a 1981 study, Raine and Peter Venables tested Eysenck’s theory of socialization as a means of explaining antisocial conduct. Specifically, Eysenck’s theory contended that criminal behavior and the seriousness of that behavior had its roots in individual differences in susceptibility to classical conditioning experiences. Ultimately, Raine and Venables found only weak (if any) support for Eysenck’s work. The purpose to bringing these early studies into this portrayal of Raine and his theory on “Crime as a Disorder” is to demonstrate the skeptical eye that he maintained while conducting research. It is clear that, during the early stages of his career, he went to great lengths to ensure that his research was rigorous and sound. In 2004, Raine wrote an exclusive article for BBC News where he provided a very candid, clear, and focused discussion of his views regarding criminality and pathology. In doing so, Raine pointed toward theories that focus on social factors such as poverty and unemployment, noting that the evidence implicating pathology and brain impairments is much more compelling. According to Raine (2004), it is the existence of brain impairments that play a key role in criminality, particularly repetitive criminality. Raine notes that research on genetic and biological factors have played an equal or greater role in explaining criminal behavior. He has referred to his particular area of interest as biocriminology, which consists of scientific studies that are traditional akin more to psychiatric and/or neuropsychological research than that of the typical sociological tradition. Consistent with a biological approach, Raine notes the various forms of brain imaging, such as functional magnetic resonance (f-MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans. Raine further points to a plethora of research studies that have determined that poor functioning in the prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain that engages in higher order reasoning—is a key causal factor related to life persistent criminality. Deficits in the cerebral cortex have been associated with murderers, psychopaths, persons with aggressive characteristics, schizotypal, and antisocial personality characteristics. Other researchers such as

Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

Terrie Moffit have produced a variety of studies that are consistent with Raine’s contentions. Raine (1993) points toward the use of electroencephalograms (EEGs) with various subjects from the criminal, delinquent, psychopathic, and violent population. A large number of these studies, such as those conducted by J. Volavka in 1987 and V. Milstein in 1988, have found that a variety of abnormal EEG readings in certain specific criminal populations, especially those who engage in repetitive offending (Bartol & Bartol, 2007). With such empirical evidence, one may wonder why it is that this type of research is not accepted in a more matter-of-fact manner by mainstream criminologists. The answer to this lies in the flaws that exist in the methodologies of many of these studies. Raine (1993) has acknowledged that many of these studies do have obvious limitations, both due to the procedure used and in regard to their general use among broader criminal populations. Nevertheless, it is equally true that as many (and perhaps more) limitations exist with studies from the fields of sociology and/or “soft” psychology. The term soft psychology is meant to refer to those psychological experiments that lack the use of hard science approaches as is found with medical-based and neurophysiological research. In such cases, the rigor of these experiments, being based on standardized surveys and psychometric scales, is not considered as great as those that also have some sort of physiological measure that is triangulated with the use of the survey or psychometric tool. Though this is not to discount the research conducted through the use of standardized psychological instruments, particularly those that have been found to be valid and reliable in their psychometric properties, this is to say that the inclusion of physiological measures from f-MRIs, PET scans, and EEGs helps provide an additional scientific measure that augments data obtained from standardized instruments and also counterbalances many of the weaknesses in their administration (Bufkin & Lutrell, 2005). It is with this in mind that biocriminality utilizes physiological measures to find associations among the criminal population, particularly those who are recidivists. As with populations of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, many offenders who are repetitively persistent in their criminal behavior possess cerebral imbalances in stimulation and/or

769

learning ability (Bennett et al., 2004). This research dovetails with longitudinal research by Terrie Moffitt and Anthony Walsh that showed that continued criminal activity among life-course-persistent offenders is associated with physiological factors. A child’s propensity toward antisocial—and later criminal—behavior emerges from inherited or acquired neurophysiological deficits. These deficits are usually first manifested as subtle cognitive deficiencies, a difficult temperament, and/or hyperactive behavior. These deficits are consistent with research on stimulation, sensation seeking, learning, and the tendency to engage in high-risk and/or aggressive behaviors (Bartol & Bartol, 2007). This research provides an interesting landscape against which Raine notes that the brains of criminal offenders tend to be physically different from noncriminals and, according to Raine, results show “an 11 percent reduction in the volume of grey matter (neurons) in the prefrontal cortex” (2004, p. 2). Neuropsychological research has clearly demonstrated that a lack of neurons in any area of the brain means less brain activity, and this is particularly true of the prefrontal cortex region of the brain, according to Neil Carlson. Raine has pointed out that, similar to other researchers, findings demonstrate that neurological deficits can explain recidivist offending across an offender’s entire life course. Spanning from childhood to later adulthood, the recidivist tends to have a number of corollary characteristics and experiences that dovetail with his or her continued criminality. Quite often, antecedent variables that are common among these offenders are neurophysiological abnormalities and deficits that either occur at birth or are the result of injury, head trauma, or illness during the offender’s early years. Compared to other offenders, these offenders tend to be more aggressive and also tend to have histories of poor judgment and impulse control. According to Raine, the “bad brains” of these offenders literally leads to bad behavior, to put it in simple terms. Raine (2004) has also noted that numerous studies of sibling twins and adoptive siblings provide evidence that genetic processes have a casual contribution for nearly half of all antisocial and criminal behavior. Raine’s deference to twin studies came after he had conducted a careful review of the research literature on twin studies. From this review, Raine concluded that “summary statistics from

770

Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

13 twin analyses show that 51.5 percent of MZ twins are concordant for crime compared to 20.6 percent for DZ twins, indicating substantial evidence for genetic influences on crime” (1993, p. 289). Aside from genetics, Raine (2004) notes that for half of the causal factors that are environmental, biology is still intertwined as an explanatory factor. As an example, one might consider children who are victims of child abuse. If the child suffers some sort of head trauma or similar injury, brain damage can follow, which in turn often leads to future antisocial and aggressive behavior. Raine has also pointed to research revealing that childhood malnutrition has been linked to low IQs and conduct disorder. He notes research that shows that when 3-year-olds are given better nutrition and appropriate physical exercise for a period of 2 years or more, they have better brain functioning (EEG measures) by age 11 when compared with control groups. Further, longitudinal research shows a 35 percent reduction in criminal behavior when subjects turn 23, as compared with control groups. Raine’s contentions are supported by other wellknown criminological researchers, such as Terrie Moffit as well as Jana Bufkin and Vickie Lutrell. When this research is considered in conjunction with twin-based studies, very convincing evidence emerges in support of biopsychological and/or biosociological approaches to explaining criminal behavior. Thus, it would appear that Raine is not alone in his belief that neurophysiological factors serve as primary causal variables for a large proportion of the criminal behavior that occurs. Raine has concluded that given the current state of research, the biological and genetic findings are irrefutable. He has also noted that these findings provide some implications from a crime prevention standpoint. In fact, Raine has noted that one reason for the failure to stop much of the crime that occurs is due to a persistent tendency for social activists and policy makers to ignore the biological and genetic contributions to the causation of crime. In response to this oversight, Raine has noted a need to place resources on new interventions that improve human brain structure and functioning among persons at risk of becoming repeat offenders. It is with this knowledge that Raine has concluded that for crime to be significantly reduced, society must make an active effort to provide interventions that begin in early childhood. He notes the

need for improved prenatal and perinatal health care, improved nutrition for the child that carries over beyond early childhood, and the use of medications for severely aggressive children. Raine points to the possibility of new drugs that might correct faulty neurotransmitters and brain abnormalities that cause violence. Further, it may be that corrective brain surgery may prove helpful with criminals who display violent behavior. All of these possibilities have been noted by Raine (1997, 2004). While such interventions are yet to be seen, the potential contributions of biological and biopsychological explanations of crime have been clearly established by Raine. He clearly notes that biological factors cannot and do not explain all of criminal behavior by themselves. Rather, it is Raine’s (1997) contention that many (but not all) instances of repeated criminal behavior may represent some type of disorder or psychopathology in a manner similar to depression, schizophrenia, or other conditions that are recognized as bona fide clinical disorders. He points toward criteria used to determine psychopathology as an overall gestalt from which criminal behavior can be compared. In doing this, he provides a compelling argument that biopsychological factors are intimately involved in the origins of criminal behavior. It is also clear that through his research and writings, Raine has helped reshape the development of criminology as a discipline. Robert D. Hanser See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Neurology and Crime; Prenatal Influences and Crime; Psychophysiology and Crime; Schizophrenia and Crime

References and Further Readings Arseneault, L., Tremblay, R. E., Boulerice, B., Seguin, J. R., & Saucier, J. (2000). Minor physical anomalies and family adversity as risk factors for adolescent violent delinquency. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157, 917–923. Bartol, C., & Bartol, A. (2007). Criminal behavior: A psychosocial approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bennett, D., Pitale, M., Vora, V., & Rheingold, A. (2004). Reactive vs. Proactive antisocial behavior: Differential correlates of child ADHD symptoms. Journal of Attention Disorders, 7, 197–204.

Rape Myths and Violence Against Women Bufkin, J. L., & Luttrell, V. R. (2005). Neuroimaging studies of aggressive and violent behavior: Current findings and implications for criminology and criminal justice. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 6, 176–191. Carlson, N. (2004). Physiology of behavior (8th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Eysenck, H. J. (1973). The inequality of man. San Diego, CA: EDITS. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and lifecourse-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Moffitt, T. E., & Walsh, A. (2003). The adolescencelimited/life-course-persistent theory of antisocial behavior: What have we learned? In A. Walsh & L. Ellis (Eds.), Biosocial criminology: Challenging environmentalism’s supremacy (pp. 125–144). Hauppage, NY: Nova Science. Raine, A. (1993). The psychopathology of crime: Criminal behavior as a clinical disorder. New York: Academic Press. Raine, A. (2004). Biological key to unlocking crime. BBC News. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ programmes/if/4102371.stm Raine, A. (2006). Crime and schizophrenia: Causes and cures. New York: Nova Science. Raine, A., Brennan, P., Farrington, D. P., & Mednick, S. A. (Eds.). (1997). Biosocial bases of violence. New York: Plenum. Raine, A., Lencz, T., & Mednick, S. A. (Eds.). (1995). Schizotypal personality disorder. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Raine, A., & Sanmartin, J. (Eds.). (2007). Violence and psychopathy. New York: Springer. Raine, A., & Venables, P. H. (1981). Classical conditioning and socialization—a biosocial interaction? Personality and Individual Differences, 2, 273–283.

771

74 percent of completed and attempted sexual assaults against females were not reported to the police. Many rape and sexual assault survivors often do not come forward to report their crimes because they fear they would not be believed by their support system or because they do not define themselves as rape victims. In many cases, rape victims are reluctant to acknowledge being raped due to prevailing social and cultural biases related to rape. Statistics and research also show that it is difficult to charge and convict perpetrators of rape. A key source of victim reluctance to report victimization and of difficulties in convicting offenders are stereotypical attitudes and pervasive false beliefs about rape, its victims, and perpetrators. These beliefs and prevailing attitudes have been coined as “rape myths.” Rape myths revolve around the definition of rape victim (the “real” victim), the circumstances in which forced sex is defined or perceived as rape, the nature of victim-offender relationship that lead to or “justify” rape, and proper victim reactions to rape. Below, prevailing rape myths about women, the theories that explain their origin or persistence, and the impact of these myths on violence against women are described. Finally, measures to prevent or attenuate the impact of myths on violence against women are discussed.

Common Rape Myths About Women Several studies indicate a wider range of common myths about female rape victims. Nine prominent rape myths are described.

Rape Myths and Violence Against Women

1. Women dressed “indecently” or “inappro­ priately” ask for it (rape). It is evident in research that rape can happen to anyone. Women cannot be blamed for being raped due to their appearance. Rape is not about sex but rather power and control by the rapist over the victim.

Rape is defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Uniform Crime Reports as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Rape is one of the least reported violent crimes in the United States. Thus, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1992 and 2000, on average 63 percent of completed rapes, 65 percent of attempted rapes, and

2. She wanted to be raped. Female rape victims presumably act sexy or tease men because they want to get raped. If a woman encourages a man or reaches a certain point in their intimacy short of sexual intercourse and then gets raped, then she has agreed to have sex with her partner. There is also a belief that women fantasize about being raped or want to be raped by men they do not know.

772

Rape Myths and Violence Against Women

3. It wasn’t really rape. If the female victim does not have any visible bruises or injuries or has not fought back against the perpetrator, it is not rape. If the female victim did not clearly say “no” to the rapist, it means she wanted to have sex and therefore cannot argue that the forced sex is not rape.

between alcohol usage and becoming a rape victim, and some rapes are perpetrated after the offender has caused the victim to consume substances. Legally, however, sexual intercourse without the victim’s consent, or when the victim is incapacitated due to substance usage, is considered rape.

4. He didn’t mean to rape her; a wife cannot be raped. In certain instances, the man may have gotten sexually carried away and never meant to rape her; it just happened, because men cannot control themselves. Another variant of this myth pertains to married couples. A husband forcing his wife to have sex without her consent is not committing rape. They are married and sex is assumed to be part of the marriage contract and should be expected.

9. Rape victims come mainly from minority or marginal communities or are not “good women”; rape victims deserve to be raped as they have bad reputations or much sexual experience. Research shows that rape occurs at all communities and at all levels of socio-economic status. Also, having prior sexual experiences does not make it legal to force sex on women. All women have the right to select their partners regardless of prior or extent of their experience. Furthermore, even prior sexual relationship with a specific man cannot be a justification for rape at a later point.

5. She may have lied that she has been raped or women may hype the impact of rape in their lives. One of the prevalent myths indicates that women who report being raped may have enjoyed the sex with their perpetrator and then changed their mind later. Hence, these so-called victims may be lying about their victimization. Another existing stereotype about female victims is that they can just forget the horrible experience and move on. Research shows that nearly one third of all rape victims develop symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorders related to rape and that 11 percent or more suffer from it for a prolonged period of time. 6. Most rapists are either black or Hispanic. This myth suggests that rape is perpetrated only or mostly by racial minorities and is often minority perpetrators prey on white women. Research shows that the majority of violent crimes against women (80 to 90 percent) are intra-racial—that is, are committed by someone of the same racial background as the victim.

It should be noted that there are also rape myths about male victims, mostly those who are raped by other men. They include the following: (1) Being raped by a male attacker is tantamount to or results in loss of masculinity. (2) Only gay men are sexually assaulted by men. (3) Men are incapable of functioning sexually unless they are sexually aroused. (4) Men cannot be forced to have sex against their will. (5) Men are less affected by sexual assault than women. (6) Men are always ready to accept any sexual opportunity. (7) A man is expected to be able to defend himself against sexual assault. These myths also portray men as incapable of controlling their behavior under certain circumstances, and blame the victim if rape occurs. The theories explaining rape myths about women, listed in the next section, explain rape myths about male victims as well.

7. Most rapists wait in a dark alley waiting to attack a (female) stranger or rapes happen only in “bad” neighborhoods. Studies show that the majority of the rapes take place at the home of the victim or the offender. Nearly 60 percent of rape and sexual assault incidents are reported by victims as occurring in their own home or at the home of a friend, a relative, or a neighbor.

Theories explaining rape myths address cultural and societal factors responsible for the emergence and persistence of rape myths about women as victims.

8. Victims who are drunk or on drugs are responsible for their rape. There is a correlation

Feminist theories emphasize the role of patriarchy (or male hegemony) as the cultural basis underlying

Theories Explaining the Origins or Persistence of Rape Myths

Feminist Theories

Rape Myths and Violence Against Women

gender roles and power differentials between the sexes. Stereotyping of gender roles is widely practiced in most cultures: girls are expected to be passive and behave in a “feminine” manner; boys are expected to be “masculine” and are positively reinforced for being aggressive. Feminist theories emphasize inequality, dominance, or other sources of women’s oppression as being at the root of rape myths about women. They argue that rape myths reflect or contribute to men’s ability to control and dominate women. Just World Theory

According to this theory, individuals believe that the world is a just and orderly place; therefore, those who are harmed get what they “truly deserve.” The desire to blame a woman for becoming a rape victim is a way to maintain intact our beliefs in a just world and reduce fear of victimization. Thus, a woman deserves to be raped if she has dressed that way or she drank with her date. It should be noted that these theories can also explain rape myths about men as victims, portraying them as not masculine, as responsible for their victimization, and for deserving the rape.

Impact of Rape Myths and Measures to Reduce Its Impact The impact of rape myths vary across ages, ethnicities, and gender. Studies have found that older women are more likely to support rape myths than younger women. Significant differences are found across race/ethnicity and class. Rape myths also cause women not to consider themselves as victims, and to blame themselves for the rape and for failing to report the incident to authorities. Research shows further that rape myths are related to the prospects that women from certain communities or with certain attributes will be victimized or how the police and judicial system would respond to them. Despite legal reforms that addressed various rape myths, or passage of laws that challenge prevailing beliefs about the “real” victim or condition that “justify” rape, there are many individuals who subscribe to the myths and blame victims for their victimization. Educating the citizenry, beginning at the public school and continuing at college level, is a starting point to bring about awareness

773

concerning rape. Media could be another prime tool to undermine the stereotypes embodied in rape myths and for providing accurate portrayals of victims and their victimization. Continued education, as well as sensitivity and cultural competence training are also necessary to ensure that agents of the criminal justice system (police, prosecutors, judges) and members of the health care and medical systems are aware of the many subtle ways in which rape myths affect how victims feel or behave, and how law enforcement and medical systems respond to the victimization. Edna Erez and Meghna Bhat See also Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape; Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape; Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory; Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk

References and Further Readings Andre, C., & Velasquez, M. (1990). The just world theory [Electronic version]. Issues in Ethics, 3(2). Retrieved September 15, 2008, from http://www.scu .edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/justworld.html Chapleau, K. M., Oswald, D. L., & Russell, B. L. (2008). Male rape myths: Role of gender, violence and sexism. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 23, 600–615. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2006). Uniform crime reports: Crime in the United States, 2006. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Lonsway, K. A., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (1994). Rape myths: In review. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18, 133–164. Lonsway, K. A., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (1995). Attitudinal antecedents of rape myth acceptance: A theoretical and empirical reexamination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 704–711. Rennison, C. M. (2002). Rape and sexual assault: Reporting to police and medical attention, 1992– 2000.Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (2006). Extent, nature and consequences of rape victimization: Findings from the National Violence against Women Survey. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. Wilson, P. (1978). The other side of rape. Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press. Winkler, C. (2002). One night: Realities of rape. New York: AltaMira Press.

774

Rational Choice and White-Collar Crime

Rational Choice and White-Collar Crime Rational choice theory serves to explain why and under what conditions any particular white-collar offender opts to commit a criminal offense. Criminal justice theorists readily understand that such factors incorporate a consideration of deterrence and overall situational factors leading to criminal behavior. This entry focuses on the nature of rational choice theory and institutional factors that help to explain the connection between rational choice and white-collar crime. Special attention is given to Raymond Paternoster and Sally Simpson’s rational choice theory of corporate crime.

General Considerations The concept of rational choice theory is derived from the notion that individuals consciously and deliberately choose criminal behavior of their own free will. For example, an individual choosing to undertake a white-collar act assesses the nature of the immediate action and the chances of successfully completing the action without facing systematic criminal justice sanctions. The components of criminal behavior forming rational choice considerations are the immediate background or social situation (e.g., an urban setting for violent crime or office setting for whitecollar criminals), justification for the physical attack on individuals or the financial property of individuals and/or corporations, and the prospects of “getting away” with the criminal action. The immediate situation dictates whether criminal activity is rational through self-justification of the specific action and an understanding that individuals can continually violate such laws with impunity. Repeated criminal behavior without detection leads individuals or financial entities to assume that white-collar crime (e.g., embezzlement or corporate fraud practices) is normative and acceptable for immediate and long-term gain. Rational choice is also closely connected with the conception of routine activity theory. The notion of routine activities assumes a particular pattern of behavior associated with a person (or group) and a given setting. In the case of street crime, a particular mall or bar may be a facilitator of collective activity.

Such activity might be considered deviant if there are illicit actions, such as violent assaults or the exchange of illegal drugs within the setting. A systematized pattern of such behaviors leads to a lifestyle defined as deviant in its basic nature. White-collar crime can take a similar direction. Corporations or individual employees embrace criminal activity “because they can.” Upper-echelon managerial ranks within corporate organizations at times engage in corruptive practices. Such practices as embezzlement, junk bond trading, manufacture of defective products, and environmental damage result from this process. For example, Bill Moyers and others in the now-famous PBS documentary Chemical Wars document how Union Carbide plants in Baton Rouge (otherwise known as “Cancer Alley”) allegedly served to undermine the health of their workers. Long-time workers were systematically dying of cancer-related illnesses. It was not until much later that investigators discovered notations in worker files. These documents indicate implicit knowledge of the chemical compounds and the dangers of contamination or exposure. Enron is another such example of how corporations shield illegal practices through layers of bureaucratic information management. Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were cognizant of the fact that the financial reports falsely reflected an ongoing profit margin. In reality, the company was drowning in debt while leveraging their cash flow through American and offshore financial institutions. Used computers and other corporate property were routinely certified higher than their asset value. In addition, as noted in the documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron artificially manipulated energy prices in the state of California. In the interim, employees could not withdraw their pension funds, and investment houses funneling retirement funds into Enron were misled into believing that the firm was solvent. Kenneth Lay also forged a tight alliance with former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney. This alliance enabled Lay to influence energy regulation. For example, several energy regulation bills Lay drafted were submitted into the system and eventually passed into law by the United States Congress. In the end, billions of dollars in corporate and individual investor funds were systematically defrauded by Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and other corporate officials.

Rational Choice and White-Collar Crime

Finally, white-collar crime as a rational choice potentially flourishes in an atmosphere of lax regulation. Lack of general deterrence or a failure of governmental regulatory bodies to follow through on corporate malfeasance can have harmful results. Deterrence must come from active investigations by federal prosecutors or governmental officials within the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Food and Drug Administration. Lack of diligence can lead to overpricing and product safety issues with a direct impact on unsuspecting consumers. The circumstances of Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme typify the regulatory problem. Federal officials expend limited resources in the investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime. Past scandals involving savings and loan institutions and junk bond securities fraud were revealed long after major economic theft was perpetrated. Federal agencies looked the other way in expressing indifference until the full state of the damage was revealed. In the case of Madoff, media reporting on 60 Minutes revealed that investigators were alerted to the unlikely legitimacy of the Madoff investment yields of 10 to 12 percent. However the Securities and Exchange Commission took no action at the time. As a result, more victims were swindled and the Ponzi scheme reached historic proportions. What can we learn from the Madoff example? The obvious point is that failure to hold white-collar criminals culpable in the early stages of an inquiry produces reinforced behavioral actions. Lack of certain deterrence from within the system reinforces the rational choice behavior. Further, the failure to apply serious punishment in most white-collar crime cases gives the impression that the criminal justice system is lenient on these transgressions.

Rational Choice and Corporate Crime Paternoster and Simpson (1993) developed the most systematic work in this area, proposing a rational choice theory of corporate crime. Corporate crimes are illegal offenses that employees commit on behalf of the company for which they work (e.g., fix prices). Paternoster and Simpson call their approach a subjective utility theory because it links corporate offending to the perceived, rather than to the objective, costs and benefits of breaking the law.

775

Paternoster and Simpson include three types of perceived costs in their theory. First, there is the extent to which employees contemplating crimes on behalf of the corporation believe that they might personally be formally sanctioned for their lawbreaking, such as being prosecuted by the criminal justice system. Second, these employees might fear informal sanctions, such as damaging the reputation of the company or being ostracized by family and friends in the community. Third, there is the possibility of losing self-respect. This could be a matter of feeling shame or guilt. In general, those perceiving fewer formal, informal, and self-imposed costs would be more likely to decide to engage in a corporate crime. Paternoster and Simpson also focus on the perceived costs of trying to comply with regulatory rules (e.g., obey environmental pollution laws or workplace safety laws). Trying to follow the law may result in inefficient business practices that depress company profits and hurt an employee’s career. They also assert that corporate decision makers perceive benefits of not complying with legal standards. Thus, noncompliance might allow the company to be more profitable than competitors who follow the rules. In turn, this might increase the value of company stock and induce more investments from financial institutions. Paternoster and Simpson argue further that morality matters in the decision to offend. This occurs in two ways. First, moral inhibitions refer to the belief that it is “wrong” to violate safety, environmental, financial, and similar rules. Such morality thus might overrule any simple cost-benefit calculation an employee might have. The failure to consider morality is thus an important omission in crass rational choice theories. Second, employees also perceive the legitimacy or fairness of the rules the company is being asked to follow. If they believe that regulations are unreasonable or being applied capriciously, this might remove their moral inhibitions and free them to consider the sheer rationality of breaking the law. Paternoster and Simpson conclude their model by specifying two additional factors. First, because corporate crimes are committed within an organizational setting, situational and contextual factors might determine whether any specific offense is committed. Thus, some corporate organizations might place employees under inordinate pressure to

776

Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory

make profits or might have business dealings that present many opportunities to offend (e.g., financial companies). Second, they caution that past behavior also matters: employees who have broken the law in the past are likely to do it again.

Complexities of Corporate Decision Making Paternoster and Simpson present a nuanced rational choice theory, emphasizing different types of costs (formal, informal, and self-imposed sanctions), how complying with rules can involve sets of costs and benefits, how personal morality and the morality of those imposing rules on employees make the decision to offend seem wrong or right, how organizational pressures and opportunities matter, and how past behavior can make future behavior more likely. In their view, the rationality of the decision to en­­gage in corporate crime is complex and contingent on a host of factors intersecting in time and space. In later work, Paternoster and Simpson (1996; see also Simpson et al., 2002) have argued that the nature of corporate decision making is more complex than can be accounted for by a rational choice theory. Although they assert that rational choice remains an integral component of the decision to engage in a corporate crime, they also observe that a broad array of other factors is involved in such offending. For example, some laws are broken not purposefully but because corporate employees make risky decisions with unforeseen consequences. Thus, products can be marketed that prove to be dangerous to consumers. Employees might have been negligent in failing to appreciate the flaws in the product but may not have made a “rational” choice to trade off harm to consumers for corporate profits. It also is possible that some corporate decisions, including illegal ones, are made not after careful calculations but out of mere habit. Finally, employees might decide to break the law to benefit their unit’s performance, even though the illegality might impose costs on the corporation (e.g., fines, public embarrassment) that the illegal act cannot justify.

Conclusion White-collar and corporate crime seem to be ideal for analysis through rational choice theory because they involve decisions made within business environments where rationality—the pursuit of profits

and the minimizing of costs—is presumably valued. This insight is important and should be considered carefully in developing any coherent theory of whitecollar offending. Nonetheless, the decision to offend—whether by offenders in city streets or in corporate suites—is complex and bounded by a host of moral, legal, and situational factors. A complete explanation of white-collar criminality thus must be based on a rich and nuanced theory of decision making that studies how criminal choices reflect both rational calculation and contextual constraints. Lloyd Klein See also Benson, Michael L.: The Collateral Consequences of White-Collar Offending; Cressey, Donald R.: Embezzlement and White-Collar Crime; Geis, Gilbert: Perspectives on White-Collar Crime Scandals; Vaughan, Diane: The Normalization of Deviance

References and Further Readings Benson, M. L., & Simpson, S. S. (2009). White-collar crime: An opportunity perspective. New York: Routledge. Paternoster, R., & Simpson, S. (1993). A rational choice theory of corporate crime. In R. V. Clarke & M. Felson (Eds.), Routine activity and rational choice (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 5, pp. 37–58). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Paternoster, R., & Simpson, S. (1996). Sanction threats and appeals to morality: Testing a rational choice model of corporate crime. Law and Society Review, 30, 549–583. Shover, N., & Hochstedler, A. (2006). Choosing whitecollar crime. New York: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, S. S., & Piquero, N. L. (2002). Low selfcontrol, organizational theory, and corporate crime. Law and Society Review, 36, 509–548. Simpson, S. S., Piquero, N. L., & Paternoster, R. (2002). Rationality and corporate offending decisions. In A. R. Piquero & S. G. Tibbetts (Eds.), Rational choice and criminal behavior: Recent research and future challenges (pp. 3–24). New York: Routledge.

Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory Walter C. Reckless is one of the most recognized criminologists of the past century, though this

Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory

nearly was not the case for this three-time president of the American Society of Criminology (1964, 1965, and 1966). According to Randy Martin, Robert Mutch­nick, and W. Timothy Austin, it was not until an auto accident resulting in permanent injuries ended Reckless’s quest for a musical career that he would pursue social science studies at the University of Chicago. While there, Reckless found himself under the tutelage of renowned sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess and, after receiving his bachelor’s degree, was offered a graduate assistantship in sociology to study vice in the surrounding area (Martin et al., 1990, p. 180). This exposure to the shadier side of life helped foster an interest and birthed a career. As observed by the scholars, Reckless’s association with Park led to his involvement in participant observation research at local Chicago roadhouses and resulted in his dissertation turned book Vice in Chicago in 1931. As Martin and his colleagues note, while serving in his first academic position at Vanderbilt University, Reckless wrote extensively, including the first text ever published on Juvenile Delinquency with Mapheus Smith and the second text in Social Psychology with Ernest T. Krueger. In 1940, he would continue his distinguished career at Ohio State University where Reckless would eventually retire from in 1969 (Martin et al., 1990, p. 181). Among his accomplishments, such as the oftencited building of the Criminology-Corrections program, Reckless wrote several influential texts, including his famous work, The Crime Problem. The volume published in 1950 was to be the first of seven editions. According to Randy Martin and his colleagues, Reckless’s research while at Ohio State University, with Simon Dinitz and others, would set the stage for containment theory, Reckless’s explanation for delinquency and crime. Reckless’s research would center on the insulating role that self-concept plays against delinquency, and it was this essential concern about insulating qualities of various personal and social features that became the foundation of containment theory. Containment theory was not formally expressed by Reckless until the third edition of his book The Crime Problem and in abbreviated form in the article “The New Theory of Delinquency and Crime,” which appeared in the journal Federal Probation in 1961.

777

Containment Theory Though interdisciplinary in nature, containment theory is considered one of the earliest control theories because it is focused on what stops people from engaging in crime—or rather, what “contains” people (contains or containment essentially being used in place of the term controls). As noted by Richard Dodder and Janet Long, containment theory enjoyed much of its popularity in the 1950s and 1960s and has become a staple in the field of criminological theory. While, according to some scholars, the theory has gone out of vogue in recent years, containment theory has kept its foundational place in criminological theory. The first conceptions of the theory were birthed when Reckless was exploring the shortcomings of other approaches meant to explain delinquency and crime. Early criminological theories were understood in terms of “pushing” and/or “pulling” individuals toward deviance (e.g., differential association theory was recognized as a pull theory; Albert Cohen’s subcultural theory represents a combination push and pull theory). According to Reckless, the problem with these approaches was that they failed to account for those youths that did not engage in delinquency in spite of being confronted with pushes and/or pulls toward delinquent ways. This also was the case with the approach promoted by Reckless’s mentors, social disorganization theory. Reckless acknowledged that social disorganization approaches to the study of delinquency and crime enjoyed popularity for a generation. He believed, however, that there was a fundamental oversight with this approach. Although he did believe there was merit to social disorganization theory, Reckless claimed that social disorganization alone was insufficient to completely address the issue of delinquency and crime. He asserted that the largest proportion of people in disorganized or instable areas do not turn out to be delinquent or criminal at all. In fact, most of these people lead lives of relative conformity. This meant that social disorganization approaches, as well as other theories relying on push and/or pull orientations, needed something more if they were to add further to explanations of crime and delinquency. It was this understanding that brought Reckless to the fundamental questions that gave rise to

778

Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory

containment theory: “Why do some persons break through the tottering (social) controls and others do not? Why do rare cases in well-integrated society break through the lines of strong controls?” (1961a, p. 339). Reckless believed that it was the interplay between inner self-controls and outer social controls that was in part responsible for whether or not an individual would engage in delinquency and criminality. Further, contrary to some other theorists, Reckless thought social disorganization was not about the stress related to social and economic pressures directly. Instead, he believed that where social disorganization played a causal role in delinquency and crime was when social disorganization led specifically to a breakdown in social controls. Important to his line of reasoning was Reckless’s prior observations of religious sects. Reckless’s observations of these closed and highly controlled groups also contributed to and solidified his beliefs that the community served the express function of external social control.

The Foundation for Containment Theory As stated above, Reckless relied upon a collection of earlier observations from his solo and collaborative research in formulating containment theory. Some of this research focused upon the notion of self-concept wherein it was observed that a good self-concept provided a youth with a protective shield and/or insulation against delinquency. A poor self-concept had the opposite effect, rendering an individual susceptible to delinquency. This observation apparently held over time, leading Reckless to assume that good and poor self-concept is a reflection of the internalization of favorable and unfavorable socialization and in that way an important internal buffer against delinquency. Similar to many theorists, Reckless also looked to the observations of others when formulating his new explanation of delinquency and, in doing so, weaved together the central tenets of containment theory. Reckless expressly mentioned the work of researchers Albert J. Reiss, F. Ivan Nye, and Fritz Redl when walking readers through the logic of containment theory. Reiss discussed the predictive value of personal and social controls on delinquent behavior in his influential work with Chicago juveniles. Reiss’s

observation and assessment of the different dimensions of control were not lost on Reckless. Reckless would incorporate this understanding into his own work, particularly the observation that personal controls were more influential than social controls on recidivism. Also, Reiss’s notion of personal controls, such as self-control, would essentially mirror what Reckless would call inner containment. Nye’s research further illuminated the ways in which controls are important to regulating personal behavior. Nye’s research specifically highlighted four types of control factors that were discussed by Reckless: direct control, internalized control, indirect control, and the availability of alternative means to goals. All had a place in restraining delinquent behavior. Reckless states that, according to Nye, punishment and discipline are among the features of direct control. Inner control is essentially self-control, and indirect control is a result of not wanting to disappoint meaningful others by deviant behavior. Of course, individuals must have an alternative to deviant behavior, which explains the fourth aspect of control identified by Nye. Hence, Reckless’s and Nye’s explanations share similar features. Both are similar in scope in that they are only meant to explain general deviance. Also, Nye’s notion of direct control can be likened to Reckless’s outer containment concept. Internalized control can be seen as mirroring Reckless’s concept of inner containment. Redl and Wineman’s formulation of the “behavior control system” was also relied on by Reckless as offering support for containment theory. Redl’s work considered inner psychological processes thought to be involved in whether or not an individual would engage in delinquency and crime. Specifically, the concepts identified by Redl were the ego (and its accompanying 22 ego functions) and the superego, which were thought to be central to inner control. The ego functions were seen by Redl as important in managing life situations and included things such as frustration tolerance, temptation resistance, learning from experience, and taking care of possessions. The superego is seen as one’s conscience and the incorporation of parental values that serve to regulate behavior. Reckless ultimately included the ego and a well-developed superego as potentially important elements to his concept of inner containment. Reckless’s inclusion of these concepts, however, seemed to be as much

Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory

about a concern over attracting scholars in other disciplines to use and possibly specify containment theory. According to Reckless, “It is important to incorporate Redl’s thinking on the ego and superego as the behavior control system within the person, so as to indicate that the components of containment theory can be specified by psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts just as readily by sociologists” (1961a, p. 354).

Inner and Outer Containment As is the tradition of control theories, containment theory assumes that people are very prone to getting in trouble. The idea is that individuals must be controlled or contained from committing delinquent and criminal acts. The core of the theory is containment—that is, personal and social safeguards that shield the individual from committing deviancy. Containment rests on the principles of control. According to Reckless, containment theory “seeks to feret [ferret] out more specifically the inner and outer controls over normative behavior” (1961b, p. 44). To do this, Reckless consolidated the particular characteristics identified in his and others’ research into exclusive themes of inner and outer containment. Containment theory, in essence, is Reckless’s attempt to ascertain what controls work best at which level to regulate conduct and therefore delinquency and crime. The principal social control concepts of containment theory are inner and outer containment. Inner containment involves the personal, social controls over behavior. Reckless believed that these included self-control, a good self-concept, ego strength, and so on. In essence, these are the qualities that serve as inner regulators against delinquent behavior. According to Reckless, outer containment dealt with the structural buffers in the youth’s proximal, social environment that served to restrain them. These immediate social constraints included such things as “a consistent moral front to the person, institutional reinforcement of his norms, goals, expectations, the existence of a reasonable set of social expectations, effective supervision and discipline (social controls), provision for reasonable scope of activity (including limits and responsibilities) as well as alternatives and safety valves, opportunity for acceptance, belongingness” (1961b, p. 45). To Reckless, these structural factors around

779

the individual served to “contain” the youth against delinquency and crime.

To Err Is Human: “Pulls” and “Pushes” Toward Delinquency According to Reckless, environmental pressures can exact influence over people to the extent that they are not contained and/or protected. In that regard, inner and outer containment serve as a buffer from these external conditions. Environmental conditions that may steer individuals toward deviancy may take various forms, such as poverty or deprivations, conflict and discord, external restraint, minority group status, and limited access to success in an opportunity structure. Reckless further elaborated upon these environmental pressures in describing them as environmental “pulls.” Pulls represent the features of the environment that may serve to attract some individuals toward deviancy. According to Reckless, pulls might be environmental distractions, attractions, temptations, carriers of delinquent and criminal patterns, and subcultures. Reckless also observed what he considered to be “ordinary” pushes. Pushes are based in individual psychology and are considered to be internal motivators toward deviancy. Pushes may include internal drives and frustrations, feelings of restlessness, disappointments, hostility, inferiority, and rebellion. Reckless acknowledged that there are some extreme internal motivations (pushes) that cannot be contained such as those derived from mental illness (i.e., compulsions). According to Reckless, such pathological compulsions were beyond the abilities of normal, ordinary containment. Again, containment theory posits that normative behavior is brought about by “resisting” deviancy and directing youth toward legitimate social expectations. According to Reckless, both inner and outer containment are core between the pressures and pulls of the external environment and inner drives and pushes.

Scope of Containment Theory As stated earlier, Reckless argues that containment theory is a general theory of crime, explaining the wide range of behaviors between the extremes of deviancy. According to Reckless, at one end of the continuum is individual pathology. This group

780

Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory

includes behaviors caused by mental illness, among other things (e.g., compulsions; behavior as the result of organic brain damage). The opposite extreme of behaviors, though deviant, would essentially be considered “normal” given the circumstances and fall beyond those behaviors that containment theory means to explain. Individuals at this extreme, explains Reckless, have been socialized by family or some affiliate and/or marginalized group to behave as societal deviants (e.g., criminal tribes of India, gypsies).

The Recognized Limitations and Validity of Containment Theory To Reckless, one of the strengths of containment theory was the ability to tailor the theory to the different disciplines that engage in the study of deviancy. Arguably, containment theory can be used by psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, and practitioners equally, as the theory reportedly explains delinquency from an interdisciplinary perspective. According to Reckless, “All of these experts look for dimensions of inner and outer strength and can specify these strengths in their terms” (1961b, p. 46). However, there are problems with containment theory specifically and control theories generally. Richard Dodder and Janet Long have observed that there is a general lack of testable statements in relation to containment and the proposed relationship with deviant behavior. Ironically, one could argue that this in part was intended by Reckless when making his statement of the theory. Reckless offered that research would have to identify the “one or two” essential elements of inner and outer containment that act as the regulators of normative behavior. He further states that research, ultimately, would have to sort out which of the inner and outer regulatory systems operated together. Problematically, a theory written in this way may lead to more speculation than answers. Dodder and Long further scrutinize the limited ability of containment theory to explain female deviance, considering socialization processes arguably differ between the sexes in respect to selfconcept. Recall that, according to containment theory, a good self-concept is supposed to insulate individuals from deviancy. If the processes are

different depending on sex, one would expect that containment theory might not apply to females. This criticism is reasonable, particularly since Reckless relied on observations of boys for his theory. Another criticism of containment theory is recognized by Thomas Kelley and rests in the idea that many of the inner motivations and environmental conditions identified by Reckless tend to be highly transient even over short time periods. Given that many of these conditions are evanescent, it is difficult to isolate the mechanisms identified by containment theory leading to deviancy. Reckless and Dinitz tested elements of containment theory with little success. As noted by Randy Martin and his colleagues, these studies have been referred to collectively as “the Good Boy–Bad Boy” series and ran from circa 1956 to 1972. Although failing to initially support containment theory, others, such as Don Gibbons and Marvin Krohn, have noted methodological flaws that would give pause to these initial results. It also has been observed by these scholars that later empirical assessments found more varied results beyond what could be accounted for by the theory. There is still contention as to whether containment theory, whether original, revised, or specified, can be revived.

Conclusion Containment theory is considered one of the earliest control theories of crime. With its “personalityoriented” slant, the theory is credited by some with laying the foundation of contemporary theoretical approaches to explaining delinquency and crime (Martin et al., 1990, p. 198). Randy Martin, Robert Mutchnick, and W. Timothy Austin (and others) are explicit in their claim that Reckless’s containment theory is the “cornerstone in the foundation of contemporary control theory” and “that the work of Travis Hirschi, which has become synonymous with control theory, constitutes an extension of Reckless’ ideas into broader social contexts” (p. 198). However, there are some detractors of this position that have noted that containment theory, as well as other theories of its time, are nothing more than extensions or reformulations of previous works. For instance, Don Gibbons and Marvin Krohn assert that containment theory consists of

Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory

“old wine in a new bottle” (1991, p. 107). Although one can see the merit in both positions on containment theory, it is undeniable that Reckless’s approach has had an impact and has served as a foundation from which others’ work was formed. Jamie L. Flexon See also Durkheim, Émile: Anomie and Suicide; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: SelfControl Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency; Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

References and Further Readings Dodder, R. A., & Long, J. R. (1980). Containment theory reevaluated: An empirical explication. Criminal Justice Review, 5, 74–84. Gibbons, D. C., & Krohn, M. D. (1991). Delinquent behavior (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kelley, T. M. (1996). A critique of social bonding and control theory of delinquency using the principles of psychology of mind [Electronic version]. Adolescence, 31(122). Retrieved November 18, 2008, from http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2248/is_n122_v31/ ai_18435715/pg_1?tag=artBody;c011 Martin, R., Mutchnick, R. J., & Austin, W. T. (1990). Criminological thought: Pioneers past and present. New York: Macmillan. Nye, F. I. (1958). Family relationships and delinquent behavior. New York: Wiley. Quinney, R., & Wildeman, J. (1977). The problem of crime: A critical introduction to criminology (2nd ed.). New York: Harper and Row. Reckless, W. C. (1961a). The crime problem (3rd ed.). New York: Appleton Century Crofts. Reckless, W. C. (1961b). A new theory of delinquency and crime. Federal Probation, 25, 42–46. Redl, F., & Wineman, D. (1951). Children who hate. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Reiss, A. J., Jr. (1951). Delinquency as the failure of personal and social controls. American Sociological Review, 16, 196–206.

781

Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory Differential oppression theory, originally published by Robert M. Regoli and John D. Hewitt in Delinquency in Society in 1991, contends that children have little power to influence their social world. They have almost no choice regarding with whom they associate and, have limited resources available to influence others or to support themselves independently of adults. In comparison to adults, children are relatively powerless and are expected to submit to the power and authority of adults. When this power is used to deny children self-determination and impede them from developing a sense of competence and self-efficacy, it becomes oppression (Finkelhor, 2008). All children are oppressed. The oppression of children falls on a continuum, ranging from simple demands for obedience to rules designed for the convenience of adults to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Differential oppression theory states that the involvement of children in crime is best understood as adaptive reaction to oppressive social situations created by adults. Differential oppression theory is organized around four principles: 1. Because children lack power due to their age, size, and lack of resources, they are easy targets for adult oppression. 2. Adult oppression of children occurs in multiple social contexts and falls on a continuum ranging from benign neglect to malignant abuse. 3. Oppression leads to adaptive reactions by children. 4. Children’s adaptations to oppression create and reinforce adults’ views of children as inferior, subordinate, and being troublemakers. This view enables adults to justify their role as oppressor and further reinforces children’s powerlessness.

Forms of Oppression The term oppression is a summation of the abusive, neglectful, and disrespectful relations children confront. Oppression occurs in different settings and falls on a continuum ranging from benign neglect

782

Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory

to malignant abuse. Oppression takes place whenever adults act in ways that belittle children as being something less than authentic and feeling human beings. While there are occasions when adults exercise power over children out of sincere concern for the child’s welfare, other times adults’ use of power over children is about the needs and interests of the adult rather than the child. Oppressive structural forces, such as poverty and residing in a disadvantaged neighborhood, also negatively influence parenting practices. However, the underlying source of this oppression is found in the mistreatment adults received as children and continue to experience as adults. Therefore, the oppression adults inflict on children is part of a chain of coercion that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Healthy development requires that social contexts provide opportunities for children to fulfill their physical, intellectual, psychological, and social developmental needs. Unfortunately, for many children, the social contexts they find themselves in are oppressive and damaging. Using a developmental-ecological perspective can provide a means for understanding how the oppression of children occurs within multiple social contexts that may interact to produce harmful outcomes. These contexts include both micro-level relationships with family and friends and macro-level structural elements, such as age, class, neighborhood, and race, which expose people to different types of oppression.

Micro-Level Oppression The most severe oppression adults inflict upon children is maltreatment. The major forms of child maltreatment include physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and emotional abuse. Certain parenting styles are more likely to oppress children. Some parents oppress children when they impose and maintain adult conceptions of social order. These parents see children as extensions of themselves rather than as individuals. The children are required to obey rules designed to reinforce adult notions of right and wrong behavior. To exert greater control over their children, parents and other adults sometimes use coercion or force. Coercion may become excessive, lead to physical harm and long-term psychological damage, and is

a mechanism for transmitting an ageist ideology that diminishes the value of children in relation to adults across society. Other parents oppress children through neglectful parenting that fails to meet their children’s physical, emotional, and educational needs. Examples of physical neglect include abandonment and inadequate supervision. Emotional neglect includes inattention to the child’s needs for affection and spouse abuse in the child’s presence. The allowance of chronic truancy and failure to attend to special educational needs are examples of educational neglect. Neglect occurs any time a caretaker fails to provide one of the basic ingredients essential for developing a child into a physically, intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically healthy person. Although single incidents of neglect may have no noticeable harmful effects, in some cases, they result in death. Chronic patterns of neglect also may result in developmental delays or emotional disabilities.

Macro-Level Oppression Macro-level social forces such as poverty also oppress children. Children living in poverty are most likely to experience oppression. This oppression can be viewed developmentally, and is cumulative as children continue to grow and develop in destitute conditions. During the early years, poverty oppresses children by impairing their physical health status at birth and providing less access to resources that may moderate the negative consequences of those problems. For healthy development, young children need exposure to stimulating materials or experiences. Children living in poverty are less likely to have access to these materials or experiences. Often their homes are unsafe, lacking heat and adequate plumbing. In addition, they have increased exposure to chemical toxins, such as lead, which are associated with cognitive deficits, lower school achievement, and long-term impairment of neurological function (Needleman, Schell, Bellinger, Leviton, & Allred, 1990). Rather than receiving cognitively stimulating experiences, young children living in poverty may rarely leave their home. Environmental and work-related conditions limit their access to the outdoors. Poor children are more likely to live in housing located in commercial and industrial areas, which often

Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory

lack safe outdoor places for them to play and limit opportunities for social interaction and cognitive development (Macleod, 2008). Poverty also has oppressive influences on schoolage and adolescent children. During middle childhood and adolescence, children increasingly come into direct contact with their neighborhoods through involvement in school and informal neighborhood groups. For young people, the physical features of their neighborhood establish the boundaries of their social universe. Some neighborhoods offer youth a variety of supervised instruction and structured activities, while others send the majority of the children out on the street. Due to the restricted tax base in poor distressed neighborhoods, limited public resources are available to support the education, recreation, and health needs of youth and their families. In contrast, youth living in wealthy neighborhoods have opportunities that poor children are not offered, like summer camp and music lessons. Instead, adolescents growing up in poverty have higher exposure to physical danger and criminal activity (Wilson, 2009). Because successful adaptation at each stage of youth development is influenced by earlier developmental histories, long-term exposure to oppressive living conditions likely results in worse developmental outcomes (McNulty, 2001). Highrisk contexts such as poverty and child maltreatment may have lasting effects when they damage crucial adaptive systems such as adult-child attachment, intelligence, and self-regulation of emotions and behavior. Persistent poverty is consistently found to have more adverse effects than transitory poverty on children’s cognitive development and school achievement. Children living in poverty for long periods experience more negative life events and adverse conditions that may place demands on their coping resources well beyond what they can handle. This may trigger a cycle of lifelong deficiencies encompassing many contexts of their lives.

Adaptations to Oppression Most children adapt to oppression through passive acceptance and subsequent obedience, an obedience built upon fear, which derives from implied threats and intimidation. Children learn that obedience is expected. Such adaptations among children are similar to the passive acceptance of

783

adaptations of prison inmates and immersion in the cycle of violence for battered women. These children outwardly accept their inferior positions, but develop a repressed hatred for their oppressors, adapting to the structures of domination in which they are immersed. Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it, oppressors and oppressed alike. The oppressed are likely to believe they have no purpose in life except what the oppressor prescribes for them. Passive children do not fully explore personal autonomy; they never become the “author of their own life.” Repression results in negative self-­ perceptions that manifest themselves in different problem behaviors including crime, delinquency, alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders, and psychiatric disorders. A second adaptation to oppression is the exercise of illegitimate coercive power. Some adolescents are attracted to delinquency because it helps them establish a sense of autonomy and control (Katz, 1988). Delinquent acts can immediately make things happen and provide the child with a sense of restored potency denied him or her by adults. Sexual misbehavior and violations of the criminal law, for example, derive greater symbolic importance for the child to the extent they demonstrate resistance to adult attempts to exert control over his or her behavior. A third adaptation is the manipulation of one’s peers. Through the manipulation of others within the peer group, a child who has experienced oppression may acquire a sense of strength and control not otherwise felt (Marwell, 1966). The school bully is an example. Unfortunately, the mere involvement of a child with his or her peers leads many adults to view the involvement as problematic in itself. Adults may then react by exercising even greater control over the child’s interaction with others. The fourth adaptation is retaliation, which may include criminal acts ranging from property crimes to violent offenses. It is the most severe and least common of the adaptations. Children may engage in retaliation to get back at the people or the institutions they see as being the source of their oppression. School vandalism can occur because a student is angry with a teacher. Some children will strike

784

Regoli, Robert M., and John D. Hewitt: Differential Oppression Theory

directly at their peers by assaulting or killing them. Others try to hurt their parents by turning inward by becoming chronically depressed and possibly committing suicide (Ianni, 1989).

Conclusion Confronted by oppressive forces, children adapt. Adults individually or collectively affect children and children react. While children as a group are oppressed, the impact is most significantly experienced at the individual level. Oppression is differentially experienced, both in its application and impact. Children adapt differentially and the individual reasons for how particular children adapt are unknown. Even children growing up in the same family, in the same neighborhood, and experiencing similar oppressive situations will exhibit different adaptations. Current research has established a good, strong examination of the connection between oppression and adolescent problem behaviors. While many research studies have tested elements of differential oppression theory, some of the most promising research assessing the theory is by Carolyn Smith and David Farrington. They explored the extent to which antisocial behavior in parents predicted antisocial behavior in children in two successive generations. They also examined the degree to which a man’s childhood antisocial behavior predicted antisocial behavior in his own children, the ways that parenting problems were related to delinquency in two successive generations, and the extent to which intergenerational continuities in antisocial behavior were mediated by parenting. They found that between generations, antisocial parents in the first generation predicted conduct problems among children in the next two generations. Within generations, second-generation child conduct problems predicted adult antisocial behavior and antisocial partnerships, which in turn predicted conduct problems among their children (the third generation). Parental conflict and authoritarian parenting led to early childhood conduct problems in two successive generations. Second-generation boys who were poorly supervised by their parents were themselves poor supervisors as fathers. Both first and second generations displayed assortative mating, which means that antisocial males tended to marry antisocial females. In this way, parents

specifically, and adults generally, cultivate delinquency, violence, and other maladaptive behaviors directly as a consequence of the way they treat children (Smith & Farrington, 2004). Future research must examine why one child adapts to abuse by passively accepting the situation and developing an eating disorder while another child experiencing similar abuse adapts by bullying others and still yet another child retaliates by murdering the offending adult. Continued research on differential oppression theory is underway. Robert M. Regoli See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Colvin, Mark: Coercion Theory; Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crimes; Prenatal Influences and Crime

References and Further Readings Colvin, M. (2002). Crime and coercion. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Finkelhor, D. (2008). Childhood victimization. New York: Oxford University Press. Hewitt, J. D., & Regoli, B. (2003). Differential oppression theory and female delinquency. Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology, 31, 165–174. Ianni, F. (1989). The search for structure. New York: Free Press. Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime. New York: Basic Books. Kingston, B., Regoli, B., & Hewitt, J. (2003). The theory of differential oppression: A developmental-ecological explanation of adolescent problem behavior. Critical Criminology, 11, 237–260. Macleod, J. (2008). Ain’t no makin’ it. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Marwell, G. (1966). Adolescent powerlessness and delinquent behavior. Social Problems, 14, 35–47. McNulty, T. (2001). Assessing the race-violence relationship at the macro level. Criminology, 39, 467–490. Miller, A. (1990). For your own good. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Needleman, H., Schell, A., Bellinger, D., Leviton, A., & Allred, E. (1990). The long term effects of low doses of lead in childhood. New England Journal of Medicine, 322, 83–88. Regoli, R. M., & Hewitt, J. D. (1991). Delinquency in society. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency Regoli, R. M., Hewitt, J. D., & DeLisi, M. (2010). Delinquency in society (8th ed.). Boston: Jones & Bartlett. Smith, C., & Farrington, D. (2004). Continuities in antisocial behavior and parenting across three generations. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45, 230–247. Wilson, W. J. (2009). More than just race. New York: W. W. Norton.

Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency Albert J. Reiss, Jr., was one of the pioneers in the areas of crime and criminology. Although Reiss may be best known for his contribution to social control theory, he also wrote important works in a number of areas such as policing, self-report surveys, male prostitution, and corporate crime. Nevertheless, his most important contribution to the field of criminology may have been his work in the area of social control theory. In 1951, in his article “Delinquency as the Failure of Personal and Social Controls” in the American Sociological Review, he introduced the ideas of personal and social controls and the important roles they played in reducing delinquency. He expanded on those ideas in another article the following year in the same journal. These concepts became important precursors for what later became known as social control theory and remain relevant to the field of theoretical criminology more than half a century after he introduced them. At the time Reiss published his seminal work, the field of criminology was largely driven by ideas from the Chicago School of thought, which is also where Reiss received his academic training. These theorists focused primarily on the negative effects of deviant peers and disorganized neighborhoods. Although the Chicago School is definitely recognizable in the work of Reiss, particularly around his social control concept, his concept of personal control was a much more individualistic concept. Reiss defined a personal control as “the ability of the individual to refrain from meeting needs in ways that conflict with the norms and rules of the

785

community” and a social control as “the ability of social groups or institutions to make norms or rules effective” (1951, p. 196). The core of Reiss’s argument was that youths were drawn to delinquency and only personal and social controls kept youths from engaging in delinquency. According to Reiss, “delinquency results when there is a relative absence of internalized norms and rules governing behavior in conformity with the norms of the social system to which legal penalties are attached, a breakdown in previously established controls, and/or a relative absence of conflict in social rules or techniques for enforcing such behavior in the social groups or institutions of which the person is a member” (1951, p. 196). In other words, Reiss proposed that delinquency resulted from a lack of personal or social controls. Reiss also suggested that these personal and social controls would be more effective in preventing delinquency among those youths who have not committed delinquency than those recidivists who have previously engaged in delinquent activity and are now attempting to refrain from further delinquency. Reiss observed that individuals develop personal controls from their primary groups (e.g., family, school, church) and that these primary groups are important in exerting social controls over an individual’s behavior. According to Reiss, these primary groups exercise social control over youths by providing roles and discipline techniques that encourage conformity. Reiss contended that delinquency occurs when the techniques of these primary groups that are designed to reduce delinquency fail. Reiss suggested that the family plays several important roles in developing personal and social controls. These roles include (1) meeting the economic and material needs of its members; (2) providing models for conformity by establishing non-delinquent norms; (3) maintaining unity (both structurally and psychologically), thus allowing the child to grow up in a two-parent home with two conformist role models; and (4) establishing and maintaining conformist rules and expectations for behavior among family members. Reiss also explained the role of the community and the institutions within the community in developing personal controls. Many of his ideas regarding institutional control are directly linked to the social disorganization perspective that was commonly found among those trained at the University

786

Reiss, Albert J., Jr.: Personal and Social Controls and Delinquency

of Chicago during that time period. Reiss suggested that youths gain personal controls by submitting to the authority and conformist values of conformist institutions found in their community. As social disorganization theorists assert, these conformist institutions are more likely to be found in communities that are less congested and physically overcrowded and in communities with fewer permanent residents. Reiss also argued that the school played an important part in developing personal controls among youths. Because schools generally provide settings where conformist norms are used to control behaviors and its personnel “represent acceptable models of authority and provide rational guides for behavior” (Reiss, 1952, p. 711), those youths who accept those norms enjoy the school experience, attend school regularly, and do not present behavior problems for the schools are thus more likely to have strong personal controls. Reiss defines a youth with strong personal controls as one who “is characterized by a) mature ego ideals or non-delinquent social roles, i.e. internalized controls of social groups governing behavior in conformity with non-delinquent group expectations, and b) appropriate and flexible rational controls over behavior which permits conscious guidance of action in accord with non-delinquent group expectations” (p. 203). These youths can delay satisfaction of their needs until they obtain that satisfaction through conformist means. Accord­ ing to Reiss, a youth with strong personal controls has a well-developed superego and an appropriate level of self-esteem. These personal controls thus assist the youth in refraining from delinquency. In his 1951 article, Reiss used official juvenile court records from white male juvenile probationers in Cook County, Illinois, to determine whether youths with strong personal and social controls were less likely to recidivate. He suggested that those juveniles with higher degrees of personal and social controls would be less likely to recidivate than their counterparts with fewer of these controls. In his assessment of these data, he found that, in general, his ideas were supported. Using largely demographic and contextual measures rather than purely theoretical measures developed later, Reiss’s analysis revealed that those with greater personal controls (e.g., delinquents whose parents were together, whose natural parents were married, whose parents had higher monthly incomes) and

greater social controls (e.g., delinquents where were not frequently truant, who had lived in the same home for over 10 years) had lower levels of recidivism. His theoretical perspective laid the foundation for both Travis Hirschi’s social bond perspective and, to a lesser extent, Michael Gottfredson and Hirschi’s self-control theory. Elements of personal and social controls articulated by Reiss are found in numerous versions of both social control and self-control theories. Hirschi’s social bond theory has received wide empirical support (although a number of criticisms of the theory exist as well). Reiss, along with Walter Reckless, F. Ivan Nye, and David Matza, are often viewed as the “grandfathers” of the social bond theory articulated by Hirschi a decade later and thus remain influential members of the theoretical community of criminology. David C. May See also Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency; Le Blanc, Marc: An Integrated Personal Control Theory of Deviant Behavior; Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift; Nye, F. Ivan: Family Controls and Delinquency; Reckless, Walter C.: Containment Theory; Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization; Toby, Jackson: Stake in Conformity

References and Further Readings Farrington, D. P. (Ed.). (2008). Integrated developmental and life course theories of offending (Advances in Criminological Theory, Vol. 14). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. McCord, J. (Ed.). (1995). Coercion and punishment in long-term perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Reiss, A. J., Jr. (1951). Delinquency as the failure of personal and social controls. American Sociological Review, 16, 196–207. Reiss, A. J., Jr. (1952). Social correlates of psychological types of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 17, 710–718.

Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory

Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory Responding to rising violent crime rates during the 1980s, criminal justice policies transferred to a “get tough” approach characterized by harsh sentencing guidelines that imprisoned individuals at a much higher rate and for longer sentences. This shift has resulted in a rapid growth of the incarcerated population, influencing minorities and the poor disproportionately. Throughout their lifetime, black men are seven times more likely to experience incarceration than their white counterparts, and black women are eight times more likely to experience incarceration than white women (Bonzcar & Beck, 1997). These “get tough” policies have resulted in large proportions of residents from select impoverished neighborhoods being removed from their neighborhoods due to incarceration. Although, it may seem commonsensical that incarcerating offenders increases public safety— thus improving the quality of life for the other residents—Dina R. Rose and Todd R. Clear propose that this strong reliance on incarceration presents negative unintended consequences for the vitality of these neighborhoods. The following section discusses the theoretical foundation and conceptual framework for Rose and Clear’s proposition, which has become known as coerced mobility theory.

Theoretical Foundation Considering incarceration as a formal control of the state, coerced mobility theory posits that an excessive dependence on formal control impedes communities’ ability to self-regulate, further attenuating informal social control. In essence, communities that are overreliant on formal control are characterized by more social disorganization. As an extension of social disorganization theory, coerced mobility is also concerned with the effects of residents moving in and out of the community—that is, the residential instability of the neighborhood. However, unlike social disorganization theory that has primarily focused on voluntary mobility, coerced mobility focuses on mobility

787

due to formal control through the mechanism of incarceration. Traditional social disorganization theory asserts that neighborhoods characterized by poverty, racial/ethnic heterogeneity, and high residential mobility will experience social disorganization, resulting in higher crime rates. Coerced mobility focuses primarily on the influence of mobility through the means of incarceration. Neighborhoods with residential instability— whether it be voluntary or coerced—impedes social integration and cohesion (Crutchfield, 1989; Sampson, 1991), increases anonymity (Warner & Pierce, 1993), and thus weakens informal social control (Sampson & Groves, 1989). Research has also focused on the different levels of control necessary for a community to function. Robert Bursik and Harold Grasmick identify three different levels of control. Private control exists between family members and close friends. Parochial control exists between those individuals and community institutions that people interact with on a regular basis, such as schools and churches. Public controls involve relationships outside of the community, such as the criminal justice system. Private and parochial controls are considered to be forms of informal social control, while public control is considered formal social control. These three levels of control are interrelated and are essential for a community to achieve self-­ regulation. For example, as a community’s informal control decreases, the community’s reliance on formal control increases. This may further attenuate informal social control. Coerced mobility theory proposes that concentrated incarceration has implications for these different levels of control.

A Nonrecursive Model Social disorganization has traditionally been modeled as a recursive theory. For example, Bursik and Grasmick’s basic systemic model of crime proposes that the social condition variables of poverty, high residential mobility, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity attenuate private and parochial controls. The weakened informal social control leads to the community relying more heavily on formal control. Those communities that do not achieve sufficient informal and formal control are characterized by social disorganization which, in turn, leads to higher crime. However, this recursive model implies

788

Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory

that removing offenders only improves neighborhood life—that is, it ignores the possible feedback effects of incarceration on community structure, informal social control, and crime. To the extent that this reciprocal relationship weakens the community structure, unintended consequences of incarceration would exist. Thus, incarceration is not purely beneficial for neighborhoods but rather further diminishes a community’s ability to selfregulate, leading to higher crime (Rose & Clear, 1998). Coerced mobility theory is an extension of Bursik and Grasmick’s basic systemic model of crime in that it introduces a feedback loop. Rose and Clear propose that public controls, specifically crime control through the mechanism of incarceration, further influence the exogenous variables of the model (poverty, residential mobility, and racial/ ethnic heterogeneity). How does incarceration influence the community structure? First, incarceration impacts the socioeconomic composition of the community by affecting the labor and marriage markets. Second, incarceration increases residential mobility in a community because each time an offender is incarcerated, he or she is removed from the community. Relying on formal control—that is, mass incarceration specifically—there is a constant influx of offenders exiting and reentering the community. Third, incarceration affects the heterogeneity of a community. Traditionally, social disorganization theory was primarily concerned with racial/ethnic heterogeneity because it was presumed that this heterogeneity was characterized by different norms and values. However, today most poor communities are not racially or ethnically heterogeneous but the heterogeneity in values and norms persist. Removing individuals from a community allows for new individuals to enter the community who may possess different norms or values. Also, when offenders return to the community after incarceration, they bring more criminalistic values and norms back into the community.

Social and Human Capital Rose and Clear refer to the private and parochial controls of Bursik and Grasmick’s model as elements of social capital. For Rose and Clear, social capital consists of the social skills and resources

necessary for a community to make positive change. The use of organized groups enhances the community’s ability to achieve the shared goals of the community. By promoting community residents to interact, social capital builds trust and cohesion among community members. This facilitates the enforcement of the norms of the community, which in turn strengthens informal social control. According to Rose and Clear, human capital consists of the human skills and resources necessary for individuals to function such as, reading and writing. Social capital and human capital are interrelated. For example, communities that are rich in social capital foster the development of human capital. These communities are able to exert more control over the residents of the community, producing better educated and more employable individuals who possess human capital. Further, it requires human capital to obtain social capital. Consequently, those communities rich in social capital are also rich in human capital and those communities lacking social capital also lack human capital. Most of the social disorganization research has examined the role of social ties or integration, focusing on their importance in relation to crime prevention. Rose and Clear pose the opposite question. They ask, “How much disruption can networks sustain before they fail to function?” (p. 456). A disruption of these networks reduces the social capital of a community leading to weaker informal social control and limiting a community’s ability to self-regulate. Previous research has proposed that the relationship between social networks and social disorganization is linear. Rose and Clear proposes a potential threshold, claiming that there is a minimum amount of healthy social networks necessary for the community to self-­ regulate. In regards to incarceration, a community may be able to withstand the removal of a small proportion of males from the community. But when a large proportion of families are affected by incarceration, the social networks may be so disrupted that informal social control breaks down and a community is no longer able to self-regulate. This leads to an overreliance on formal control which, in turn, further weakens informal social control. Because these neighborhoods that experience concentrated incarceration are deficient in

Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory

social and human capital to begin with, the effects of incarceration on the neighborhood are even more detrimental.

Influences of Incarceration on Neighborhood Order Rose and Clear approach the possible unintended consequences of incarceration with a “systems” model. From this model, “criminals are seen as embedded in various interpersonal, family, economic, and political systems” (p. 457). Rose and Clear propose that these legitimate and illegitimate systems have a direct effect on a neighborhood’s ability to exert informal social control. Rose and Clear use existing empirical evidence to demonstrate these influences. Familial Systems

Families have been dramatically affected by incarceration policies; and as previously mentioned, these policies have impacted poor and minority families disproportionately. For example, about three in five African American high school dropouts will be incarcerated at some point in their life. This is at a rate of five times greater than their white counterparts (Pettit & Western, 2004). Forty percent of those males are fathers who had lived with their children (Western et al., 2004). The removal of a parent has several consequences. For example, when a father is incarcerated, many families have to relocate. This often means moving into crowded accommodations and potentially changing school districts. Sometimes, a new male enters the family to replace the incarcerated father, causing family disruption. Often, mothers acquire secondary employment to make up for the lost income, resulting in less parental supervision for the children. These circumstances may attenuate family cohesiveness, potentially leading to delinquency. Research also reveals that children of incarcerated parents are more likely to experience problems in school, depression, anxiety, aggression, and low self-esteem. At the very least, mass incarceration of males from a community reduces the number of adults available to provide supervision to the children in the community. Research by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh has shown that even offenders provide

789

supervision and have positive influences on neighborhoods. They may act as protectors, encourage school attendance, or provide renovation to a neighborhood park or recreation area. Removing a large proportion of parent-age males affects the marriage market of the community by limiting the number of available male partners for females. The surplus of females may result in females remaining in unhealthy relationships, as well as in males having less incentive to remain faithful and in a committed relationship. All of these studies demonstrate that families have been disrupted by incarceration and that much of this disruption has been concentrated in poor and minority communities. Because families serve as the primary socialization unit for children, these family disruptions contribute to a slow erosion of the social capital of a community, according to Rose and Clear. Economic Systems

Rose and Clear note that communities where a large proportion of residents engage in both legal and illegal work often experience local economic devastation by the incarceration of its residents. By removing large numbers from the job market within the community, human capital is diminished. Incarceration affects offenders’ and their families’ economic situation by decreasing income from the household or family. Research has demonstrated that mothers rely on other individuals within their network to help sustain their family. The mothers left behind frequently resort to public assistance for survival. These communities that experience a high rate of welfare do not promote healthy private labor markets (Clear, 2007). Research has also demonstrated that economic difficulty is a strong predictor of aggregate crime rates. Some research has even suggested that the unemployment rate of the community may be even more influential to people’s criminality than their individual employment status. Incarceration directly reduces an individual’s human capital. During incarceration, offenders rarely receive job training that is transferrable to the community. Typically, offenders do not return to their community any more prepared for employment than prior to incarceration, except for now they carry the added stigma of being incarcerated.

790

Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory

There is also evidence that incarceration leads to economic marginality. Being incarcerated limits individuals to unstable, low-wage jobs that provide little opportunity for advancement (Uggen et al., 2005). This type of employment may reduce the individual’s stake in conformity potentially leading to future criminal involvement (Crutchfield & Pitchford, 1997). At the community level, incarceration policies destroy communities by shifting government funding from the community toward building and managing correctional institutions. Funds are removed from schools and other programs that provide social services and transferred to the criminal justice system. To the extent that these social programs promoted informal social control and facilitated the creation and maintenance of social networks, the elimination of these programs further weakens informal social control within the community. Political Systems

Social capital is produced through the interrelationship between community institutions, organizations, and outside agencies, according to Rose and Clear. Neighborhoods deficient in social capital may not be able to organize and take collective action when problems occur within the community. They also may not be able to obtain external resources because they lack the necessary network. Concentrated incarceration may disrupt networks that facilitate the functioning of community programs that promote social networks and informal social control. Rose and Clear contend that “we need not make the argument that offenders are active participants in local political efforts. Rather, we need only make the argument that their removal disrupts the networks of other individuals who otherwise might participate” (p. 463). Rose and Clear also contend that residents are less likely to participate in local politics if they do not believe that they are legitimate or effective. Many of the communities hit the hardest by incarceration policies do not think that the government and/or the criminal justice system works on their behalf. According to Tom Tyler, in these communities the state is most likely to be viewed as coercive rather than fair. When individuals view the law as illegitimate, they are less likely to conform to the law.

Within these communities that experience concentrated incarceration, going to prison is “normal,” it is part of life, and in some cases a rite of passage. Because incarceration is ubiquitous in these communities, the experience of incarceration loses the uncertainty and mystery that surrounds it, according to Rose and Clear. This may weaken the deterrent power of incarceration. Rose and Clear also suggest potential brutalization effects, such as those that have been found with the death penalty. Rose and Clear contend that “the politics of imprisonment may be a combination of increasing resentment and decreasing marginal gain” (p. 465). Illegitimate Systems

Concentrated incarceration also influences illegitimate activity within the community. The vast majority of crime occurs locally, rooted in interpersonal relationships and group relations. According to Rose and Clear, it is these relations that may be seen as illegitimate systems. Because most crime occurs within groups, it is important to understand the effect of removing a member of the criminal group. It is likely that the group sustains the disruption and continues to engage in criminal activity. Sometimes, the group recruits a new member to replace the member who was incarcerated. The recruitment of new members may lead individuals who otherwise would have stayed on the periphery of criminal activity to become more deeply involved in criminal behavior. In sum, this discussion illustrates that concentrated incarceration weakens informal social control through the familial, economic, political, and illegitimate systems of offenders. In turn the neighborhood becomes highly disorganized community, resulting in higher crime rates.

A Preliminary Examination of Coerced Mobility Clear, Rose, Elin Waring, and Kristen Scully provided the first partial empirical test of Rose and Clear’s coerced mobility theory. They explored the effects of incarceration on crime rates in 80 Tallahassee, Florida, neighborhoods. At that time the data needed to test the nonrecursive model, as proposed in Rose and Clear, were unavailable. However, remaining consistent with Rose and

Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear: Coerced Mobility Theory

Clear, Clear et al. examined the affect of a neighborhood’s incarceration rate of 1 year on the crime rate of the neighborhood on the next year. They hypothesized a curvilinear relationship between admissions and crime. First, with low levels of admissions, they hypothesized that crime rates will be reduced; however, when admissions reach a certain level, they hypothesized that the relationship between admissions and crime becomes positive and high levels of admissions increases the crime rate. This relationship was proposed by Rose and Clear in 1998. Clear et al. used admissions and releases from prison in 1996 to measure the magnitude of coerced mobility and the crime rate for each neighborhood for the dependent variable. As hypothesized by Rose and Clear, the analysis provided some support that the relationship between admissions to prison and crime is nonlinear. They found that a moderate level of incarceration is associated with a reduction in the crime rate of the neighborhood. However, when the level of incarceration reaches a certain point, incarceration is associated with an increase in the crime rate. While Clear et al. is only a partial test of coerced mobility theory, the results furnish preliminary support for the theory.

Community Justice: The Policy Implications of Coerced Mobility In his book Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighbor­ hoods Worse, Clear not only further expands coerced mobility theory, but he also provides a more fully developed response to the problem of coerced mobility and mass incarceration. Clear proposes that if the problems of mass incarceration are to be addressed it is necessary to reform the sentencing policies in the United States and to adopt a new philosophy of penal justice. Before the criminal justice system can seriously think about reducing the corrections population, sentencing reform is necessary. Because the prison population is determined by how many enter prison and how long they stay, the criminal justice system needs to send fewer individuals to prison and for shorter amounts of time. This will require rethinking policies such as mandatory sentencing, especially for drug offenders. Clear proposes that the United States should embrace community justice. Community justice refers to all crime prevention strategies that

791

explicitly include the community. The emphasis is placed on the quality of life of the residents of the community. The emphasis shifts from individuallevel outcomes and individual good to community-level outcomes and the common good of the neighborhood (Clear & Karp, 1999). Community justice strategies should target the neighborhoods plagued by mass incarceration, the norms and values of these communities, and their schools, jobs, and housing institutions. It is through the coordinated efforts of private, parochial, and public controls that community justice functions. By strengthening the private and parochial controls of the neighborhood, this should in turn strengthen the informal social control of the neighborhood—in time leading to lower crime rates.

Conclusion As an extension of social disorganization theory, coerced mobility theory proposes that concentrated incarceration—similar to the voluntary mobility included in most social disorganization models— weakens informal social control within the community and its ability to self-regulate. Informal social control is weakened through the various systems that the offenders are embedded. The inability to self-regulate, the deficiencies in human and social capital, and the overreliance on formal control foster social disorganization, which ultimately leads to higher crime rates. While traditionally removing offenders from a community has been viewed as purely beneficial for the community, Rose and Clear propose that unintended consequences of concentrated incarceration exist, and they demonstrate how criminal justice policies may exacerbate the exact problem the policy attempts to alleviate. Kristin Swartz See also Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Systemic Model of Social Disorganization; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

References and Further Readings Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, class, and change in an urban community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

792

Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society

Bonczar, T. P., & Beck, A. J. (1997). Lifetime likelihood of going to state or federal prison. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Bursik, R. J., Jr., & Grasmick, H. G. (1993). Neighborhoods and crime: The dimensions of effective community control. New York: Lexington Books. Clear, T. R. (2007). Imprisoning communities: How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged neighborhoods worse. New York: Oxford University Press. Clear, T. R., & Karp, D. R. (1999). The community justice ideal: Preventing crime and achieving justice. Boulder, CO: Westview. Clear, T. R., Rose, D. R., Waring, E., & Scully, K. (2003). Coercive mobility and crime: A preliminary examination of concentrated incarceration and social disorganization. Justice Quarterly, 20, 33–64. Cochran, J. K., Chamlin, M. B., & Seth, M. (1994). Deterrence or brutalization? An impact assessment of Oklahoma’s return to capital punishment. Criminology, 32, 107–134. Crutchfield, R. D. (1989). Labor stratification and violent crime. Social Forces, 68, 489–512. Crutchfield, R. D., & Pitchford, S. R. (1997). Work and crime: The effects of labor stratification. Social Forces, 76, 93–118. Edin, K., & Lein, L. (1997). Work, welfare, and single mothers’ economic survival strategies. American Sociological Review, 62, 253–266. Hagan, J. (1993). The social embeddedness of crime and unemployment. Criminology, 31, 465–492. Hagan, J., & Dinovitzer, R. (2000). Collateral consequences of imprisonment for children, communities, and prisoners. In M. Tonry & J. Petersilia (Eds.), Crime and justice: A review of research—Prisons (Vol. 26, pp. 121–162). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pettit, B., & Western, B. (2004). Mass imprisonment and the life course: Race and class inequality in U.S. incarceration. American Sociological Review, 69, 151–169. Rose, D. R., & Clear, T. R. (1998). Incarceration, social capital, and crime: Implications for social disorganization theory. Criminology, 36, 441–479. Sampson, R. J. (1991). Linking the micro- and macrolevel dimensions of community social organization. Social Forces, 70, 43–64. Sampson, R. J., & Groves, W. B. (1989). Community structure and crime: Testing social disorganization theory. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 774–802. Tyler, T. (1990). Why people obey the law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Uggen, C., Wakefield, S., & Western, B. (2005). Work and family perspectives on reentry. In J. Travis &

C. Visher (Eds.), Prisoner reentry and crime in America (pp. 209–243). New York: Cambridge University Press. Venkatesh, S. A. (1997). The social organization of street gang activity in an urban ghetto. American Journal of Sociology, 103, 82–111. Warner, B. D., & Pierce, G. L. (1993). Reexamining social disorganization theory using calls to the police as a measure of crime. Criminology, 31, 493–517. Western, B., Patillo, M., Weiman, D. (2004). Introduction. In M. Patillo, D. Weiman, & B. Western (Eds.), Imprisoning America: The social effects of mass incarceration (pp. 1–18). New York: Russell Sage. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the under-class, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ross, E. A.: Sin

and

Society

On September 14, 1901, President William McKinley died from wounds inflicted by unemployed factory worker and anarchist Leon Czolgosz. McKinley’s successor, 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, was and remains the youngest man ever to hold the office of president. With his comparative youth and considerable energy, and with interests ranging from history to hunting, Roosevelt was the ideal leader for a Progressive era that marked the beginning of the modern age in America. Progressivism was a broad-based reform movement that included politicians, feminists, intellectuals, artists, and writers. Key targets for the largely middle-class Progressives were large corporations and trusts, together with the small number of wealthy industrialists and financiers who controlled them. Progressive intellectuals sought solutions to problems generated by the rapid pace of industrialization, urbanization, and population change across the United States. Crusading Progressive journalists— given the name “muckrakers” by an ambivalent Roosevelt—devoted their energies to exposing wrongdoing and corruption in public life and corporate America (Mowry, 1962).

Social Control and Public Opinion In the same year that Roosevelt took office, Edward Alsworth Ross—known as E. A. Ross—published

Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society

his book Social Control. Ross was one of a group of pioneering American sociologists who rejected the evolutionary model of human progress propounded by the British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer. For Ross and his contemporaries, social progress was not circumscribed by the laws of nature, but could be directed and enhanced by reform-minded social scientists working in tandem with government. Ross dismissed as a “common delusion” the idea that people’s innate capacity for goodness is sufficient to maintain social order. Rather, social stability depends on a core of values that brings together diverse individuals under communal ideals. These communal ideals operate as a collective mind that regulates behavior and encourages desired conduct. President Roosevelt evidently read and approved of Social Control (Ross, 1965, p. ix). Like much of Ross’s early work, the book addresses the problem of order in a newly modernized America. At the center of Ross’s sociological vision is social control: the internalization of behavioral, moral, and ideological standards. In the book, Ross outlines the formal and informal forces that sustain social order in highly differentiated societies. The formal force that directly maintains social order is law, described by Ross (1959, p. 57) as “the cornerstone of the edifice of order.” Legal sanctions are certain, corporal (in the main), irresistible, and detached; but in complex societies, law is perceived as inflexible, even clumsy. The informal force of social order is public opinion; that is, the psychological pressure exerted by society in order to encourage or discourage conduct. Public opinion has many advantages over the more mechanical force of law: it is nuanced, flexible, immediate, and cheap. The transgressions that public opinion polices are moral, not legal, enabling it to apply pressure in anticipation of wrongful conduct. As Ross (1959, p. 43) notes, “Its premonitory growl is more preventive than the silent menace of justice.” Yet public opinion also has myriad faults. It lacks clarity, both in terms of the behavior it requires and the sanctions it imposes; it is instinctive, impulsive, and passionate; it is crude in technique and indefinite in purpose. Despite its faults, Ross regarded public opinion as the locus of social control; the “germ” from which all the instruments of social order develop. For this reason, it was crucial that public opinion

793

be directed by the wise: influential men who constituted the “nerve centers . . . of society” and “rallying points of public opinion” (1959, p. 47). Both Ross the pioneering sociologist and Roosevelt the Progressive politician were positioning themselves for roles as nerve centers in a reformed, refocused America. Following his re-election in 1904, Roosevelt initiated a package of reforms designed to curtail the detrimental effects of industrialization. Roosevelt’s “square deal” aimed to balance the claims of producers and consumers, managers and workers, and to regulate powerful trusts and corporations. Ross meanwhile worked on a series of essays that drew attention to the same harmful behaviors that the “square deal” sought to eliminate. When the essays were brought together in a short book intended for a lay audience, Ross wrote to Roosevelt, inviting him to contribute a short preface. The president accepted.

Sin and Society The essays that became Sin and Society were published between 1905 and 1907 in the Atlantic Monthly, a journal devoted to literature, politics, science, and the arts. Ross’s theme was “social sins”—a range of corrupt and exploitative practices that had emerged in modern industrial America. The use of the word sin was deliberate and intended to appeal to a Progressive audience who no longer regarded religion as the primary source of moral standards. As social problems, corporate greed and corruption could be assuaged by a collective response, but only one underpinned by a system of social control sturdy enough to stand up to the new forms of misconduct that industrialization had inadvertently unleashed. In his preface to Sin and Society, Ross distances the book from his work in the field of social psychology. His method, he explains, is to speak to the intellect rather than to touch the heart; his target is public opinion, not individual conduct. At present, Ross argues, public opinion is simply not keeping pace with contemporary wrongdoing: “It never occurs to the public that sin evolves along with society. . . . In today’s warfare on sin, the reactions of the public are about as serviceable as gongs and stink-pots in a modern battle.” In order to counter contemporary sin, Ross claims that

794

Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society

public opinion needs a new code of ethical behavior (Ross, 1965, p. vii–viii). Ross identifies the interdependence of the time as the source of new sins. In complex societies, we entrust others with responsibility for our food, work, education, and health, thus creating endless opportunities for wrong-doing and breaches of faith. At the same time, what Ross refers to as “the older sin” (p. 5)—crimes of violence, cruelty and lust—are, he asserts, in decline. The frantic pace of modern life drains away the energy that was formerly expended in violent behavior. Meanwhile, the new sins—and the new sinners—are on the rise. Ross explains the success of modern sin in three ways. First, he says, it lacks the repulsive quality of “primitive sin” (p. 7), at least on the surface. Blood is rarely shed, and even when it is, there is no personal contact between victim and slayer. Modern homicide comes courtesy of those who fail to fence off dangerous machinery or send passengers out to sea with defective life preservers. By the same token, property crime is no longer furtive or disagreeable; rather, they are more indirect and refined. In the second place, modern sin is not accompanied by the melodrama and signs of guilt that are traditionally associated with crime. It is not committed down dark alleys by slouching, scowling villains dressed like Dickens’s Bill Sykes, but by serene, cigar-smoking gentlemen in immaculate linen and silk hats (p. 10). Neither can its proponents be incorporated within the criminological frameworks of the 19th century; they are not Cesare Lombroso’s “born criminals,” whose depravity is biologically determined and irresistible, but simply “the creatures of Crooked Thinking and Opportunity” (p. 28). As a consequence, these quasi-criminals or “criminaloids” remain in good odor with public opinion and with themselves; unrecognized, they lack the “spiritual attitude” of the old-fashioned offender (p. 48). Finally, the crimes these serene, cigar-smoking gentlemen commit are impersonal. They do not strike at selected individuals but at anonymous members of the public; some do not even have victims at all. If no one falls into the dangerous machinery or relies on the defective life preservers, the sinner is merely “chancing it” or “augmenting risk” (p. 12). Even more impersonal are the sins

that damage democratic institutions (and thereby the American people as a whole): the corrupt editor who undermines the freedom of the press; the corrupt bosses who “murder” representative government. It is the sins of corporations in particular that Ross views as requiring expert intervention. In the modern business environment, corporations have become distant and impersonal. They “sin by syndicate,” unmoved by the limitations placed on individual businessmen by conscience and public opinion. Here Ross returns to a theme that he introduced in Social Control: the inability of public opinion to sustain its power in the face of wrongdoing that is traced back to a group rather than a single individual. It is this inability, Ross claims, that fuels the disregard of public opinion within the realm of business management (1959, p. 44). In Sin and Society, though, Ross is less dismissive of public opinion. In an ideal world, company directors would be held legally accountable for misconduct and abuses, but in the meantime, American citizens need to channel their anger. Rather than allowing itself “to be kept guessing which shell the pea is under,” public opinion needs to curb corporate abuses by aiming wrath directly toward the top—the sinning directors (pp. 125–126). The appeal of Ross’s critique for Progressive politicians like Theodore Roosevelt (as well as for academics like Ross himself) lay in the solution he proposed for the elimination of what he termed “latter-day iniquity.” As a broad national trend, Progressivism reflected a modernist belief in the ability of men and women to act on and change their world. Ross shared this belief but feared that left to themselves, the American people were incapable of adjusting their conception of wrongdoing to incorporate the “fresh parasites” who had emerged in post-industrial America. A collective response to change was clearly required, but so was expert supervision. As long as public opinion continued to categorize sinners according to “the old righteousness,” it would be necessary for professionals—politicians and professors—to maintain control of social defense.

Conclusion Sin and Society was the response of a leading Pro­ g­ressive sociologist to the unintended consequences

Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society

of rapid industrialization. For Ross and his political counterparts, there was nothing unalterably sinful in basic human nature. The origins of evil could be traced back to society and exorcised from it through the combined forces of professional experts and enlightened public opinion. Ross was very much aware of his status as a pioneer in sociology, and he accepted that in time his theories and ideas would be superseded. Social Control is credited with establishing a paradigm for the discipline and is generally regarded as his best work. Today, however, it is little read and largely forgotten. Even in his own lifetime, Ross acknowledged that subsequent scholarship had rendered large parts of it “junk” (Hertzler, 1951). Sin and Society, his only foray into criminological theory, seems to have fared even worse. In an extensive account of Ross’s life and work published in the American Sociological Review, the book receives short shrift as one of a series of “semi-popular” books that showcased Ross’s analyses (Hertzler, 1951, p. 607). Sin and Society indisputably contains its share of the rhetorical flourishes and overgeneralizations that characterize much of Ross’s work on the salient public issues of his day. Ross produced no quantitative analyses in support of his thesis, but this did not stop him from dismissing statistical evidence pointing to an upsurge in the “bloody crime” that he asserted was in decline. Un­­ fortunately, time has shown his conviction that the older sins of “brutality, lust and cruelty are on the wane” (1965, p. 5) to be—as Ross himself might have put it—junk. That said, there is a lot to value in this analysis of modern sins and sinners. Ross’s account of “new varieties of sin” and the “criminaloids” who commit them is the largely unacknowledged forefather of Edwin Sutherland’s theory of white-collar crime (Sutherland, 1940, 1949; see, however, Cullen et al., 2006). Moreover, a new generation of scholars have suggested that Sutherland’s focus on the individual, high-status offender (an emphasis that is absent from Ross’s analysis), created an “imprisoning framework” that neglects the structural and organizational dimensions of white-­ collar crime (Braithwaite, 1985; Shapiro, 1987, 1990). A key insight of recent scholarship— namely, that the social organization of trust in complex societies provides endless opportunities

795

for abuse—appears on the first pages of Sin and Society: Modern sin takes its character from the mutualism of our time. Under our present manner of living, how many of my vital interests I must entrust to others! . . . Most sin is preying, and every new social relation begets its cannibalism. . . . Every new fiduciary relation is a fresh opportunity for breach of trust. (Ross, 1965, p. 3)

In its way, Ross’s theory of “social sins” has been as enduring as the Progressive ideals he championed a century ago (Clift, 2009). Amanda Matravers See also Clinard, Marshall B.: The Black Market; Michalowski, Raymond J., and Ronald C. Kramer: State-Corporate Crime; Sutherland, Edwin H.: WhiteCollar Crime

References and Further Readings Borgatta, E. F., & Meyer, H. J. (Eds.). (1959). Social control and the foundations of sociology: Pioneer contributions of Edward Alsworth Ross to the study of society. Boston: Beacon Press. Braithwaite, J. (1985). White-collar crime. In R. H. Turner & J. F. Short (Eds.), Annual review of sociology (Vol. 11, pp. 1–25). Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. Clift, E. (2009, March 13). A progressive moment. Newsweek. Retrieved April 20, 2010, from http:// www.newsweek.com/id/189122 Cullen, F. T., Cavender, G., Maakestad, W. J., & Benson, M. L. (2006). Corporate crime under attack: The fight to criminalize business violence (2nd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson. Hertzler, J. O. (1951). Edward Alsworth Ross: Sociological pioneer and interpreter. American Sociological Review, 16, 609–613. McMahon, S. H. (1999). Social control and public intellect: The legacy of Edward A. Ross. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Mowry, G. E. (1962). The era of Theodore Roosevelt and the birth of modern America. New York: Harper and Row. Ross, E. A. (1959). Social control: A survey of the foundations of order. In E. F. Borgatta & H. J. Meyer (Eds.), Social control and the foundations of sociology: Pioneer contributions of Edward Alsworth Ross to the study of society. Boston: Beacon Press.

796

Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape

Ross, E. A. (1965). Sin and society: An analysis of latterday iniquity. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ross, E. A. (1977). Seventy years of it: An autobiography. New York: Arno Press. Shapiro, H. (1987). The social control of impersonal trust. American Journal of Sociology, 93, 623–658. Shapiro, H. (1990). Collaring the crime, not the criminal: Liberating the concept of white-collar crime. Annual Sociological Review, 55, 346–365. Sutherland, E. H. (1940). White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review, 5, 1–12. Sutherland, E. H. (1949). White collar crime. New York: Dryden.

Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape In The Politics of Rape, first published in 1975, Diana E. H. Russell considered the consequences of rape, an extreme form of aggressive male behavior toward women. Russell attempted to determine what leads men to act aggressively toward women and why, as well as what the consequences and repercussions for the victim are as a result. Further, she explores the ways that society regards the crime, the victims, and the perpetrators of rape. She conducted and analyzed 22 in-depth interviews with rape victims. These narratives served as the vehicle for exploring the underlying social assumptions, views, and beliefs about rape. Included in the accounts are examples of the different forms the crime can take (rape by strangers, marital and date rape, gang rape, incest), as well as examples of reactions to the crime by the victims themselves and by their friends and family members. Russell also includes a chapter with interviews of four male rapists, which she uses to underline her main argument that rape is a sexist crime and that its sexist nature has severe and lasting consequences for victims. Finally, Russell offers suggestions about how to prevent the occurrence of rape at both the institutional and individual levels.

Social Conceptions of Rape Written before laws banned domestic abuse and marital rape, Russell explored a topic that, at the

time, was not considered to be as prevalent as it actually was and had not yet been systematically explored in the social sciences. Rape was not regarded as a social crisis that demanded attention, largely because the crime was underreported by victims to the police, leading to lower statistical evidence that rape was occurring. Since rape was not an issue being publicly discussed, its absence in public discourse supported falsely held beliefs that rape was not a serious issue of concern for most Americans. Russell points out that the proclivity of women to not report instances of rape, even violent cases, was largely due to the victims’ fear of how they would be treated by authorities and members of their own social circles. At the time of Russell’s research, victims’ charges of rape were often not believed by police or not taken seriously, prosecution of rapists rare, and conviction rarer still. Victims were socially stigmatized. Common understandings of rape were either that it was impossible for a woman to be raped and a victim must have “wanted it,” or that the victim must have provoked the attack in some way and “had it coming.” Because of the prevalence of these views, many victims feared social stigmatization if others found out they had been raped. The extent to which these views affected treatment of victims is highlighted by the allowance of a woman’s sexual past to be admitted as evidence in rape prosecutions in order to show that the would-be rapist had good cause for thinking any protest on behalf of the victim was disingenuous and part of the “game.”

Race, Class, and Rape Russell argues that rape is a crime of misogynistic aggression, not passion. The victim interviews illustrate this conception of rape, as they point to explanations for the crimes that lie outside of a need or desire for sex. Building off the evidence of the victim’s testimonies, Russell considers the effects of race and class relations in an attempt to uncover what attitudes lead men to perpetrate rape and how these attitudes and beliefs shape society’s views about and the treatment of rape. Black and white interracial and intraracial rapes stem from somewhat different attitudes, both of which have their roots in the legacy of American slavery. Historically, interracial rape in the United

Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape

States was most often perpetrated by white males against black females. Seemingly, this view of white superiority and the male right to use black women carried over into contemporary times, as some of the black victims of rape reported the need of the attacker to put them down or keep them in their place. Conversely, white victims of black attackers reported that the attacker either wanted to conquer a white woman or to use them as a way to get back at the men their aggression was really aimed at. Feeling that they had been raped in order to get back at the males she “belonged” to was not an uncommon theme in the interviews, as raping a woman was considered the ultimate insult either to the individual man or to the class of men charged with her protection. Women who were victimized by rape were then seen as “unclean” or “damaged.” In turn, sullying the reputation of a woman then sullied the reputation of the men with whom she was associated. Intraracial rape, the most common form the crime takes, resulted from men feeling the need to show their superiority over women they equal in other respects. Date and marital rape most often fall under this category, with the male needing to keep the power dynamic in his favor in the relationship. Class considerations also appear in Russell’s analysis, though the pattern of perpetrators is different from that of victims. While there is no evidence that perpetrators are limited to one class background, the majority have low socioeconomic status. Russell sees a parallel between the effects of class background on perpetrators to that of the effect of race; both are a way to show one’s masculine power over others when the perpetrator may feel their power or masculine identity is threatened. Conversely, victimization is distributed relatively equally across classes, especially when the rape was perpetrated by a stranger. Russell argues that while attitudes about class and race can shed some light on the issue of rape, the most important beliefs to be scrutinized are those regarding gender. Social attitudes about what men and women are expected to do and how they are supposed to act go furthest in helping to understand rape. Beliefs surrounding expected behavior are so engrained in individuals that efforts to fulfill gender roles can have the ultimate consequence—rape.

797

The Role of Gender Through analysis of the victims’ interviews, Russell examines how ideas and beliefs about rape are largely based on gender roles. It is these roles that inform expectations about how men and women are to relate to each other. They are also the mechanism to determine what is considered acceptable behavior and the response of one sex toward the other. Describing male and female roles as the “masculine mystique” and “feminine mystique,” Russell concludes that at its core rape is a sexist crime that is a direct reflection of these beliefs. Males are expected to be strong and dominant. They are the heads of the families, the authorities over women. “Macho” attitudes, grounded in power and superiority, are also part of the male mystique. In addition, men have sexual expectations placed on them. They are assumed to be virile, to have sexual appetites, and to take pride in fulfilling sexual desires. As a complement to the power-driven identities of their male counterparts, women are expected to be passive and submissive in their relations with men. They are to be dependent on men for their well-being, with their identities largely based in the perceptions males have toward them. Sexual expectations for women are vastly different from men; as they are to focus on male pleasure and it is shameful for them to focus on their own sexual desires. Due to the way these gender roles inform the course of relationships and communication between men and women, Russell argues that rape is a sexist crime and that it occurs more frequently than is acknowledged by the media or society. Underacknowledgment of rape as a crime by victims and perpetrators is one of the results of the definitions and assumptions perpetuated by gender roles. Because of gender roles, men feel a sense of superiority over women that both consider the normal dynamic in relations between sexes. This superior feeling leads to a sense of male entitlement to female bodies and to sexual gratification. Women, believing that they are to be submissive to men, may also accept that they are supposed to be at the mercy of male sexual desires. This belief can lead to women submitting to sexual demands unwillingly. Another consequence of gender roles is the idea that rape is not possible, because all protests

798

Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape

against sexual advances are hiding the true desires of the woman—that is, she indeed approves of the sexual advance made toward her. Women are supposed to want attention from men, and thus they do what it takes in order to receive that attention. This includes conforming to the male’s ideal of “beauty,” a standard commonly achieved through cosmetics and clothing. This effort works to garner the attention of men, but at the same time women must maintain their pure identity by distancing themselves from impure acts. This simultaneous attraction and rejection leads to the belief that women will say “no” to sexual advances when they actually mean “yes” in order to avoid the man thinking she is “easy.” Women are expected to want and to give into sexual relations with men, while acting to the contrary. This view of women leads to the belief that a woman must protest against sexual advances, but will, and want, to give in when pressed. Since women are thought to be allowing and wanting the act to take place, despite any protest made, it cannot be rape. Men also face the expectation that they are to prove their worth relative to others through success and achievement, specifically by showing power and capability to overcome any obstacle. This success or worth can be achieved in many different realms of life: financial, familial, and romantic. When men have failed or feel that their worth is not recognized or diminished in some way, they may act in a way that reestablishes their position. Some manifestations of this are benign, but when a man feels he cannot achieve romantically he may resort to rape. Several women Russell interviewed reported that they were raped by men whose prior sexual advances toward them had been dismissed. Their frustration at not being able to overcome this romantic obstacle ultimately led the men to rape. The feeling that women are in the category of problems to be conquered, and that in

the end they could be conquered, illustrates an aspect of the misogynistic nature of rape.

Conclusion: Rape Prevention As a conclusion, Russell offers suggestions for rape prevention. A central problem in rape prevention is that receiving institutional protection often deprives independent women of their personal freedoms. Among her recommendations for institutional changes are altering the way hospitals deal with rape victims, increased research into the causes of rape, and changes in the penal system to better treat and rehabilitate rapists. Acknowledging that institutional reforms like those suggested are often slow to happen, especially when they are regarding a problem not yet identified as such, Russell focuses on ways individuals may help prevent rape. These suggestions include forming victim support groups, learning self-defense and resistance techniques, and forming neighborhood alert organizations. April Dawn Henning See also Inequality and Crime; Koss, Mary P.: The Prevalence and Sources of Rape; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Patterson, Gerald R.: Social Learning, the Family, and Crime; Rape Myths and Violence Against Women

References and Further Readings Henderson, H. (2007). Feminism, Foucault, and rape: A theory and politics of rape prevention. Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice, 22, 225–253. Russell, D. E. H. (1975). The politics of rape: The victim’s perspective. New York: Stein and Day. Russell, D. E. H. (1998). Dangerous relationships: Pornography, misogyny and rape. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

S how they unite to form the foundation of the criminal event perspective’s approach to crime.

Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective

Crime, Not Criminality Criminological theories often focus on explaining criminality or the reason why people commit crime. In addressing this goal, traditional theories frequently study crime by attempting to explain the motivation of the offender. In other words, the offender and their motivation to commit crime is the primary focus of the theory. For example, social learning theory offers an explanation for the action of offenders based on human learning processes. Social bond theory suggests that offenders do not learn to commit crime; rather, they are born ready to commit crime and it is only through effective social bonds that crime be averted. Both theories emphasize offenders and the reason(s) why they commit crime while offering different explanations for offender motivation. More recently, theories have begun focusing on the importance of opportunity in understanding criminal activity. Opportunity is argued to be a key ingredient in crime and a crucial component of study for developing effective crime prevention policy. More broadly, opportunity theories focus on explaining crime rather than criminality. Routine activity theory is arguably the best known of these approaches. Its core explanation for crime is represented in the statement that crime occurs when a motivated offender and a suitable target interact in time and space without guardianship (Cohen and Felson, 1979). Thus, while a motivated offender is

The criminal event perspective (CEP) is not a traditional theory of why people commit crime; instead it offers a way of identifying and organizing information to understand criminal activity. In other words, it is not a theory of criminality but a road map to understanding crime. The CEP is an explanation of crime that is firmly rooted in the philosophy of environmental criminology, and shares similarities with routine activity theory. Building from this foundation, the CEP directs focus to the factors necessary for commission of a crime. Introduced by Vincent F. Sacco and Leslie W. Kennedy in 1996, the criminal event perspective is defined by three characteristics. First, the CEP focuses on studying crime, not criminality, which is consistent with the philosophy of environmental criminology. Second, the CEP identifies and encourages the exploration of multiple factors that contribute to the occurrence of crime. In other words, understanding crime requires exploration of a broad, inclusive list of variables. Finally, the CEP examines crime as an event, not an act. From this perspective, crime is not an isolated act but an event with different stages that coalesce to form a criminal event. These three characteristics underpin the CEP and define its contribution to the field. This discussion explores each characteristic in detail and describes 799

800

Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective

necessary, it is not sufficient. In other words, opportunity (i.e., suitable targets without guardianship) is also a necessary condition for the commission of a criminal offense. Much of the research within this tradition has focused on the role of targets and guardians leading to its categorization as an opportunity theory. The CEP continues in this vein by acknowledging that both offenders and victims (i.e., targets) are crucial to the criminal event. Specifically, the CEP mirrors the approach of routine activity theory by identifying specific necessary components for crime to occur. In addition, the CEP re-emphasizes the role of offenders in crime, which reflects earlier criminological theorizing focused on the motivation of the offender. Thus, the CEP acknowledges the importance of offenders (and their motivation), but also embraces the role of opportunity in understanding crime.

Components of the Criminal Event Perspective A second characteristic of the CEP is its emphasis on studying multiple variables necessary for the commission of a crime. The CEP groups these factors into two dimensions. Understanding crime requires consideration of offenders, victims, and the social context within which the activity occurs. In addition, the precursors of the crime, the transaction itself, and the aftermath of the crime are all central to understanding crime. In other words, the proximate and distal factors surrounding crime offer crucial information regarding the criminal event. The first dimension, comprising offenders, victims, and social context, reflects core elements that must be present for crime to occur. The CEP argues for study of offender decision making based on the principles of rational choice theory. This approach posits that individuals base their decisions on a cost-benefit analysis. Victims also play a pivotal role in crime, not as a direct cause of crime, but as a necessary component of the event. Finally, the social context of the event is also crucial to understanding crime. The social context refers to factors including, but not limited to, the geographic location, the time of the event, or a combination of environmental influences that combine to create the social world. In short, the

social context refers to the environment and its role in encouraging or inhibiting crime. The second dimension of the CEP involves study of the precursors, the specific transaction (i.e., the crime), and the aftermath of the criminal event. Exploration of this dimension is a key characteristic defining the study of crime as an event, and not as an act. Emphasizing a broader examination of crime to include factors occurring before, during, and after the actual crime is arguably the key contribution of the CEP and is a primary defining characteristic of the approach. Sacco and Kennedy suggest that precursors to the crime include situational and geographic factors that influence interactions between individuals that may lead to crime. For example, such factors may include the relationship between the offender and victim or the rules that define particular behaviors as acceptable (e.g., the law). At the time of the crime, the interactions between the participants also assist in defining the nature of the crime. For example, studying transactions may involve exploring how the offenders or victims define their role in the crime or in understanding the offender or victim’s perceptions of how economic or political pressures affected the commission of the crime. Finally, the aftermath of the crime offers insight through exploration of factors occurring once the crime is complete. For example, the role of the police, the degree of harm caused by the crime, and the long-term impact of the specific crime on the broader society are all factors to consider in the study of crime. The CEP emphasizes specific, necessary components of crime (i.e., offenders, victims, and the social context) and its temporal considerations, including the precursors, the transaction, and the aftermath of the crime. Collectively, each of these components requires study to fully understand crime.

Crime as an Event, Not an Act As described by Sacco and Kennedy, the CEP also suggests that criminal activity should be viewed as an event, not simply an act. When crime is viewed as simply an isolated act, the role of social context in crime may not receive the proper attention and/or the processes defining or contributing to the act may be ignored. As previously mentioned, crime requires offenders and victims, but defining crime as an event encompasses other crucial elements not

Sacco, Vincent F., and Leslie W. Kennedy: The Criminal Event Perspective

often identified in criminological theories. For example, key considerations include, but are not limited to, the physical time and location of the crime, the role of law in defining what activities constitute crime, the personal histories between the parties, and the environmental context of the crime. These factors are not exhaustive but identify primary factors necessary to understanding criminal activity. The CEP could theoretically include additional factors and future research may in fact supply new important vectors to the CEP. Exploring crime as an event, not an act, requires the acknowledgement that multiple factors collectively influence the commission of crime. By defining crime as an act, previous criminological theories may have missed the explanatory power of key components that converge to create a criminal event. Sacco and Kennedy suggest that while studying offenders and their motivation is important, a holistic approach that emphasizes multiple facets of crime offers a fuller explanation for crime. As succinctly stated by Meier, Kennedy, and Sacco, “We are, in other words, getting a more complete picture of the factors that promote and curtail crime and that attempt to address its consequences” (2001, p. 4). Thus, the CEP emphasizes the importance of viewing crime as an event in which multiple factors coalesce, rather than simply an act by a single individual.

Conclusion Due to common assumptions, the CEP is frequently associated with routine activity theory. There are, however, differences that define each approach’s contribution. Routine activity theory essentially claims that crime occurs as a result of offenders interacting with victims without adequate guardianship and these instances are often a product of normal activity patterns of everyday life (Cohen & Felson, 1979). The most common criticism of this explanation is the lack of importance placed on the motivation of the offender. The CEP differs from routine activity theory by encouraging study of offenders and their motivation. In addition, the CEP also emphasizes exploration of the broader social, economic, and legal structures and their role in influencing criminal events. In the language of the CEP, the study of victims and the social context of crime needs to be

801

coupled with an examination of the offender and an exploration of the precursors to the crime, the crime itself, and the aftermath of the crime (i.e., the criminal event). Thus, the CEP encourages attention not only to the crime but also to the dynamic and contextual nature of the event. In this manner, the CEP offers a systematic approach to understanding crime. The CEP offers a road map for understanding crime that moves beyond the exploration of crime as a compartmentalized act (i.e., only the combination of offender motivation and opportunity) to analyzing criminal activity as an event with multiple causal factors. The CEP focuses primarily on crime, but its inclusive nature allows existing criminological theories of offender motivation to fit within this framework. In this manner, the CEP offers a holistic and comprehensive guide to studying and understanding crime. Rob Tillyer See also Clarke, Ronald V.: Situational Crime Prevention; Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Miethe, Terance D., and Robert F. Meier: An Integrated Theory of Victimization

References and Further Readings Anderson, A. L., & Meier, R. F. (2004). Interaction and the criminal event perspective. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 20, 416–440. Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Meier, R. F., Kennedy, L. W., & Sacco, V. F. (2001). Crime and the criminal event perspective. In R. F. Meier, L. W. Kennedy, & V. F. Sacco (Eds.), The process and structure of crime: Criminal events and crime analysis (pp. 1–28). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Pino, N. W. (2005). Serial offending and the criminal events perspective. Homicide Studies, 9, 109–148. Sacco, V. F., & Kennedy, L. W. (1996). The criminal event: An introduction to criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Weaver, G. S., Wittekind, J. E., Huff-Corzine, L., Corzine, J., Petee, T. A., & Jarvis, J. P. (2004). Violent encounters: A criminal event analysis of lethal and nonlethal outcomes. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 20, 348–368.

802

Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory

Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory Collective efficacy is defined as the process of activating or converting social ties among neighborhood residents in order to achieve collective goals, such as public order or the control of crime (Sampson, 2006a; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). Empirically, collective efficacy has been represented as a combined measure of shared expectations for social control and social cohesion and trust among neighborhood residents. The theory of collective efficacy helps explain one of the most robust findings in criminological research, that crime is nonrandomly distributed across geographic space. Collective efficacy also explains why neighborhood characteristics such as concentrated poverty and high levels of residential turnover are positively related to crime. Neighborhoods vary in their capacity for efficacious action, and Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls argue that this variation explains differences across neighborhoods in levels of crime and violence. In order to understand the theoretical utility of the concept of collective efficacy, it is vital to comprehend the intellectual foundation of the theory. Collective efficacy theory is rooted in the social disorganization tradition in sociology and criminology, yet augments the disorganization model in important ways. In the social disorganization model, neighborhood organization is facilitated by the density of neighborhood social networks; however, empirical research has demonstrated that strong social ties among neighbors do not always lead to the social control of crime and may even foster criminal behavior. Moreover, research by Mark Granovetter has demonstrated that weak social ties may be a more important resource for individuals than strong, cohesive ties. The theory of collective efficacy resolves these apparent inconsistencies related to the importance of social networks by arguing that the social control of crime may be facilitated by strong neighborhood ties and associations, but does not necessarily require cohesive ties. This entry proceeds by first describing early conceptions of social disorganization and then more recent formulations of the theory. Next, the entry turns to a description of how the theory of collective

efficacy explicitly addresses criticisms of social disorganization and therefore serves as a more valid model of the utility of neighborly social networks for the social control of crime. The essay concludes with a discussion of future directions in the development of the theory of collective efficacy.

Social Disorganization Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s conceptualization of social disorganization was influenced by the ecological perspective of their Chicago School of Sociology predecessors Robert Park and Ernest Burgess and the social psychological perspective of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization thesis can be conceived as describing the macro-level processes that lead to variation in rates of delinquency across neighborhoods, and the micro-level (i.e., social psychological) processes underlying these macrolevel factors. Shaw and McKay suggest that urban growth processes characterizing Chicago and other United States cities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century produced neighborhoods marked by drastic differences in physical and economic conditions. Furthermore, they found vast differences in systems of values across these neighborhoods, although they did argue that conventional values were still dominant in all areas. Shaw and McKay sought to understand why rates of delinquency varied across localities, and why delinquents were concentrated in certain localities. Shaw and McKay mapped the home addresses for over 100,000 delinquents processed by the Cook County (Illinois) Juvenile Court from 1900 to the mid-1930s and found that delinquents were concentrated in four areas of Chicago— Italian delinquents on the near west side, Italians to the near north, black youth on the south side, and Polish delinquents in South Chicago. Shaw and McKay concluded that variation in delinquency across areas was a function of the extent of social disorganization across these areas, where social disorganization refers to the breakdown in the social institutions of a community (e.g., family, schools, churches, and political groups). In other words, these institutions were ineffective at maintaining social order and control. The implication is that to prevent or reduce crime and delinquency, it is necessary to alter conditions of neighborhoods

Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory

and not simply focus on the individuals within those neighborhoods. Chapter 7 of Shaw and McKay’s book Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas details the main theoretical points of their argument by describing exactly why variations in community structures and organization lead to variation in delinquency. Central to this discussion is their emphasis on “differential systems of values.” Shaw and McKay note that in both high and low socioeconomic status neighborhoods, the dominant value system is conventional, but in low socioeconomic status areas there is a competing system of values that residents (particularly youths) must contend with. This is not to say that the more affluent and less delinquent areas do not have unconventional values and behavior, but rather that there is greater uniformity and consensus on values in those areas which insulates youth from the criminal element. In contrast, in high delinquency areas youths are routinely brought into contact with unconventional attitudes and behaviors that conflict with the dominant (conventional) value systems. These unconventional attitudes still emphasize the achievement of status and economic gain, but different means to achieve these ends are formulated and transmitted. In other words, these unconventional values support delinquent behavior. Related to the arguments of Thomas and Znaniecki, Shaw and McKay argue that the weakening of social institutions in disorganized areas hinders efforts to reinforce conventional value systems. Furthermore, they contend that low rate delinquency areas are more often characterized by a community consensus on how to deal with social problems and how to collectively regulate unconventional behavior like delinquency, but high delinquency areas lack such consensus. Central to this point is that in certain neighborhoods, traditional forms of social control are weakened and ineffective at countering the advance of these unconventional value systems and the resulting criminal behavior.

Extensions and Revisions of Social Disorganization Theory Recent formulations of social disorganization theory have focused more on the social control and collective action aspects of the theory, and have come to define social disorganization as the inability

803

of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls (Bursik, 1988; Kornhauser, 1978; Sampson & Groves, 1989). With an emphasis on the importance of relational networks to facilitate social control, current formulations of the social disorganization thesis have utilized the systemic model, which identifies the social organization of communities by focusing on the local community networks. In the systemic model, local community is viewed as a complex system of friendship and kinship networks and of formal and informal associational ties rooted in family life and socialization processes that are fashioned by societal institutions. These social ties facilitate the creation and maintenance of social capital, where social capital refers to a resource that arises from social relations. Social capital, in turn, facilitates social control. Thus, the systemic model of social disorganization posits that the structure and characteristics of these social networks determines the capacity with which a neighborhood can engage in the control of various behaviors, including crime.

A Critique of Social Disorganization Theory One central challenge to Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory are findings of the simultaneous occurrence of internally organized local communities and high crime rates in those areas. If dense neighborhood social networks are supposed to advance the social control of crime, then how do we explain the observation that some neighborhoods characterized by strong social ties are nevertheless overrun with crime? There are numerous examples of research that have found that high rates of crime occur in socially organized neighborhoods. Some of the most vivid evidence of this can be seen in the work of William F. Whyte. In the opening statements of Street Corner Society, William F. Whyte describes the common perception of the “Cornerville” neighborhood of Boston (“Eastern City”) as a crime-ridden and disorganized local community. This perception, he claims, was constructed through secondhand information and sensationalized newspaper accounts. These sources may describe some of the realities of Cornerville, such as the presence of rackets and corruption, but Whyte’s work demonstrates that the strength and density of social relations were much

804

Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory

different than commonly perceived by outsiders. Cornerville was not an area in chaos and disorganization, but rather a neighborhood with sure signs of organization. However, in the course of finding a strong, dense network of social ties in Cornerville, he also uncovered an extensive criminal network and an organized gang life. Thus, what appears to be disorganized from outside the local community is actually quite different when viewed from the street corner, even if there is a high incidence and prevalence of crime. The theory of collective efficacy helps explain why Whyte found high crime in the presence of an internally organized neighborhood. One lesson learned from Whyte’s study is that dense social ties among neighborhood residents, and the social capital derived from these relations, are certainly resources available to control crime and misbehavior, but they must be used or activated toward a specific purpose, like stopping neighborhood crime. Sampson asserts that collective efficacy is “the activation of social ties to achieve shared expectations for action” (2006b, p. 39). Whyte’s Cornerville was characterized by dense social ties, yet those ties were not activated to reduce crime.

which social capital confers benefits on neighborhoods. Collective efficacy is the process of activating or converting social ties among neighborhood residents in order to achieve collective goals, such as public order or the control of crime. This formulation relies on trust and a shared willingness to actively engage in social control as key dimensions explaining crime. As Sampson asserts, “social networks foster the conditions under which collective efficacy may flourish, but they are not sufficient for the exercise of control” (2006b, p. 39). In other words, when neighbors have mutual trust for each other, this facilitates social control but does not guarantee it. Similarly, Barry Wellman argues that social scientists have become preoccupied with local solidarity, “rather than a search for functioning primary ties” (p. 1202). The point is that strong ties and a union of interests are secondary in importance to a consideration of whether the structure of ties provides some function or benefit irrespective of strength or sentiment. So the emphasis should not be put upon whether social ties are strong, but whether ties (among neighbors, institutions, and also extralocal entities) provide resources, information, or social control.

Collective Efficacy

The Mechanism of Collective Efficacy

Sampson argues that social networks and the strength of social ties alone cannot explain the social control of crime, given that strong ties are not always conducive to action. While the systemic model of social disorganization assumes that relational networks are related to, and even facilitate, the exercise of control, they are not sufficient for explaining social control because nonconforming behavior may be tolerated by network members as long as it does not interfere with the attainment of common goals. Again we know from the research of Whyte that dense social networks do not always translate into low crime. Jeffrey Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush argue that researchers must move beyond a reliance on social capital and density of ties when examining the determinants of crime. They describe social capital as a “resource potential,” but one that must be activated and utilized. To move beyond social capital and strong ties and associations, Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls conceptualize collective efficacy as a mechanism through

It is vital to ask what exactly is the causal mechanism underlying collective efficacy? Is collective efficacy simply a form of group intervention to stop a criminal event from occurring, or does collective efficacy more broadly involve the collective socialization of youths toward prosocial behavior? Sampson (2006a) characterizes these dilemmas as one of distinguishing between the situational and enduring effects of collective efficacy. With the former, collective efficacy inhibits crime in a given neighborhood regardless of where the would-be criminal resides, while in the latter collective efficacy in an individual’s neighborhood of residence influences her behavior even when she leaves the confines of the neighborhood (Kirk, 2009). Theoretically, the answers to these questions lie in Sampson and colleagues’ (1997) conception of social control. While many studies in criminology conceive of social control as the direct supervision of behavior—whether by parents, teachers, or neighbors—Sampson and colleagues define social control more broadly.

Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory

Drawing on the definition employed by Morris Janowitz, Sampson, Rauden­bush, and Earls define social control as “the capacity of a group to regulate its members according to desired principles” (p. 918). The precise means to achieve these desired principles are many and may include group intervention and collective socialization. Empirically, research to date convincingly demonstrates a situational effect of collective efficacy on neighborhood crime rates, yet research by David Kirk as well as Sampson, Morenoff, and Rauden­bush has also shown that neighborhood collective efficacy does not significantly predict individual levels of delinquency. This may result because collective efficacy is situational (as opposed to enduring), with little staying power once residents are outside the boundaries of the given neighborhood (Sampson, 2006a). A necessary next stage in the theoretical development of collective efficacy is to sort out if collective efficacy has an enduring influence on crime in addition to a situational influence. David S. Kirk See also Kornhauser, Ruth Rosner: Social Sources of Delinquency; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Systemic Model of Social Disorganization; Whyte, William Foote: Street Corner Society

References and Further Readings Burgess, E. W. (1967). The growth of the city: An introduction to a research project. In R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, & R. D. McKenzie (Eds.), The city (pp. 47–62). Chicago: University Chicago of Press. (Original work published 1925) Bursik, R. J., Jr. (1988). Social disorganization and theories of crime and delinquency: Problems and prospects. Criminology, 26, 519–551. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380. Janowitz, M. (1975). Social theory and social control. American Journal of Sociology, 81, 82–107. Kirk, D. S. (2008). The neighborhood context of racial and ethnic disparities in arrest. Demography, 45, 55–77. Kirk, D. S. (2009). Unraveling the contextual effects on student suspension and juvenile arrest: The independent and interdependent influences of school,

805

neighborhood, and family social controls. Criminology, 47, 479–520. Kornhauser, R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morenoff, J. D., Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2001). Neighborhood inequality, collective efficacy, and the spatial dynamics of homicide. Criminology, 39, 517–560. Park, R. E. (1967). The city: Suggestions for investigation of human behavior in the city. In R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, & R. D. McKenzie (Eds.), The city (pp. 1–46). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1925) Pratt, T. C., & Cullen, F. T. (2005). Assessing macrolevel predictors and theories of crime: A meta-analysis. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 32, pp. 373–450). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sampson, R. J. (2006a). Collective efficacy theory: Lessons learned and directions for future inquiry. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (Advances in Criminological Theory: Vol. 15, pp. 149–167). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Sampson, R. J. (2006b). How does community context matter? Social mechanisms and the explanation of crime. In P.-O. Wikström & R. J. Sampson (Eds.), The explanation of crime: Context, mechanisms, and development (pp. 31–60). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sampson, R. J., & Groves, W. B. (1989). Community structure and crime: Testing social disorganization theory. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 744–802. Sampson, R. J., Morenoff, J. D., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2005). Social anatomy of racial and ethnic disparities in violence. American Journal of Public Health, 95, 224–232. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 227, 918–924. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, W. I., & Znaniecki, F. (1918). The Polish peasant in Europe and America (Vols. 1–2). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wellman, B. (1979). The community question: The intimate networks of East Yorkers. American Journal of Sociology, 84, 1201–1231. Whyte, W. F. (1993). Street corner society (4th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1943)

806

Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control A debate over the significance of criminal careers dominated theoretical criminology, beginning in the mid-1980s. On one side, Alfred Blumstein et al. (1986, 1988a, 1988b) promoted a criminal career model to describe the volume of crime committed over an individual lifespan, including age of onset, frequency of offending, age of termination (desistance), and career length. The criminal careers paradigm suggested that each of these parameters warranted investigation and, possibly, distinct theoretical explanations. In opposition, Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi argued that these supposed distinct parameters were not necessary for understanding the causes of crime; stable individual differences in self-control accounted for crime committed over an individual criminal career. Further­ more, because of the stability of these differences, there was no need to measure criminal career lengths, or even to conduct longitudinal research. This debate fueled many theoretical and quantitative advances in criminology throughout the 1990s, and continues to impact research today. In 1993, Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub joined the fray by introducing a compelling new age-graded theory of informal social control in their book Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life. This theory has become the leading life-course theory of crime. The theory does not side with either Blumstein’s criminal career model or Gottfredson and Hirschi’s self-control theory; rather, it attempts to walk a middle ground, drawing useful elements from both perspectives. Sampson and Laub side with Blumstein in terms of embracing the value of longitudinal research and explanations of crime that takes into account not just the beginning of a criminal career but persistence and desistance as well. They reject the stable individual differences hypothesis of Gottfredson and Hirschi, claiming instead that individual propensity to offend may vary over the life course due to a number of factors, primarily informal social controls. Their recent theoretical reformulation, presented in Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives, identifies a number of factors in addition to informal social control that explain crime across the life

course, the most important of which are routine activities and human agency. According to the theory, social control, routine activities, and human agency, both directly and in interaction, affect trajectories of crime across the entire life course.

The Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency Study Sampson and Laub’s life-course theory is drawn from their analysis of a groundbreaking data set. The data for a multiple-wave prospective study of juvenile and adult criminal behavior were originally collected by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck and presented in their book Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency. The research design involved a sample of 500 male delinquents ages 10 to 17 and 500 male nondelinquents ages 10 to 17 matched case-by-case on age, race/ethnicity, IQ, and low-income residence in Boston. The two groups grew up in similar high-risk environments of poverty and exposure to antisocial conduct. Because of this environmental similarity and the matching design, differences in offending between the two groups cannot be attributed to sex, age, ethnicity, IQ, or residence in slum areas. The initial period of data collection lasted from 1940 to 1948. The average age in this first time period was 14. This sample of 1,000 boys was followed up twice—at age 25 and again at age 32. As a result, extensive data are available for nearly 90 percent of the original sample at all three age periods. The Gluecks collected a wide range of data for analysis relating to criminal career histories, criminal justice interventions, family life, school and employment history, and recreational activities for the subjects in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Despite the richness of this study, the original case files were left nearly forgotten in the basement of the Harvard Law School Library until they were discovered by John Laub in 1987. Following the discovery of the original files for this study, Sampson and Laub spent 6 years (1987–1993) reconstructing, augmenting, and analyzing the full longitudinal data set. Sampson and Laub’s analysis of this reconstructed data, presented in Crime in the Making, was driven by the challenge to develop and test a theoretical model that would account for crime and deviance in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Their age-graded theory integrates the life-course perspective with social control theory to meet this challenge.

Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

The Life-Course Perspective The life-course perspective provides a broad framework for studying lives over time. Sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists all use life-course methods to help explain and predict major life changes and decisions. It has been applied to numerous domains of human behavior, including crime. According to Glen H. Elder, Jr., the life course is a pathway through an individual’s life that follows a sequence of culturally defined, agegraded roles and social transitions. For example, entering the workforce is a culturally defined event that would be part of most people’s pathways. Elder maintains that two central concepts underlie the analysis of life-course dynamics: trajectories and transitions. Trajectories may be described as pathways or lines of development throughout life. These long-term patterns of behavior may include work life, marriage, parenthood, and criminal behavior. Transitions, on the other hand, are short-term events embedded in trajectories, which may include starting a new job, getting married, having a child, or being sentenced to prison. Because transitions and trajectories are so closely connected, transitionary events may lead to turning points, or changes in an individual’s life course. For example, getting married may have a great influence on one’s life and behavior, from changing where a person lives or works to changing the number and type of friends with whom one associates. Turning points are closely linked to role transitions and are helpful in understanding change in human behavior over the life course. Turning points in adulthood modify life trajectories, creating life paths that cannot be predicted from childhood characteristics or events. Contrary to Gottfredson and Hirschi’s position, life-course theory holds that people continue to be strongly influenced by society throughout adulthood.

Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control Sampson and Laub developed a theory of agegraded informal social control in an attempt to explain childhood antisocial behavior, adolescent delinquency, and adult crime. The key component of this theory is that delinquency and crime have an inverse relationship with an individual’s bond to society. The theory is organized around three

807

major themes. First, informal family and school social controls are the fundamental social structures that influence behavior and explain delinquency in childhood and adolescence. Second, antisocial behavior in childhood has a strong likelihood of continuing through adulthood across a variety of life domains. Finally, informal social control in adulthood explains changes in criminal behavior over the life span, independent of prior individual differences in criminal propensity. Structure and Process in Adolescent Delinquency

Sampson and Laub believed that the separation of structural and process-oriented explanations for the onset of delinquency was a mistake. This theory joins structural and process variables, along with individual characteristics, into a single theoretical model. It explains onset with both structural factors, such as poverty or broken homes, and process variables, such as attachment to family and school. Structural context thus influences informal social controls, which in turn explain variations in delinquency. In Crime in the Making Sampson and Laub point to three components of informal social control in the family context: consistent discipline, monitoring, and attachment to the family. To the extent that these three link the child to the family (and ultimately, to society), they inhibit delinquency. These three components of informal control can reduce delinquency through emotional bonds, or through direct control (monitoring and punishment). The school context is another important socializing institution in the prevention of delinquency. Attachment to school and school performance are inversely related to delinquency. The age-graded theory of informal social control also suggests that social structural factors, such as family disruption, unemployment, residential mobility, and socioeconomic status, indirectly affect delinquency through social bonds. These factors are considered to be structural because they indicate a person’s structural position in society. Sampson and Laub claim that previous research has failed to account for the influence of the social structural context on delinquency through family life and social bonds. Some authors argue that socioeconomic disadvantage has potentially adverse effects on parents, such that parental

808

Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

difficulties are more likely to develop and good parenting is impeded. Similarly, factors related to socioeconomic disadvantage, such as poverty and household crowding, may disrupt bonds of attachment between the child and school and may lead to educational deficiencies. If true, one would expect poverty and disadvantage to have indirect effects on delinquency via the influence of parenting and education. Therefore, Sampson and Laub predict that family and social bonding will mediate the effects of structural background factors on delinquency. Continuity Between Adolescent Delinquency and Adult Offending

Sampson and Laub point to weak social bonds to explain continuity in antisocial behavior across adolescence and adulthood. That is, early antisocial behavior, such as delinquency, conduct disorder, and violent temper tantrums, predicts adult antisocial behavior, such as crime and substance abuse. In addition, adolescent antisocial behavior predicts weak adult social bonds. These weak bonds become evident in erratic labor force participation, low educational attainment, and poor quality of marital attachment. These outcomes occur independently of the sociological and psychological variables that are traditionally used to predict delinquency, such as social class background, ethnicity, and IQ. Sampson and Laub emphasize a developmental model of cumulative continuity to explain the correlation between adolescent delinquency and adult crime. Their “cumulative disadvantage” concept, presented in 1997, suggests that delinquency continues into adulthood because of its negative consequences for future life chances. For example, arrest, official labeling, incarceration, and other negative life events associated with delinquency may lead to decreased opportunities, including school failure and unemployment. Delinquent activities are also likely to sever informal social bonds to school, friends, and family and to jeopardize the development of adult social bonds. In this way, childhood delinquency has an indirect effect on adult criminal behavior through the weakening of social bonds. Thus, the theory proposes that crime, deviance, and informal social control are intimately linked over the full life course.

Changes in Offending Across the Life Course Despite the considerable continuity between adolescent offending and adult crime, Sampson and Laub (1993) hold that salient life events and socialization experiences in adulthood can, to some extent, counteract the influence of early life experiences. They recognize that the concepts of continuity and change are not mutually exclusive, and their theory attempts to explain both. Using the imagery of the life-course perspective, they identify certain turning points in the life course, such as marriage, work, and the military, which can alter life trajectories. The social ties that are an inevitable component of most adult transitions (e.g., marital attachment, job stability) provide social capital and can change an individual’s path from a delinquent trajectory to a nondelinquent one or vice versa. In other words, pathways to both crime and social conformity are modified by key institutions of social control in the transition to adulthood, regardless of past indicators of an individual’s criminal propensity. Contrary to the emphasis of many life-course researchers, Sampson and Laub argue that the mere occurrence of an event (e.g., getting married or getting a job) or the timing of that event are not the determining factors in their effects on lifecourse trajectories. Rather, the changes in social bonds and social capital that occur in conjunction with a transition may divert life trajectories. Similarly, the mere presence of a relationship between adults is not sufficient to produce social capital. Instead, adult social ties are important insofar as they create interdependent systems of obligation and restraint that impose significant costs for translating criminal propensities into action. For example, being married will not increase social control if the relationship is not strong. However, close emotional ties and mutual investment between spouses increase the social bond between individuals and, all else being equal, should lead to a reduction in criminal behavior. Sampson and Laub hold that adults, regardless of delinquent background, are inhibited from committing crime in proportion to the amount of social capital invested in work and family relationships. On the other hand, those subject to weak informal social control as adults—that is, those without strong family obligations or steady work— are freer to engage in deviant behavior, even if they were nondelinquent in adolescence.

Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

While this focus on change may appear inconsistent with the earlier discussion of the stability of antisocial behavior over time, evidence suggests that continuity is far from perfect. In fact, most antisocial adolescents do not become antisocial adults (Robins, 1978). Additionally, lives are often unpredictable, and change is ever present. Sampson and Laub propose a dynamic theory of social capital and informal social control that incorporates explanations of stability and change in criminal behavior. Adult social ties can modify childhood trajectories of crime despite general stability. Specifically, they suggest that adult social bonds have a direct negative effect on adult criminal behavior, controlling for childhood delinquency. A person whose youthful life course seems to predict a criminal adulthood may, in fact, experience a well-defined turning point that leads to social stability and engagement instead. Age-graded theory brings together the concepts of continuity and change. This theoretical framework proposes a dynamic process whereby transitions within trajectories generate turning points in the life course. Sampson and Laub identify three kinds of positive turning points for adult offending trajectories: a cohesive marriage, meaningful work, and serving in the military. They also identify prolonged incarceration and subsequent job instability during the transition to young adulthood as a negative turning point that prevents the formation of social capital and conformity.

Revised Theory While Sampson and Laub made considerable headway in explaining criminal behavior across the life course with their theory, lingering questions remained, so they followed up on the Glueck men one more time, searching out records and interviewing subjects who were then about age 70. In particular, Sampson and Laub wished to further explore the relationship between age and crime, especially in later years, and to better integrate qualitative and quantitative data. They presented their findings in their 2003 book Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives. Their study involved three sources of new data collection: criminal record checks, death record checks, and personal interviews with a sample of 52 of the original Glueck men, stratified to ensure variability in patterns of persistence and

809

desistance in crime. These combined data represent a roughly 50-year window on “criminal careers,” allowing them to update the Glueck men’s lives at the close of the 20th century and connect them to life experiences as far back as early childhood. Analysis of these quantitative and qualitative data led Laub and Sampson to significantly modify their age-graded theory of informal social control. While they maintain that social bonds help to explain persistence and desistance throughout the life course independent of pre-existing factors, they invoke a number of other causal factors as well. They suggest that criminal behavior, or lack thereof, is a result of individual actions (choice) in conjunction with social situations and influences linked to key institutions. More plainly, they identify social controls, structured routine activities, and purposeful human agency as causal elements in explaining crime throughout the life course. The lack of these factors helps explain late onset of criminal behavior, or persistence in criminal behavior. The presence of all three of these factors helps explain desistance in adulthood independent of a history of antisocial behavior. The core proposition of Laub and Sampson’s theory remains intact in its newest version: levels of offending are reciprocally related to social bonds throughout the life course. In the revised theory, they seek to expand the understanding of informal social control across the entire life course by highlighting how social bonds interact with individual choice and situational context. They note that social bonds may interact with age and life experiences. That is, the inhibiting effect of the increased costs of offending due to potential loss of social capital may increase with age (Shover, 1996). Structured routine activities, such as going to work every day, tend to limit the variety of situations an individual finds himself or herself in, thus reducing the array of behavioral choices available (Birkbeck & LaFree, 1993). Laub and Sampson (2003) contend that structured routine activities enhance the effect of social controls on offending. Persistent offenders are notable in their lack of structured routine activities across the life course. On the other hand, increased routine activities facilitate desistance from crime regardless of prior offending trajectories. The third factor proposed to shape offending trajectories across the life course is human agency,

810

Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

a core principle of the life-course perspective. At first glance, the concept of human agency might seem inconsistent with the social control perspective, since a key distinction of control theories is their assumption of universal motivation to offend. Laub and Sampson offer a less stringent version of control theory, assuming that human nature, and thus the motivation to offend, is changeable. In addition, their concept of human agency cannot be understood simply as a proxy for motivation. Rather, their concept of agency has the element of projective, or transformative action within structural constraints. Laub and Sampson refer to agentic moves within structural context as “situated choice.” Beyond these three causal factors, Laub and Sampson’s expanded theory of age-graded informal social control gives theoretical expression to “random developmental noise.” They conceive of development as the constant interaction between individuals and their environment, coupled with the factor of chance (Lewontin, 2000). This implies that there will always be considerable heterogeneity in criminal offending no matter how many factors are taken into account. In addition, prospective identification of meaningful long-term patterns of offending is not possible. That is, while distinct trajectories of criminal offending may be evident in post-hoc analyses, these trajectories cannot be reliably predicted prospectively (Eggleston et al., 2004; Laub & Sampson, 2003). In addition to identifying three core causal factors which explain crime throughout the life course, Laub and Sampson draw heavily from their life-history interviews to describe in detail the mechanisms of desistance. The major self-described turning points that they found important in the process of desistance from crime include marriage, the military, reform school, work, and neighborhood change. They maintain that there are multiple pathways to desistance, not limited to these particular institutions. Rather, they identify general mechanisms whereby these institutions facilitate desistance. These institutional or structural turning points all involve, to varying degrees, new situations that (1) knife off the past from the present, (2) provide both supervision and new opportunities for social support and growth, (3) change and structure routine activities, and/or (4) provide the opportunity for identity transformation. While

cognitive transformation is implicated in some desisting offenders, Sampson and Laub believe that most offenders choose to desist in response to structurally induced turning points that serve as a catalyst for long-term behavioral change. In the short term, these institutions interrupt and replace previous social and situational motivations to commit crime, while in the long term they enhance commitments to conformity.

Conclusion Raymond Paternoster and his colleagues (1997) suggested that Sampson and Laub’s theory of informal social control could be classified as a general theory of crime, because age-graded social control explains both continuity and change in offending throughout the life course. Although one may be skeptical of this classification due to fundamental disagreements with the other prominent general theories, particularly Gottfredson and Hirschi’s, Laub and Sampson (2003) agreed that theirs is a general theory. While they sharply disagree with Gottfredson and Hirschi over the static versus dynamic nature of crime-producing processes across the life course, Laub and Sampson’s theoretical statements signal allegiance with Gottfredson and Hirschi on a number of other contemporary debates in criminology. They agree, for example, that the search for separate explanations for the processes of onset, persistence, frequency of offending, career length and desistance, promoted by the criminal careers perspective, is unnecessary. Likewise, they agree that typological theories of crime, which promote distinct etiologies of crime for different groups, are also mistaken. Their agreement on these matters simply stems from their adherence to a general theory of crime, albeit very different general theories. The revised version of age-graded theory more clearly specifies Laub and Sampson’s position relative to both sides of the criminal careers debate of the late 1980s. In summary, Laub and Sampson’s revised agegraded theory of informal social control was developed in response to questions arising from new data on the Glueck men that their original theory had difficulty answering. Their original theory, which was developed in an attempt to explain crime and deviance in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, was not fully able to account for

Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control

offending patterns across the entire life course. Laub and Sampson identify three causal factors that affect offending patterns for all people both directly and in interaction: social controls, routine activities, and human agency. They suggest that development is best conceived of as the constant interaction between individuals, their environment, social interactions, and random processes. Together, these factors result in considerable heterogeneity in trajectories of offending, and make it difficult to predict adult offending trajectories based on youth or adolescent risk factors. This unpredictability drives Laub and Sampson’s interest in adult-onset offending, desistance, and “zigzag criminal careers.” Age-graded theory, although a general theory of crime, like Gottfredson and Hirschi’s, embraces the notion of change. It is at root a hopeful theory that describes the ways in which supposed career criminals, life-course-persistent offenders, or those with low self-control may exit a life of crime. Gary Sweeten See also Criminal Career Paradigm; Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime; Gottfredson, Michael R., and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Moffitt, Terrie E.: A Developmental Model of Life-CoursePersistent Offending

References and Further Readings Birbeck, C., & LaFree, G. (1993). The situational analysis of crime and deviance. Annual Review of Sociology, 19, 113–137. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Farrington, D. P. (1988a). Criminal career research: Its value for criminology. Criminology, 26, 1–35. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Farrington, D. P. (1988b). Longitudinal and criminal career research: Further clarifications. Criminology, 26, 57–74. Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., Roth, J., & Visher, C. (Eds.). (1986). Criminal careers and career criminals. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Eggleston, E. P., & Laub, J. H. (2002). The onset of adult offending: A neglected dimension of the criminal career. Journal of Criminal Justice, 30, 603–622. Eggleston, E. P., Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2004). Methodological sensitivities to latent class analysis of long-term criminal trajectories. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 20, 1–26.

811

Elder, G. H., Jr. (1994). Time, human agency, and social change: Perspectives on the life course. Social Psychological Quarterly, 57, 4–15. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1950). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. New York: Commonwealth Fund. Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1986). The true value of lambda would appear to be zero: An essay on career criminals, criminal careers, selective incapacitation, cohort studies, and related topics. Criminology, 24, 213–234. Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1987). The methodological adequacy of longitudinal research on crime. Criminology, 25, 581–614. Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1988). Science, public policy, and the career paradigm. Criminology, 26, 37–55. Gottfredson, M., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laub, J. H., Nagin, D. S., & Sampson, R. J. (1998). Trajectories of change in criminal offending: Good marriages and the desistance process. American Sociological Review, 63, 225–238. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2001). Understanding desistance from crime. In M. H. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (Vol. 28, pp. 1–69). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laub, J. H., & Sampson, R. J. (2003). Shared beginnings, divergent lives: Delinquent boys to age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewontin, R. (2000). The triple helix: Gene, organism, and environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-coursepersistent adolescent behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Moffitt, T. E. (1994). Natural histories of delinquency. In E. G. M. Weitekamp & H. Kerner (Eds.), Crossnational longitudinal research on human development and criminal behavior (pp. 3–64). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Paternoster, R., Dean, C. W., Piquero, A., Mazzerolle, P., & Brame, R. (1997). Generality, continuity, and change in offending. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 13, 231–266. Patterson, G. R., & Yoerger, K. (1993). Developmental models for delinquent behavior. In S. Hodgins (Ed.), Mental disorder and crime (pp. 140–172). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Robins, L. N. (1978). Sturdy childhood predictors of adult antisocial behavior: Replications from

812

Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture

longitudinal studies. Psychological Medicine, 8, 611–622. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1994). Urban poverty and the family context of delinquency: A new look at structure and process in a classic study. Child Development, 65, 523–540. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1997). A life-course theory of cumulative disadvantage and the stability of delinquency. In T. P. Thornberry (Ed.), Developmental theories of crime and delinquency (pp. 133–162). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (Eds.). (2005). Developmental criminology and its discontents: Trajectories of crime from childhood to old age (The Annals of the American Academic of Political Science No. 602). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sampson, R. J., Laub, J. H., & Wimer, C. (2006). Does marriage reduce crime? A counterfactual approach to within-individual causal effects. Criminology, 44, 465–508. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shover, N. (1996). Great pretenders: Pursuits and careers of persistent thieves. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture In 1995, Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson developed a theory of race and crime that explains racial differences in violent crime in terms of the community contexts in which people live. This theory draws heavily on Sampson’s earlier criminological research grounded in social disorganization theory, and Wilson’s earlier sociological research on the causes and consequences of urban inequality. Though Sampson and Wilson do not use the term contextualized subculture, this concept is a key part of their theory of race, crime, and urban inequality. This theory is one of the most prominent contemporary sociological explanations of the relationship between race and crime, and it has generated much empirical research,

which has tested and supported the theory. Rather than trying to distinguish between offenders and nonoffenders, macrosocial theories such as this examine how both structural and cultural characteristics of communities are related to variation in crime rates across communities. Sampson and Wilson begin by noting that African Americans are disproportionately involved in and victimized by violent crime. To explain racial differences in crime, Sampson and Wilson describe the importance of community context, and begin with the observation that blacks and whites in America tend to live in very different “ecological contexts.” As Wilson demonstrated in The Truly Disadvantaged, blacks are much more likely than whites to live in areas of concentrated poverty. For example, in 1980, 38 percent of poor blacks lived in areas of extreme poverty, while only 7 percent of poor whites lived in such areas (Sampson & Wilson, 1995, p. 41). In addition, most poor blacks live in areas with high rates of family disruption. This is not the case for poor whites, who tend to live in areas of greater family stability. Sampson and Wilson write, “In not one city over 100,000 in the United States do blacks live in ecological equality with whites when it comes to these basic features of economic and family organization” (p. 42). Why do poor blacks and whites live in profoundly different contexts?

Structural Component of the Theory Sampson and Wilson describe various historical and contemporary structural factors that have contributed to this concentration of poor blacks in areas of extreme poverty and family disruption. These factors include deindustrialization and job loss in central cities; migration of middle- and upper-income black families out of inner-city neighborhoods, which weakens the social institutions of the community; urban renewal projects that produced population and housing loss in the inner city; housing policies deliberately intended to discriminate against minorities and concentrate the poor in public housing in particular neighborhoods; and other political and institutional policies that have contributed to neighborhood deterioration, such as redlining, lax municipal code enforcement, and withdrawal of municipal services from poor neighborhoods.

Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture

Given the very different community contexts in which poor blacks and poor whites reside, perhaps the relationship between race and violent crime is confounded with racial differences in community context. Indeed, Sampson and Wilson note that variation among blacks in crime rates corresponds to the various contexts in which blacks live. They argue that the sources of violent crime are similar across race. For both blacks and whites, violent crime is linked to structural variation in economic and family organization across communities.

Cultural Component of the Theory In addition to this structural dimension, Sampson and Wilson’s theory also includes a strong cultural component—the idea of “contextualized subculture.” The concentration of poverty, family disruption, and residential instability in particular communities produces social disorganization, social isolation, and cultural adaptations. Sampson and Wilson conceptualize structural social disorganization in terms of the prevalence of social networks in the community (e.g., density of friendship and kinship networks, organizational participation, institutional stability) and the ability of the community to informally address local problems and exert social control (e.g., willingness of residents to respond to problems caused by unsupervised groups of teenagers). Communities characterized by concentrated poverty, family disruption, and residential instability are not only more socially disorganized (in terms of social networks and informal social control) but also more culturally disorganized. In areas of concentrated disadvantage and instability, mutual trust and communication among neighbors are difficult to achieve, and the search for common values is undermined. In addition, where structural forces like those described above have separated disadvantaged communities from the larger society, the cultural values of the larger society become attenuated. In their place emerges a value system that seems to legitimize, or at least tolerate, crime and deviance. Sampson and Wilson describe the social isolation of communities of concentrated disadvantage that “deprives residents not only of resources and conventional role models, but also of cultural learning from mainstream social networks that facilitate social and economic advancement in modern industrial

813

society” (p. 51). In other words, residents of these extremely impoverished communities are cut off from the institutions and individuals of mainstream society. This isolation then leads to cultural adaptations, as residents adjust to the conditions of life in areas of concentrated disadvantage. Sampson and Wilson are careful to distinguish their ideas about social isolation and cultural adaptations from subcultural perspectives such as the culture of poverty and the subculture of violence. The latter perspectives view behaviors (e.g., violence) as resulting from the internalization of norms and values that are at odds with the values of conventional society, and that condone, rationalize, and call for particular behaviors, such as violence. This view implies that these internalized, alternative values influence behaviors, regardless of the context. But Sampson and Wilson’s theory views behaviors as “cultural adaptations to constraints and opportunities”—adaptations that do not require the internalization of values conducive to violence (p. 51). Those who live in areas of extreme poverty do not accept an alternative value system that approves of violence and crime. Yet they come to expect crime and deviance as an unavoidable part of the “cognitive landscape” of everyday life, and they adapt by developing “ecologically structured norms” about expected standards and behaviors (p. 50). These norms, in turn, influence the likelihood of crime and deviance. According to this perspective, mainstream cultural values simply become irrelevant in certain structural contexts. This view implies that norms and behaviors change with the context in which they occur. In summary, Sampson and Wilson’s theory argues that structural forces create communities of concentrated disadvantage that are socially isolated from mainstream society, where cultural adaptations undermine social organization and the control of crime. The disproportionate involvement of blacks in violent crime is not linked to race per se, but rather to the fact that poor blacks and whites live in distinct ecological contexts.

Research Evidence A great deal of empirical research has tested Sampson and Wilson’s general assertion that neighborhood context, rather than individual-level factors, can explain variation in crime and delinquency

814

Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson: Contextualized Subculture

rates. This research has shown how neighborhood disadvantage shapes structural social disorganization and, ultimately, crime rates. Numerous studies have shown that neighborhood context (e.g., concentrated poverty, residential mobility, family structure, immigrant concentration) influences crime rates (e.g., delinquency, gang fights, robbery, homicide) primarily through its effects on neighborhood social organization, measured in terms of informal social control (e.g., confronting those who cause neighborhood disturbances), kinship and friendship ties, participation in neighborhood organizations, and collective efficacy (a combination of cohesion among neighbors and a willingness to exert informal social control). For example, in 1997, Sampson and his colleagues found that collective efficacy (a neighborhoodlevel variable) influenced multiple measures of violence, and it mediated a large portion of the effects of neighborhood context (concentrated disadvantage and residential stability) on violence. A 1998 study by Sampson and Dawn Jeglum Bartusch provides evidence regarding the cultural component of Sampson and Wilson’s theory. They examined how structural characteristics of neighborhoods explain racial and ethnic differences in normative orientations about law, police, and deviance. Sampson and Bartusch analyzed survey data regarding tolerance of deviance (including violence), satisfaction with police, and “legal cynicism,” which represents views about the legitimacy of laws. They found that, compared to white respondents, blacks and Latinos were less tolerant of deviance and violence, less satisfied with policing in their neighborhoods, and more cynical about the legitimacy of law. This contradicts the subculture of violence perspective, which hypothesizes a cultural tolerance of violence among blacks. Yet, when Sampson and Bartusch examined these issues at the neighborhood level, they found that areas of concentrated economic disadvantage and residential instability showed high levels of tolerance of deviance, dissatisfaction with police, and legal cynicism. In addition, once neighborhood-level differences in concentrated disadvantage were taken into account, race no longer significantly affected satisfaction with policing and legal cynicism. This means that it is neighborhood context, rather than race-specific attitudes, that explains normative orientations about police and

law. In other words, blacks appear to be more cynical about the legitimacy of law and less satisfied with policing because they are disproportionately likely to live in areas of concentrated disadvantage. As Sampson and Bartusch conclude, In support of contextual accounts of subculture, it thus appears that there is an ecological structuring to normative orientations—“cognitive landscapes” where crime and deviance are more or less expected and institutions of criminal justice are mistrusted. . . . Normative orientations toward law and deviance are rooted more in experiential differences associated with neighborhood context than in a racially induced subcultural system. (pp. 800–801)

Extension of the Theory Robert Sampson and Lydia Bean recently proposed new directions for research on communities, race, and crime. Their proposal calls for (1) an expanded view of neighborhood context that considers how characteristics of surrounding communities and citywide dynamics may influence what happens in a particular neighborhood, (2) a consideration of increases in the Latino American population, and of how Sampson and Wilson’s theory of race and crime might be extended to ethnicity and crime and used to explain lower levels of violence in Latino immigrant communities, and (3) a more dynamic, relational perspective on culture and structure that views culture as both shaping and shaped by social structure. Dawn Jeglum Bartusch See also Inequality and Crime; Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime; Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Wilson, William Julius: The Truly Disadvantaged

References and Further Readings Morenoff, J. D., Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2001). Neighborhood inequality, collective efficacy, and the spatial dynamics of urban violence. Criminology, 39, 517–559.

Schizophrenia and Crime Sampson, R. J., & Bean, L. (2006). Cultural mechanisms and killing fields: A revised theory of community-level racial inequality. In R. Peterson, L. Krivo, & J. Hagan (Eds.), The many colors of crime: Inequalities of race, ethnicity, and crime in America (pp. 8–36). New York: New York University Press. Sampson, R. J., & Jeglum Bartusch, D. (1998). Legal cynicism and (subcultural?) tolerance of deviance: The neighborhood context of racial differences. Law and Society Review, 32, 777–804. Sampson, R. J., Morenoff, J. D., & Gannon-Rowley, T. (2002). Assessing “neighborhood effects”: Social processes and new directions in research. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 443–478. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924. Sampson, R. J., & Wilson, W. J. (1995). Toward a theory of race, crime, and urban inequality. In J. Hagan & R. D. Peterson (Eds.), Crime and inequality (pp. 37–54). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schizophrenia

and

Crime

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental illness, and one of a larger class of psychotic disorders defined by the presence of delusions (false beliefs) and/or hallucinations (sensory perceptions without external sensory input). Schizophrenia may also be characterized by disorganized speech and behavior and by negative symptoms such as social, cognitive, and emotional withdrawal. Sensationalized accounts of dangerous, violent, and criminal behavior committed by schizophrenic persons have proliferated through the popular media; and the assumption of schizophrenia-associated crime and violence has contributed to public fear, stigma, social rejection, and even the denial of services and programmatic funding to schizophrenic individuals (Raine, 2006). In reality, most schizophrenic persons are not criminal or violent. Given this common misperception, a review of the empirical schizophrenia-crime/violence literature—along with proposed explanations for the relationship based in psychological, neurobiological, and social theory—appears timely.

815

Two converging lines of evidence continue to support a relationship between schizophrenia and crime: First, higher rates of psychosis and schizophrenia are found in criminal or delinquent populations; and second, schizophrenia patients are much more criminal and violent than the general population. In most cases, family or close network members are the victims of severe violent crimes, and most offending is found among young males in early illness stages. Examination of the schizophrenia-crime link began over a century ago with early psychoanalytic proposals and published case histories. This inquiry has progressed through research in different areas, including studies of violence within psychiatric hospital settings, of criminal behavioral histories of mentally ill individuals, and of national registry case linkages.

Schizophrenia and Specific Crime Types Violent Crimes

Violent schizophrenic crime research has examined a broad range of violence indicators, from assaults in psychiatric hospitals to criminal record violent convictions. Much of what is currently known about schizophrenic violence is based upon studies of newly admitted schizophrenia inpatients, who often experience emotional turmoil along with intense psychotic symptoms (Krakowski, 2005). Forensic inpatient samples indicate that, violent psychotic offenders are often first-time offenders who committed severe physical assaults against intimates. Non-hospitalized schizophrenic persons may engage in the spectrum of violent behaviors observed in the general population, from minor assaults to brutal murders. And limited evidence suggests some schizophrenic and mentally ill murderers may be characterized by specific motivational, behavioral, and emotional characteristics (Häkkänen & Laajasalo, 2006; Nijman et al., 2003). Property and Drug Crimes

To date, nonviolent or property offending among schizophrenic persons has not been systematically studied, though incidental data indicate that schizophrenic offenders may commit vagrancy crimes and minor thefts for motives other than material

816

Schizophrenia and Crime

gain. Substance use rates among schizophrenic persons are high, possibly representing efforts to use legal and illegal substances to ameliorate psychotic symptoms. Individuals with schizophrenia are more likely than others to abuse substances and be criminal and violent (Douglas & Skeem, 2005). Sexual Crimes

Sexual crimes appear comparatively rare among schizophrenic persons. Individuals with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders comprise only small percentages (i.e., 2 to 5 percent) of sexual offender populations (Alish et al., 2007), and they demonstrate reduced proportional rates of sexual offense convictions in comparison to nonmentally ill individuals in case linkage studies. Rare descriptive reports suggest a complex relationship between schizophrenia and sexual offending.

Psychological Factors: Schizophrenia Symptoms Individual psychological symptoms may explain schizophrenic crime and violence, and research on delusions and hallucinations in the mentally ill (including schizophrenia but also mood and substance use disorder patients) have provided some evidence for this explanation. Delusions

Previous research indicates a general association between delusions and violence among mentally ill persons; and a substantial minority of violence committed by psychotic persons appears to be delusionally driven (Taylor, 2006). Specific delusions (i.e., persecutory) may contribute more to violence risk (Bjorkly, 2002a); and symptoms such as threat (i.e., perceptions of threat or harm from others) and control-override (i.e., mind control or thought insertion) have been shown to be separately associated with violent behaviors (Link et al., 1998). Additionally, several rare delusions of misidentification appear related to violence. These include Capgras syndrome (the belief that familiar persons have been replaced by physically identical imposters), subjective doubles or Doppleganger syndrome (the belief that oneself has a double or impersonator), Fregoli syndrome (the belief that

another person has changed his or her physical identity while his or her psychological identity remains the same), and intermetamorphosis (the belief others have undergone radical physical and psychological changes to become persecutors (Malloy et al., 1992). Hostility and suspiciousness toward the misidentified person may lead to extreme violence. For example, in one reported case, a Capgras patient decapitated his father— whom he thought to be a robot imposter—in order to find the “batteries in his head.” Though many schizophrenic patients will not act on their delusions, the risk for doing so may increase with accompanying emotional distress (Bjorkly, 2002a), challenge to the delusion by others (Taylor, 2006), or the absence of protective social support networks and professional supervision (Douglas & Skeem, 2005). Hallucinations

The literature on command hallucinations (i.e., voices ordering action) is disparate—with some studies examining the relationship between command hallucinations and compliance, some the factors associated with acting on command hallucinations, and some the relationship between command hallucinations and dangerous behavior. Despite methodological problems, evidence indicates that some individuals who hear violent commands will act on them. However, violent command hallucinations do not produce action in isolation. Other factors mediate the process, such as beliefs about voices (malevolence/benevolence, power, voice recognition or familiarity, trust, voice quality such as pressure or persistence, content of instruction, emotion), general reasoning processes leading to action (including beliefs about disobedience), hospital environment, and presence of concurrent delusions (Bjorkly, 2002b).

Neurobiological Factors Antisocial schizophrenic individuals may represent a biologically distinct subgroup of schizophrenic persons. For example, brain imaging studies indicate structural and functional differences in frontal and temporal regions among aggressive, violent, and antisocial schizophrenia patients in comparison to those who are not. EEG anomalies have

Schizophrenia and Crime

characterized violent but not nonviolent schizophrenia patients and controls, and electrodermal deficits appear to distinguish individuals with both antisociality and a mild form of schizophrenia from those having either condition alone. Molecular genetic studies report that specific genotypes related to neurotransmitter functioning differentiate antisocial from non-antisocial schizophrenia patients, and specific neuropsychological deficits appear to distinguish antisocial schizophrenics from their non-antisocial and non-schizophrenic counterparts (Schug & Raine, 2009).

Social and Biosocial Factors Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to represent the mental states of one’s self and others. Deficits in ToM functioning might explain the social withdrawal, poverty of speech, and repetitive behaviors seen in schizophrenia. Thought insertion and delusions of control may reflect impairments in the ability to represent one’s own intentions to act, whereas reference and persecutory delusions may reflect difficulties in representing the mental states of others. Research in forensic populations has shown that unique ToM deficits differentiate schizophrenia from non-schizophrenia patients, violent from nonviolent schizophrenia patients, and differentiate among symptom-specific subtypes of schizophrenia patients (Abu-Akel & Abushua’leh, 2004; Murphy, 2006). Treatment Issues

Issues related to standard biosocial treatment and management approaches (i.e., pharmacological and psychosocial therapies) may directly influence schizophrenic violence and criminality. Violence in schizophrenic outpatients has been associated with difficulties in basic social areas, including psychosocial treatment adherence, medication compliance, and treatment alliance (Douglas & Skeem, 2005). Additionally, new biosocial research into the prevention and treatment of schizophrenia indicates that early environmental enrichment (i.e., nutritional, educational, and physical exercise) at ages 3 to 5 years reduced a mild form of schizophrenia and antisocial behavior 14 to 20 years later (Raine et al., 2006).

817

Risk Factors

Biosocial risk factors have been examined in longitudinal studies of crime and schizophrenia. Though violence largely post-dates schizophrenia in violent schizophrenic persons, violence may be part of the preschizophrenia phase of young criminals, and there may exist a distinct subgroup of “early start” schizophrenic offenders characterized by pre-schizophrenia criminality (Hodgins, 2004). Finally, poor educational attainment, poor grades for attention at school, higher birth weight, and larger head circumference have been linked to adult criminality in schizophrenia patients in registry linkage studies (Cannon et al., 2002).

Conclusion Empirical evidence continues to suggest a solid schizophrenia-crime relationship. There is a need for a second generation of crime-schizophrenia research—that focuses on risk factors for both disorders in an attempt to elucidate common psychological, biological, and social etiological mechanisms. Such research may lead to a better understanding of schizophrenic individuals who become criminal and help reduce the negative stigma unjustly attached to those who do not. Robert A. Schug and Adrian Raine See also Brain Abnormalities and Crime; Mednick, Sarnoff A.: Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) Theory; Mental Illness and Crime; Psychophysiology and Crime; Raine, Adrian: Crime as a Disorder

References and Further Readings Abu-Akel, A., & Abushua’leh, K. (2004). “Theory of mind” in violent and nonviolent patients with paranoid schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 69, 45–53. Alish, Y., Birger, M., Manor, N., Kertzman, S., Zerzion, M., Kotler, M., et al. (2007). Schizophrenia sex offenders: A clinical and epidemiological comparison. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 30, 459–466. Bjorkly, S. (2002a). Psychotic symptoms and violence toward others—a literature review of some preliminary findings. Part 1. Delusions. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7, 617–631.

818

Schur, Edwin, M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency

Bjorkly, S. (2002b). Psychotic symptoms and violence toward others—a literature review of some preliminary findings. Part 2. Hallucinations. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7, 605–615. Cannon, M., Huttunen, M. O., Tanskanen, A. J., Arseneault, L., Jones, P. B., & Murray, R. M. (2002). Perinatal and childhood risk factors for later criminality and violence in schizophrenia. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180, 496–501. Douglas, K. S., & Skeem, J. L. (2005). Violence risk assessment: Getting specific about being dynamic. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11(3), 347–383. Häkkänen, H., & Laajasalo, T. (2006). Homicide crime scene behaviors in a Finnish sample of mentally ill offenders. Homicide Studies, 10, 33–54. Hodgins, S. (2004). Criminal and antisocial behaviours and schizophrenia: A neglected topic. In W. F. Gattaz & H. Häfner (Eds.), Search for the causes of schizophrenia (Vol. 5, pp. 315–341). Darmstadt, Germany: Steinkopff Verlag. Krakowski, M. (2005). Schizophrenia with aggressive and violent behaviors. Psychiatric Annals, 35, 45–49. Link, B. G., Stueve, A., & Phelan, J. (1998). Psychotic symptoms and violent behaviors: Probing the components of “threat/control-override” symptoms. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 33, S55–S60. Malloy, P., Cimino, C., & Westlake, R. (1992). Differential diagnosis of primary and secondary Capgras delusions. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology, 5(2), 83–96. Murphy, D. (2006). Theory of mind in Asperger’s syndrome, schizophrenia and personality disordered forensic patients. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 11(2), 99–111. Nijman, H., Cima, M., & Merckelbach, H. (2003). Nature and antecedents of psychotic patients’ crimes. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, 14(3), 542–553. Raine, A. (2006). Pursuing a second generation of research on crime and schizophrenia. In A. Raine (Ed.), Crime and schizophrenia: Causes and cures (pp. 3–12). New York: Nova Science. Raine, A., Liu, J., Venables, P., & Mednick, S. A. (2006). Preventing crime and schizophrenia using early environmental enrichment. In A. Raine (Ed.), Crime and schizophrenia: Causes and cures (pp. 249–265). New York: Nova Science. Schug, R. A., & Raine, A. (2009). Comparative metaanalyses of neuropsychological functioning in antisocial schizophrenic persons. Clinical Psychology Review, 29, 230–242.

Taylor, P. J. (2006). Delusional disorder and delusions: Is there a risk of violence in social interactions about the core symptom? Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 24, 313–331.

Schur, Edwin, M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency Radical non-intervention was developed by Edwin M. Schur as an alternative way of dealing with juvenile delinquency. The theory holds that juvenile delinquency is common among all socioeconomic classes. The theory further proposes that “delinquents” are no different from “non-­ delinquents,” except that “delinquents” have been processed through the court system. Radical nonintervention maintains that the juvenile court’s authority in children’s lives is too broad and that laws illegal only for children (e.g., running away, incorrigibility, tobacco use) should be abolished. Additionally, radical non-intervention theory proposes that the “delinquent” label given to juveniles processed by the court system can increase their delinquency. When children are labeled as “bad” or “delinquent,” they are often viewed as such in their community (e.g., by parents, teachers), which may increase their sense of alienation and risk of further delinquency. Radical non-intervention theory argues that juveniles should be left alone as much as possible for minor “delinquency” violations. Finally, to form a better juvenile justice system, radical non-intervention proposed five priorities for reform.

The Delinquency Label Adverse consequences result from being processed through the court system. Specifically, court processing labels the juvenile as a delinquent. Once that occurs, juveniles adopt that identity and often perform in accordance with the label and associate with similar youths. For example, in school, teachers may treat delinquent children differently than “regular” children. The “bad” youths then associate themselves with other “delinquents,” increasing their proclivity toward delinquency. Some courts

Schur, Edwin, M.: Radical Non-Intervention and Delinquency

attempt to identify “at-risk” youth and place them in programs aimed at correcting pre-delinquent behaviors, effectively labeling the youths as “predelinquent.” Radical non-­intervention theory suggests that children placed in treatment programs for “pre-delinquency” may feel like they are being punished for a behavior that is not illegal. This sense of injustice by the court system may cause youths to distrust the system and lead them to rebel against it, thus increasing the probability of further, more serious delinquency.

The Juvenile Court System Radical non-intervention theory holds that courts intervene too often into the lives of juveniles. The theory argues that although the court claims to know what is best for children, in fact, children are the only ones who know what is best for their unique situations. As a result, the theory proposes that voluntary treatment programs (as opposed to compulsory programs) should be included in juvenile justice policies. Additionally, the theory proposes removing all status offenses from the juvenile court’s jurisdiction. Minor violations should be handled outside of the juvenile court to avoid negative labels caused by system interaction.

Priorities for a Better Juvenile Justice System Radical non-intervention theory suggested that the policies of the juvenile justice system should be modified to better suit the needs of youths who enter it. Five key priorities are proposed to accomplish this. • First, reassess the ways of thinking about juvenile problems. Juvenile misconduct is inevitable; therefore, society must abandon the idea that juvenile delinquency is limited to certain individuals. Children act the way they do, whether it be “delinquent” or not, because of social norms and customs. To change the negative behaviors of children, society must consider these influences and attempt to rectify them. • Policies that indirectly influence delinquency may be more important than those that directly influence delinquency. According to radical nonintervention, juvenile behavior reflects the norms and values of greater society; therefore, adults

819

should not be surprised that juveniles commit delinquent acts. The theory proposed that policies aimed at combating juvenile delinquency will not change children’s behavior because they do not address the underlying issues leading to delinquency. Widespread social change regarding how society views and reacts to children’s behavior must occur if we are to reduce “delinquent” behavior. • To eliminate injustice toward juveniles, society must take them more seriously. The bonds a child has to society can be an effective deterrent to juvenile delinquency; therefore, more focus should be placed on strengthening those bonds. This begins by creating a legal system that respects children and, in turn, can be respected by children. The juvenile justice system must take into account that delinquents are not “bad,” “sick,” or “malicious” children; they are simply the products of a society that has little respect for its youth. • The juvenile justice system should focus less on “treating” those deemed delinquent, and more with dispensing justice. Radical non-intervention theory proposed that courts should focus less on “treating” broad juvenile problems that may lead to delinquency, such as incorrigibility and idleness. In turn, the court should concern itself with defining specific penalties for law violations, which apply equally to all youths who commit the violation. As a result, discretion and discrimination within the juvenile court would be reduced, and the court could then be respected by youths. • Juvenile justice professionals must utilize a vari­­­ety of approaches to the delinquency “problem.” According to the theory, delinquency prevention programs should be conducted in the youths’ community and should employ “indige­ nous”personnel—persons who live in the community and have experience dealing with delinquent children—as opposed to outside professionals. Additionally, since juveniles may view treatment programs that are held in correctional facilities as punishment, treatment programs should be noninstitutional and voluntary. According to the theory, voluntary programs have two significant benefits: (1) since youths can choose whether or not they enter a program, they may feel that the court respects their decisions more, and (2) discretion and discrimination in the adjudication process

820

Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory

may be reduced. As Schur stated, “Our young people deserve something better than being ‘processed.’ Hopefully, we are beginning to realize this” (p. 171). Stacy C. Moak and Shaun M. Gann See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Matza, David: Delinquency and Drift; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization; Sykes, Gresham M., and David Matza: Techniques of Neutralization

References and Further Readings Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Study in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press. Platt, A. (1969). The child savers: The invention of delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schur, E. M. (1973). Radical non-intervention: Rethinking the delinquency problem. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Shelden, R. G. (n.d.). Resurrecting radical nonintervention: Stop the war on kids. San Francisco: The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Retrieved January 5, 2009, from http://www.cjcj.org/ files/radical.pdf

Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory Violence, particularly sexual assault, has been a frequent topic of research for several decades, especially for feminist researchers. Generally, feminist research suggests that there are high levels of sexual assault against women due to a patriarchal, rape-supportive culture. However, not all women have the same heightened risk for sexual assault victimization. What the feminist perspective does not adequately account for are the variations in rape victimization rates across the female population. This is where the importance of theory focusing on individual statuses and lifestyles becomes important. Routine activity theory is one perspective that addresses the differential risks for victimization

among individuals by examining lifestyle. The strength of this theory is that it focuses on the idea that crime is not a random occurrence in society but follows regular patterns regarding situation and place—and how these interact with individual characteristics and behaviors. This theory can be used as an enhancement to a theory, such as feminism, to discuss why, although all women may be at greater risk for sexual assault, some women have higher risks than others. Martin D. Schwartz and Victoria L. Pitts greatly enhanced the discussion of the sexual assault of college women by utilizing an approach that combined feminism and routine activity theory into a discussion that explores the idea that while women are the more likely victims of sexual assault there are lifestyles college women have that may work to increase their victimization risks. These lifestyles are those that frequently put them into contact with men when they are in vulnerable situations (such as drinking alcohol). Routine activity theory can explain, in the context of feminism, why some women have higher risks than others. Alternatively, feminism can aid a routine activity theory by placing the analysis of lifestyle into the context of cultural and societal norms and values about violence, especially violence against women.

Routine Activity Theory To elaborate, research inspired by routine activity theory has consistently shown that criminal victimizations are not randomly distributed in society (see Cohen & Felson, 1979). Instead, victimization is associated with lifestyles and daily routines of individuals, which in turn may be linked to demographics. These routines influence the amount of exposure one has with potential offenders, how valuable or vulnerable they or their property is as a target, and how well guarded they or their property are. When potential offenders, suitable targets, and incapable (or absent) guardians converge, victimization is likely to occur. Routine activity theory specifically suggests that the social context of criminal victimization is a central issue in understanding victimization risks. Certainly, a person may be willing to commit crime given an opportunity, but if that opportunity never arrives, the crime will not occur. Opportunities may not come for several reasons. It may be that

Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory

the potential offender does not find any target of sufficient vulnerability or any property of sufficient value to merit attempting an offense. It is also possible that a suitable target may be perceived as too well guarded to merit an attempt. Routines in activities are products and consequences of lifestyles; it is the lifestyle of individuals that carry them through settings, contexts, and interactions, which may either increase or decrease the possibility of their victimization. Movement through time and space exposes individuals to varying numbers and varieties of potentially motivated offenders as well as provides for differing perceptions of people’s vulnerability/suitability as a target. Additionally, as individuals move between and among settings, their activities alter their possibilities (and self-identified needs) to have access to guardianship measures. Clearly, some lifestyles and activities enhance victimization likelihood by involving individuals with “dangerous” others or those who are disposed to perceive persons with certain characteristics as more or less vulnerable or acceptable as targets. It is the identification of the specific lifestyle factors, activities, and statuses that increase or decrease victimization risks that is the goal of routine activity theory. Even so, individuals’ behaviors and routines take place within the context of society and cultural norms and values. Individuals typically behave in ways that the culture or subculture in which they live support. Individuals’ perceptions and interactions with others are based, in part, on the attitudes and thoughts of those around them (e.g., their primary group members). As such, interpreting the behaviors of individuals must take into account the larger context in which these behaviors occur. This is where a theory explaining the cultural orientations of one group of people toward other groups of people can help account for the variations in victimization risks across not just individuals but also larger groups of people.

Feminism and Sexual Assault At the core of a feminist view on sexual assault is the belief that men assault women (both sexually and physically) in an effort to maintain a position of dominance over women. Men are first of all seeking to individually maintain power and control over specific other women (those they directly

821

victimize). The actions of individual men toward individual women also, however, have important effects throughout society. Sexual assault, then, is seen as a way for one class of people (men) to instill fear in—and therefore impose restrictions on the activities of—a second class of people (women). Additionally, men form or become members in social or peer groups that work to encourage or buffer any guilt or shame associated with the sexual assault of women. Thus, the odds of sexual assault continuing to occur are increased. Feminist views on sexual assault are supported by a large body of empirical research. What is most telling about this research is that rapists themselves frequently explain their actions using the words of feminist theory. Rather clearly, then, feminist theories offer important insights about the nature, general causes, and societal role of sexual assault. However, what the feminist perspective does not adequately account for are the variations in rape victimization rates (i.e., victimization risks) across subgroups of the female population. This is where the importance of theory focusing on individual behavioral routines becomes important. A combination of feminism and routine activity theory to understanding sexual assault victimization risks for female college students thus focuses on identifying activities and lifestyle factors that are associated with increased exposure to motivated offenders or male social peer groups, heightened perceptions of the woman as a suitable/vulnerable victim, and a minimization of effective guardianship. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the behaviors and lifestyle factors that have been shown in previous research to be related to female college students’ sexual victimization risk. In this regard, it is important to identify not only why women are at increased risk of victimization, but also what factors are associated with the increased risk of some women as compared with women in general.

Schwartz and Pitts As mentioned, Schwartz and Pitts conduct one of the few studies on female sexual assault that incorporates both feminist and routine activities perspectives. They discuss that women are the more likely targets for sexual assault victimization, but they also note—through an analysis of lifestyle— which women have relatively higher risks for such

822

Schwartz, Martin D., and Victoria L. Pitts: A Feminist Routine Activity Theory

victimization than others. They accomplish this theoretical intermingling with great success. Their discussion focuses on the idea that feminism can enhance our understandings of the three core concepts of routine activity theory: potential offenders, suitable targets, and absent or incapable targets. Specifically, while routine activity researchers typically take the concept of potential offenders for granted, assuming there are plenty of such individuals “out there,” feminism can enhance this explanation by noting that men may be more motivated to sexually assault females because of a rape-­ supportive culture in the United States that works to normalize and downplay violence against women. In such a climate, it is no wonder that women are frequently assaulted violently by men. In this type of culture, then, the number of potential sexual assault offenders is going to be high. This can clearly be seen in the case of college campuses. Relatedly, in a culture with values and beliefs that allow men to assault women without feeling guilt or shame, it is also likely that there will be few, if any, willing or capable guardians who would stop a progressing or possible sexual assault against a woman. This would be particularly likely to happen in a male social peer group with pro-violence-against-women attitudes. Further, given the lower penalties that men experience for sexually assaulting women, any guardianship or deterrence that the criminal justice system would provide is diminished significantly. Finally, women are the obvious suitable targets in an atmosphere such as this. Since women are viewed as being the acceptable targets of male aggression, they are vulnerable and accessible. This effect is compounded in a locational hot spot like a college campus. In this location, men are more likely to be members in social peer groups that promote violence against women. Further, women are typically in close proximity to these male social groups, increasing their vulnerability and suitability as targets. In their research, Schwartz and Pitts note that a closer examination of the concept of suitable targets would highlight the types of factors (alcohol use and friendships with men who sexually abuse women) that would enhance the targeting of women by potential offenders. They find support for their contentions: women who drank more often and women who had male friends who got women drunk for the purposes of sexually assaulting them were more likely to be sexually assaulted themselves.

While these findings are highly informative and move beyond (1) the pure feminist contention that all women are suitable targets for sexual assault due to their gender and society’s view of it as an acceptable choice for sexual assault and (2) the routine activity theory assertion that individuals have higher risks for sexual assault victimization when they are engaging in behaviors that place them into greater proximity to potential offenders, they are also limited. For example, this approach does not examine whether there may be other lifestyle factors that increase a woman’s proximity to potential (and perhaps highly motivated) offenders or a woman’s vulnerability or suitability as a target to males who are culturally supported in their desire to assault women sexually. Numerous questions, therefore, remain. Are there ways that women can reduce their risks for sexual assault by, for example, utilizing more personal forms of self-protection, rather than relying on men to act as guardians? Are there other routines related to the use of alcohol that influence a woman’s risks for sexual assault? Does drug use elevate a woman’s suitability as a target or increase her proximity to potential offenders? Are there other forms of leisure activities that heighten the risks for sexual assault? Given that college campuses are hot spots for sexual assault, are there particular campus activities that increase or decrease a woman’s risks for victimization? Finally, are there lifestyles relating to a woman’s youth that can aid in an understanding of her suitability to men as a target for sexual assault? In the end, Schwartz and Pitts provide an excellent step forward in several areas of academic exploration: they enhance our understanding of routine activity theory by incorporating feminist assertions (and visa versa). They also aid in our understanding of the heightened sexual assault victimization risks for college women. Finally, they conduct a first-rate empirical analysis of a theoretical synthesis that can aid scholars in their interpretations of criminal victimization, particularly sexual assault. Elizabeth Ehrhardt Mustaine See also Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson: Routine Activity Theory; Felson, Marcus K.: Crime and Everyday Life; Hindelang, Michael J., Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo: Lifestyle Theory; Rape Myths and Violence Against Women; Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk

Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime

References and Further Readings Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Mustaine, E. E., & Tewksbury, R. A. (2002). Sexual assault of college women: A feminist routine activities analysis. Criminal Justice Review, 27, 89–123. Schwartz, M. D., & DeKeseredy, W. (1997). Sexual assault on the college campus: The role of male peer support. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schwartz, M. D., & Pitts, V. L. (1995). Exploring a feminist routine activities approach to explaining sexual assault. Justice Quarterly, 12, 9–31.

Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the large number of individuals immigrating to the United States led some Americans to raise questions about the norms and cultural values of the newly arrived groups. In particular, concerns were raised about possible conflicts between the norms and cultural values of the society from which they had come and those in existence within the United States. Some argued that these differences would lead to high rates of criminal behavior among immigrants as a result of the cultural conflict. Concerns were also raised about the possibility of a weakening of American society. Two potential types of criminal behavior stemming from conflict between the different norms and values were identified. The first possible conflict was seen as arising from the cultural values immigrants themselves had brought with them and the differing norms and values that already existed in the United States. The second conflict was viewed as developing during the period of time after immigrants had arrived and were being assimilated but were starting to follow behavioral patterns that were in conflict with the normative standards of American society. Some sociologists began to study immigrants after they had arrived in the United States and settled in “disorganized” areas where the existing norms and values oftentimes were thought to be opposed to those of the dominant society. As a result, the issue

823

of culture conflict was prominent among those who studied crime. For example, the ecological studies so popular in that era, particularly in the research conducted in the city of Chicago (Shaw et al., 1929) with their studies about “delinquency areas,” had led them to focus much of their attention upon the social pathology of various aspects of the “zone of transition.” In order to better understand the issue of culture conflict and criminal behavior, in 1935 the Social Science Research Council selected a sociologist from the University of Pennsylvania, Thorsten Sellin, and a criminologist, Edwin H. Sutherland of the University of Chicago, to be the two members of a Subcommittee on Delinquency. The subcommittee on delinquency chose the issue of culture conflict and its role in the causation of crime, since at the time the idea of culture was a source of both social and academic interest. Both men brought with them differing types of expertise that were considered essential to the project. Sutherland was starting to develop his theory of differential association which, while primarily utilizing a social psychological approach to the study of criminal behavior, was also concerned about structural factors and so left room in his theory for the inclusion of the idea of culture conflict. Sellin had also been working in the criminology area, but he was more involved in activities that focused on the development of criminology as a science (Laub, 1983). When the final report was published, Sellin was identified as the sole author as he had developed and subsequently written the bulk of the manuscript. The completed manuscript, Crime and Culture Conflict, was published by the Social Science Research Council in late 1938. Due in large part to the publication of this manuscript, the relationship between culture, subculture, and crime continued in American criminology throughout the next few decades. So pervasive was this approach that it led J. Pinatel to comment that “as a consequence of its general nature, the theory of culture conflict has permeated many modern developments in American sociological criminology” (p. 5).

Culture Conflict and Conduct Norms The central idea behind culture conflict as a source of crime, as developed by Sellin, was that different

824

Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime

groups learned different conduct norms and that these norms would violate the dominant norms of American society, in particular the criminal law. Conduct norms were viewed by Sellin as rules based on the social attitudes of groups toward the various ways in which a person might act under certain circumstances. When a person’s actions and reactions are governed by rules or norms, they are conduct norms. Accordingly, conduct, by definition, could occur only in situations that are defined by some social group and governed by a rule of some sort. In his monograph, Sellin reaffirmed the idea that the criminal law is a body of norms that binds all those who live within the political boundaries of a state and are enforced through the coercive force of the state. Furthermore, he stated that the specific character of these legal rules depends upon the character and interests of those groups that influence legislation. He emphasized the idea that such groups are not necessarily in the majority, a notion that was becoming popular at the time. Instead, his focus was upon the lack of congruence between criminal laws promulgated by a dominant majority group and the moral ideas of different social groups subjected to the criminal laws of the state. Since the norms embodied in the criminal law change as the values of the dominant groups change, what is defined as crime varies from time to time and also from place to place. The view of culture conflict as a source of crime maintained that different groups learned different conduct norms and that these conduct norms would become a fixture of the criminal law. According to Sellin, the “conduct which the state denotes as criminal is, of course, that deemed injurious to society or, in the last analysis, to those who wield political power within that society and therefore control the legislative, judicial, and executive functions which are the external manifestations of authority” (p. 3). When developing his conception of conduct norms, Sellin combined two ideas: (1) the notion that members of a society are not equally committed to the norms contained in the criminal law, and (2) that members of a society are not equally committed to other conduct norms. The result of these variations in degree of commitments, he observed, is conflict. According to Sellin, a conflict of norms occurs when more or less differing rules of conduct govern the specific situations in which a person may find himself or herself. The conduct norm of

one group of which a person is a member may permit one response to this situation while the norm of another group may possibly permit the very opposite response. Sellin then proceeded to examine the concept of culture conflict, pointing out that a number of studies had studied this issue and its relationship to delinquency (Shaw et al., 1929). Importantly, these studies assumed the existence of legal and nonlegal conduct norms that were in conflict with each other. He noted that the concept had been used in two ways: sometimes culture conflict was regarded as the result if the migration of conduct norms from one culture complex to another, sometimes as a by-product of a cultural growth process. The primary and most commonly used of these two definitions focused on the crime and delinquency rates of immigrants who had recently arrived in the United States, particularly those who lived in those areas identified as the zone of transition in large American cities. The research conducted in Chicago led to the interpretation of the differing crime and delinquency rates within the various areas of the city as the result of different cultural values. The areas with low delinquent behavior were characterized by uniformity, consistency, and universality of conventional cultural values, while the zone of transition, with the highest rates of delinquency, experienced the greatest amount of competing and conflicting cultural values (Shaw & McKay, 1969). Sellin also used the concept of culture conflict in a secondary way. He demonstrated that as a modern industrial and mercantile society developed, the process of social differentiation produced a conflict of conduct norms. As a result, a vast extension of impersonal control agencies has emerged. These agencies were designed to “enforce rules which increasingly lack the moral force which rules receive only when they grow out of emotionally felt community needs.” One by-product of the development of complex societies, then, is certain life situations “governed by such conflicting norms that no matter what the response of the person in such a situation will be, it will violate the norms of some social group concerned” (p. 48).

Conduct Norms and the Causes of Crime Sellin started his investigation of conduct norms by discussing the need for criminologists to actively

Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime

search for the causes of crime. Up until that time, criminologists had used the legalistic definition of crime, an approach he found problematic in terms of differentiating criminals from noncriminals. He was critical of the legalistic definition of crime that had been used most commonly by criminologists because he felt “that the categories set up by the criminal law do not meet the needs of scientists because they are of ‘a fortuitous nature’ and do not ‘arise intrinsically’ from the nature of the subject matter” (p. 19). In Sellin’s view, if the study of crime was to attain an objective and scientific status, it could not allow itself to be restricted to the terms and boundaries of inquiry established by law makers. In particular, he felt that the concept of crime should be extended beyond violations of legal codes to include violations of moral and social codes. He believed that while all societies have standards of behavior or conduct norms, not all these standards are necessarily reflected in law. In this context, terms such as deviance, nonconformity, and antisocial conduct were preferred to that of crime, because the latter is unable to include all criminal acts. An important feature of this approach is that it does not require any reference to the criminal law at all. In order to move the field of criminology away from this problem, Sellin supported a different conception to the approach to etiological questions in criminology. As such, he proposed the concept of conduct norms be used instead. Conduct norms stemmed from those life situations that are repetitious and socially defined and that require definite responses from people. Attached to these responses are norms that define the reaction or response “which in a given person is approved or disapproved by the normative group” (Sellin, 1938, p. 28). A normative group was any group held together by common interests, sufficient to bring forth group attitudes toward any inquiry of these interests. All groups were considered by Sellin to be, in a sense, normative. As societies grow, the more complex the culture becomes, and the more likely it is that the values within these groups will fail to agree. Conduct norms were viewed by Sellin as the result of the values of the group that had formulated it. There is, for every person in a society, in each life situation in which he or she finds himself or herself, a right (or normal) and a wrong (or abnormal) way of reacting, with the norm being

825

dependent upon the values that has formulated it. Social groups place restrictions on the actions of their members in the attempt to secure protection of social values that have been injured by unrestricted conduct. All reactions or activity in situations governed by them could be called conduct.

Conclusion The insights made by Sellin about culture conflict and conduct norms became popular at the time, but its appeal diminished due largely to cultural homogenization in the United States, a process that has been attributed to the rise of the various forms of the mass media (Tittle & Paternoster, 2000). Perhaps its most enduring contribution to criminology was its influence upon Edwin Sutherland, who viewed the second usage of culture conflict as developed by Sellin to be basic to the explanation of crime. The concept in this sense later became the principle of differential association. Accordingly, the history of the culture conflict concept is tightly entwined with the development of Sutherland’s differential association theory, which ultimately became the most prominent theory in American criminology during the 1940s and 1950s. A number of years later, when he was discussing the history of his own theory, Sutherland reported that he inadvertently stated the principles of differential association before he realized he had a theory. Significantly, his statement included the concept of conflict of cultures. Colin H. Goff See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Miller, Walter B.: Lower-Class Culture Theory of Delinquency; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization; Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory

References and Further Readings Laub, J. (1983). Interview with Thorsten Sellin. In J. Laub (Ed.), Crime in the making (pp. 166–181). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Lejins, P. P. (1987). Review essay. Criminology, 25, 975–988. Lilly, J. R., Cullen, F. T., & Ball, R. A. (2007). Criminological theory: Context and consequences (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

826

Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller

Pinatel, J. (1968). Thorsten Sellin and the principal trends in modern criminology. In M. E. Wolfgang (Ed.), Crime and culture: Essays in honor of Thorsten Sellin (pp. 3–10). New York: Wiley. Sellin, T. (1938). Culture, conflict, and crime. New York: Social Science Research Council. Shaw, C., Forgaugh, F. M., McKay, H. D., & Cottreel, L. S. (1929). Delinquency areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shaw, C., & McKay, H. D. (1969). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas: A study of rates of delinquency in relation to differential characteristics of local communities in American cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1956). Development of the theory. In A. Cohen, A. Lindesmith, & K. Schuessler (Eds.), The Sutherland papers (pp. 13–29). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tittle, C. R., & Paternoster, R. (2000). Social deviance and crime: An organizational and theoretical approach. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Wolfgang, M. E. (Ed.). (1968). Crime and culture: Essays in honor of Thorsten Sellin. New York: Wiley.

Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller First published in 1930 and reissued in 1966, The Jack-Roller is the life history of “Stanley,” a 23-year-old Chicago man who had compiled by the time of its initial publication an extensive record of delinquency, crime, and incarceration both as a juvenile and a young adult. This entry describes the book, highlights aspects of Stanley’s background and personality that contributed to his delinquency, comments briefly on the intellectual context of early-20th-century Chicago in which The Jack-Roller was compiled and published, and concludes with observations on the potential value and limitations of offender autobiographies as sources of data about crime.

Stanley Stanley was the product of a large blended family with an employed but alcoholic father and an emotionally indifferent, if not abusive, stepmother. The family’s residence was in low income and high

delinquency areas of Chicago. Stanley’s conflict with and antipathy for his stepmother figure prominently in his early life, and she is singled out repeatedly by him as a major source of his problems. She also condoned or encouraged his stealing. Stanley began running away from home and living on the streets well before adolescence. He found close at hand both cultural conditions and delinquent companions that offered little resistance, if they did not facilitate, his drift into lowlevel crime. Jack-rolling is a dated name for strong-arm robbery, typically committed by yoking from behind victims who are adjudged unlikely to offer effective resistance. Mugging is the more contemporary name for it. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Stanley’s personality was his lifelong interpersonal abrasiveness. He was quick to take offense and retaliate at perceived signs of interpersonal disrespect or unfair treatment from others. Whether this was rooted in part in his family’s precarious material circumstances and the inevitable disrepute that accompanies it is unclear, but Stanley was unmistakably a product of the working class and its culture. The significance of this and the possibility that his prickly personality had origins at least in part in repeated disrespectful treatment by authority figures and others are not considered in The Jack-Roller.

Shaw Clifford R. Shaw, who encouraged Stanley to write his autobiography, provided topical categories for and edited it and was instrumental in seeing it through to publication. At the time, Shaw was on the staff of the Institute for Juvenile Research, an innovative Chicago-based state agency created to study and develop promising responses to juvenile delinquency. Shaw was educated at the University of Chicago, where sociologists viewed crime and other forms of social pathology as products of socially disorganized urban conditions. One chapter of The Jack-Roller describes the social and cultural aspects of the neighborhoods in which Stanley’s family resided during his formative years. Shaw and his colleagues believed that life histories could lay bare the interaction of individual characteristics, family dynamics, and adverse neighborhoods. The “boy’s story” could show

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

827

how these various factors were understood and responded to by him, and the part they played in the development and sequencing of delinquency. Truancy, for example, generally preceded onset of minor delinquency and gave way in turn to more serious infractions. Just as Shaw believed that disadvantaged and poorly integrated urban areas spawned delinquency, he also believed that the key to turning offenders away from these pursuits was placing them in more conventional and socially integrated environments. He employed this approach with Stanley, which may have contributed to his successful avoidance of prolonged criminal participation. The Jack-Roller was followed in later years by publication of additional life histories of delinquents, coauthored by Shaw and his colleague, Henry D. McKay.

criminal participation, relocated to California, and maintained legitimate employment in sales. Retired for several years, he passed away on April 25, 1982.

Conclusion

Becker, H. S. (1966). Introduction. In C. R. Shaw, The jack-roller: A delinquent boy’s own story (pp. v–xviii). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maruna, S., & Matravers, A. (2008). N = 1: Criminology and the person. Theoretical Criminology, 11, 427–442. Shaw, C. R. (1930). The jack-roller, a delinquent boy’s own story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shover, N. (1996). Great pretenders: Pursuits and careers of persistent thieves. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Snodgrass, J. (1976). Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay: Chicago criminologists. British Journal of Criminology, 16, 1–19. Snodgrass, J. (Ed.). (1982). The jack-roller at seventy: A fifty year follow-up. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath.

The Jack-Roller, its compiler, and its subject have been examined critically from a variety of intellectual perspectives and also in light of changing theoretical approaches to criminal offenders. It is a case study. Case studies can serve as the source of theoretical and conceptual stimulation, but their utility for rigorous testing of theoretical explanations is extremely limited. What is clear is that there is little about Stanley and his background that distinguish him from a high proportion of street-level thieves and hustlers. They can suggest shortcomings of or needed modifications to general explanations. Given these limitations of case studies, the value of The Jack-Roller may lie in the extent to which its contents and descriptions are consistent with similar autobiographical statements. On this count, the book reveals Stanley, his childhood and delinquency, and his subsequent desistance from crime to be remarkably similar to the lives of a high proportion of street thieves and hustlers. This is clear from the work of subsequent investigators who mined multiple life histories for analytic generalizations. A half-century after The Jack-Roller was published, a sequel appeared that brought readers up to date on how Stanley’s life unfolded in later years (Snodgrass, 1982). His life was not free of difficulties, including a short involuntary stay in a state mental hospital following conflict with his first wife. Eventually, however, Stanley terminated

Neal Shover See also Cullen, Francis T.: Social Support and Crime; Giordano, Peggy C., and Stephen A. Cernkovich: Cognitive Transformation and Desistance; Life-Course Interdependence; Peers and Delinquency; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub: Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders

References and Further Readings

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory Originally developed by Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, two researchers from the University of Chicago, social disorganization is one of the most popular criminological theories today. Unlike most other theories, it is concerned with understanding why crime rates are higher in some communities than others. Thus, it focuses on the macro-level distribution of crime rates across areas, not on why any one individual may be more or less likely to engage in criminal acts than another.

828

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

As the name implies, the theory posits that communities can be classified on a continuum of disorganization, from low to high. According to the theory, some communities are highly disorganized and experience more crime compared to other communities that are less disorganized and experience less crime. The key to combating crime, then, is to reduce levels of social disorganization. Just how that can be accomplished is explained shortly but first it is necessary to understand the intellectual history of social disorganization theory and its ascendancy in criminological thought during the 20th century.

Social Disorganization Theory’s Intellectual Roots Often considered the original architects of social disorganization theory, Shaw and McKay were among the first in the United States to investigate the spatial distribution of crime and delinquency across urban areas. Their research built on work done by other Chicago School researchers, in particular Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, whose concentric zone theory examined how critical changes of the time (e.g., industrialization, urbanization, and immigration) affected the nature of social life in Chicago communities. Park and Burgess’s theory characterized zones within the city, some marked by disorganizing characteristics and attributes. It was not until years later, however, with the work of Shaw and McKay, that crime became part of the equation. In their work, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, Shaw and McKay applied the concentric zone model developed by Park and Burgess to the study of juvenile delinquency. Shaw and McKay’s primary interest was to study the relationship between community and delinquency and determine the extent to which differences in characteristics of local areas paralleled variation in rates of delinquency. They sought to address questions such as, To what extent do variations in rates of delinquency correspond to demonstrable differences in economic, social, and cultural characteristics of local communities? How are delinquency rates affected over time by successive changes in the nativity and nationality composition of the population? To answer these questions, Shaw and McKay examined the distribution of delinquency in Chicago

communities based on juvenile court cases and commitments for three time periods: 1900 to 1906, 1917 to 1923, and 1927 to 1933. One of their key findings was that delinquency was not randomly distributed throughout the city; rather, it tended to cluster in certain areas. Stated alternatively, rates of juvenile delinquency were consistent with an ordered spatial pattern. The highest rates were found in the inner-city areas and declined with distance from the city center. Using maps and other visuals, Shaw and McKay demonstrated that its distribution was closely related to the location of industrial and commercial areas and to the composition of the population in the area (e.g., rates of poverty and families on relief), in line with the concentric zone model. Because they had data over time, Shaw and McKay were also able to demonstrate a consistency in the general processes regarding the distribution of delinquency across neighborhoods. They found that high delinquency communities in Chicago remained high delinquency communities over several decades, regardless of which racial or ethnic group inhabited the area. A key “social fact” about crime that is central to social disorganization theory can be gleaned from the early Chicago School studies: crime and delinquency co-occur with other social problems in communities, including poverty, dilapidated housing, and residential instability, among others. For the Chicagoans, this implied a connection between broader social and economic conditions of areas and crime. This discovery was important because until then biological determinism, which assumes that all or virtually all human behavior, including criminal behavior, is innate and cannot be changed or altered, had served as the primary explanation for understanding crime. Early Chicago School studies were thus important for pointing out that crime is present in certain areas of the city where there is social, economic, and cultural deprivation. Researchers emphasized that residents in these areas were not biologically abnormal or personally disoriented; rather, they were viewed as responding naturally to disorganized environmental conditions. The implication of this finding for the field of criminology is clear: just as “kinds of people” explanations are needed to understand crime, “kinds of places” explanations are also needed to account for the ecological concentration of crime and delinquency.

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

In sum, the findings from Shaw and McKay and other Chicago School studies formed the basis of social disorganization theory, a theory chiefly concerned with understanding the relationship between community characteristics and crime.

Theoretical Overview According to social disorganization theory, some neighborhoods are socially disorganized and have high crime rates while others are less disorganized and have lower crime rates. Social disorganization can be defined as the inability of a community to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls (Bursik, 1988). Thus, socially disorganized communities are ineffective in combating crime, a common value or goal among residents. Alternatively, crime is more successfully prevented in socially organized communities. Socially organized and disorganized communities are quite different, according to the theory. Characteristics of socially organized communities include (1) solidarity, or an internal consensus on important norms and values (e.g., residents want and value the same things, such as a crime-free community); (2) cohesion, or a strong bond among neighbors (e.g., residents know and like one another); and (3) integration or social ties, with social interaction occurring on a regular basis (e.g., residents spend time with one another) (Kubrin et al., 2008, p. 87). Socially disorganized communities, in contrast, typically lack solidarity, cohesion, and integration among residents. According to the theory, these characteristics are critical because they help to foster informal social control, a key factor for preventing crime within communities. Informal social control is the scope of collective intervention that the community directs toward local problems, including crime (Kornhauser, 1978). It is the informal, nonofficial actions taken by residents to combat crime in their communities. Consider, for instance, a group of neighbors who patrol the streets at night to fight crime. Or consider residents who watch each other’s homes when a family is on vacation to prevent burglaries. Or consider residents who scold neighborhood youth when they act out of line or cause trouble. These individuals represent the eyes and ears of the community and their presence is often enough to deter others from committing crime.

829

Solidarity, cohesion, and integration or social ties generate informal social control, which ultimately prevents crime. This is why socially organized communities have lower crime rates than socially disorganized communities—they have greater levels of informal social control. In recent years, theorists have added another dimension to this explanation. Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls argue that social cohesion and networks may be necessary, but not sufficient, for social control and that what is missing is the key factor of purposive action (i.e., how social ties are activated and resources mobilized to enhance social control). For the latter to occur, they argue, residents must be willing to take action and intervene, which depends in large part on conditions of mutual trust and solidarity among neighbors. Sampson et al. therefore propose a new construct—collective efficacy—which captures this linkage of trust and intervention for the common good. They argue high levels of collective efficacy within communities should lead to lower crime rates, similar to the effect of social ties and informal social control. In sum, socially organized communities marked by social integration, cohesion and ties, informal social control, and collective efficacy should have comparatively lower crime rates compared to socially disorganized communities which lack these characteristics. This is often found to be the case in studies of neighborhood crime. But social disorganization theory does not stop here in its explanation of crime. The theory also specifies the larger structural characteristics of communities that contribute to levels of disorganization, or conversely, organization. Early Chicago School researchers focused on three neighborhood characteristics they believed distinguished disorganized communities: poverty, residential instability, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity. They were able to demonstrate, to some degree, that Chicago communities marked by these characteristics had higher crime rates than those without such characteristics. They theorized this was primarily due to lower levels of social integration and informal social control, in line with the theory. But they were never able to empirically test this theoretical assertion. It is important to note that the neighborhood characteristics just described are not direct causes of crime within communities. Rather they indirectly affect crime through their influence on

830

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

social integration and informal social control. Thus, high poverty neighborhoods typically have higher crime rates than low poverty neighborhoods not because poverty in and of itself causes crime but because poorer neighborhoods, according to the theory, have fewer ties and less informal social control, leading to higher crime rates. The same can be argued for the other neighborhood characteristics. Along these lines, the neighborhood characteristics of communities are commonly referred to as exogenous sources of social disorganization while solidarity, cohesion, integration, informal social control, and collective efficacy constitute the intervening dimensions of social disorganization. Over the decades, research on social disorganization theory has taken numerous directions. In one direction, researchers have examined additional structural characteristics of communities theorized to cause disorganization including family disruption (e.g., divorce and single-parent households), education levels (e.g., residents with a high-school diploma), population density (e.g., population per square mile), and population composition (e.g., number of young males). Researchers have also been concerned with empirically testing the full social disorganization model by showing that neighborhood characteristics affect levels of social integration, informal social control, and collective efficacy, which in turn affect crime rates. Progress aside, there have been and continue to be some noteworthy criticisms of Shaw and McKay’s early work as well as the theory more generally.

Earlier Critiques As noted earlier, at the time, the work of Shaw and McKay and other Chicago School researchers had a profound impact on the study of crime. However, interest in the relationship between community characteristics and crime began to recede in the 1950s when the field of criminology moved toward more micro-level or individual theories of crime causation, including social learning, social control, and labeling theories (Kubrin et al., 2008, p. 90). Concurrent with this shift, several early criticisms of the theory emerged. One key criticism centered on the theory’s central concept of social disorganization. Shaw and McKay at times did not clearly differentiate the presumed outcome of social disorganization (i.e., increased rates of crime and

delinquency) from disorganization itself. In early writings, the delinquency rate of an area was often both an example of disorganization and something caused by disorganization. As one example, in his study, Calvin Schmid used houses of prostitution and homicides as indices of social disorganization yet disorganization is theorized to cause these very things. Eventually, this problem was resolved when theorists attempted to clarify the unique conceptual status of social disorganization by defining it in terms of the capacity of a neighborhood to regulate itself through formal and informal processes of social control (recall the formal definition of social disorganization discussed earlier). Another early criticism centered on what some referred to as the theory’s inherent biases about lower-class communities and disorganization, biases generated from the relatively homogeneous, middle-class backgrounds of the theorists themselves. Critics questioned: Is it true that physical, economic, and population characteristics are objective indicators of social disorganization, or does the term reflect a value judgment by the theorists about lower-class lifestyle and living conditions? Several theorists believe the latter. For instance, Edwin Sutherland preferred to use the term differential social organization because of his belief that “the organization of the delinquent group, which is often very complex, is social disorganization only from an ethical or some other particularistic point of view” (p. 21). According to this line of reasoning, some urban neighborhoods may not be so much disorganized as simply organized around different values and concerns. Although it is impossible to completely remove such biases from social disorganization or any theory for that matter, researchers today are much more aware of this bias and prefer a more nuanced explanation of what generates social disorganization within neighborhoods. Perhaps the most damaging early criticism had to do with researchers’ ability to empirically test the social disorganization model. Although Shaw and McKay collected data on characteristics of areas and delinquency rates for Chicago communities and were able to visually demonstrate a relationship between the two using maps and other visuals, theirs did not constitute a test, in the strict sense, of social disorganization theory. Nor did future studies for decades to come. The norm for

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

quite a long time was to use Census data to characterize neighborhoods in terms of poverty, residential mobility, racial and ethnic heterogeneity, and other factors along with official crime data to show the two were related, and then to theorize that this was due to intervening levels of social ties and informal social control. The criticism was that without empirically verifying the true proposed theoretical path—neighborhood characteristics lead to crime indirectly through social ties and informal control—the theory had not been properly tested. It was not until 1989 that researchers were able to formally test social disorganization theory, including specifying the true nature of the relationships among ecological characteristics of communities, levels of social disorganization, and crime. Robert J. Sampson and W. Byron Groves used data from a large national survey of Great Britain to empirically test the theory. They constructed community-level measures of neighborhoods (specifically, poverty, residential mobility, and racial/ ethnic heterogeneity) and the mediating dimensions of social disorganization, and they then determined how both sets of factors influenced neighborhood crime rates. Their findings were largely supportive of social disorganization theory: communities characterized by strong social ties and informal control had lower rates of crime, and, more importantly, these dimensions of social disorganization were found to explain, in large part, the effects of community structural characteristics (e.g., poverty) on crime rates. Apart from Sampson and Groves, today only a handful of studies successfully empirically examine all the theoretical processes laid out by social disorganization theory. Far more research is needed before we are able to confidently understand why some communities produce higher crime rates than others. A final early criticism relates to the theory’s reliance on official data, especially in terms of measuring crime. All but a handful of studies use official data to document crime patterns across neighborhoods when testing social disorganization theory. Even Shaw and McKay relied on official court records to determine the distribution of juvenile court cases and commitments. Yet few scholars have considered the extent to which neighborhoods themselves are a consideration in police and court decisions and there is a significant degree of

831

community-specific bias that may exist within police departments (Bursik, 1988). In other words, some neighborhoods are more likely to be “overpoliced” than others. Thus, the assumption that policing practices do not vary across neighborhoods is unfounded. The question remains: Given variation, how might policing practices influence official data collection? Whatever the answer, it is clear that official rates represent a mixture of differentials in neighborhood behavior patterns, neighborhood propensities to report behavior, and neighborhood-specific police orientations. Thus, a more ideal situation involves collecting alternative indicators of neighborhood crime and delinquency based on self-report or victimization data to be used in conjunction with official records. Such data collection efforts are occurring more and more through the use of large-scale surveys in cities throughout the United States (e.g., the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighbor­ hoods, the Seattle Neighborhood and Crime Project, and the Neighborhood Project in Denver, Chicago, and Philadelphia). There are several additional earlier criticisms of social disorganization theory, many of which are detailed in Robert Bursik’s classic 1988 piece, “Social Disorganization Theory: Problems and Prospects.” A more recent analysis of the theory, highlighting on-going challenges to social disorganization theory, was completed decades later by Charis Kubrin and Ronald Weitzer in “New Directions in Social Disorganization Theory.” Below some of the more vexing on-going challenges confronting the theory are described.

On-Going Challenges Today, disorganization theorists continue to document how community characteristics and crime go hand in hand. The theory is very much alive and kicking. But as with any theory, there remain several challenges confronting social disorganization theory. One of the most critical on-going issues surrounds the definition of what constitutes a neighborhood. The concept “neighborhood” is central to the theory yet researchers have not arrived at a consensus, either conceptually or operationally, on the definition of a neighborhood. This is due, in part, to variability in people’s perceptions of neighborhood boundaries. For some residents, their

832

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

neighborhood constitutes the street they live on; for others, it constitutes the few blocks surrounding their home; and still for others, it is a much larger section of the city in which they live. This variability is often not captured in social disorganization research due to an overreliance on official data. Because studies use official data as their source, researchers most commonly operationalize neighborhoods in terms of census tracts—an official designation of the U.S. Census Bureau. Jointly defined by the Census Bureau and local groups, census tracts are small, permanent subdivisions of a county with homogeneous population characteristics, status, and living conditions. Most census tracts in the United States have between 2,500 and 8,000 residents. In the majority of disorganization studies, researchers measure neighborhood characteristics using census tracts as a proxy. But this may be problematic. Census tract boundaries are invisible to residents, so they represent, in many cases, meaningless, unidentifiable units. It is unlikely that residents, even those who have lived in an area for a long period of time, can identify the particular census tract in which they reside. The point here is that the extent to which researchers believe they are capturing neighborhood measures of social disorganization and crime remains unclear. Of course, this problem is minimized with the use of other forms of data. In the rare case when researchers collect their own data through surveys, they are able to more accurately specify the concept of “neighborhood.” In survey questions, researchers often define what constitutes a neighborhood using common, unofficial designations that are more consistent with residents’ perceptions. One example comes from a large-scale survey of Seattle neighborhoods where participants were told the following at the start of the survey: “We would like to start off by asking you some questions about your home and your neighborhood. While people might define their neighborhood in different ways, we would like you to think about it roughly in terms of the area within 3 blocks on any side of your current home. Your block will refer to the area between the crossstreets on either side of your home.” Although this may not constitute the ideal definition of neighborhood for all residents, it is clear this designation is preferred to the the census tract. As fewer and fewer studies rely on official data to test the basic

assumptions of social disorganization theory, more refined definitions and accurate measurements of the central concept of “neighborhood” will result. No doubt this will increase our understanding of why crime rates are higher in some communities than others. A second on-going challenge involves testing the true nature of the social disorganization model. As you may recall from the earlier discussion on the work of Shaw and McKay and other Chicago School scholars, social disorganization theory, at its heart, is a dynamic theory. It is dynamic because it is primarily interested in processes of change within communities and their effect on crime rates over time. Chicago School researchers were keenly interested in the adaptation of social groups to processes of urbanization and changing forms of social organization, which is why they collected data that spanned several decades. Even today, a key assumption is that neighborhood levels of informal social control and collective efficacy are influenced by changes in neighborhood ecological structures, such as change in the racial composition of the population. Despite this assumption, nearly all studies testing social disorganization do not directly examine processes of change. According to Charis Kubrin and Ronald Weitzer, “The full set of dynamics that may lead to disorganization can only be discerned when longterm processes of urban development are considered, yet the majority of studies that test social disorganization theory are cross-sectional” (p. 387). In other words, most empirical tests of the theory do not use longitudinal data that allow one to directly examine dynamic processes at work. Instead, researchers use cross-sectional data, which provide a snapshot at one point in time, to assess relationships among neighborhood characteristics, social disorganization, and crime. Although informative, these studies are unable to examine the effects of processes such as gentrification and segregation on the distribution of crime and delinquency, issues that go to the heart of the theory. Apart from recognizing the need to collect data that span several years or even decades, Kubrin and Weitzer suggest that researchers develop more sophisticated models for assessing change. They provide one example, the growth-curve model, and illustrate how its use in neighborhood crime studies could benefit social disorganization theory.

Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory

A final ongoing challenge relates to what many consider to be social disorganization’s narrow focus on intra-neighborhood influences on crime, or those influences that occur exclusively within communities. But communities are not islands unto themselves; they are shaped and influenced by the larger urban political and economic context within which they are embedded. According to critics, then, social disorganization theory as traditionally conceptualized is hampered by a restricted view of community that fails to account for the larger political and structural forces that shape communities, including governmental policies at local, state, and federal levels as well as private investment practices within communities. As Kubrin and Weitzer note, political and economic decisions may have direct effects on community crime rates (e.g., when a halfway house is introduced into a neighborhood and its members commit crime) as well as indirect criminological effects such as by increasing the level of joblessness (through deindustrialization or disinvestment), residential instability (through housing, construction, or demolition policies), and population density (through public housing or zoning policies). One particularly relevant example of extracommunity influences is related to a community’s access to capital, particularly home mortgage lending. Redlining and disinvestment by banks, fueled by regulatory initiatives (or lack thereof) may contribute to crime within a community through neighborhood deterioration, forced migration via gentrification, and instability. Alternatively, access to mortgage loan dollars and effective regulation of bank practices (e.g., enforcement of fair lending and community reinvestment requirements) may reduce crime within a neighborhood directly by introducing capital into the community or indirectly by promoting homeownership and reducing residential instability in the long run. Whatever the precise mechanism at work, at issue for the theory is a general disregard for extracommunity forces that shape neighborhood dynamics, with implications for social disorganization and crime. As Sampson asserts, “neglecting the vertical connections (or lack thereof) that residents have to extra-communal resources and sources of power obscures the structural backdrop to community social organization” (p. 102). A more complete social disorganization framework would thus

833

incorporate the role of extra-community institutions and the wider political environment in which local communities are embedded. Several additional on-going challenges facing the theory, both substantive and methodological, are discussed by Kubrin and Weitzer. No doubt as the theory continues to evolve and transform in the 21st century, new challenges will emerge, even as old ones become resolved. Regardless of old and new challenges, social disorganization theory holds an important place in criminological history and will continue to do so as long as researchers remain interested in understanding why crime rates are higher in some communities than others. Charis E. Kubrin See also Bursik, Robert J., Jr., and Harold C. Grasmick: Levels of Control; Crime Hot Spots; Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime; Krivo, Lauren J., and Ruth D. Peterson: Extreme Disadvantage and Crime; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Spergel, Irving A.: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures; Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places; Systemic Model of Social Disorganization

References and Further Readings Bursik, R. J. (1988). Social disorganization: Problems and prospects. Criminology, 26, 519–551. Elliott, D. S., Wilson, W. J., Huizinga, D., Sampson, R. J., Elliott, A., & Rankin, B. (1996). The effects of neighborhood disadvantage on adolescent development. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 33, 389–426. Kornhauser, R. R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kubrin, C. E., Stucky, T. D., & Krohn, M. D. (2008). Researching theories of crime and deviance. New York: Oxford University Press. Kubrin, C. E., & Weitzer, R. (2003). New directions in social disorganization theory. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40, 374–402. Sampson, R. J. (2001). Crime and public safety: Insights from community-level perspectives on social capital. In S. Saegert, P. J. Thompson, & M. R. Warren (Eds.), Social capital and poor communities (pp. 89–114). New York: Russell Sage. Sampson, R. J., & Groves, W. B. (1989). Community structure and crime: Testing social-disorganization theory. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 774–802.

834

Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency

Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924. Schmid, C. (1928). Suicides in Seattle, 1914 to 1928. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stark, R. (1987). Deviant places: A theory of the ecology of crime. Criminology, 25, 893–909. Sutherland, E. H. (1973). Development of the theory. In K. Schuessler (Ed.), Edwin H. Sutherland on Analyzing Crime (pp. 13–29). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1942) Warner, B. D., & Wilcox Rountree, P. (1997). Local social ties in a community and crime model: Questioning the systemic nature of informal social control. Social Problems, 44, 520–536.

Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency Some of the earliest criminological theories equated crime to the biological makeup of humans. Because some of the earlier biological studies either overstated the causal nature of biological variables or were completely disproved due to methodological shortcomings or antiquated statistical techniques, a majority of criminologists today dismiss the biological research on criminality without a second thought. James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein suggest that many criminologists are not attuned to biological and psychological concepts involved with the causes of criminality due to their sociological training; “physical correlates of crime are often dismissed by most criminologists, for whom these are at best historical stages in the development of their subject” (p. 72). Because of this lack of understanding of the biological approach or the inherent bias of most sociological theories of criminality, the debate of whether or not criminals are characterized by a certain type of body-build has long been debated in the field of criminology. Hans Eysenck and Gisli Gudjonsson argued that the study of physique is a complex subject, due primarily to many different typologies and methods of measurement. In the 1940s, William H. Sheldon attempted to study the relationship between human physique

and criminality. Sheldon graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in psychology in 1926 and with an M.D. in 1933. He held positions as a professor at the University of Oregon Medical School, where he was also the director of the constitution clinic, and the director of the Biological Humanics Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work led him to the belief that the psychological foundation of humans was predominantly supported by biological underpinnings. In this search to link physique and behavior, Sheldon developed the idea of the somatotype; this is a personal score that is determined by different measurements taken from a human body. Sheldon posited three types of extreme somatotype: mesomorphs who are athletically built, endomorphs who are overweight, and ectomorphs who are underweight. Sheldon suggested that these somatotypes corresponded directly to psychological states. That is, mesomorphs are active, dynamic, assertive, and aggressive; endomorphs are relaxed, comfortable, and extroverted; and ectomorphs are introverted, thoughtful, inhibited, and sensitive. Here, Sheldon’s body of work and the research linking somatotypes to criminality is examined. First, Sheldon’s classification system and the research that resulted from initial studies on somatotypes are explored. Second, somatotypic classification methods produced to advance the work of Sheldon are discussed. Finally, the decline of somatotyping as both a function of measurement constraints and theoretical shortcomings is reviewed.

William Sheldon and Somatotypes Dating back to the times of Cesare Lombroso, there have been numerous attempts to study the links between physique and criminality that have yielded different methods of measuring physique. Some of these measurements have been simplistic while others have been complex. For instance, Earnest Hooton separated height and weight into a 3 × 3 matrix, or nine subgroups, to see if there was a relationship between physique and crime; height was identified as short, medium, and tall, and weight was identified as slender, medium, and heavy. This example outlines a simple method of determining physique. A more complex method of determining physique can be found in the work of Ernst Kretschmer.

Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency

While a host of physique studies were completed in Europe in the 1800s, one of the preeminent studies of physique was completed by Kretschmer. Originally published in 1931, Kretschmer’s study, Physique and Character, comprised 400 patients of every age and occupation in a hospital in an effort to link physique and character. Kretschmer’s key contribution to physical determination was the three types of physique he established: the asthenic, athletic, and pyknic forms. A person could contain characteristics from each of Kretschmer’s types, making for a blended physical type. According to Kretschmer, the extreme asthenic type of physique has a “deficiency in thickness combined with an average unlessened length” (p. 22); this type is characterized as weak and frail. The extreme athletic type of physique is “recognized by the strong development of the skeleton, the musculature and also the skin” (p. 25). The extreme pyknic type of physique “is characterized by the pronounced peripheral development of the body cavities, and a tendency to a distribution of fat about the trunk, with a more graceful construction of the motor apparatus” (p. 30). Drawing directly from the work of Kretschmer, Sheldon outlined the study of physique and the measurement of somatotypes in The Varieties of Human Physique. His theory was founded on the assumption that it is possible to determine physical differences among human beings. Sheldon focused on three extreme physical types, adapted from embryology, which correspond approximately to Kretschmer’s physical typology: endomorphs (pycknic), mesomorphs (athletic), and ectomorphs (asthenic). These three types were selected because they illustrated the most extreme cases of physique. Sheldon and colleagues defined endomorphy as the “relative predominance of soft roundness throughout the various regions of the body” (1940, p. 5). Mesomorphy means the “relative predominance of muscle, bone, and connective tissue” (p. 5). Ectomorphy means the “relative predominance of linearity and fragility” (p. 5); Sheldon noted that this form had the largest brain and central nervous system. To refine his measurement, Sheldon examined 400 male undergraduate students at the University of Chicago. In an effort of standardization, subjects were photographed naked from three angles: a front view, a side view, and a back view. The

835

subject stood on a pedestal a certain distance away from the camera. From the 400 subjects, 4,000 photographs were amassed and examined. From these photographs, 17 measurements (dependent on the height to convert into ratio form) were taken from a body. From this, a three-number scale was derived to conclude a person’s somatotype. The first number in the score reflects the amount of endomorphy in an individual, the second number represents the amount of mesomorphy in an individual, and the third number represents the amount of ectomorphy present in an individual. Thus, an extreme endomorph would receive a score of 7-1-1, an extreme mesomorph would receive a score of 1-7-1, and an extreme ectomorph would receive a score of 1-1-7. There are potentially 343 different identifiable somatotypes when using Sheldon’s classification procedure. In 1949, Sheldon put his method of somatotyping to the test in studying crime for the first time. Sheldon followed the lives of a sample of 200 young men from the Hayden Goodwill Inn. Because it was a social service agency, the sample consisted of youth with antisocial personalities as well as delinquent histories. This gave Sheldon’s study a comparison group of non-criminals on which to base his results. Although Sheldon examined many different sociological variables as well as biological variables, Sheldon’s chief finding among the criminal sample, in terms of somatotypes, was that mesomorphy was the most common somatotype. In essence, Sheldon concluded that delinquents were more inclined to being mesomorphically built. With the exception of a 30-year follow-up study, this would also mark the last time that Sheldon’s method of somatotyping would be used in the study of the link between physique and crime. In the 30-year follow up of Sheldon’s research, Emil Hartl et al. reexamined the 200 men whose biographies were presented by Sheldon in 1949. Hartl et al.’s major finding was that future adult criminals differed from non-criminal subjects in the sample in terms of mesomorphy. As in Sheldon’s original study, criminals were more likely to have a mesomorphic build. In their discriminant function analysis on all of the data, Hartl et al. found mesomorphy to be the strongest discriminating variable. When conducting a multiple regression on criminal behavior, however, Hartl et al. indicated that none of the variables relating to morphology,

836

Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency

mesomorphy, endomorphy, or ectomorphy were statistically significant. In other words, the somatotype did a poor job in predicting future criminality.

Extended Somatotype Classifications Sheldon’s somatotyping approach was inevitably eclipsed by the work of Richard Parnell in 1958. Parnell’s method of somatotyping was considered to be more objective than Sheldon’s. This method of somatotyping emphasized the phenotype, not the somatotype. The phenotype is the body as it appears at a particular point in time (Parnell, 1958, p. 4). Because of this, Parnell indicated that his method for somatotyping was not a good variable for prediction purposes. Unlike Sheldon, Parnell labeled his physical types on the chart as Fat, Muscularity, and Linearity, which correspond to the endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph, respectively. Inspired by the somatotyping work of Sheldon and Parnell, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck conducted an analysis on the relationship between physique and crime. The Gluecks (1951) compared the physiques between a sample of delinquents and a sample of non-­delinquents. The Gluecks relied on a physical anth­ropologist to measure the somatotypes of their subjects. It was Parnell’s method of somatotyping that was used to study the physique of individuals in the Gluecks’ sample; the Gluecks merely interpreted the results. The Gluecks concluded that mesomorphy was more predominant among the delinquents, while the control group of non-delinquents contained no predominance of any single somatotype. The Gluecks (1956) examined this data source further by examining the physique of criminals in relation to other sociological variables and traits they had found. The Gluecks looked at the relationship between physique and several categories of variables that included neurological traits, intelligence, character, family, environment, and personality. While some of the variables in each category were found to be correlated with the different body types, the Gluecks concluded that there is no combination of physical traits and sociological traits that could predict delinquency in an individual. This is true even for the mesomorphs, who comprised the majority of the criminal sample. Besides the Gluecks’ study, two other studies utilized Parnell’s somatotyping procedure. Juan

Cortes and Florence Gatti examined the relationship between a person’s physique and the need for achievement, or motivation. They examined 100 delinquent youths and a comparison group of 100 non-delinquents in a high school. In both groups, a significant and positive relationship was found between mesomorphy and motivation; they also found that a significant, but negative, relationship existed between ectomorphy and motivation. Cortes and Gatti concluded that a relationship existed between mesomorphs and the desire to achieve (p. 412). Boyd McCandless, W. Scott Persons, and Albert Roberts examined perceived criminal opportunity and body build among delinquent youth. McCandless et al. examined 500 adjudicated delinquent youth by both somatotyping the youth and administering a questionnaire to measure opportunity. McCandless et al. hypothesized that mesomorphs would be more likely to have committed more delinquent acts than either ectomorphs or endomorphs. However, their regression analysis lent no credence to this. Race was the only variable to have a significant relationship with perceived criminal opportunity. After the McCandless et al. study in 1972, research utilizing somatotypes was discontinued predicated on many of the issues discussed in the next section. It was not until 2008 that a new method of somatotyping emerged. In an effort to utilize a newer, more refined method of somatotyping, Sean Maddan, Jeffery Walker, and J. Mitchell Miller utilized the body mass index (BMI) as a measure of an individual’s somatotype. The body mass index, often referred to as the Quetelet Index, utilizes a person’s height and weight to gauge the total body fat in adults. It is an indicator of optimal weight for health and different from lean mass or percent body fat calculations because it only considers height and weight (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 1998). This measure correlates primarily to body fat and can be used on either males or females. The BMI is a “heterogeneous phenotype” (Feitosa et al., 2002, p. 72) or how the person’s physique is at a given point in time. In this sense it is a measure of somatotyping more similar to Parsons’s method, which was based on physical phenotype as well. A person’s BMI is calculated by dividing weight (in kilograms) by height (in meters) squared. The

Sheldon, William H.: Somatotypes and Delinquency

BMI equation relies heavily on the subject’s height. The relationship between the physique and height of an individual was mentioned frequently in the literature. Even Sheldon foreshadowed the importance of height and weight in measuring somatotypes noting that with height-weight norms, it will be possible to create a scale of height-weight measures for each different somatotype. BMI values can range from one and up, making it a continuous, interval level variable. According to the BMI, a person who is an endomorph receives a BMI score of 26 and above, a person who is a mesomorph will receive a BMI score of between 19 and 25, and a person who is an ectomorph will receive a score of less than 19. To test the reliability of the BMI measure, Maddan and colleagues took Sheldon’s original sample data from Varieties of Delinquent Youth and compared the results of his somatotyping technique with the same sample using the BMI scale to determine the individual’s somatotype. The bivariate correlation analyses that were completed to measure the relationship between the two types of somatotype measures showed a strong relationship between Sheldon’s method of somatotyping and the BMI measure. These analyses indicate that the BMI is a reliable measure of somatotyping. The most important finding of the Maddan et al. research was that somatotypes still accounted for some of the variation in violent and nonviolent prison sentences in a sample of male prisoners (N = 5,000) taken in Arkansas from 1975 to 2000. While the somatotype showed effects, the impact was minor across the somatotype measures. The logistic regression analysis illustrated that the somatotypes had a statistically significant effect, albeit weak, and added to the overall model. More importantly, the direction of the effects was in line with previous research on physique and criminality. Mesomorphic offenders were more likely to be in prison for a violent offense than their endomorphic counterparts. The direction was the same for ectomorphs, but this variable failed to gain statistical significance.

Issues With Somatotype Studies The biological approach to studying criminality has been much maligned. These studies have suffered from methodological issues, ranging from

837

measurement to sampling, and conceptual issues, ranging from untestability to logic. One of the key problems with biological studies has been with regards to the types of variables included in analyses. Most of the biological research, not including the work in this area today, has focused primarily on strictly biological variables. The other major problem for biological studies has been with regards to control groups. Most of the biological research has focused only on a single group, which has greatly decreased the worth of much of the biological research. Somatotyping has its own set of problems and shortcomings. There are several limitations to the research on delinquency and somatotypes. First, Sheldon’s method of somatotyping was very time consuming and expensive. It took 3 to 4 months to compare the data gathered from the three different pictures of each subject. This time did not include the time it would take to analyze the data with other data in the study, in the case of criminology, delinquency, social, and other structural variables. Second, and due to the time period in criminological development, little data were collected on females. Third, the study on the link between crime and biology, in general, and somatotyping, specifically, is that the results are either mixed or weak. The final, and maybe most important, limitation of the somatotyping research before 2008, was the technique that had to be used to measure somatotypes. Sheldon’s procedure (and reformulations of his method) required not only that subjects be naked, but also that several pictures were taken of the naked subjects. Today, a researcher would have difficulty finding subjects and securing approval by an institutional review board to conduct the study.

Conclusion Adrian Raine asserted that “no factor linked to crime should be viewed in the anachronistic terms of genetics versus environment” (p. 204). To do this is both divisive and overly simplistic. Crim­ inologists should move toward an integration of genetic and social factors for crime in an effort to examine how these two factors relate to one another. This entry has focused on a biological approach that has largely fallen to the wayside of criminological history: somatotypes.

838

Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory

While several studies have been conducted on somatotyping and criminality over the last 50 years, overall interest in the subject has waned. This is due primarily to the stigma that has been associated with conducting research on the link between biological causes of crime in the past, the methodological shortcomings of some of the work in this area, and some of the causation overstatements made in relation to findings. Even though this is the case, it is hard to discard some of the findings from the somatotype literature in spite of some of the methodological shortcomings. Research has consistently shown that mesomorphic physiques are more associated with criminal groups than with non-criminal control groups. This makes it difficult to simply dismiss the relevance of somatotypes as correlates to criminal behavior. Physique is not the cause of crime. This much is known from all of the studies related to somatotyping. However, the majority of criminal subjects represented in research do have a mesomorphic body type. The remaining challenge for criminologists is to determine what it is about mesomorphy that is related to criminality and why this is so. Sean Maddan See also Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck: The Origins of Crime; Hooton, Earnest A.: The American Criminal; Kretschmer, Ernest: Physique and Character; Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein: Crime and Human Nature

References and Further Readings Cortes, J. B., & Gatti, F. M. (1966). Physique and motivation. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 30, 408–414. Eysenck, H. J., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (1989). The causes and cures of criminality. New York: Plenum. Feitosa, M. F., Borecki, I. B., Rich, S. S., Arnett, D. K., Sholinsky, P., Myers, R. H., et al. (2002). Quantitative-trait loci influencing body-mass index reside on chromosomes 7 and 13: The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute family heart study. American Journal of Human Genetics, 70, 72–82. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1951). Unraveling juvenile delinquency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glueck, S., & Glueck, E. (1956). Physique and delinquency. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Hartl, E. M., Monnelly, E. P., & Elderkin, R. D. (1982). Physique and delinquent behavior: A thirty-year follow-up of William H. Sheldon’s varieties of delinquent youth. New York: Academic Press. Hooton, E. A. (1968). Crime and the man. New York: Greenwood. Kretschmer, E. (1970). Physique and character: An investigation of the nature of constitution and of the theory of temperament. New York: Cooper Square. Maddan, S., Walker, J. T., & Miller, J. M. (2008). Does size really matter? A reexamination of Sheldon’s somatotypes and criminal behavior. Social Science Journal, 45, 330–344. McCandless, B. R., Persons, W. S., III, & Roberts, A. (1972). Perceived opportunity, delinquency, race, and body build among delinquent youth. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 38, 281–287. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. (1998). Clinical guidelines on the identification, evaluation, and treatment of overweight, and obesity in adults: The evidence report. Washington, DC: National Institute of Health. Parnell, R. W. (1958). Behavior and physique: An introduction to practical and applied somatometry. London: Edward Arnold. Rafter, N. (2007). Somatotyping, antimodernism, and the production of criminological knowledge. Criminology, 45, 805–834. Raine, A. (1993). The psychopathology of crime: Criminal behavior as a clinical disorder. New York: Academic Press. Sheldon, W., Hartl, W. M., & McDermott, E. (1949). Varieties of delinquent youth: An introduction to constitutional psychiatry. New York: Harper & Brothers. Sheldon, W., Stevens, S. S., & Tucker, W. B. (1940). The varieties of human physique: An introduction to constitutional psychology. New York: Harper & Brothers. Wilson, J. Q., & Herrnstein, R. J. (1985). Crime and human nature. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory Criminological theory and criminal justice policy have long focused on the relationship between sanctions and criminal behavior. Deterrence and labeling are two major theoretical traditions that

Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory

emphasize sanctions as a key explanatory factor, providing contradictory predictions of the impact of those sanctions on behavior. Deterrence theorists predict that sanctions, especially those which are swift, certain, and proportionally severe, will deter or reduce further criminal behavior. Additionally, criminal justice policy is often predicated on the assumption that sanctions deter offenders. Labeling theory, on the other hand, predicts that sanctions will stigmatize the offender, producing increased offending (i.e., secondary deviance) in the future. The empirical evidence supporting either deterrence or labeling has been mixed. Recognizing this diversity in the effects of sanctions, Lawrence W. Sherman has argued that the apparent pattern of sanction effects observed in existing research exhibits two themes. First, the impact of sanctions appears to depend on perceptions of fairness, in that sanctions viewed as unfair are more likely to increase offending. Second, sanctions appear to increase crime among out-groups while deterring crime among in-groups. Suggesting that existing theory is incapable of accounting for these patterns, Sherman proposed defiance theory to explain the conditions under which sanctions will increase criminal activity versus deterring offending.

Defiance Theory The starting point in Sherman’s defiance theory is the differential effects of sanctions. Research suggests that, in varying instances, sanctions may either deter or increase future offending. In an effort to explain the conditions under which sanctions increase criminal behavior, Sherman developed the concept of defiance, which is defined as “the net increase in the prevalence, incidence, or seriousness of future offending against a sanctioning community caused by a proud, shameless reaction to the administration of a criminal sanction” (p. 459). Defiance may take several forms. Similar to deterrence, defiance may be either specific (i.e., the reaction of an individual to his or her own punishment) or general (i.e., the reaction of a group to the punishment of a group member). Additionally, individuals may exhibit either direct defiance, reacting against the sanctioning agent, or indirect defiance, reacting against another individual who vicariously represents the sanctioning agent. Sherman provides examples of the different types of defiance. For

839

example, an individual who assaults a police officer during an arrest is exhibiting specific, direct defiance. An individual who assaults his or her spouse following a domestic violence arrest is exhibiting specific, indirect defiance. General, direct defiance is illustrated by the South African ambush killings of police officers, who were viewed as the tools of oppression during the apartheid era, a perception that has lingered. The 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of the four police officers who beat Rodney King during a traffic stop provide an example of general, indirect defiance.

Conditions for Defiance Sherman argues that defiance is likely to occur when the sanctioned individual views his or her punishment as unfair or illegitimate, is poorly bonded, and denies the shame of the punishment. In contrast, sanctions are expected to produce deterrence when the sanctioned individual is well bonded, views the sanction as legitimate, and accepts the shame he or she feels, remaining proud of his or her connection to the community, recognizing the harm that his or her actions have caused, and attempting to repair that bond. Sanctions are irrelevant to future offending when these factors are evenly balanced. For example, when a well-bonded offender denies the shame associated with the unfair sanction, the expected outcome will likely be irrelevance, not deterrence. In this instance, the perceived unfairness of the sanction and the failure to accept the shame that accompanies the sanction will nullify any deterrent effect produced by the strong social bond. With this discussion, Sherman is able to theoretically account for the mixed effects of sanctions. Defiance theory focuses on explaining the defiant reaction to a sanction. Specifically, there are four necessary conditions for defiance to occur: (1) the sanction must be defined by the offender as unfair, (2) the offender must be poorly bonded to society, (3) the sanction must be viewed by the offender as stigmatizing, and (4) the offender must refuse to acknowledge the shame produced by the sanction. In proposing his theory and identifying these four conditions, Sherman has borrowed from John Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming, Tom Tyler’s concept of procedural justice, and Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger’s discussion of the role of shame and rage in destructive conflicts.

840

Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory

Perceptions of Fairness

According to Sherman, one key theme in understanding whether a sanction produces defiance or deterrence is the perceived fairness or legitimacy of the sanction or sanctioning agent. Unfairness may be related to disrespect by the sanctioning agent or a perception that the punishment is arbitrary or discriminatory. Whether the unfairness of a punishment is substantive or perceptual, unfair or unjust sanctions may not have their intended deterrent effect. According to Tyler’s procedural justice perspective, sanctions that are perceived as unfair reduce the legitimacy of law enforcement or the criminal justice system, which reduces the likelihood of compliance. If an individual perceives a punishment as unjust, he or she may begin to question the law itself and feel justified in disregarding it. Scheff and Retzinger contend that societal disapproval, when expressed disrespectfully or to a person with weak social bonds, may evoke anger. Reintegrative shaming theory likewise argues that sanctions that stigmatize and label the offender may weaken existing social bonds and produce increased offending. Thus, perceptions of the fairness of a sanction and the experience of being stigmatized by a sanction may interact with an individual’s social bonds to produce defiance. Social Bonding

Procedural justice argues that when the legitimacy of formal sanctions breaks down, social sanctions are expected to take their place. Thus, social bonding also plays a large role in defiance theory. In particular, Sherman relies on some elements of reintegrative shaming theory to explain the connection between unfair or stigmatizing sanctions and social bonds. For Braithwaite, individuals who have strong social bonds (i.e., interdependency) may be more likely to experience reintegrative sanctions, which are rejecting of the act but avoid applying a label to the individual. Thus, reintegrative sanctions are likely to be viewed as fair and to produce deterrence. Disintegrative sanctions, however, are rejecting of both the act and actor, stigmatizing the sanctioned individual. These sanctions are more likely to be viewed as unfair and disrespectful. Sherman likewise recognizes the potential criminogenic effect of stigmatizing sanctions, especially among individuals with

weak social bonds. He argues that individuals with strong social bonds will not react defiantly to a punishment perceived as unfair so as not to jeopardize those bonds. On the other hand, individuals with weak social bonds are more likely to deny the shame of being sanctioned and respond with indignation and anger. This angry, prideful reaction sets the stage for defiance and increased offending. Experiencing Shame

An individual’s reaction to the shame of a sanction is the final link in the explanation of defiance. Sherman highlights the role of shame, pointing both to reintegrative shaming theory and to Scheff and Retzinger’s work on the master emotions of shame and pride. Both Braithwaite and Scheff and Retzinger argue that individual reactions to the shame of a sanction will vary depending on an individual’s level of social bonding. Similarly, labeling theory suggests that secondary deviance (i.e., defiance for Sherman) occurs as a reaction to the experience of being sanctioned, in that individuals may perceive their punishment as an attack and may act defiantly as a defense to society’s disapproval. Scheff and Retzinger criticize early versions of labeling theory for failing to take emotions, especially shame, into account. For these authors, societal disapproval is described as a threat to the sanctioned individual’s social bonds. If the individual accepts the shame that he or she feels and recognizes the harm he or she has caused, the individual may seek to avoid that behavior in the future (i.e., deterrence). Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming presents a similar argument. On the other hand, if the person refuses to acknowledge or rejects that shame, he or she may respond with self-righteous anger. Scheff and Retzinger describe a shame/rage spiral, in which rage is a protective measure against shame, a way of rejecting the shame, and a defense against a perceived attack. Thus, this shame/rage spiral occurs when a person’s bond is threatened, the shame is not acknowledged, and behavior is interpreted as an attack. This produces violence, hatred, and resentment which may lead to defiance. For Sherman, shame, or the refusal to acknowledge shame, is the primary causal mechanism in explaining defiance.

Sherman, Lawrence W.: Defiance Theory

Empirical Evidence for Defiance Theory Sherman concludes his theoretical formulation by noting that “until recently, the science of sanction effects has been short on facts and even shorter on theory. Now, it seems, the available theory has gotten ahead of the facts” (p. 468). Despite the promise of defiance in explaining variation in sanction effects, there have been no complete tests of the theory since its development. Most of the evidence that can be marshaled in support of the theory is derived from studies not originally designed to examine its propositions. Some research supports the notion that perceptions of unfairness, either to the law being imposed or to the sanction itself, are likely to lead to more criminal offending (i.e., defiance). Sherman highlights research suggesting that previously sanctioned individuals are less likely to be deterred. It may be that, because few people are formally sanctioned for offending, those who do receive a punishment perceive their treatment as comparatively unfair and respond defiantly by engaging in further delinquency. Additional research examining police-citizen encounters indirectly tests some of the propositions articulated by defiance theory. These studies primarily focus on the offender’s (or citizen’s) perceptions of fair treatment by police officers in their encounters. Raymond Paternoster, Robert Brame, Ronet Bachman, and Sherman examined the effect of arrest on the likelihood of engaging in subsequent domestic assaults and found that the offender’s perceptions of fair treatment by police were important determinants of future offending. Other studies of policecitizen interactions support the premise that individuals who feel that they are unfairly treated by police are more likely to be resistant. In other words, the perceived legitimacy of a police officer’s action is an important predictor of citizen compliance or resistance. When the police are perceived to be respectful to citizens, compliance is more likely. Confrontational and physical actions on the part of police, on the other hand, are more likely to produce resistance, possibly because the actions are interpreted as unfair and stigmatizing. This body of research supports Sherman’s argument that defiance is more likely to occur when sanctions are perceived as unfair. While these results are suggestive, they do not address the key to defiance theory, which is an individual’s perception of the sanction.

841

A more recent study examined the perceptual nature of defiance theory and the impact of those perceptions on future offending more closely and has provided the most complete test of the theory to date. Leana Bouffard and Nicole Leeper Piquero found that individuals who perceived a sanction as unfair and were poorly bonded had higher rates of offending in the future. While much existing research demonstrates that perceptions of unfairness and social bonding have a strong connection to offending, the role of shame in producing defiance remained unclear in this study. Other research, however, has supported the role of shame in offending. Unfortunately, the existing research generally provides only piecemeal support for defiance theory. Studies specifically designed to link the theory’s propositions together are necessary.

Future Directions for Defiance Theory Other researchers have highlighted the links between Sherman’s defiance theory and other explanatory mechanisms. For example, within psychology, the personality construct of grandiosity (i.e., exaggerated perceptions of self-worth) may inform the path to defiance, in that grandiose or self-centered individuals may be more likely to reject the sanctioning agent and the shame associated with being sanctioned, resulting in a defiant response. In criminology, research also suggests that individuals with low levels of self-control are more likely to perceive sanctions as unfair and to respond with anger. Though not specifically addressed by Sherman or necessarily intended, one advantage of defiance theory is that in linking concepts, like emotion and social bonding, it offers an integrative perspective that accounts for either defiance or deterrence. From the life-course and criminal career perspective, defiance may also be seen as an explanation of continuity in and desistance from offending. The theory can explain desistance by arguing that if an individual defines a sanction as unfair and stigmatizing but has strong social bonds, that person may accept the shame that he or she feels or be unwilling to jeopardize his or her bonds through a defiant reaction. According to Sherman, these individuals will be deterred from future offending (i.e., they will desist). This theory also provides an explanation for continuity, which is the defiant response of a poorly

842

Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes

bonded offender who defines his or her sanction as unfair and stigmatizing and refuses to acknowledge the shame he or she feels. These individuals may continue or escalate their offending, becoming involved in secondary deviance. Thus, exploring defiance theory from a longitudinal, life-course perspective is another promising avenue for research.

Conclusion It is difficult to truly assess the value of Sherman’s defiance theory with the paucity of studies that directly test its propositions. Rather, the existing research provides suggestive evidence supporting some elements of the theory, particularly perceptions of fairness and social bonding. What remains is to explicitly design studies that link these elements together as proposed by the theory and to explore the connections between this and other theories. At this point, the theory is relevant to understanding the importance of the interplay between perceptions of fairness, social bonding, and the experience of shame, but future research is necessary to fully explore these relationships. Leana Bouffard See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Braithwaite, John: Reintegrative Shaming Theory; Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; Hirschi, Travis: Social Control Theory; Lemert, Edwin M.: Primary and Secondary Deviance; Perceptual Deterrence; Tyler, Tom R.: Sanctions and Procedural Justice Theory

References and Further Readings Bouffard, L. A., & Piquero, N. L. (2010). Defiance theory and life course explanations of persistent offending. Crime and Delinquency, 56, 227–252. Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame, and reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Paternoster, R., Brame, R., Bachman, R., & Sherman, L. W. (1997). Do fair procedures matter? The effects of procedural justice on spouse assault. Law and Society Review, 31, 163–204. Scheff, T. J., & Retzinger, S. M. (1991). Emotions and violence: Shame and rage in destructive conflicts. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Sherman, L. W. (1993). Defiance, deterrence, and irrelevance: A theory of the criminal sanction. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 445–473.

Tyler, T. R. (1990). Why people obey the law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes The city of Chicago remains a bastion for sociological research. Known as the Chicago School, observation and ethnographic research stemming from the University of Chicago essentially birthed the ecological study of crime and criminals. An integral part of Chicago School research was the identification of delinquent and criminal groups operating in neighborhoods, especially gangs. Frederick Thrasher’s 1927 study of 1,313 gangs commenced this line of gang research and his work is still influential to this day. Roughly four generations of scholars produced extensive gangrelevant research at the individual and neighborhood level that shaped how law enforcement, policymakers, and the public came to view gangs. The Chicago way of analyzing ecological problems paved the way for more elaborate techniques of research methods. James F. Short, Jr., a University of Chicago graduate and student of Clifford Shaw, and a working group of colleagues (Desmond Cartwright, Robert Gordon, Kenneth Howard, and Fred Strodtbeck) came together to conduct a major study of gang activity in Chicago. They sought to examine the breadth of existing gang and lower class-specific macro-level theories of delinquency. Although data were collected across a variety of fronts, the working group relied heavily on the field work conducted by the detached workers assigned to the 16 gangs included in the study. The research culminated in Short and Strodtbeck’s seminal work Group Process and Gang Delinquency. The authors recognized that the phenomena of gangs and the delinquency tied to these groups could not be studied solely at a structural level, nor could they be analyzed merely at an individual level. Emerging from Short and Strodtbeck’s research was the finding that the group itself was decidedly responsible for a considerable amount of the behavior perpetrated by its members. This led Short to critique an especially important problem not only for the study of gangs but also for criminology in

Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes

general—the level of explanation problem. Individual-level, micro-level or meso-level, and macro-level research explain different problems. This was the central thesis to Short and Strodt­ beck’s book, and something that Short has continued to emphasize over the last four decades. Short and Strodtbeck concluded that their results indicated that for theoretical explanations of delinquency, the group processes within the gang were crucial in facilitating delinquency.

Group Processes Within the Context of the Level of Explanation Problem As mentioned above, over the course of Short’s career, he has insisted that criminology suffered from a level of explanation problem. In his 1997 presidential address to the American Society of Criminology, Short commented that research examining differing units of analysis often lay victim to “talk[ing] past each other” (1998, p. 3). Short’s Chicago research demonstrated this point; macrolevel and individual-level undertakings could not fully explain the social challenges that delinquent gangs posed. In other words, the core levels of explanation (individual and macro) were missing a nucleus—a microsocial unit of explanation. Short highlighted this in his presidential address and argued that an emphasis on microsocial contexts can bridge the gap between individual and macro approaches to explain crime. Traditionally, especially during the time of Short’s research, the field of sociology focused on structural or macro-level theories of delinquency and crime. Macro-level approaches focus on larger environmental and social forces beyond the immediate control of the individual that interact to produce crime. Key concepts include the community, societal goals, opportunities for success, social support, race, and economic deprivation. Influential macro-level theories include Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s social disorganization theory; Albert Cohen’s subcultural theory; Francis Cullen’s social support, Robert Sampson, Stephen Rauden­ bush, and Felton Earls’s collective efficacy, and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s and Robert Merton’s strain/anomie. Short and Strodtbeck recognized the importance of these factors but were critical of the lack of individual-level variables. “Personality variables, for example, for all practical

843

purposes are ignored” (p. 18). Partly in response to the rejection of individualism, individual-level approaches (e.g., the Gluecks’ research) to crime explanation were not acknowledged until the advent of survey research (Lilly et al., 2007). These types of approaches focus on individual deficits and control-based concepts—of which Short recognized the limitation in research at the time—and are now far more prevalent in the literature. Short ultimately found that the micro-level of explanation, or a group process perspective, best characterized the delinquency patterns of youth gang members. In Short’s words, “much of the behavior we were observing was influenced by the immediate situations of actions on the street, especially the interaction of gang members with one another” (1997, p. 46). Short explained that this was at odds with existing explanations of gang delinquency but imposed on the working group that context and group processes were central to explaining this behavior. What research failed to produce prior to Short and colleagues’ investigation was conceptualizing the importance of living group lives. People did not function only among themselves or as just another individual in the city. People functioned within a network of family, coworkers, and peers with whom they lived, worked, and played (Short, 1998). Within these networks operated particular and intimate norms in which informal social controls essentially created specific types of order. The question that Short addressed was, What is it about the gang that facilitates this behavior? The answer to this question lies in the heart of Short’s research. “Group norms create risks for group members which would not exist for non-members” (Short & Strodtbeck, 1965, p. 45). In other words, participation in this group may spark moneymaking opportunities and companionship, but the very existence of the group sparks conflict both within the group and with other groups enclosed in the confines of urban America. Short and Strodtbeck described some of this delinquency as a response to status threats that are situationally determined. These threats—especially within the company of gang peers—to status, leadership, territory, and ego must result in a response. Short and Strodtbeck remarked that “[t]o the extent that a child acquires the lower class, culturally patterned

844

Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes

bias against planful behavior, he will be drawn to situations where the ‘action’ is likely to involve choices which crucially affect his ability to stay out of trouble” (pp. 282–283). These behaviors and responses manifest in the presence of the gang. For the purposes of understanding gang behavior, Short uncovered what has been a topic of interest for a host of researchers over the last four decades. The microsocial processes operating within the group are compatible with existing theories (e.g., social learning/process-based theory: differential association, differential reinforcement, modeling) that contend that individual/personality traits and environmental settings are either too imprecise or too impersonal to explain group behavior. This is why learning or process theory is so applicable to Short’s contentions. In addition, this is also why existing learning or process theories hold up so well empirically in explaining deviant peer group and gang involvement.

Why Group Processes Trump the Individual-Level and Macro-Level Explanations of Delinquent Behavior

While observation and ethnography may have dominated the early days of criminological research, the survey design restructured the way criminologists conducted research and devised theory thereafter. As J. Robert Lilly, Francis Cullen, and Richard Ball pointed out, Travis Hirschi’s 1969 study “was perhaps most instrumental in demonstrating the power of the self-report study to assess competing delinquency theories” (p. 308). This line of methodology then translated into the longitudinal design, where subjects were followed over a period of time and systematically surveyed. While the Gluecks and Marvin Wolfgang, Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin had been conducting this research for some time, the longitudinal design really accelerated in the 1980s. These research ventures provided a unique opportunity to test many of the influential theories and concepts relevant to gang delinquency research. For example, longitudinal studies coordinated by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Denver, Pittsburgh, and Rochester (New York), were able to measure delinquent involvement before, during, and after gang involvement, especially pertinent to understanding Short’s key conceptual claims.

According to Short, the group is where individual and macro variables intersect to produce behavior. Gangs typically germinate in economically deprived areas (macro-level), and gang member attributes (individual-level) amenable to the gang are then exploited in group interaction. In other words, these larger perspectives are contingent upon group interaction to produce behavior. Because longitudinal designs have the ability to test delinquent involvement prior to and subsequent to gang involvement, quasi-experimentally, they can test what sort of effect the gang had on an individual’s behavior. The longitudinal studies mentioned above have produced a wealth of information for gang researchers. The results from Denver, Pittsburgh, and Rochester found that during periods of gang membership, an individual’s involvement in delinquency was elevated. This was consistent across cities in the United States, and evidence has been found abroad suggesting that the gang has an impact on behavior that goes beyond typical individual and environmental processes. A key theoretical argument guided the above research. In 1993, Terence Thornberry and colleagues first articulated this argument from their findings in Rochester. Three models could be posited to explain gang behavior: (1) a selection or “types of persons” model, (2) a facilitation or “types of groups” model, and finally (3) an enhancement model that is a blend of the two models. It followed that selection models emphasize the criminal characteristics or traits of the individual. Thornberry et al. argued that this model is consistent with propensity, opportunity, and control-type theories. The facilitation models emphasize the group characteristics that facilitate the behavior of the individual, with the authors placing this in line with learning and process-type theories. These theoretical assumptions stipulated by Thornberry and colleagues provided an appropriate platform for the propensity/process debate while using the gang to test each theory’s core assumptions. In summarizing the studies mentioned above that examine these models, Marvin Krohn and Terence Thornberry concluded that “perhaps the safest conclusion to draw is that there is a minor selection effect, [and] a major facilitation effect” (p. 147), thus lending credence to the learning or process-based theory. Gottfredson and

Short, James F., Jr.: Gangs and Group Processes

Hirschi may respond to Krohn and Thornberry’s conclusion by arguing that the gang provides better “masks” and “shields,” thus facilitating opportunities to commit crime (p. 209). No matter whether one subscribes to the opportunity/propensity or learning/process explanations of crime, what should be taken from these empirical examinations is that the group or the gang is responsible for producing delinquent and criminal behavior.

Conclusion Short’s group process perspective has had a large impact on gang delinquency theory over the past four decades. His main piece with Strodtbeck, Group Process and Gang Delinquency, has been cited nearly 500 times (Google Scholar) and is a must-read for researchers and practitioners interested in better understanding gang behavior and gang member delinquency. The problem, however, is that Short’s message of studying group processes has been largely undermined by the emphasis placed on conducting individual-level research. Short stated that “[f]orty years later . . . the group process perspective remains undeveloped. The research that we did has been cited frequently and appreciatively, but later gang research by sociologists and anthropologists has focused less on group processes than on correlates of individual self-reports” (2005, pp. 4–5). This dilemma arises because most studies are not designed to have the capacity to analyze a representative sample of gang members from multiple gangs. This goes to the heart of the level of explanation problem that Short has addressed over the years and something that Malcolm Klein addressed in his call for more comparative gang research. Short’s contention that group processes are instrumental in facilitating gang member behavior has been validated by both longitudinal and qualitative research over the years. As more elaborate statistical techniques and methodological advances emerge (e.g., network analysis) and are used to study gang and gang member behavior, Short’s work will be used as the anchor to that research. David C. Pyrooz and Scott H. Decker See also Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L.

845

Maxson: Street Gang Structure and Organization; Thornberry, Terence P.: Interactional Theory; Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang; Vigil, James Diego: Multiple Marginality Theory

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. New York: Free Press. Decker, S. H. (1996). Collective and normative features of gang violence. Justice Quarterly, 13, 243–264. Decker, S. H., & Van Winkle, B. (1996). Life in the gang: Family, friends, and violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Esbensen, F.-A., Winfree L. T., Jr., & He, N. (2001). Youth gangs and definitional issues: When is a gang a gang, and why does it matter? Crime and Delinquency, 47, 105–130. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krohn, M. D., & Thornberry, T. P. (2008). Longitudinal perspectives on adolescent street gangs. In A. M. Liberman (Ed.), The long view of crime: A synthesis of longitudinal research (pp. 128–160). Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. Lilly, J. R., Cullen, F. T., & Ball, R. A. (2007). Criminological theory: Context and consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McGloin, J. M., & Decker, S. H. (2009). Theories of gang behavior and public policy. In H. D. Barlow & S. H. Decker (Eds.), Criminology and public policy: Putting theory to work (pp. 212–225). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Short, J. F., Jr. (1997). Poverty, ethnicity, and violent crime. Boulder, CO: Westview. Short, J. F., Jr. (1998). The level of explanation problem revisited: The American Society of Criminology 1997 presidential address. Criminology, 36, 3–36. Short, J. F., Jr., (2005). Why study gangs? An intellectual journey. In J. F. Short & L. A. Hughes (Eds.), Studying youth gangs (pp. 1–14). Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Short, J. F., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1965). Group process and gang delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

846

Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders

Sutherland, E. H. (1939). Principles of criminology (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott. Thornberry, T. P. (1987). Toward an interactional theory of delinquency. Criminology, 25, 863–891. Thornberry, T. P., Krohn, M. D., & Lizotte, A. J. (1993). The role of juvenile gangs in facilitating delinquent behavior. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 55–87. Thrasher, F. M. (1963). The gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago (Abridged). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1927)

Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders Neal Shover’s Great Pretenders synthesizes conclusions from a scholarly career spanning four decades and devoted largely to the study of persistent street offenders. It is relevant as an empirical work and analysis for all who would develop theory for this type of offender. The male recidivists examined compose much of the crime problem and drain tremendous criminal justice resources. They are the primary source of concern in the ongoing public conversation of the crime problem and policies to address it. Interpreta­ tions from the book are aimed at a small segment of those who offend, but this persistent minority represents a population that cannot be ignored. Shover focuses on the pursuits and careers of street offenders who return to criminal activity following a period of incarceration for earlier crime. The project draws on diverse data that include results of research on street offenders by other investigators, offenders’ published autobiographies, interviews collected in three ethnographic studies of persistent thieves, and secondary analysis of inmate surveys. Shover’s primary goal is not theoretical development or testing; rather, his aim is to present the decisions and consequential contingencies of offenders’ lives through their eyes. While a view of crime as choice frames the discussion, it is clear early on that those who wish to view crime purely as economic choice or who hope to reduce rates of offending exclusively by increasing punishment will find disappointment in these pages. This use of choice can accommodate sophisticated cultural analysis as well as simple costs and benefits of crime, as is seen

in the six stories of difficult lives and prolonged participation in crime that initiate the analysis. Before focusing precisely on the world as seen by thieves, Shover describes the historical context of criminal opportunity. Dramatic technological changes that have opened and constrained opportunities for crime over the last century are documented. There have been, for example, technological improvements to make large sums of money inaccessible to thieves that rely on the handy skills of tradesmen; peeling or punching holes in safes full of cash can no longer be accomplished by ordinary men with ordinary tools. Brazen large-scale heists of trains or banks, always high-risk prospects, will almost inevitably end badly for malefactors who cannot outrun the communication technology of their age or easily leave criminal notoriety behind. The all-too-­prevalent dream of big scores and outlaw careers uninterrupted by punishment is far out of reach for most would-be street offenders. Nevertheless, some opportunities expand. Drug dealing and fraud offer lucrative potential. And there are goods and money in houses, stores, and pockets accessible to any with the inclination to steal fairly small sums at the risk of what would be off-putting penalties for most. The implication in the discussion of historical developments is that currently there is something akin to a dual labor market for offenders. Lucrative illicit opportunities are available for those with patience and ability to manage personnel and plans or who develop sophisticated strategies for committing discrete crimes. There is some promise in crime for those who can devote forethought and resources to designing offenses that insulate from law enforcement and who can avoid mistakes and the worst damage from living life as party. The bulk of robbery and burglary are committed by men with no such resources, inclinations, or abilities. Disadvantage and disrepute not only constrain opportunities but also affect what is pursued. Most lower-class men will choose hard work befitting their social and occupational training, but there are multiple identities that can conduce in crime available to them as well. Some offenders, drawn mainly from the lower rungs of their class, also embrace a lifestyle centered not on the commitments of work and family but on concern with immediate social settings and appearances in them. Drugs and alcohol are the typical organizing activities in these

Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders

settings. Shover calls related pursuits and the mindset that potentially make regular intoxication, unstructured days, and theft attractive life as party. Within the broad pursuit of it, there are several prevailing identities that mark stylistically distinctive accomplishment of the criminal lifestyle, and that define how thieves categorize themselves and their peers. They vary on forms of drug use, abilities to manage crime and drugs, and the degree of commitment to crime relative to conventional pursuits. One prevalent category, the noncriminal identity, does not derive from direct pursuit of a criminal course or character project, but from fatalistic and alienated worldviews of poor men who have spent long periods of life down on their luck. These know that in their ranks hard times and criminal mistakes eventuating in heavy costs are mundane eventualities. Prison is a misfortune, but is not a completely unexpected shock. Other culturally reproduced lifestyles that are prominent in the lower classes are more closely linked to crime and related pursuits. These include the thief, hustler, dope fiend, and screw-up. Alongside diminished chances of acquiring the financial security and stability that are rewards in respectable and licit occupational pursuits, the attractions of crime are especially likely to draw those ensconced in crime commensurate outlooks. The second half of Great Pretenders is devoted to understanding what criminal careers, from first to last crime, look like in the population of persistent thieves and why this is the case. It is established firmly, for example, that many young males engage in serious delinquency and that few do so frequently or over long periods of time. Even among those who engage in serious delinquency frequently and who continue to do so past their teenage years, many will stop committing crimes by their early to mid-20s. Those who persist in crime even after they are punished as adults may be peculiar statistically and qualitatively. Through practice, seasoned offenders begin to see environments and opportunities from the perspective of thieves who know how to do it. Few opportunities for theft may be taken as experience teaches that they are plentiful, but they also will not escape the notice of those who have learned to look. Most persons pay little attention to jars of coins on mantles, storeroom windows left ajar, vehicles in driveways that indicate gun collections in houses,

847

cigar boxes under registers, or illegal gambling machines in country convenience stores. Those who have larceny sense cannot help but notice. Many must actively suppress thoughts of committing crime when apparent opportunity knocks. Therefore, it can take herculean commitment for those who see criminal opportunity everywhere to change thinking and desist from crime. Rewarding relationships and jobs help offenders to abide. For those who spend long periods of time committing crime and paying the price for it, crimereducing commitments can remain elusive con­tin­ gencies, however. Nevertheless, neglect of family and work has consequences for aging thieves that may get through to many eventually and that can lead to dramatic shifts in outlook. Those with extensive past troubles often come to see the rewards to be found in familial relationships and the types of pursuits associated with them. These awakenings to the pleasure of stability and associated rewards are one way in which persistent offenders come to recognize their past mistakes, to view crime as self-defeating, and to develop the resolve which is almost necessary for them to change. Fortunately, middle age is not too late for such realizations. Those who are to make a late transition out of crime often confront and acknowledge eventually that offending has paid paltry returns and done tremendous damage when all is considered. Years are a limited resource. Potential to undo harm to loved ones and self-respect diminishes. Therefore, prison time is more costly with age and occurs in ever longer stints. Stubborn continuance in crime and its associated pursuits and any tendency to proudly or lackadaisically shirk the costs diminishes with maturity. Aging offenders develop a more complex understanding of criminal folly, and it saddens them to know that another generation is at the trailhead representing onset of lengthy criminal careers. They tend to accept, however, that the young will not listen to what they have to say, perhaps indicating recognition of the thickness of blinders that accompany a criminal lifestyle and outlook. The closing pages of Great Pretenders address attempts by the state to make crime less attractive by threats and confinement. When policy is measured against conclusions of this study, the prospects for crime control based on philosophies that

848

Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders

emphasize reducing crime with near exclusive use of aggressive and tough criminal justice policies seem gloomy. A central reason may be that policymakers have devoted almost no attention to imagining how their initiatives and the resultant conditions are experienced by the economically marginalized and troublesome citizens of low repute. At a time when political moods in the country ardently questioned the prospects of government to intervene, plan for, and correct problems, so great was faith in aggressive crime control that few questioned whether it could deter the persistent and potentially dangerous offenders at which it was aimed. Even less attention was given to potential unexpected and collateral costs. The irony of this penal policy is that it strips options and visits the heaviest penalties on already vulnerable offenders “just as they are beginning to contemplate the possibility of going straight” (Wright, 1997). Overoptimistic assessments of deterrent potential of punishment result in part from the fact that academics and policy makers are ill-positioned to understand the chaotic contexts and inattention to preparation for lucrative careers in the ranks that produce persistent offenders. To those accustomed to the careful metrics—organization and planning common among economists and business professors—it is a mystery why countless bakeries, laundries, construction ventures, and neighborhood bars open without business plans and fail soon after. Continued participation in crime remains a mystery as well. Many thieves are not moved by attempts to scare them with harsh penalties because at the moment of crime they do not care about the consequences. They have learned that stealing requires the ability to set aside fear of the unknown, and may have been surrounded by offending and offenders for much of life. If punishment is unduly tough, it might anger some and further entrench them in alienated and angry attitudes. For others, it will present a chance to show that they can take whatever is given without acquiescing to pressures to change personal pursuits or identities. If offenders were ill-suited for dealing with their shortcomings and consequences of their choices before long periods of incarceration, some will be less so upon release. There are always the inefficient and morally unattractive options of incarcerating tremendous numbers of persons cheaply and repeatedly or keeping them until they

are old and tired. Intelligent and efficient sanctioning requires acknowledging that even persistent thieves are redeemable, helping them to escape their own histories and taking reasonable chances. Insights from Great Pretenders have had their greatest academic influence on those intrigued by offenders’ thinking and reasoning. It is pronounced in contemporary qualitative research, where Shover has exercised considerable tutelage, and which is almost necessarily influenced by the book (Maruna, 2006). Research that allows offenders to provide straightforward insight into their lives, views of the world, and what they are trying to accomplish often draws heavily from this work. Among other things, the book accompanies a renewed theoretical and empirical attention to the temporal level between background and situational factors and also accompanies a cultural and symbolic interactionist turn in criminology (Ulmer, 2003). Here, storylines that pull together individual characteristics, interactions, and/or settings for interaction in ways that increase chances of crime are revealed (Agnew, 2006). Great Pretenders also foretells the recently invigorated interest, especially in developmental and life-course perspectives, in the changing meanings of offending associated with age and experience. However, it is not only qualitative researchers who are influenced. Any who deign to understand street offenders encounter the unusual metrics described in this and other foundational accounts of contemporary theft and street-life. The knowledge imparted by these explorations now is incorporated into all forms of inquiry into experienced offenders’ decision making (Nee, 2003). Andy Hochstetler See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Economic Theory and Crime; Perceptual Deterrence; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (2006). Storylines as a neglected cause of crime. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 43, 119–147. Maruna, S. (2006). Review of “In Their Own Words”: Criminals on crime. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 39, 268–283.

Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime Nee, C. (2003). Research on burglary at the end of the millennium: A grounded approach to understanding crime. Security Journal, 16, 37–44. Shover, N. (1985). Aging criminals. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Shover, N. (1996). Great pretenders: Pursuits and careers of persistent thieves. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ulmer, J. T. (2003). Demarginalizing symbolic interactionism: A comment on interactionism’s place. Symbolic Interaction, 26, 19–31. Wright, R. T. (1997). Review of “Great Pretenders: Pursuits and careers of persistent thieves.” Contemporary Sociology, 26, 360–361. Wright, R. T., & Decker, S. H. (1996). Burglars on the job: Streetlife and residential break-ins. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Wright, R. T., & Decker, S. H. (1997). Armed robbers in action: Stick-ups and street culture. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime In 1975, Rita J. Simon authored a pioneering book called Women and Crime. It was one of the first publications to examine women and their criminality from a sociological/gendered perspective. Prior to its publication, female criminality was often attributed to mental, emotional, and biological weaknesses embedded in the nature of women. Even the mainstream theories of criminology (i.e., strain, bonding, differential association) provided very little explanation of how and why women engaged in crime. Most of the “traditional” theories of crime simply applied the theoretical explanations of male criminality to those of women criminals. With the Feminist Movement of the 1970s in full swing, Simon’s work delved into the sociological forces surrounding women’s opportunity to engage in crime. She investigated crime statistics in the United States from the early 1950s to the early 1970s and concluded that increased labor force participation, via the women’s liberation movement, led to increased crime rates for women during that 20-year period. To further support her point, she also cited a similar increase in female crime rates across several other industrialized countries. In addition, Simon looked at how women

849

were treated in the criminal justice system by examining convictions and sentencing patterns in federal and state courts. Lastly, she described the issues and concerns of women in prison in the United States during that time period. She focused on such topics as programming opportunities, separation from children and families, and the conditions inside of women’s prisons. This entry provides an overview of Simon’s liberation hypothesis, describes the treatment of women in the criminal justice system with an emphasis on the chivalry hypothesis, and presents some points of view in opposition to Simon’s work.

Liberation/Opportunity Thesis One of the major ideas put forth by Simon in Women and Crime was that women’s criminality was linked to the opportunities, social skills, and networks available to women in American society. This idea ran counter to the existing notion that women offenders had mental and genetic deficiencies that caused their criminality. From a sociological perspective, Simon suggested that prior to the Feminist Movement, women’s criminal options were limited because most women were relegated to the home. Before the changes of the 1970s, the role of women consisted of being a good wife, mother, and homemaker. All of these functions required women to spend most of their time in the home, leaving very little discretionary time for other activities, especially crime. As a result of the Feminist Movement, these roles shifted, and women became “liberated” or “emancipated” from the home. They were able to find paid employment outside the home, which allowed them greater opportunity to involve themselves in crime. In essence, Simon disputed the long-standing idea that women were more moral than men and were, therefore, less criminal. She suggested that if women had the same opportunities to commit crimes as men, they would take advantage of those opportunities. Increased participation in the labor force during the 1970s provided women with criminal options they had not had in the past. In addition, Simon also purported that the position women occupied in the labor force was related to the types of crimes they had the chance to commit. Her opportunity/liberation thesis hypothesized that, over time, women’s crime rates would rise

850

Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime

sharply for property and white-collar crimes, such as larceny/theft, embezzlement, fraud, and forgery. The increased opportunity of working outside the home would provide women with more chances to engage in job-related and property offenses. In fact, Simon saw a future where the rates of whitecollar offenses for men and women would be similar as women continued to increase their status outside the home. As a corollary, Simon contended that liberation from the home would not make women more violent, but actually reduce their aggressive behavior. As women became more involved in the labor force, and as their education increased, they would feel happier and less likely to alleviate their frustration by acting out violently. Simon also believed that labor force participation would decrease the victimization of women. As women’s labor force participation increased, women became more confident and on guard for potentially violent situations. Women would also gain more financial independence and establish social networks to escape from abusive relationships. In the original version of Women and Crime, Simon demonstrated support for the liberation/ opportunity thesis by citing arrest statistics from the Uniform Crime Reports. The Uniform Crime Reports is compiled annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and is based on arrest statistics reported from local police agencies across the United States. In particular, Simon focused on two categories of arrests from 1953 to 1972. The first, Index Crimes, included homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/ theft, and auto theft. Forcible rape was excluded. The second category, Type II offenses, included offenses such as other assaults, arson, vandalism, weapons, prostitution, drugs, gambling, liquor laws, and so on. Simon’s data showed that, over the period of her study, women’s arrests increased over 20 percent for all crimes and over 50 percent for serious crimes. Of great importance is that most of the serious crime arrests were for property offenses (i.e., more than 60 percent). Her analysis was bolstered by a slew of other statistics, including arrests from other industrialized countries. Simon’s analysis showed that over the 20-year span of the study, the greatest increases in female arrests were reported for larceny/theft, embezzlement and fraud, forgery, and counterfeiting rather than other serious types of crimes. These figures supported

her opportunity theory. During the same time frame, women’s arrest rates for violent crimes remained steady, supporting Simon’s contention that employment in the community would work to stabilize or reduce women’s violent behavior.

Women and the Criminal Justice System In addition to presenting arrest statistics, Simon also examined the courtroom treatment of women versus that of males who committed similar crimes. Simon offered a two-pronged perspective to describe the treatment of women. On the one hand, Simon suggested that women were treated more leniently and received “softer” treatment by judges. She labeled this approach paternalism or chivalry. In a courtroom operating from this mind-set, when a man and a woman were charged with the same offense, the woman would receive preferential treatment. The female offender would be less likely to be convicted and formally sentenced. If she was convicted, she would most likely serve less time than her male counterpart. Simon suggested that when prosecutors and judges had to punish a female they often equated her with their mother or sister and were, therefore, less likely to move forward with official punishment. The fact that many women had children also swayed the judgment of court officials, who did not want to separate families. In other words, the chivalrous judicial system could not see women as criminals and acted in a paternalistic manner toward female offenders. To prove her point, Simon examined the treatment of male and female offenders in assault and larceny cases. Specifically, women were more likely to be released on bail, have their case dismissed, or receive probation as compared to men who had committed the same offenses. Overall, Simon discovered that the idea of paternalism or chivalry toward women criminals holds moderately true for both assault and larceny. Also of interest is that Simon actually interviewed judges and state attorneys in the Midwest asking them about paternalism or chivalry toward female criminals. More often than not, these officials admitted that they were not as punitive toward women criminals as men. In opposition to the chivalry hypothesis, Simon suggested that some court personnel treat women criminals with much more disdain than men. In fact, she suggested that some judges were likely to

Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime

punish women more severely when compared to men who had committed similar offenses. In this scenario, Simon believed that women criminals were perceived as acting so far out of their sex or gender roles that judges punished them for not only being criminals but also for violating the standards of femininity. Thus, the punishments meted out in these courts were more punitive for women because they were breaching societal expectations as well as the law. Again, Simon presents a litany of data from state and federal courts regarding outcomes and convictions disaggregated by gender and offense. Her federal data for the period 1964 to 1971 revealed that women were more likely than men to be convicted for certain crimes: fraud, embezzlement, and forgery. Her state conviction data from Ohio and California courts supported these findings as well. Besides the courtroom, Simon also included a short section in Women and Crime about women in prison, whom she labels “the forgotten offenders.” Simon suggested that with the liberation afforded to women during the era of women’s rights, the number of women entering state and federal prisons should have also increased along with arrest rates. However, the statistical data she presented actually showed, that from 1950 to 1970, there was not a spectacular increase in the number of women entering federal institutions. State data from New York yielded similar results, suggesting that the women’s movement did not directly affect women’s prison populations. Moreover, Simon examined the availability of educational and vocational programming for women inmates across the United States in comparison to those programs offered to males. In general, she found that women were offered fewer programs, and the programs that they were offered, especially vocational programs, did not prepare women for successful reentry into the community. At the time, women inmates were typically offered vocational training that was gender stereotyped, such as sewing, horticulture, cosmetology, and housekeeping. More importantly, these programs had less earning potential than the training offered to male inmates. Therefore, a woman who left prison would find it difficult to make ends meet on such low wages. Her problem was compounded if she had a family to support. Thus, she was more likely to return to crime and find herself back in

851

prison. Simon’s work exposed important disparities between programs offered to male and female inmates. These issues are still being examined by today’s criminologists.

Opponents of Simon Since the publication of Women and Crime in 1975, many criminologists have challenged Simon’s theoretical explanations of why women commit crime. Several concerns about her data from the Uniform Crime Reports have been raised. As mentioned above, Simon used arrest rate data compiled between 1953 and 1972. Since 1953 was the first year that women’s arrests were gathered by the FBI, its accuracy is suspect. Much of the data could be inaccurate or flawed. Second, Simon used arrests as a representation of actual crime rates. The Uniform Crime Reports gives the number of arrests, not the number of persons arrested. Thus, one individual who committed multiple offenses might be overrepresented in these data. A third underlying problem with the data is that the FBI does not collect data from every police precinct in the United States. Local jurisdictions report their information voluntarily and typically count only crimes “known” to the police. This means that some crime is potentially missed. There are only a few ways in which crimes can be known by the police: A victim or a witness can report the crime to the police, or a police office can witness a crime as it takes place. Since not all crime is reported to the police, and officers rarely witness a crime actually taking place, it becomes obvious that the Uniform Crime Re­ports is undercounting criminal activity. Compounding this reporting problem is the capability of law enforcement personnel to use discretion in deciding whether to arrest. In light of these filters, criminologists estimate that less than half of all crimes are reported. Therefore, the data from the Uniform Crime Reports may be an underestimate of the true nature and amount of women’s criminality. Besides problems with the Uniform Crime Reports, methodological errors have been noted in the way Simon operationalized or measured her key dependent variable of white-collar crime. She showed increases in embezzlement and fraud, as well as forgery and counterfeiting, but many criminologists believe these crimes are poor indicators of white-collar crime. Some recent crim­inological

852

Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime

research has found that the majority of women’s white-collar crime is “petty” in nature when compared to the white-collar activities of men. They found that the most common white-collar crimes committed by women were welfare and benefit fraud. Their forgery often involved writing bad checks for lesser amounts than men. Also, women who embezzle were usually not CEOs or bank presidents. More often than not, they were lower level workers, like the bank teller or clerical worker, who sneaked out a dollar a day in change rather than bilking customers out of billions with elaborate schemes. Women in these financial occupations held relatively low paid positions when compared to men. Thus, their opportunity to commit the costliest white-collar crimes was very limited. Simon did not address any of those issues. These findings actually contradict her work, largely because she predicted that women’s liberation would uplift women to higher occupational statuses. In reality, that neither was nor is necessarily happening. Even today, most bank presidents and top Wall Street executives are men. Men still reside at the top of the labor force hierarchy and maintain a greater opportunity to commit the costliest white-collar crimes than women. So although women’s arrest rates did increase during Simon’s study period, labor force participation and opportunity were not the sole predictors of that. One last point needs to be made about Simon’s methodology. She presented a vast amount of arrest data for women but never actually reported the real number of arrests. She presented all of her data as percentages and/or a percent change in offending. She often showed a huge percentage increase in arrests for a specific crime, but in actual numbers the increase was not that great. For example, from 1965 to 1975, the number of women arrested for murder increased by 500 percent. If one looks at the actual numbers of arrests, murders rose only from one to five instances. This absence of raw arrests distorts the true picture of women’s criminality, which is that women still make up a very small percentage of criminal activity compared to men. Not all criticism of Simon’s work is based on her methodology. Her strongest opponents target her opportunity or liberation thesis. As mentioned previously, Simon linked the women’s movement, in the form of increased labor force participation,

to increased crime rates for women. While women’s crime rates did increase during the time period examined by Simon, many criminologist believe that the women’s movement had very little to do with that. Rather, some of her critics suggest that economic necessity was and still is the major impetus behind women’s criminality. Advocates of this position agree that more women are working than in years past, but the majority of them are still relegated to jobs at the lower end of the economic spectrum, both in prestige and pay. This contradicts the liberation hypothesis in that women, in large numbers, have not gained the occupational status that Simon espoused. Thus, women are committing crimes not because they have access to high-powered, high-paying jobs but rather out of financial need or desperation. Current data show that most of the women represented in today’s criminal justice system are often poor, undereducated, and involved with alcohol and/or drugs. This image is quite opposite of the picture put forth by Simon’s liberation hypothesis.

The Future of Women and Crime Simon has revised Women and Crime twice since its initial publication in 1975. In her 1991 and 2005 editions, she continued to provide updated arrest data as well as information on women in the criminal justice system today. She highlighted the enormous changes that have taken place since her first edition. Moreover, Simon also included current discussions on the sexual abuse of women prisoners and women on death row. Her current data provided continued support for the opportunity thesis. But, in the end, Simon suggested that her opportunity theory should not stand alone as the sole explanation for women’s criminality. Rather, she proposed a multifaceted approach containing elements of liberation and economic marginalization as the most fitting explanation for the increase in women’s criminality. Despite her detractors, Simon is a pioneer in the study of women and crime. She brought to light many of the critical issues faced by women offenders and continues to examine the changing issues of women in the criminal justice system both in the United States and abroad. Karen F. Lahm

Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime See also Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime; Chesney-Lind, Meda: Feminist Model of Female Delinquency; Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

References and Further Readings Adler, F. (1975). Sisters in crime: The rise of the new female criminal. New York: McGraw-Hill. Messerschmidt, J. (1986). Capitalism, patriarchy, and crime: Toward a socialist feminist criminology. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Pollack-Byrne, J. (1990). Women, prison, and crime. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Simon, R. J. (1975). Women and crime. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Simon, R. J., & Ahn-Redding, H. (2005). The crimes women commit, the punishments they receive (3rd ed.). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime Sally S. Simpson is well known for her research and contributions related to intersections between gender, class, race, and crime. Throughout her research, Simpson’s examination of gender and crime is juxtaposed against the effects of race, ethnicity, and social class of both the offender and the victim. Further, Simpson provides quantitative research on these intersections, something that is not common in much of the mainstream literature. Most other research on this topic has been qualitative in nature. Although these qualitative approaches have added to the discipline’s understanding of such intersections, particularly in regard to showing how race and class influence perceptions of structure and opportunities for crime, qualitative approaches alone leave many questions unanswered. Though Simpson has written many pieces on feminist criminology and is well-versed on women and criminal behavior, it is apparent that her research is multifaceted when examining the female offender. Feminist criminologists have often utilized qualitative approaches due to the claim that it is difficult to make categorical distinctions necessary for

853

quantitative analyses. This is particularly true in those cases where the sample of female offenders is small, such as with studies that use snowball sampling. However, Simpson and Carole Gibbs have noted that qualitative methods may also be preferred by feminist criminologists because they comport better with the epistemology of feminist criminology. Simpson and Gibbs (2004) examined the gender, race, and class patterns of offending using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The analysis concentrated on the responses provided by the 2,716 males and females aged 15 to 16 years who responded to wave 1 and wave 2 interviews. When conducting this research they used a number of control variables, such as age, urban area, and prior delinquency. Simpson and Gibbs used these data because of their suitability to examining intersectional groups; minority youth had been oversampled and the survey contained numerous indicators of social class. Specifically, this study examined whether constructs developed from four neutral or, according to Karen Heimer and Candace Kruttschnitt, male-oriented theories, explained juvenile offending better than intersectional models that accounted for the effects of gender, race, and class on delinquency. The results of this study demonstrated significant differences in delinquency based on the gender, race, and class of the participant. In particular, Simpson and Gibbs (2004) found that intersectional analyses by class, gender, and race provided a better data fit than did the four male-centered theories. As an example, it was noted that multiple sex partners among female offenders was a better predictor of delinquency than social class among delinquent youth. Just as interesting, a mother’s social control was found to have a stronger impact on reducing delinquency for African Americans than for Caucasian Amer­icans, but this was also better explained by intersectional models than by control theory (one of the four male-centered theories). These examples and other findings in the 2004 research by Simpson and Gibbs indicate that intersectional analyses by class, gender, and race can produce better explanations for delinquent behavior than do other more prominent male-centered theories. The findings from this research essentially suggest that quantitative analysis is an effective means for finding intersectional differences that result

854

Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime

from gender, class, and race. Equally important, these findings also demonstrate how quantitative approaches can lend additional support to feminist assertions that general (or male-oriented) theories of delinquency are less universal than their proponents claim. This research is important because often feminist criminology has been viewed as a “soft” approach to explaining criminality due to the lack of quantitative empiricism. When looking back at research and/or publications produced by Simpson throughout her career, there is a clear tendency for her work to point out the need for a more sophisticated examination of female crime. This is particularly true in regard to intersections between gender and race. In 1995, Simpson and Lori Elis noted that while many researchers up to that time had examined the relationship between inequality and criminal behavior (including class, gender, and racial oppression), few researchers had considered how gender and racial oppression are associated with causal factors related to delinquency. In reviewing the state of the literature, at that time, Simpson and Elis generated several hypotheses related to masculinity, femininity, and social institutions such as work, family, peer groups, and schools. They found that both gender and race modify the effect of independent variables on both property and violent delinquency. This study was important because it laid the groundwork for continued examination of race, gender, and social class as causal factors that work in tandem yet have their own distinct and unique contributions. Further, this study examined delinquency as well as adult criminality, providing an added dimension to the study of female criminal behavior. Going back even further into Simpson’s research career, it can be seen that Simpson (1991) exhibits a passion for examining gender issues within the context of race and class. Indeed, Simpson noted that in years prior to 1991, criminological research had targeted gender as a key variable in examining participation and persistence in criminal behavior. Even at this time, Simpson had led the charge to examine male and female crime within a race, class, and gender context. In this work, Simpson demonstrates how race and class combine to produce female populations who are socially situated in a unique set of circumstances that produce unique patterns of criminality. This examination of race and class focused

largely on underclass African American females. Simpson also examined violent crime committed by African American females and compared this with violent crime committed by white females and provided plausible explanations for variance in violent crimes between these two groups. Further, Simpson examined three specific theoretical perspectives—neo-Marxist, power-control, and socialist-feminist theories—and evaluated each for intragender and racial inclusivity. Simpson concluded that class-oppressed men, regardless of whether they are Caucasian or African American, tend to have privileges extended to them due to their role as men in a sexist and patriarchal society. She also notes that class-oppressed Caucasians— whether male or female—have privileges that are extended to them as whites in a Caucasian dominated and racist society. More to the point, Simpson concludes that those persons who are African American, female, and poor have a tripled amount of discrimination against them emanating from classism, racism, and sexism that bears down upon them, keeping them trapped in a world of injustice and discrimination. From her earliest of years, it can be seen that Simpson has followed and examined race-genderclass interactions in criminal behaviors. One of her earlier works makes this clear. In Simpson’s 1989 article titled “Feminist Theory, Crime, and Justice,” Simpson provides a perceptive overview of the research on female offending and on the progress that feminist criminology had made within the field. However, even at this early stage of her career, she provides an interesting subsection discussion on race and crime amidst the article’s broader scope on women and crime. In this work, Simpson contends that poorly conceived offender self-report surveys had given criminologists a convenient rationale for ignoring the race-crime relationship. In this regard, Simpson notes that this apparent research oversight worked well within the prevailing political climate of the time but also points out that such negligent forms of research leads to a prevailing set of problems since less critical (and thereby less productive) perspectives are examined. This is important because this also meant that until the time that race and class were considered, crime prevention and crime intervention approaches overlooked key aspects of crime that would better address the issue. Simpson urged

Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime

feminist criminologists to undertake research focusing on the gender-race-class connection in criminal etiology. She also noted that the data were sparse at this time, problematic, and with very few analytic contributions being made. Simpson also observed that research often relied on quantitative analyses that simply dichotomize race into being either Caucasian or African American. In other cases, an additional category may be included, but more often than not, this was typically classified as simply being a non-white category that included all other groups aside from African Americans and Caucasians. Simpson’s early piece pointed to the need to examine minority women in feminist research, noting that much of the data indicated that significant differences existed between African American and Caucasian crime rates. She further pointed toward unique structural and cultural contexts for African American women. These cultural and structural pushes and pulls often do not exist for Caucasian women. Simpson notes that the ethnography of lower-class deviant networks can describe how male and female criminality may differ among the underclass and lower classes and how instrumental crimes (e.g., hustling, pimping, gambling) are often interdependent in minority communities (Simpson, 1989). Although there may be some degree of interdependence among the criminal community of minority offenders, patriarchy still exists within these communities. Simpson notes that even within the criminal element, women still play a subservient role in most cases. This is especially true among minority groups. Male dominance and control continue to be reproduced within interpersonal relationships between men and women, and this sense of dominance is also reinforced in informal organizations such as street gangs. While some of the crimes committed by women can be viewed as establishing autonomy, most of it is seen as stemming from abusive relationships between men and women and/or frustrations associated with racial discrimination and oppression based on social class. Due to the cultural differences between African Americans and Caucasians and because the overwhelming majority of female criminologists in the early nineties were Caucasian, Simpson speculated that perhaps most theories—including feminist

855

theories—were centered on the Caucasian experience. Since that time, of course, the field of criminology has made great strides in acknowledging this deficit in the research and the need to address racial issues for both male and female offending. In discussing the criminal justice system’s response when contending with the race and gender intersection, Simpson observes that some research has found that the interaction between race and gender is a key factor that influences arrest decisions. Indeed, she notes that the chivalry hypothesis—the notion that the criminal justice system is less harsh of females due to their status as women—exists only for Caucasian female offenders. She contends that minority women are treated more harshly than Caucasian counterparts because they are not as likely to exhibit expected gender-stereotyped behaviors. Simpson has also noted that race and gender have been found to intersect through victim characteristics, leading her to conclude that although chivalry may exist for Caucasian women, it does not appear to exist for African American women. Adding to this, similar to many feminist scholars, Simpson contends that in sentencing, variation may be related to what are referred to as counter-type offenses. Here, women are treated more harshly when they commit nontraditional female crimes such as assault or murder, because their offenses violate female sexual norms. At present, Simpson tends to conduct the majority of her research on corporate and white-collar crime, which seemingly represents a shift in her career interests. Likewise, she serves as the Chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, reflecting her position as a leader among colleagues and scholars in the field of criminology. Still, Simpson occasionally returns to the study of gender, race, and class (Simpson, 2008). Regardless, her many contributions are well regarded among her peers as evidenced by her receipt of the 2008 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Division on Women and Crime within the American Society of Criminology. Thus, it is clear that Simpson has left a permanent mark upon the research landscape of feminist criminology, demonstrating the need for researchers to consider the cumulative effects that tend to occur in our society through multiple routes of marginalization, particularly those that occur at

856

Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline

the intersection of the race, gender, and social class of the offender population. Robert D. Hanser See also Daly, Kathleen: Women’s Pathways to Felony Court; Heimer, Karen, and Stacy De Coster: The Gendering of Violent Delinquency; Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Miller, Jody: Girls, Gangs, and Gender

References and Further Readings Simpson, S. (1989). Feminist theory, crime, and justice. Criminology, 27, 605–631. Simpson, S. (1991). Caste, class and violent crime: Explaining differences in female offending. Criminology, 29,115–135. Simpson, S. (2002). Corporate crime, law and social control. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, S. (2008). Introduction to special issues on historical and contemporary views of social control, race, crime, and justice. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 49, 241–244. Simpson, S., & Elis, L. (1994). Is gender subordinate to class? An empirical assessment of Colvin and Pauly’s Structural Marxist theory of crime. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 82, 453–480. Simpson, S., & Elis, L. (1995). Doing gender: Sorting out the caste and crime conundrum. Criminology, 33, 47–81. Simpson, S., & Gibbs, C. (2004). Making sense of intersections: Does quantitative analysis enlighten or obfuscate? Presentation at the American Society of Criminology, 56th Annual Meeting. Simpson, S., & Gibbs, C. (2005). Intersectionalities: Gender, race, poverty, and crime. In K. Heimer & C. Kruttschnitt (Eds.), Gender and crime (pp. 269–302). New York: New York University Press.

Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline Wesley G. Skogan’s Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighbor­ hoods is a classic study in the fields of sociology and criminal justice. In Disorder and Decline, Skogan examines the concept of disorder, which refers to minor offenses and other disreputable

behaviors and conditions that can potentially impact the quality of life in neighborhoods. Specifically, Skogan investigates how minor disorders relate to serious criminal activity, citizen fear of crime, and neighborhood destabilization. Skogan draws extensively on survey data from nearly 13,000 respondents to study disorder and its impact. The respondents were residents of 40 neighborhoods in six U.S. cities: Newark (New Jersey), Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco. The surveys were originally administered as part of five separate studies conducted between 1977 and 1983. All of the surveys asked residents to answer questions on a variety of topics pertaining to neighborhood life, including disorder, personal victimization, community satisfaction, and fear of crime. Skogan also supplements the survey data with information collected from field observations and interviews with residents in Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The results of Skogan’s analyses offer important insights concerning the relationship between disorder and neighborhood life. For example, although an individual act of disorder may be relatively minor in severity, citizens often take notice of the accumulation of disorder and report it as a serious concern. Many survey respondents rated activities and conditions such as public drinking, harassment by youth, noisy neighbors, vandalism, trash and litter, and dilapidated buildings as serious problems in their communities. The results also suggest that minor offenses can have a negative impact on residents’ quality of life. Thus, disorder was associated with fear, anger, demoralization, residential dissatisfaction, and the desire to move out of neighborhoods. Perhaps the most frequently discussed result of the study, however, concerns the relationship of disorder to criminal offending. Even after controlling for neighborhood demographic characteristics, such as poverty and neighborhood instability, Skogan discovered that disorder was significantly related to serious crime. Places that experienced greater problems with disorder were also more likely to experience problems involving serious criminal activity. After establishing the link to neighborhood decline and serious crime, Skogan examined methods to manage disorder and its related problems.

Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline

In doing so, he discussed a variety of proactive police tactics tied to the community policing philosophy, as well as efforts designed to organize and mobilize citizens around common problems in their communities.

The Concept of Disorder The term disorder is often identified with, or used synonymously with, terms such as incivilities, nuisance offenses, quality-of-life offenses, or simply minor offenses. As described in Disorder and Decline, disorder refers to a wide range of conditions and activities that are considered less severe than felony crimes but are nonetheless regarded as serious problems in communities. Disorders can be, but are not necessarily, violations of criminal or civil codes. Nevertheless, disorderly conditions and conduct are considered problematic because they violate communal values and social norms held by neighborhood residents. Skogan distinguishes between two types of disorder: social and physical. Human activities, such as aggressive panhandlers who intimidate passersby, individuals who engage in street prostitution, people who use drugs and alcohol in public, or rowdy teenagers who harass pedestrians, are examples of social disorders. Persistent conditions, such as abandoned cars on the street, litter along sidewalks, broken windows in buildings, or discarded drug paraphernalia in alleyways, are examples of physical disorders. Since the publication of Disorder and Decline, it has become common for scholars studying communities and crime to utilize Skogan’s distinction between physical and social disorders when constructing research designs and reporting findings. The concept of disorder continues to be the subject of considerable discussion and debate in academic circles. Because disorder refers to such a broad array of activities, researchers cannot always agree on consistent definitions of just what is, and what is not, disorder. Several other factors complicate discussions over disorder. As Skogan notes, disorders do not always result in a “victim” in the traditional sense; rather, entire neighborhoods can be the victims of ongoing disorderly acts and conditions. Additionally, the type and amount of disorder that communities can absorb may vary from place to place. A busy entertainment district, for

857

instance, may have the capacity to tolerate a certain level of public intoxication, public urination, and aggressive panhandling without great consequence to the well-being of that neighborhood. The same amount of those activities in an otherwise quiet retirement community, however, could cause that neighborhood to quickly deteriorate. It is important to note that the conceptualization of disorder in Disorder and Decline has become the familiar use of the term within the criminological research literature. This conceptualization differs from a less common use of the term, which refers to acts of rioting and/or civil disobedience that are displayed by crowds during periods of civil unrest.

Impact on Theory and Public Policy Skogan’s research in Disorder and Decline is closely associated with the broken windows hypothesis—a theory proposed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. According to the broken windows hypothesis, minor offenses, if left untended, can lead to a breakdown in community social control. In places where residents are unable to manage minor offenses, criminals will feel more at ease to operate, believing that no one cares about the community. Serious criminal offenses, therefore, will be more likely in places where there is unchecked disorder. Disorder and Decline was the first major piece of research to provide empirical support for the broken windows hypothesis. Taken together, the conclusions from Disorder and Decline, along with the theory of broken windows, suggest a major policy implication: if communities can manage problems of disorder, they may well be able to prevent problems related to serious felonies and violence. Since the publications of Disorder and Decline and the broken windows essay, efforts to manage disorder (i.e., order maintenance strategies) have become popular in many communities. These strategies have become most closely associated with the activities of public police, primarily because officers often possess discretion regarding the enforcement of disorder. One of the first large-scale applications of the order maintenance principle occurred in the New York City subways during the early 1990s, where a reduction in serious crime was associated with the police management of disorderly offenses such as turnstile jumping (Kelling

858

Skogan, Wesley G.: Disorder and Decline

& Coles, 1996). Many other police agencies have adopted order maintenance practices, and these strategies have been empirically linked to crime reduction in places such as Jersey City, New Jersey (Braga et al., 1999); Lowell, Massachusetts (Braga & Bond, 2008); New York City (Corman & Mocan, 2002; Kelling & Sousa, 2001; Messner et al., 2007; Rosenfeld et al., 2007); and counties in California (Worrall, 2006).

Critical Analysis of Disorder and Decline Practitioners, policy makers, and many members of the research community who are familiar with Disorder and Decline are generally supportive of its findings. Several within the academic community have been more critical, however, citing both methodological and theoretical concerns. Bernard Harcourt, and Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush, for example, suggest that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is not as strong as Skogan’s analysis would indicate, except perhaps for the crime of robbery. Similarly, Ralph Taylor finds some support for the idea that disorder leads to serious crime, but he suggests that other characteristics of neighborhoods are more reliable predictors of later criminal activity. Although scholars continue to debate the strength of the disorder-crime link, some have argued that managing disorder is nevertheless an important task when maintaining the quality of life in neighborhoods. David Thacher, for example, suggests that minor disorders alone may be intrinsically harmful to communities. Efforts to reduce disorderly behaviors and conditions, therefore, may have value regardless of whether they also reduce more serious crime. Other academics have voiced concerns over the moral complexities of enforcing order in neighborhoods. Because the definition of disorder is varied and inconsistent, that which is considered disorderly to some people may be considered acceptable behavior to others. Skogan himself is concerned with this aspect of disorder, and he cautions that the communal desire for order maintenance could potentially reflect an intolerance of the values and rights of individuals. Balancing communal interests with individual rights remains a significant issue when enforcing disorder in communities. As Skogan’s research

demonstrates, however, minor offenses can have a dramatic impact on neighborhood life. As such, citizens should consider the control of disorderly activities and conditions to be an important goal in community management. William H. Sousa See also Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime; Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling: Broken Windows Theory

References and Further Readings Braga, A. A., & Bond, B. J. (2008). Policing crime and disorder hot spots: A randomized controlled trial. Criminology, 46, 577–607. Braga, A. A., Weisburd, D. L., Waring, E. J., Mazerolle, L. G., Spelman, W., & Gajewski, F. (1999). Problemoriented policing in violent crime places: A randomized controlled experiment. Criminology, 37, 541–580. Corman, H., & Mocan, N. (2002). Carrots, sticks and broken windows (NBER Working Paper No. 9061). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Harcourt, B. (1998). Reflecting on the subject: A critique of the social influence conception of deterrence, the broken windows theory, and order-maintenance policing. Michigan Law Review, 97, 291–389. Kelling, G. L., & Coles, C. M. (1996). Fixing broken windows: Restoring order and reducing crime in our communities. New York: Free Press. Kelling, G. L., & Sousa, W. H. (2001). Do police matter? An analysis of the impact of New York City’s police reforms (Civic Report No. 22). New York: Manhattan Institute. Messner, S. F., Galea, S., Tardiff, K. J., Tracy, M., Bucciarelli, A., Piper, T. M., et al. (2007). Policing, drugs, and the homicide decline in New York City in the 1990s. Criminology, 45, 385–414. Rosenfeld, R., Fornango, R., & Rengifo, A. F. (2007). The impact of order-maintenance policing on New York City homicide and robbery rates: 1988–2001. Criminology, 45, 355–384. Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1999). Systematic social observation of public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 603–651. Skogan, W. G. (1990). Disorder and decline: Crime and the spiral of decay in American neighborhoods. New York: Free Press.

Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime Taylor, R. B. (2001). Breaking away from broken windows. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thacher, D. (2004). Order maintenance reconsidered: Moving beyond strong causal reasoning. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 94, 101–133. Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982, March). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic Monthly, 29–38. Worrall, J. L. (2006). Does targeting minor offenses reduce serious crime? A provisional, affirmative answer based on an analysis of county-level data. Police Quarterly, 9, 47–72.

Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime In the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Congress authorized the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to administer federal monies to assist state and local law enforcement agencies to fight crime through better training and equipment, and support criminological and criminal justice research. In the mid-1970s, the LEAA funded and published a series of national evaluations of individual and collective responses to crimes (e.g., citizen patrols, Operation Ident­ification) and inaugurated the Community Anti-Crime Program to assist community organizations to respond to crime. The now-defunct LEAA, which was abolished in 1982, funded The Reactions to Crime Project (RTC) at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University. The RTC was a 5-year (1975–1980) interdisciplinary, multimethod project lead by Fred DuBow to inquire into how crime shaped the attitudes of city residents toward crime and how they individually and collectively responded to crime. Wesley Skogan and Michael Maxfield’s book, Coping With Crime: Individual and Neighborhood Reactions, was among the three major volumes produced that presented the RTC’s major results (see also Lewis & Salem, 1981; Podolefsky & DuBow, 1981).

859

In Coping With Crime, Skogan and Maxfield primarily are “concerned with how city dwellers cope with the problems of crime and fear of crime” (p. 11). The authors examine the apparent paradoxes in the relationships between crime, fear, and reactions to crime. Specifically, they investigate why “more people are fearful of crime than report being victimized,” and why “people who are least likely to be victimized are among the most likely to report being fearful” (p. 11). They also observe yet another crime- and fear-related paradox: urban dwellers’ risks of victimization and their fears heightened at a time when a large sum of federal dollars was flowing to state and local budgets to encourage urban residents to adopt personal precautionary measures and participate in collective strategies. Skogan and Maxfield developed, at the time, a new victimization perspective to examine more fully these paradoxes. Their model proposes a guide to explaining two fundamental relationships that underline these crime-fear-reaction paradoxes: the relationship between crime and fear of crime, and how and why they respond to both. Their model of the antecedents to reactions to crime links the theoretical underpinnings of individuals’ personal and household qualities (e.g., sex, age, family income, race) and neighborhood conditions (e.g., disorder problems, neighborhood integration) to their victimization experiences and learning about crime (e.g., media exposure, personal communication networks). These factors in turn are linked to the relationship between individuals’ fear of crime and their reactions to protect themselves and their property from vic­­tim­ ization. These reactions include personal precaution, household protection, community involvement, and flight to the suburbs. Adhering to a strong quantitative approach, Skogan and Maxfield use a triangulation of data collection strategies to strengthen their methodology and results. They relied primarily on survey data from more than 1,300 telephone interviews conducted in 1997 in 10 residential neighborhoods in three large cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. They also incorporated content analysis of daily newspapers serving these cities, on field observation reports of selected neighborhoods and interviews with community leaders and local officials, and supplementary data from the

860

Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime

Census Bureau victimization surveys conducted in 1971 and 1974 for those three cities.

Explaining the Crime-Fear Paradoxes In Coping With Crime, Skogan and Maxfield unpack the relationship among the individual-level and neighborhood-level correlates of fear and develop plausible explanations for the crime-fear paradoxes. Few people were personally victimized, but many reported high levels of fear; and those most likely to experience a personal victimization, namely young males, were among the least fearful. Clearly, personal victimization cannot directly explain high levels of fear that plague cites. One explanation Skogan and Maxfield offer to this apparent paradox is that low-victimization groups, such as women and the elderly, report high levels of fear and are more vulnerable on two dimensions. First, women and the elderly are physically vulnerable to attack; they are less able to defend against attack and are more likely to experience long-term negative mental and physical health care issues if attacked. Second, others, such as low-income individuals, are socially vulnerable because they live primarily in high-risk neighborhoods and, once victimized, they are not able to recover from the financial consequences of victimization. While both dimensions of vulnerability contribute to understanding the crime-fear paradox, Skogan and Maxfield find that these two dimensions of vulnerability are independent of each other. This discovery suggests that each has its own unique impact on fear. Skogan and Maxfield also examine several features of residential neighborhood conditions and integration that seem to produce perceptions of problems with crime and heighten fear. They find that residents’ perceptions of neighborhood disorders, such as abandoned buildings, teenagers hanging out, and vandalism, and their perceptions of crime are clearly interconnected; both factors are related to fear of crime levels. Residents’ fear of crime tends to be higher in communities where they perceive “big problems” with neighborhood disorder and crime. Two aspects of neighborhood integration, residential ties and social ties, are linked to the degree of perceived disorders. They report that there is a weak-to-moderate tendency

for individuals who have strong social and residential ties to report being less fearful. Interestingly, neighborhood crime and disorder problems, residential and social integration, and personal vulnerability are related to each other; yet, when they are considered simultaneously, each significantly predicts fear. Beyond the importance of personal and neighborhoods characteristics to explaining fear, Skogan and Maxfield find that indirect experiences with crime, particularly talking with neighbors about local crime, affect fear differently depending on the community context. Residents in high-crime and low-crime neighborhoods talk to one another about local crime. But in low-crime areas, residents, especially those who are well-integrated, talk more often about what little crime there is in their neighborhoods. This communication tends to elevate their fear levels. Individuals who are integrated into their communities usually live in lowcrime areas. Ironically, then, the very social and residential structure that keeps crime low encourages the communication about local criminal incidents and results in heightened fear. As Skogan and Maxfield note, the analysis of the communication about crime helps to explain why relatively high fear levels are often found in low-crime communities—yet another paradox about fear of crime.

Why People React as They Do in Response to Crime Understanding the crime-fear paradox and the relationship among its individual- and neighborhood-level factors provides an insightful working model for Skogan and Maxfield to further probe the fear-and-participation nexus. People engage in a variety of crime prevention precautions to reduce the risk of being personally victimized. Skogan and Maxfield find that the frequency by which they engage in precautionary behaviors is related to their fear, personal vulnerability, and neighborhood conditions. Households also engage in measures to prevent burglary and property theft. Turning to how and why people react to property crimes, contrary to their expectations Skogan and Maxfield find (1) that vulnerability measures are related to fear but mostly in the “wrong direction” and (2) that

Skogan, Wesley G., and Michael G. Maxfield: Coping With Crime

perceptions of crime conditions are not related to fear. The less vulnerable households—homeowners, whites, higher-income residents and singlefamily dwellers—did the most to protect their property. But being either a direct or vicarious burglary victim and perceiving burglary as a problem were not related to household protection. One explanation that they offer to this seemingly paradoxical result is that those who have an economic investment in the community and have strong ties to the neighborhood’s social network are more likely to protect their home and property. Skogan and Maxfield’s exploration of the correlates of participation in organized community response to crime are both supportive and contradictory of arguments suggesting that crime discourages involvement in organized community responses while it also stimulates fear. On one hand, participation in collective anti-crime efforts was higher among residents who had experienced a burglary and who believed their neighborhoods were getting worse. On the other hand, participation was lowest among those residents who felt unsafe in the neighborhoods. As the authors note, the relationships among these variables are confounded, however: “with the exception of Blacks, those who are the most involved in these activities are those who personally seem the least affected by crime problems” (p. 240). One option for urban residents is flight to the suburbs to escape the perceived risks of crime. According to Skogan and Maxfield, in the Chicago metropolitan area, both push and pull factors— but more so pull factors—influence residential relocation to the suburbs. Their findings suggest that “the problem of flight to the suburbs is a white flight problem”; “[b]lack families are more likely to remain in the center city” (p. 245). Whites’ relocation decision was based on pull factors such as changes in the household composition or lifecycle considerations. Whites were not pushed by perceived crime problems in their neighborhood, but crime and safety were among the pull factors shaping their suburban relocation decision.

Influence on Fear of Crime and Community Crime Prevention Research Skogan and Maxfield’s book is a seminal work that influenced at least two lines of research. First,

861

their work was influential to better understanding the measurement of fear of crime and its correlates. Building from Skogan and Maxfield’s fear of crime measures, Mark Warr and Mark Stafford, and Randy LaGrange and Kenneth Ferraro made contributions to conceptually refining fear and developing offense-specific measures of fear. Second, their work influenced the next generation of neighborhood-centered studies that further examined various sociological and political aspects of the relationships between crime, fear, and disorders, and rigorously evaluated the effectiveness of collective community action to reduce crime and fear. In this vein, the main crime-fear-reaction findings reported in Coping With Crime have continued to define Skogan’s community-focused research agenda for nearly three decades. Bonnie S. Fisher See also Altruistic Fear; Ferraro, Kenneth F.: Risk Interpretation Model; Fisher, Bonnie S., and Jack L. Nasar: Fear Spots; Lewis, Dan A., and Greta W. Salem: Incivilities and Fear; Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk

References and Further Readings Lewis, D. A. (Ed.). (1981). Reactions to crime: Individual and institutional responses. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Lewis, D. A., & Salem, G. W. (1981). Crime and urban community: Toward a theory of neighborhood security. Washington, DC: National Crime Justice Reference Service. Ferraro, K. F., & LaGrange, R. (1987). The measurement of fear of crime. Sociological Inquiry, 57, 70–101. Podolefsky, A., & DuBow, F. (1981). Strategies for community crime prevention: Collective responses to crime in urban America. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas. Skogan, W. G. (2009). Wesley G. Skogan homepage. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from http://www.skogan.org Skogan, W. G., & Maxfield, M. G. (1981). Coping with crime: Individual and neighborhood reactions. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Rosenbaum, D. P (Ed.). (1986). Community crime prevention: Does it work? Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Warr, M., & Stafford, M. C. (1983). Fear of victimization: A look at the proximate causes. Social Forces, 61, 1033–1043.

862

Smart, Carol: Women, Crime and Criminology

Smart, Carol: Women, Crime and Criminology Carol Smart’s book Women, Crime and Criminology focuses on female offenders and criminality. Smart summarizes the nature of female criminality, presents classical and contemporary studies of female criminality, and provides a feminist critique of prostitution/rape, the treatment of female offenders, and the myths surrounding female offenders and mental illness.

The Nature of Female Criminality Smart postulates that criminology conceals women in the same manner that they are concealed in other aspects of life. She argues that as a direct result of the low status of women in society, academics, criminologists, and policy makers evidence disinterest in female criminality. Circumstances that contribute to this disinterest include the statistical bias of criminal reporting (e.g., there are sex-specific offenses—categorization and legal definitions such as prostitution and infanticide only define it as a crime for one particular sex—and sex-related offenses can be committed by either sex but are predominately committed by a particular sex), and problems in statistical analysis. These circumstances lead to the illusion that female criminality is subordinate to male criminality and, as a result, little attention is paid to the nature and needs of female offenders.

Studies of Female Criminality Smart presents a summary of classical and contemporary studies of female criminality. The classical studies include what she deems to be the pioneering studies of female criminality. They are as follows: Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s biological abnormality explanations that include atavism and social Darwinism, W. I. Thomas’s focus on socially induced pathology, and Otto Pollak’s combination of biological and psychological factors in association with social factors. Smart argues that these three theories were based upon common misperceptions of the character and nature of women and therefore are unable to correctly capture the nature of female criminality.

Contemporary theories presented were John Cowie, Valerie Cowie, and Eliot Slater’s focus on biological determinism, abnormal chromosomal structure, and personality deficiencies and Gisela Konopka’s focus on sociological and psychological factors such as maladjustment, poverty, and differential social structure. Smart demonstrates how these theories add to the development and understanding of female criminality. Even so, she argues that studies of female criminality remain biased because they lack the inclusion and understanding of gender roles, distinctions between sex and gender, social structure and status, cultural contexts and expectations specific to females, and the positioning of women within society.

The Feminist Critique Smart presents a feminist critique of the factors, perceptions, and myths surrounding gender and crime. She focuses on prostitution/rape, the treatment of female offenders, and mental illness. Prostitution/Rape

Smart’s critique argues that studies of prostitution/rape are too biologically/psychologically oriented, and that they do not focus on the subordinate social position of women or the sexual double standard for males and females. Classical and contemporary theorists view female prostitutes as primitive, degenerate, uncivilized, mentally defective, unnatural, problematic, sexually confused, and pathological. Smart calls for an examination of the social structure, financial necessity, and limited opportunities afforded to women prior to establishing prostitution as a moral crime. She points out that while the women are viewed as morally repugnant offenders that are to be punished harshly, those that use their services are not viewed as immoral, inferior, or criminal. Smart also believed a double standard applies to rape victims and perpetrators of rape. Instead of being viewed as a crime of hatred toward women, rape is viewed as the result of a male’s violent sexual desire with a biological basis and desire to procreate. The belief that women enjoy masochistic activities and precipitate rape by not forcefully rejecting their advances has led to a social and cultural belief surrounding rape, the treatment of rape victims, and punishment for perpetrators that is inferior.

Southern Subculture of Violence Theory

Treatment of Female Offenders

Smart argues that the cultural double standard, use of the biological determinism model, and lack of consideration of social status has influenced general viewpoints of female offenders and policy decisions regarding their treatment. The wording of rape and prostitution legislation reflects condemnation and voluntary involvement of women. Discretion among police and court officials leads to discriminatory treatment, such as a female being arrested or sentenced harshly for a sexually deviant crime whereas a male is not brought into the system at all. The social expendability of females produce high arrests for gender-specific crimes, heavy sanctioning in the court system, and institutionalization into correctional facilities that perpetuate dependency on their subordinate position and offer stereotypical, if any, programs. Mental Illness

Smart also argues that the pathological basis of female criminality assumes females to be irrational, illogical, and sick or ill. This assumption denies the existing socioeconomic structure and the intention or choice of the offender. The cultural stereotype of females as less rational, less intelligent, and more dependent than males, allows for female offenders to fit better in a pathological model and its forms of treatment than male offenders. She proposes this viewpoint is dangerous for the following reasons: criminal behavior is seen as an equivalent to mental illness, treatment should “cure” this mental illness, criminal behavior may be excused, and women who report victimization are viewed as neurotic or mentally ill. These misperceptions have led to inappropriate diagnosis, inapplicable policy, a lack of appropriate correctional programs, and the treatment of female criminality as an outcome of mental instability.

Conclusion Smart states that although women have not been entirely ignored in the studies of crime and deviance, studies are inadequate in their understanding of social, cultural, and characteristics and nature of women and have relied on a biologically deterministic model. To advance studies of female criminality and societal understanding of female offenders,

863

she warns against proceeding in a manner that will continue to render women invisible within crime and criminology. She concludes that research is necessary in the following areas: types of offenses committed by women and girls and the form that their involvement in criminality and delinquency takes; the attitudes of police, probation officers, and social workers toward delinquent girls and criminal women; the treatment of women and girls in the court system and corrections; and the structure and purposes of criminal laws. As one of the first female authors to call attention to the neglect of women within criminology and as an advocate for the use of a feminist approach, Smart helped inspire the movement to focus on women and crime. Alana Van Gundy-Yoder See also Freud, Sigmund: The Deviant Woman; Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime; Lombroso, Cesare: The Female Offender; Pollak, Otto: The Hidden Female Offender; Rape Myths and Violence Against Women; Thomas, W. I.: The Unadjusted Girl

References and Further Readings Cowie, J., Cowie, V., & Slater, E. (1968). Delinquency in girls. London: Heinemann. Konopka, G. (1966). The adolescent girl in conflict. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lombroso, C., & Ferrero, W. (1895). The female offender. London: Fisher Unwin. Pollak, O. (1961). The criminality of women. New York: A. S. Barnes. Smart, C. (1976). Women, crime, and criminology: A feminist critique. London: Routledge. Thomas, W. I. (1923). The unadjusted girl. With cases and standpoint for behavior analysis. Boston: Little, Brown.

Southern Subculture of Violence Theory Criminologists have long observed and debated the causes of high rates of violence in the Ameri­­ can South, particularly the Appalachian region. Researchers have identified social structural, environmental, and cultural sources in numerous theoretical statements that have alternatively

864

Southern Subculture of Violence Theory

emphasized ecological and cultural forces. Southern subculture of violence theory (SSV) is more of a perspective (similar to, for example, conflict theory) than a single testable theory (such as routine activities or social control theories, which feature more easily measureable predictors of crime). While several variables have been shown to covary with violence in the South, cultural elements such as ideas, values, and beliefs supportive of aggression have captured research focus increasingly in recent years as evidenced by important contemporary contributions to theoretical criminology that extend the SSV tradition. A southern subculture of violence has been debated for several decades in both social science and historical contexts. These statements have oriented around retaliatory violence, generally, and homicide, specifically. While early statements generalized the southern culture and violence relationship to the entire region, the SSV perspective has evolved to focus rather specifically on white-onwhite homicide in the southern highlands—the only theoretical lineage addressing this United States population segment. The perspective has been influential to the development, survival, and recent resurgence of cultural transmission as a major, empirically confirmed cause of crime and is thus significant to the advancement of criminological thought. This entry surveys the conceptual framework and evolution of the SSV perspective mindful of the history and axioms of subculture theory, generally. A review of the empirical evidence supporting the southern subculture argument, essentially social-psychological reinforcement of defense of honor through violent expression as normative, is followed by consideration of SSV theory’s further development.

Conceptual Framework SSV extends the subculture theoretical school that enjoyed a dominant position in criminology during the 1950s and 1960s due to major seminal statements from leading criminologists such as Albert Cohen, Lloyd Ohlin, and Walter B. Miller that were developed around heterogeneous, inner-city and gang delinquency contexts rather than the more homogeneous rural South. Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti offered the seminal theory of subcultural violence, which generalized the scope

of the perspective to explain violence as a function of value conflict between the dominant or mainstream culture and criminal subculture. The dominant culture places high value on human life and typically frowns on violence, for example, while devalued life and quick resort to violence are normative in subcultural settings. Consistently emphasizing the criminogenic nature of ideas, values, and beliefs, these early subculture theories established that (1) criminal values are derived from various social conditions (e.g., poverty, social disorganization, familial instability) and (2) crime is considered more normal behavior within the environment of the subculture. The rise of conflict and learning theories of crime during the 1970s negatively impacted and thus slowed the development of subculture theory. Conflict theory viewed much of subcultural crime as political resistance against a classist and racist society whose surplus labor control relegated subculture to exogenous status in favor of focus on inequality-based socialization processes encouraging delinquency and crime. The rise of positivistic criminology during the 1970s and 1980s, largely practiced through multivariate analysis of combinations of social ecological and social interaction factors, also moved theoretical attention to other social sources of crime and delinquency than cultural factors. Because subculture was presented as inherently criminal, it was deemed tautological and thus unscientific. The subculture lineage was extended during these times of hard academic scrutiny largely due to focus on violent crime in the American South.

Southern Subculture of Violence Thesis In regard to accounting for disproportionately high rates of southern violence, the social ecological approach to crime—explanations incorporating demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental variables—has entailed extensive consideration of various causes. Rurality, gun ownership, the historical effects of slavery, poverty, religion, and temperature have been identified as factors that heighten violence in the southern environment (Erlanger, 1976). High temperatures, for example, purportedly lessen patience, elevate frustration, and ultimately accentuate hostility—especially in overcrowded homes in impoverished areas. Readily available guns common in hunting cultures typical

Southern Subculture of Violence Theory

to the rural South, coupled with an eye-for-an-eye religious outlook, made violence a frequent regional reality. These covariates of violence, however, have been either falsified or shown to be spurious. The temperature argument, for example, has been refuted recently by a social isolation argument that posits that very hot weather forces people indoors and retards both movement and the rate of social interaction. Limited interaction, in turn, decreases the chances for arguments and physical altercations in the first place. Race is strongly correlated with violence in all regions and is thus not a factor in SSV inquiry. The causal significance of the other frequently hypothesized sources for southern violence have similarly been limited, not because they are statistically insignificant but because they do not account for why crime is higher in the South than in the West, Midwest, and other rural areas with approximate social ecological conditions. Accordingly, criminologists turned attention to culture in attempt to realize a more explanative theory. Focus on culture as the basis of regional violence, particularly homicide, is rooted in southern history. The notion of honor among southern gentlemen requiring “satisfaction” for insults through violence (e.g., feuds and duels), coercion related to maintaining slavery, and collective social resentment lingering from the War Between the States and subsequent economic exploitation during Reconstruction all reinforced normative lawlessness and violence. These values became culturally embedded and, although the factors that led to their development have faded into history, pass from generation to generation as normal behavior. Most importantly, an ethos honor came to the forefront of the southern subculture of violence thesis. This ethos distinguishes between typically random acts of violence and southern violence. Southern violence, as characterized in the SSV tradition, is instrumental and intimately related to the defense of honor/reputation of self and family. After controlling for race and other cofounders, homicide in the South is as much as four times higher than in other regions of the United States. Only homicides involving insults and personal attacks, however, are more frequent in the South as southerners typically disapprove of violence generally. Vested in the driving force of collective conscious, an honor-based line of inquiry has emerged as the dominant theme in SSV research.

865

Culture of Honor While several theorists have emphasized honor, a culture of honor hypothesis framed by Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen is the most comprehensive. After providing figures documenting homicide rate differences between the North and South, Nisbett and Cohen present multifaceted empirical evidence supporting attitudes toward violence that centers on the concept of defense of honor. Through experimental ethnography, southerners are shown to define and react to insults with greater anger and aggression than non-southerners. Laboratory studies have demonstrated that southerners experience far greater physical (cortisol and testosterone level fluctuation), psychological (dominance projection, anger), and cognitive (attitudinal endorsement of violence in dispute resolution) distress in argumentative and conflictual situations when compared to non-southerners. The culture of honor theory posits that a regional collective conscious not only endorses but mandates conditional use of violence. Social policy and law concerning marital affairs and child-rearing, for example, reflect a higher value on state non-intervention and a continuation of a states rights legacy derived from the necessity of local and vigilante social control during the 18th and 19th centuries when most of the South was a frontier area with limited legal authority. Southern legal codes, especially those pertaining to violence for protective purposes and defense of honor, also support the Nisbett and Cohen hypothesis. Gun control laws reinforce the frontier mentality of self-reliance for protection and provision (i.e., hunting) as indicated by U.S. senators and representatives voting patterns on gun restriction issues. Similarly, laws pertaining to self-defense (e.g., degree of citizen entitlement to utilize force in defense of home and property and obligation to retreat by innocent persons in lieu of fighting back against an assailant) provide southerners a “right to fight” that would be unlawful in most states. The “true man law,” for example, conveys the moral and social premium placed on standing one’s ground to the point of killing another person if necessary when attacked. Failure to do so is often equated with cowardice and dishonor, while “showing fight” enhances reputation and respect in the community. Southern legal perspectives on

866

Southern Subculture of Violence Theory

capital punishment, domestic violence, corporal punishment, and national defense policy also reinforce the use of violence. The foremost contribution of the culture of honor theory, however, is the integration of cultural transmission and ethnic perspectives. While southern history and current laws provide a context facilitative of violence, much of the violent crime in the South can be accounted for by other than cultural factors. Minority representation and poverty, which are both relatively higher in the South than other regions, account for much of the violence in the region as elsewhere in the country. When these factors are controlled for, however, southern violence—particularly homicide—is noticeably pronounced in the Appalachian region. Scrutiny of violence in the southern highlands provides unique opportunities for criminological analysis. Whereas southern violence, generally, is considered a function of high levels of social disorganization associated with high minority populations and low levels of socioeconomic status, the southern highlands have low minority population representation and comparatively low levels of in and out migration. Thus, a highly homogenous population enables examination of violence in a context of social stability in a white-on-white context. Because the honor ethos is pervasive throughout the region, all social classes internalize the conditional use of violence as socially acceptable if not required and are ostensibly affected. Moreover, the temperature argument is also naturally controlled due to the milder temperatures in Appalachia compared to the rest of the region. Nisbett and Cohen also observe that the dominant ethnic group in the South is the Scots-Irish. It is argued that the herding culture developed by these people in the British Isles emphasized violence in small group/extended clan context so as to protect livestock from rival clans (i.e., economic survival) and as political resistance against a suppressive English state. Projection of fierceness and willingness to engage literal acts of aggression were traits that transferred across continents with the ScotsIrish migration to the United States and became culturally embedded in mountainous regions where they settled. Quick reaction to personal affronts to one’s family necessarily was met with suppressive violence, so as to deter both predation on weak targets and the need for further violence itself. In a

very real sense, this is a “best defense is a good offense” type of logic as portrayed in Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, James Webb’s account of the Scots-Irish in the United States. Indeed, through topographical comparison of lowland, foothills, and mountain counties, Nisbett and Cohen demonstrate that violence and elevation are positively correlated—a reality that is empirically observed throughout Appalachia and attributed to Scots-Irish culture. The backwards, violence, and almost always southern hillbilly stereotype has been consistently projected in popular culture over several decades as indicated by a sequence of films and television programs (e.g., The Beverly Hillbillies, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Deliverance), evidencing violence and family pride as core characteristics of Southern mountain people.

Critique The most obvious problem with the SSV perspective, generally, and the culture of honor proposition, specifically, is that southern culture itself is not adequately addressed in either measurement or historical development. While Nisbett and Cohen present an interdisciplinary and multifaceted hypothesis, they fail to account for why homicide is substantially higher in southern Appalachia than in northern Appalachia, even though both are predominantly occupied by the Scots-Irish who subscribe to an honor ethos. Additionally, analyses have relied on behavior measurement at the individual level—perhaps an ecological fallacy for a theory emphasizing a collective (i.e., macro) level focus. While economic factors are vital to the perspective, attention to historical and sociocultural realities specific to the region offers perhaps the best chances for furthering SSV theory. Lingering effects of Confederate nationalism, for example, clearly continue to shape southern culture and may well facilitate further specification of the honorviolence relationship. Whereas Cohen and Nisbett submit that herding culture values have transferred across continents and over several centuries, the Appalachians today, while still highly homogenous, have more ethnic diversity and much less of a herding economy. The Confederate experience is considered by most native southern Appalachians as a second war for southern American independence

Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems

that was unsolicited, defensive, and necessary. It served to solidify a we-versus-them outlook that is an innate attribute of virtually all subcultures. The necessity of defensive violence that de­­rived from the war continues to have contemporary relevance through states rights doctrines and politics that gives currency to the honor premise. In that slavery was never economically viable in Appalachia and thus never widespread, focus on Confederate nationalism (measureable through Confederate social heritage organization affiliation and participation) offers further focus on white-on-white violence while logically isolating Southern highland culture. To date, the extant SSV literature minimizes the significance of the war and its aftereffects to slavery that was not consequential in Appalachian context anyway. Another advancement opportunity lies in examination of migration patterns. While the mountain South is becoming more diverse, the fundamental subculture characteristic of culture conflict provides naturally competing hypotheses regarding demographic change. On one hand, consistent with the subculture perspective, outside pressure will only strengthen cultural values—a sort of solidifying the core. Alternatively, there may well be a cultural tipping point that offsets cultural endorsement of violence. J. Mitchell Miller See also Anderson, Elijah: Code of the Street; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Miller, Walter B.: LowerClass Culture Theory of Delinquency; Wolfgang, Marvin E., and Franco Ferracuti: Subculture of Violence Theory

867

Cohen, D. (1996). Law, social policy, and violence: The impact of regional cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 961–968. Cohen, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1994). Self-protection and the culture of honor: Explaining southern homicide. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 551–567. Ellison, C. G., Burr, J. A., & McCall, P. L. (2003). The enduring puzzle of southern homicide. Homicide Studies, 7, 326–352. Erlanger, H. S. (1976). Is there a subculture of violence in the South? Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 66, 483–490. Faust, D. G. (1988). Confederate nationalism: Ideology and identity in the Civil War South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Gastil, R. D. (1971). Homicide and a regional culture of violence. American Sociological Review, 36, 412–427. Hackney, S. (1969). Southern violence. American Historical Review, 74, 906–925. Hawley, F. F., & Messner, S. F. (1989). The Southern violence construct: A review of arguments, evidence, and the normative context. Justice Quarterly, 6, 481–511. Hayes, T. C., & Lee, M. R. (2005). The Southern culture of honor and violent attitudes. Sociological Spectrum, 25, 593–617. Nisbett, R. E., & Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Odum, H. W. (1947). The way of the South: Toward a regional balance of America. New York: Macmillan. Webb, J. (2004). Born fighting: How the Scots-Irish shaped America. New York: Broadway Books. Wyatt-Brown, B. (1984). Southern honor: Ethics and behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press.

References and Further Readings Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York: W. W. Norton. Borg, M. J. (1997). The Southern subculture of punitiveness? Regional variation in support for capital punishment. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 34, 25–45. Brearley, H. C. (1932). Homicide in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Chu, R., Rivera, C., & Loftin, C. (2000). Herding and homicide: An examination of the Nisbett-Reaves hypothesis. Social Forces, 78, 971–987.

Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse published Constructing Social Problems in 1977. This short book became the key statement for a new sociological approach to studying social problems: social constructionism. In recent decades, constructionist theory has guided a large number of

868

Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems

empirical studies of different social problems, even as the theory has evolved. American sociologists began teaching courses with the title “Social Problems” early in the 20th century. These courses were usually taught to first-year or second-year undergraduates. A typical class summarized sociological knowledge about crime, race relations, and a series of other troubling social conditions. These topics were presumably related, in that each was a condition that somehow harmed society—a social problem. Spector and Kitsuse noted that, even as the social problems course became a standard part of the sociology curriculum, the concept of social problems had attracted critics. These critics argued that the various conditions classified as social problems had little in common: some involved troubled individuals (such as suicide or mental illness); some involved much larger entities, even the entire globe (such as world population). What definition could encompass such different phenomena? Moreover, the critics noted that harmful conditions were not necessarily regarded as social problems. People might disagree about whether a particular condition was harmful, or whether it should be seen as a social problem. What was considered a social problem at one time might be seen as perfectly acceptable at another time, and it was easy to point to conditions that were considered social problems in some societies but not others. This explains the dramatic first sentence in Constructing Social Problems: “There is no adequate definition of social problems within sociology, and there is not and never has been a sociology of social problems” (p. 1). Any definition that characterized social problems as particular types of conditions would be unsatisfactory. Therefore, Spector and Kitsuse sought to redirect sociological thinking about social problems. Instead of defining social problem in terms of some presumably objective quality of social conditions (such as harmfulness to society), they defined it in terms of subjective reactions—people characterizing social conditions as social problems. Thus, they defined social problems as “the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions” (p. 75).

Social Construction In this view, social problems are seen not as conditions but as a process. There is only one quality that suicide, world population, and all other social problems have in common: People define them as social problems. Through definitional processes, people create—or construct—social problems. (At the time Spector and Kitsuse were writing, many sociologists were adopting the term social construction [Berger & Luckmann, 1966].) Consider an example from Kathleen Lowney and Joel Best: the crime of stalking. During the late 1980s, public attention began to focus on celebrities who were being harassed or attacked by fans; this was sometimes termed starstalking. By the early 1990s, the meaning of stalking had shifted. Instead of being thought of as something that happened to celebrities, it was now understood to be relatively common, typically involving women being stalked by ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends, and potentially ending in serious violence. While such behaviors were not new, within just a few years, those behaviors were defined as constituting a social problem and assigned a new name, and virtually all states passed laws making stalking a crime. In other words, through claims by victims, journalists, battered women’s advocates, and others, stalking was constructed as a social problem. Studies of social problems construction frequently adopt terminology that Spector and Kitsuse originated. For instance, analysts describe advocates making claims that particular conditions should be considered social problems, and they call those advocates claimsmakers. Constructionist analysts may examine how a particular claimsmaking campaign attracted public attention, or they may compare campaigns at different times (e.g., tracing how different definitions of sexual abuse emerged during different historical periods [Jenkins, 1998]) or in different places (e.g., examining how different cities or different countries developed distinct conceptions of homelessness and devised different policies to deal with the problem [Bogard, 2003]). Criminologists examine a related process—criminalization. Criminalization occurs when laws are passed designating new crimes (such as the antistalking laws passed in the early 1990s). This is a topic that concerns criminologists from various theoretical schools: functionalists tend to interpret criminalization as evidence of an evolving societal

Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems

consensus; conflict theorists tend to view it as a means by which elites seek to maintain their positions of power; and labeling theorists see it as a product of moral crusades. Constructionists may adopt any of these interpretations, but they always understand criminalization as one possible outcome of constructionist processes. That is, constructionists never forget that, in order to pass laws that create new crimes, advocates must construct the issue so as to convince lawmakers that an offense is a serious problem, worthy of being criminalized. Similarly, sociologists study the parallel process of medicalization, whereby social conditions are understood to be medical problems, diseases requiring treatment (Conrad, 2007). As the influence of medical authorities has grown over the past century, a medical vocabulary (i.e., words such as symptom, syndrome, and treatment) has been applied to a wide range of social problems, including many crimes. There are often competing claims about particular social problems. Thus, some claimsmakers argue that drug abuse is best understood as a crime that merits punishment; others insist that addiction is a disease that should be treated; while still others call for decriminalization, redefining drug use as a legitimate choice, analogous to drinking. Over time, the accepted construction of some condition may shift, so that what has been considered a crime comes to be understood as a disease, and so on. Social constructions can be heavily publicized and presented in dramatic terms. Criminologists are generally suspicious of media warnings about crime waves, which often reflect little more than waves in press coverage of crimes. Similarly, constructions of drug problems often take the form of drug scares, claims that some drug suddenly poses a particularly grave threat to society. Sociologists sometimes use the term moral panic to describe alarming dangers posed by deviants. Because claimsmakers must compete to gain the attention of the public, the press, and policymakers, dramatic rhetoric is often chosen to make the advocate’s cause seem especially important (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). As a consequence, attention is continually shifting to different problems as new claims arise.

Theoretical Issues The constructionist approach is sometimes misunderstood by those who think that socially

869

constructed means false. Thus, a critic, in referring to the moral panic over satanic ritual abuse (claims that in retrospect seem to have had no factual basis), might argue that “satanic ritual abuse was a social construction.” Certainly this is true, but constructionists understand that all social problems—both those that are well documented, as well as those that may seem fanciful— are socially constructed. In both sorts of cases, claimsmakers seek to draw attention to some condition they consider troubling. Another critique, which led to debate among constructionists, concerned what Steve Woolgar and Dorothy Pawluch termed ontological gerrymandering. Here, critics argued that social constructionists must not exempt themselves from their own analyses. That is, social constructionists routinely view claims as social constructions and, in doing so, contrast those claims with other knowledge which the analyst does not question. But of course whatever knowledge constructionists accept also has been socially constructed. Doesn’t this pose a logical problem? Some constructionists responded to this critique by adopting a strict constructionist approach and by trying to avoid incorporating any socially constructed assumptions into their analyses—an approach that seemed to require abstract analysis, because empirical research inevitably required taking some knowledge for granted. Most constructionists, however, adopted a stance of contextual constructionism that, while acknowledging that all knowledge is socially constructed, understands that, as a practical matter, analysts need to be able to focus their attention on particular issues. (On this debate, see the essays in Holstein and Miller [2003].) Spector and Kitsuse suggested the case study as an appropriate method for conducting sociological research, and there have been hundreds of studies that trace the social problems process. Often, these address particular stages in that process, and link constructionism to other sociological specialties. Many case studies focus on claimsmakers and their campaigns; here, constructionist analyses often overlap with sociological research on social movements (in cases where activists are prominent claimsmakers) or science and medicine (in cases where experts are the leading claimsmakers). Other studies focus on particular aspects of the social problems process. For instance, analyses of the media’s role in constructing social problems incorporate insights from

870

Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures

mass media research, while studies that focus on the public’s reactions to claims draw on research on public opinion. Most claimsmakers hope to inspire policy—such as the passage of a new law. Still other constructionist analyses explore how the process of creating social policies incorporates particular understandings of what is at issue; this research reflects work in political sociology and political science. And social policies have to be implemented; police officers, public defenders, and others carry out social problems work and, in the process, devise their own constructions of the problem and how, in practice, it should be addressed. The social problems process never ends: People assess how policies actually work (activity that links constructionism to evaluation research), and the flaws they identify often become the basis for new claims, which start the cycle yet again. While most analysts concentrate on the construction of social problems in the contemporary United States, a growing number of studies examine historical cases of the social problems process or look at social problems construction in other countries. Some of this work is explicitly comparative in that it contrasts two or more cases across time or space. But all case studies are implicitly comparative in that they show how particular issues have been constructed under particular circumstances and invite comparisons with other researcher’s findings. Often it is possible to see how claimsmaking campaigns influence one another, how claims originate in one country but then spread to others, or how claims devised to construct one problem are adapted and applied to other problems. The constructionist orientation—thinking critically about how people define, not just social problems, but all aspects of their world—has spread widely beyond sociology (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008). It is used by other social scientists, especially political scientists, psychologists, historians, and, of course, criminologists, so that people writing from many different perspectives are able to interpret the social construction of crime and criminal justice. Joel Best See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Katz, Jack: Seductions of Crime; Postmodern Theory; Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes; Turk, Austin T.: Criminalization Process

References and Further Readings Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York: Doubleday. Best, J. (2008). Social problems. New York: Norton. Bogard, C. J. (2003). Seasons such as these. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Conrad, P. (2007). The medicalization of society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hilgartner, S., & Bosk, C. (1988). The rise and fall of social problems. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 53–78. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of constructionist research. New York: Guilford. Holstein, J. A., & Miller, G. (Eds.). (2003). Challenges and choices. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Jenkins, P. (1998). Moral panic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jenness, V., & Grattet, R. (2001). Making hate a crime: From social movement to law enforcement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lowney, K. S., & Best, J. (1995). Stalking strangers and lovers. In J. Best (Ed.), Images of issues (2nd ed., pp. 33–57). Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Spector, M., & Kitsuse, J. I. (1977). Constructing social problems. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings. Woolgar, S., & Pawluch, D. (1985). Ontological gerrymandering. Social Problems, 32, 214–227.

Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures Following in the tradition of Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s Delinquency and Opportunity, Irving Spergel’s examination of three different neighborhoods in a large city seeks to explain the connection between delinquent norms and neighborhoods. In Racketville, Slumtown, Haulburg, Spergel’s focus is specifically on the content and location of these delinquent norms, which are not necessarily the cause for delinquent acts. Spergel conducted firsthand observation and interviews with delinquent youths, non-delinquent youths, drug users, and social workers who provided services to three neighborhoods in an unidentified Eastern United States city. Spergel finds that the criminal subculture in each neighborhood is distinct from the

Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures

others. He identifies these subcultures as the racket, conflict, and theft. The formation of one subculture versus another in a neighborhood is dependent on the conventional and criminal means available to the youths in the neighborhood.

Theoretical Underpinnings Spergel’s work is grounded ultimately in strain theory. Robert Merton’s strain theory suggests that crime is the result of a cultural definition of success as monetary wealth. Opportunities for success are not equally distributed, however. The gap between success aspirations and reality causes persons to adapt to the strain; one such adaptation is crime. In addition to Merton’s idea that legitimate means for attaining success are not equally distributed, Richard Cloward contended that illegitimate means are unequally distributed as well. A year later, Cloward and Ohlin expanded this theory to include an explanation of why different types of deviant subcultures form. Spergel situates his work within this framework, focusing on the illegitimate means available to delinquents in three neighborhoods: “The fundamental assumption of this study is that in lowerclass urban communities certain distinct types of delinquent subcultures are created and thrive under the impetus of socially unacceptable opportunities available to youths for achieving acceptable, culturally induced success goals” (p. xv).

Methods Spergel’s data were collected in a large, unidentified Eastern U.S. city during the summer of 1959 and 1960. A mix of participant observation and formal interviews were used in each of the three neighborhoods, with most data coming from a total of 90 core interviewees. Ten delinquents, 10 non-­ delinquents, and 10 drug-using youths were interviewed from each of the three neighborhoods. Selection of the respondents was non-random, and Spergel cautions that there were “no systematic checks on validity or reliability” (p. xx). A key limitation was that Spergel focused exclusively on anomie and means for achieving success goals—other variables were not explored. Spergel’s goal was explaining the delinquent youth subculture, not the origins of adult criminal behavior, so the narrow focus is less limiting than it appears at first blush.

871

Racketville, Slumtown, and Haulburg Spergel named the neighborhoods under study according to their dominant delinquent subculture. In each neighborhood, Spergel found a dominant culture of the criminal racket, conflict, or thievery. This dominant culture did not preclude other acts—there was conflict in the neighborhood characterized by rackets, for example—but each neighborhood had a prevailing cultural connection to a particular type of delinquent behavior. Racketville was characterized by the racket— that is, by organized criminal activity. Numbers games, off-track betting, loan sharking, narcotics selling, and organized prostitution were common crimes organized by the rackets. In Racketville, illegitimate opportunities were abundant, while legitimate opportunities were limited. These two types of opportunities were closely integrated, with crime having a business-like structure. Youths were under direct pressure to succeed. Opportunities to learn criminal values and techniques for carrying out crime were common. While upper-echelon positions in the rackets were not filled by juveniles, youngsters were groomed for the racket from a young age. Weak basic conventional norms tended not to encourage the use of the limited conventional means available to achieve success. Youths in Racketville had a value orientation that was the most criminal of the three neighborhoods, yet delinquent youth often were not directly involved in the rackets as juveniles. They were expected to be involved in the rackets as adults. Slumtown was the most disorganized neighborhood studied. Gang fights—defined as group-based ritualized, systematic violence—were common. Such fighting was a preoccupation in Slumtown—a way of life. There were few means for obtaining monetary success of any kind, legitimate or illegitimate. Youths in Slumtown had high aspirations and created their own definitions of success in gang fighting. Specifically, in Slumtown, a youth’s success goals revolved around reputation (or “rep”)— attaining and maintaining one’s reputation was paramount. These reputations were built and lost as the result of “heart,” or toughness, displayed during fights. Crises and disputes with rival gangs were artificially created to maintain a level of violence required to attain status for gang members. While violence existed in Racketville and Haulburg,

872

Spergel, Irving: Neighborhoods and Delinquent Subcultures

the delinquent subculture in Slumtown was organized around these conflicts. Conflict was a way to acquire prestige but was not a way to prepare for a criminal career. Violence was practiced not as a pathway to a criminal career but to attain immediate status, which was fleeting. Delinquents in Slumtown aspired to conventional careers but did not expect to attain them. Haulburg was characterized by theft. Haulburg was, in many ways, a midpoint between Racketville and Slumtown. In Haulburg, there were partially limited conventional and criminal opportunities. The general orientation of Haulburg youths was more legitimate than in Racketville, which prevented systematic rackets from taking hold in Haulburg. Access to partial material success eliminated the need for a new avenue to gain success, such as gang conflict (as was seen in Slumtown). In Haulburg, criminal activity was only semiorganized but was stable. Material goods were valued in Haulburg. Reputations were made by thievery but not by violence. Haulburg youths with inadequate preparation for conventional careers could gain success through somewhat sophisticated criminal activity in the form of burglary, forgery, auto theft, and shoplifting. These theft-related activities were more organized and systematic in Haulburg than in Racketville and Slumtown, though the latter two neighborhoods also experienced theft. While theft was a way of life, violence was generally not permitted by neighborhood residents. Youths joined gangs in Haulburg primarily for short-term financial gain. Unlike Cloward and Ohlin, Spergel does not consider drug users separately. Instead, Spergel considers drug users—retreatists, to use Cloward and Ohlin’s term—as a subtype of each culture. Drug use can help youths ease the transition from delinquent to adult. Drug users need money to purchase drugs, and they may obtain funds through criminal or legitimate means. In all three neighborhoods, drug addiction led to low status among delinquents.

formed as a defense against other gangs. The formation of these gangs was (at least tacitly) supported by local adults, and the gangs were largely aimed at keeping undesirable groups out of the neighborhood. At the time of Spergel’s research, there was little friction between groups within Racketville. In Slumtown, groups were created to earn status and maintain neighborhood integrity. If Racketville gangs were defensive, Slumtown gangs were offensive in nature. Because conflict was required to maintain reputation in Slumtown, gangs were often engaged in violence with other gangs in Slumtown. The alliances and conflicts between groups were complex, with groups often moving into and out of conflict with one another. In Haulburg, the reason for gang formation was rooted not in conflict but rather in a shared neighborhood experience: The original members had grown up together on the same street. The gangs in Haulburg were less organized than in the other two areas, but members did occasionally get into unorganized brawls with other groups. Most of these brawls were non-gang-related disputes and were limited to fist-fighting. Gang membership was fluid in each of the neighborhoods, with a less-than-clear understanding of exactly who was in a gang and who was not. In Spergel’s data, membership in a gang was not necessarily stable, and was not a once-and-for-all social fact. Furthermore, though success goals varied by neighborhood, youths joined gangs in each neighborhood to obtain success goals. Youths joined the gang in Racketville out of friendship or social interaction. Stable, long-term affiliations were forged with other members. These relationships could be leveraged later in life through the criminal rackets. In Slumtown, youths joined the gang out of a desire for reputation or prestige, not for friendship. Slumtown youths even changed gangs when the reputation of a gang changed. In Haulburg, gangs formed for the purpose of shortterm financial gain and were characterized by limited but friendly interaction.

Gang Formation and Membership

The Gap Between Success Goals and Opportunities

In each neighborhood, the groups of youths (loosely termed “gangs”) predated the membership of Spergel’s interview subjects. The genesis of the gangs varied by neighborhood. In Racketville, groups

Spergel found that delinquents in all three areas had higher goals for their weekly wages than nondelinquents. That is, aspirations of delinquents

Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime

were higher than non-delinquents. Delinquents in Racketville had the highest wage goals of any group in the study. In all three areas, delinquents had internalized both conventional and criminal success goals. There was little doubt among Racketville youths that they could obtain a fairly decent job. Even so, these youths felt they could get more money and prestige from the racket. In Slumtown, youths perceived no chance of having a decent job and were generally pessimistic about the future. Slumtown youths placed a greater value on lucky breaks than did youths in other areas. Haulburg youths generally expected to gain semi-skilled jobs with medium pay. In general, there were large gaps between aspirations and expectations among Spergel’s delinquent respondents as compared to non-delinquent respondents. Racketville had the smallest gap between aspirations and expectations, due largely to illegitimate means available. Racketville delinquents were not technically “deviant,” since they were subjected to a normative process of induction and socialization into the rackets. In Slumtown, delinquents were deviant in that they were involved in violence. Slumtown youths perceived very few opportunities for obtaining monetary success. Slumtown and Haulburg youths were nearly equal in terms of the gap between aspirations and expectations. Haulburg youths perceived slightly more access to means for obtaining success, placing them between Slumtown and Racketville youths.

Conclusion Spergel found numerous differences between the groups of delinquents in each of the neighborhoods he studied. These differences suggest that the dominant type of delinquent behavior within a neighborhood is sensitive to the neighborhood context. Spergel concluded his study by offering policy implications for this theory that included suggestions for improving access to livable housing, quality education, employment, and services in neighborhoods. Troy Payne See also Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Kobrin, Solomon: Neighborhoods and Crime; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie

873

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into crime: An overview of general strain theory. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Cloward, R. A. (1959). Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behavior. American Sociological Review, 24, 164–176. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Cullen, F. T. (1988). Were Cloward and Ohlin strain theorists? Delinquency and opportunity revisited. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25, 214–241. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Spergel, I. (1964). Racketville, Slumtown, Haulburg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime According to Marxist criminologists such as Steven Spitzer, crime in capitalist societies cannot be fully understood unless criminologists comprehend the nature of the capitalist economic system, the class relations upon which that system rests, and the ways in which those class relations in turn reproduce the economic system. These relations determine to a large extent how crime is defined, who gets labeled and processed as “criminals,” and the social response to crime. Spitzer argues that understanding crime and deviance requires criminologists to reflect on who and what are considered to be deviant (1975, p. 638). Why, for example, is so little attention paid to corporate crime compared to street crime? How do we account for changing definitions of crime and deviance? Why are certain groups disproportionately singled out for processing by the criminal justice system? For Spitzer, the answers to such questions require criminologists to appreciate that crime and other forms of deviance are aspects of broader social conflict between the working and ruling classes in capitalist society. Spitzer’s perspective on the relationships between capitalism and crime draws upon the classical Marxist argument that the ruling class controls capitalist societies because they own and control the

874

Spitzer, Steven: Capitalism and Crime

means of production, such as factories, businesses, and banks. This kind of ownership allows the ruling class to exploit the labor power of the working class in the sense that workers, while paid a wage for the value they create through their labor, also produce surplus value (or profit) which is appropriated by owners of the means of production. However, maintaining this exploitative relationship requires that the ruling class find ways to maintain social harmony. If the economic system is to be reproduced, the working class must believe in the legitimacy of a system that is inherently unjust. Following Marx, Spitzer argues that such legitimacy is maintained and reproduced through the “super­structure”: institutions like the family, religion, media, and schooling that provide psychological and cultural resources to justify the economic system. However, a central predicament of capitalism is that it creates “problem” populations, consisting of people who represent a threat to the functioning and growth of the economic system, and a corresponding need to protect the “assets, profits and all concrete forms of capital itself” (Spitzer, 1979, p. 187). Specifically, Spitzer argues that over time, capitalists increasingly rely upon technological developments and innovations to increase rates of profit. This process also causes workers to be displaced as machines, technology, and new production methods gradually replace the need for human labor. Thus, over the history of capitalism, more and more workers have become expendable and therefore problematic. For example, the unemployed, the poor, student radicals, and those who are marginalized pose a threat to the legitimacy of the system because their existence challenges the doctrine that capitalism is an economic arrangement based on equality of opportunity and condition. Spitzer argues that there are two general categories of such problem populations. First, social junk consists of individuals who have refused, are unable, or have failed to take part in the capitalist system, such as the aged, handicapped, drug addicts, or the mentally ill. As such, social junk do not represent a direct threat to the capitalism because they generally do not question it. Thus, they require regulation and containment, rather than more aggressive forms of control. The second category, which he calls social dynamite, is more problematic in that these individuals directly challenge the legitimacy of capitalist

relations of production and the coercion and dominance associated with those relations. Spitzer argues that such social dynamite is generally more youthful, alienated, and politically volatile than social junk and therefore subject to more formal control as represented by the criminal justice system (1975, p. 646). Having laid the groundwork for a theory of the linkages between capitalism and crime, Spitzer discusses the methods by which social life is regulated to secure public order and a disciplined working class (Spitzer, 1979). Thus, the earlier capitalist state had been responsible not only for political governance but also for the development of highly bureaucratized regulatory systems such as the police, the courts, and the correctional systems that in turn are responsible for “processing” criminality. More recently, however, Spitzer maintains that such institutions have increasingly been subject to privatization and the logics of profitmaking as evidenced by the growth, for example, of private policing (Spitzer & Scull, 1977). While Spitzer’s ideas are regarded as influential, they have been subject to two main criticisms. First, his emphasis on crime as a by-product of the class conflict inherent to capitalism does not address the reality that most crimes are intra-class. Second, the perspective does not address important questions of differences in criminal behavior and victimization between groups on the basis of race/ethnicity and gender, nor the ways in which these identities condition and shape criminal behavior and the social reaction to it. Shahid Alvi See also Bonger, Willem: Capitalism and Crime; Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime; Colvin, Mark, and John Pauly: A Structural Marxist Theory of Delinquency; Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels: Capitalism and Crime

References and Further Readings Spitzer, S. (1975). Toward a Marxian theory of deviance. Social Problems, 22, 638–651. Spitzer, S. (1979). The rationalization of crime control in capitalist society. Contemporary Crises, 3, 187–206. Spitzer, S., & Scull, A. (1977). Privatization and capitalist development: The case of the private police. Social Problems, 21, 18–29.

Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory

Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory The deterrence doctrine has been a mainstay in criminological theory and criminal justice policy since the early writings of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria in the 18th century. The doctrine entails the basic assumption that people refrain from crime or reduce their criminal involvement because they fear punishment (Gibbs, 1975). Two types of deterrence have been posited: (1) specific deterrence, meaning the reduction of criminal offending among those directly experiencing punishment, and (2) general deterrence, meaning the omission or reduction of crime among people in the general population indirectly experiencing punishment, that is, perceiving it as threatening.

The Reconceptualization In 1993, Mark Stafford and Mark Warr reconceptualized the deterrence doctrine, arguing that these two types are not solely contingent on the direct or indirect experience of punishment. Punishment avoidance may also yield deterrence. Specifically, punishments imposed or avoided may be felt directly through personal experience or indirectly through the experiences of others. The direct (individual is punished) and indirect (individual perceives others being punished) experience of punishment presumably decreases an individual’s inclination to offend by increasing the perception of punishment risk. Conversely, punishment avoidance presumably increases the likelihood of criminal offending by decreasing a potential offender’s perception of punishment risk, regardless of whether avoidance is direct (individual avoids punishment) or indirect (individual perceives others avoiding punishment).

Implications for General and Specific Deterrence According to Stafford and Warr’s reconceptualization, general deterrence is influenced by knowledge of others who have been punished or avoided punishment. Specific deterrence is the result of personal experience with punishment or punishment avoidance. Two types of general deterrence are therefore possible, indirect experience of punishment

875

and indirect experience of punishment avoidance; and two types of specific deterrence are possible, direct experience with punishment and direct experience with punishment avoidance (Paternoster & Piquero, 1995, p. 252). The influence of punishment on criminal involvement for all types is mediated by the perception of punishment risk: Experiencing punishment increases perceived risk, thus promoting general or specific deterrence, and avoiding punishment decreases perceived risk, thus undermining the possibility of general or specific deterrence. Stafford and Warr claim that empirically estimating the influence of punishment on behavior via perceived risk is complex because people experience a mixture of punishment processes. An individual may have direct and indirect experience with punishment imposition and avoidance when contemplating crime. This mixture produces several possible outcomes, thus prompting the theorists to advocate for research that includes direct and indirect punishment imposition and avoidance because “punishment avoidance may do more to encourage crime than punishment does to discourage it” (p. 125). Additionally, Stafford and Warr assert that specific and general deterrence are not likely to be equally important across populations (p. 128). They contend that criminal involvement among those with little direct experience of punishment imposition and avoidance is likely to involve general deterrence processes, while criminal involvement for those with direct experience of punishment imposition and avoidance is likely to involve specific deterrence processes. All types of punishment experiences should be included in research to disentangle the mixture of influences punishment may have on behavior. Those studies would require measuring an individual’s perceptions of certainty and severity of punishments, perceptions of the certainty and severity of punishment for others within their immediate social network, self-reported criminal behavior that includes punishment imposition and avoidance, and estimates of others’ criminal behavior, including reports of punishment imposition and avoidance (p. 133).

The Theoretical Contribution Stafford and Warr extended deterrence theory by challenging two assumptions guiding research on

876

Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory

deterrence. First, deterrence theorists had long assumed the direct experience or indirect threat of punishment was the only ingredient in the deterrence process. Thus, research neglected to inquire about punishment avoidance experiences. Stafford and Warr’s revision incorporated punishment avoidance and treated it as analytically distinct from direct or indirect punishment imposition. Second, general and specific deterrence presumably operated on two different populations. Lawabiding citizens were subject to general deterrence whereas criminal offenders were affected by specific deterrence. However, any person or population experiences a mixture of general and specific deterrence processes, rendering it necessary to study specific and general deterrence in combination rather than separately. Besides challenging these two assumptions, a major contribution of the theory is that it integrated the deterrence doctrine into the larger framework of social learning theory. Stafford and Warr used the principles of vicarious learning and experiential learning to inform their reformulation of general and specific deterrence.

Empirical Support Three studies tested the main tenets of Stafford and Warr’s theory: Alex Piquero and Greg Pogarsky’s 2002 study; Alex Piquero and Ray­ mond Paternoster’s 1998 study; and Paternoster and Piquero’s 1995 study. The former two studies looked at the deterrent effect of various punishments on estimated intentions to drive after drinking, whereas the latter study investigated underage drinking and marijuana use. The study on alcohol and marijuana use involved a survey, distributed among 10th grade students (N = 1,422) in southeastern United States. It was completed twice, with the second questionnaire being administered 1 year later. The first study on drunken driving used a 62-item telephone survey of licensed drivers aged 16 or older (N = 1,686). Participants were selected by random digit dialing with samples stratified by population. The most recent drunken driving study included 250 students from a southwestern U.S. university who completed a questionnaire. The respondents included those who responded to an e-mail invitation to participate in a study about driving while intoxicated.

The drunken driving studies included various direct punishment experiences as independent variables: Piquero and Pogarsky used being stopped by police, whereas Piquero and Paternoster used being arrested by police and being pulled over at a roadside checkpoint. Indirect or vicarious punishment experiences were measured by friends’ arrest in Piquero and Pogarsky’s study, and by license suspension or jail time in Piquero and Paternoster’s study. Piquero and Pogarsky calculated punishment avoidance as the percentage of people known by the respondent who had escaped detection while driving drunk, whereas Piquero and Paternoster calculated punishment avoidance as the respondent’s estimate of how often those convicted of drunk driving get the prescribed punishment. For the Paternoster and Piquero’s study that focused on alcohol and marijuana use, direct punishment experience included being caught by police, being taken to the police station, being arrested, or taken to juvenile court. Punishment avoidance was measured by the frequency with which the respondent had avoided detection. Vicarious punishment and avoidance was not directly measured, but the frequency of friends’ substance use was used as a proxy. Each of these studies included measurements of respondents’ perceived certainty of punishment, with perceived severity of punishment included in the drunk-driving studies. Besides punishment variables, these studies also considered factors that may influence behavioral outcomes through deterrence and non-deterrence mechanisms. For example, moral evaluations of illegal behavior were incorporated on the assumption that those who disapprove of drinking and driving are more likely to perceive that formal sanctions will be imposed, thus promoting deterrence. Thus, in addition to asking about one’s own moral attitudes toward drinking and driving, Piquero and Paternoster asked about friends’ moral attitudes as a way to ascertain a vicarious analog of one’s own moral beliefs. Similarly, informal surveillance and closeness of emotional bonds with conventional others were used as indicators of likely informal sanctions. More specifically, Paternoster and Piquero posited that conventional others would reinforce the risky nature of alcohol and marijuana use, thus monitoring the respondent’s behavior. As a final example, Piquero and Pogarsky included

Stafford, Mark C., and Mark Warr: Deterrence Theory

impulsivity since research had shown that it influences how individuals weigh future outcomes and thus may interfere with the perceptual processes associated with deterrence. The findings reported in these studies were mixed in terms of their support of Stafford and Warr’s theory. For example, Paternoster and Piquero found that personal and vicarious punishment imposition and avoidance increased perceived punishment risk, that general and specific deterrence work concurrently, but that a person’s prior experience will influence which type of deterrence has a stronger effect. Such findings are consistent with the theory, but they also found that the direct experience of punishment led to additional offending, which contradicts the theory. Consider Piquero and Paternoster’s findings, which also provide mixed support for the theory. They found that personal experience with punishment avoidance reduced the perceived risk of punishment; but vicarious punishment avoidance decreased drunken driving intentions, whereas the vicarious imposition of punishment increased those intentions. Moreover, personal experience with punishment had no influence on drunken driving intentions. Finally, Piquero and Pogarsky found that direct and indirect punishment avoidance experiences decrease perceptions of punishment risk and relate positively to offending, in support of Stafford and Warr’s theory, but prior punishment and vicarious punishment experiences encouraged future intentions to drive after drinking.

877

officer. Further, only Paternoster and Piquero used self-reports of actual behavior. The other two studies used behavioral intentions measured in the context of hypothetical scenarios. The issue here is that intentions in such scenarios may not necessarily correspond to actual behavior in realworld circumstances. These studies found that experiences with punishment, or the avoidance thereof, have some, although mixed influence on the likelihood of actual or projected offending. However, punishment may not be the main determinant of the perceived certainty of punishment. Other researchers posit that perceptions may also be influenced by extralegal sanctions, low self-control, and beliefs favorable to crime, and association with delinquent peers (Cullen & Agnew, 2006). For this reason, some argue that the theory should be incorporated into an integrated theory of crime. Certainly, future studies should use original longitudinal data, investigate the influence of alternative punishment criteria, and extend data collection to other populations. Until such research is done, the empirical status of Stafford and Warr’s reconceptualization of deterrence remains an open question. Stephanie D’Auria and Kirk Williams See also General Deterrence Theory; Gibbs, Jack P.: Deterrence Theory; Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence; Perceptual Deterrence; Williams, Kirk R., and Richard Hawkins: Deterrence Theory and Non-Legal Sanctions

Critiques of the Reconceptualization Tests of Stafford and Warr’s theory are inconclusive, but this may be due to the limitations of each study. Piquero and Pogarsky as well as Piquero and Paternoster relied on secondary data, resulting in potential measurement issues. For example, Paternoster and Piquero were unable to analyze vicarious punishment and punishment avoidance experiences. Of concern in the second study is the operationalization of a respondent’s personal experience with punishment; being stopped at a roadside checkpoint may not suffice for a punishment experience, unless it is followed by arrest or conviction. Although Paternoster and Piquero used original data, they also measured personal experience with punishment in a potentially problematic way—being pulled over by a police

References and Further Readings Cullen, F. T., & Agnew, R. (2006). Reviving classical theory: Deterrence and rational choice theories. In F. Cullen & R. Agnew (Eds.), Criminological theory: Past to present (pp. 404–414). New York: Oxford University Press. Gibbs, J. P. (1975). Crime, punishment, and deterrence. New York: Elsevier. Paternoster, R., & Piquero, A. (1995). Reconceptualizing deterrence: An empirical test of personal and vicarious experiences. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 32, 251–286. Piquero, A., & Paternoster, R. (1998). An application of Stafford and Warr’s reconceptualization of deterrence to drinking and driving. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 35, 3–39.

878

Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk

Piquero, A., & Pogarsky, G. (2002). Beyond Stafford and Warr’s reconceptualization of deterrence: Personal and vicarious experiences, impulsivity, and offending behavior. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. 39, 153–186. Pogarsky, G., & Piquero, A. (2003). Can punishment encourage offending? Investigating the “resetting” effect. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40, 95–120. Stafford, M., & Warr, M. (1993). A reconceptualization of general and specific deterrence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30, 123–135.

Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk Elizabeth A. (Betsy) Stanko is one of the key researchers who has focused on the causes and consequences of women’s risk and fear of crime over the last two decades. She is a self-described “radical feminist criminologist” (Stanko, 1998b, p. 57), who believes that she sometimes cares “too passionately about the issue of violence against women” (Stanko, 1998a, p. 35). In 1997, she earned her Ph.D. at the City University of New York (Stanko, 2004). Interestingly, she did not start out her career steeped in feminism but rather came to it after spending time researching criminal justice system actors (e.g., prosecutors and police), setting up a shelter for battered women, and teaching a course on women and crime in the 1970s—finding that there was not much research on women’s experiences committing or being victimized by crime. In addition, her personal experience with sexual harassment contributed to her desire to do research and policy-related work that was relevant to women’s experience of powerlessness and invisibility (Stanko, 1998a, 2007). Since 2003, Stanko has worked for the London Metropolitan Police, currently as the head of research and analysis. But she spent much of her career as a sociologist working in academe both in the United States and in Britain. She went into her new role in the practitioner world in hopes of using her extensive knowledge on women’s experiences with crime and fear to help shape police practices in the field—to practically bridge the divide between academe and the real world (Stanko,

2004, 2007). She has authored many scholarly articles and chapters and two books focusing on how gender affects perceived risk and fear of crime. Much of her work has focused on qualitative interviews with women, and some men, about their personal safety. This entry discusses her influential arguments regarding these issues. One of the most consistent findings in fear of crime research for decades has been that women are more afraid than men. Indeed, much scholarly research has focused on trying to explain women’s greater fear in light of the fact that men are much more likely to be victimized by violent street crime. Stanko has argued that the structural, cultural, and physical context women experience in a male-dominated society easily explains their heightened fear of crime. Specifically, she argues that women’s “ordinary experiences” (Stanko, 1985, p. 2) lead them to believe and worry every day that they are at risk of being victimized by men in many situations. She believes that violence is an “ordinary part of life,” and that people regularly adjust their lives to manage the risk and danger they face both inside and outside the home (Stanko, 1990, p. 5). In fact, many of these adjustments are so routine that they are considered common sense (e.g., locking doors and avoiding unsafe areas of the community). She first made this argument about the ordinariness of violent experiences for women in her influential book Intimate Intrusions, where she noted, “To be a woman—in most societies, in most eras—is to experience physical and/or sexual terrorism at the hands of men” (p. 9). She continually has argued that women, in particular, are more at risk because of their powerless position in society. For example, she believes that male violence is an important component in the social control of women generally, and so women face unique experiences with danger that are not an issue for men. Specifically, she has noted that “the reality of sexual violence is a core component of ‘being’ female” in male-dominated societies, and she argues that women’s fear recognizes this condition (Stanko, 1994b, p. 122). In essence, although women are not always victimized, fear of victimization by men is a constant for women throughout their lives, because they are always at risk of being victimized especially by intimates and acquaintances, although women

Stanko, Elizabeth A.: Gender, Fear, and Risk

are not always afraid. Women’s experiences, of course, vary based on their environmental, economic, and familial contexts, and so their level of fear and the amount and type of protective measures vary as well. Nevertheless, women’s fear and the precautions they take are legitimately based in their life contexts rather than irrational, as many scholars who focus on “stranger danger” have argued. According to Stanko (1985, 1992, 1994a, 1994b), most criminologists ask the wrong questions in their effort to understand female fear of crime, leading them to believe that women should not be as afraid as they often are. She argued that focusing on public crimes as measures of victimization (like those reported in official crime and victimization statistics) points to males being hurt more by violence but ignores the important and probably more frequent private experiences that women have with problematic male behavior, much of which can be categorized as violent by women. Women are more likely to be victimized by people close to them, and these experiences do not always become known to the police. These “hidden” experiences include male behaviors that clearly would be classified as crime if the police were aware of them (e.g., rape, battering, and incest) and those that might not be crimes but are nevertheless threatening to women (e.g., whistles, sexual comments, and unwanted touching). The latter experiences, she has termed “little rapes,” pointing to the continuum of male violence that women experience in their daily lives, as opposed to the stereotypical street violence that some believe is the cause of women’s fear (Stanko, 2000, p. 154). Importantly, Stanko also has argued that when women are victimized, academics and practitioners ask why they are victimized rather than asking why men hurt them, thereby putting the focus and blame on the woman (Stanko, 1985, 2002). This approach to the problem, then, puts the personal and societal responsibility for women’s victimization on the women rather than men. People ask questions like why was she out at night by herself, why was she wearing those skimpy clothes, why did she choose to stay with her abusive husband, and why did she keep the victimization a secret? For example, Stanko (1998b) has noted that police advise women regarding ways to keep themselves safe, assuming that women have the

879

power and ability to prevent crimes by men, rather than focusing police efforts on finding ways to keep men from hurting women. This concentration on women’s responsibility for men’s behavior then leads women to feel that they are accountable for protecting themselves from men and they then try to predict which men that they encounter in their daily lives will be violent, including not just strangers but more often acquaintances, friends, and intimates. This heightened awareness leads women to see every man as a potential victimizer and makes women feel vulnerable and more afraid. It also leads them to take more precautions to protect themselves, although they may more easily control their risk of victimization by strangers than by intimates (e.g., by avoiding certain geographical areas, staying inside at night, listening for footsteps, or examining bushes when they walk by). Notably, she has argued that when women feel threatened by men, they often keep it to themselves and question their own feelings (and sometimes feel shame) because society considers it normal for men to act unruly toward them (e.g., make sexual comments and tease them). Women wonder whether something is wrong with them rather than with the men who are doing the behaviors that make them feel uncomfortable. Stanko has argued that men who commit violent crimes against women are assumed to be abnormal; yet, such crimes are just the extreme end of typical male behavior, and many men who commit these crimes are “ordinary” guys (Stanko, 1985, 1990, 1994a, 1994b, 2002). According to Stanko (1985, 2002), when women are victimized, criminologists and others tend to separate them into a category different from other women, as if victimization was not a condition of being a woman. Again, this points to the general problem that she believes plagues society and scholarly research—the focus on male street crime as atypical rather than as one piece of a larger continuum of negative behaviors that can have a hurtful impact on women and therefore lead to heightened fear of crime. In her current role, working with practitioners who struggle with how best to respond to people impacted by crime, Stanko is able to marry the academic world of scientific information with the practical reality of policing and work to improve

880

Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places

system responses to women’s experiences with men’s violence. It is a strong possibility that her influential impact in the academic criminological field will now be expanded into the practical world and make a major mark there as well. Her efforts may eventually lead to a reduction in women’s fear of crime by increasing societal and practitioner understanding of the causes. This increased understanding may then affect how these entities respond to women’s negative experiences with men. By changing careers, Stanko is among the few scholars who have taken their influential ideas into the “real world” in hopes of prompting positive changes in the criminal justice system. Jodi Lane See also Rape Myths and Violence Against Women; Russell, Diana E. H.: The Politics of Rape

Stanko, E. A. (1996). Women, crime, and fear. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 539, 46–58. Stanko, E. A. (1998a). Making the invisible visible in criminology: A personal journey. In S. Holdaway & P. Rock (Eds.), Thinking about criminology (pp. 35–54). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Stanko, E. A. (1998b). Warnings to women: Police advice and women’s safety in Britain. In S. L. Miller (Ed.), Crime control and women: Feminist implications of criminal justice policy (pp. 52–71). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stanko, E. A. (2000). Naturalising danger: Women, fear and personal safety. In M. Brown & J. Pratt (Eds.), Dangerous offenders: Punishment and social order (pp. 147–163). London: Routledge. Stanko, E. A. (2002). Ordinary experiences. In Y. Jewkes & G. Letherby (Eds.), Criminology: A reader (pp. 251–261). London: Sage.

References and Further Readings Rand, M., & Catalano, S. (2007). Criminal victimization, 2006. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Stanko, B. (2004). A tribute to 10 years of knowledge. Violence Against Women, 10, 1395–1400. Stanko, B. (2007). From academia to policy making: Changing police responses to violence against women. Theoretical Criminology, 11, 209–219. Stanko, E. A. (1985). Intimate intrusions: Women’s experience of male violence. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Stanko, E. A. (1990). Everyday violence: How women and men experience sexual and physical danger. London: Pandora. Stanko, E. A. (1992). The case of fearful women: Gender, personal safety, and fear of crime. Women & Criminal Justice, 4, 117–135. Stanko, E. A. (1993). Everyday violence and experience of crime. In P. J. Taylor (Ed.), Violence in society (pp. 169–180). London: Royal College of Physicians of London. Stanko, E. A. (1994a). The case of fearful women: Gender, personal safety, and fear of crime. Women & Criminal Justice, 4, 117–135. Stanko, E. A. (1994b). Challenging the problem of men’s individual violence. In T. Newburn & E. A. Stanko (Eds.), Just boys doing business? Men, masculinities and crime (pp. 32–45). London: Routledge.

Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places Rodney Stark contributed greatly to the field of criminal justice and to the theory of deviant places versus deviant people with his work titled “Deviant Places: A Theory of the Ecology of Crime.” Before this work is discussed, it is necessary first to look back at the history of studies on crime and place, starting with social disorganization theory.

Previous Research Despite the original theory being over 50 years old, social disorganization theory remains one of the most influential contextual theories of crime and delinquency. Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay developed social disorganization theory. They first built their idea on Burgess’s concentric zone theory. Burgess outlines the growth of the city of Chicago by describing five concentric zones. Zone I is the central business district and the industrial district; this is the center of the city. Zone II is the zone of transition, also known as the slum area. This zone is in transition from being a residential area to a business and industry area. Zone III is a residential area known as the zone of working men’s homes. This zone consists of working-class

Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places

families. Zone IV is known as the residential zone. This zone is residential, but it is nicer than zone III. Zone V is known as the commuters’ zone. This zone is also residential. It is generally located outside the city limits and is considered to be the suburb. Shaw and McKay used this information in conjunction with the data they collected to develop social disorganization theory. Shaw and McKay collected data from juvenile court records. They plotted the addresses of the juvenile delinquents they obtained through court records on a map of the city of Chicago. They found that the highest rates of delinquency were in the zones closest to the center of the city and declined as one moved further out from the center of the city. They also discovered that rates of delinquency were highest in these areas despite different racial and ethnic groups inhabiting the areas over time. They found as these racial/ethic groups departed the center of the city and moved to zones farther from the center of the city, their rates of delinquency fell. This suggests that it is the area that people live in and not the individuals themselves, that is the cause of crime. In the areas with high rates of delinquency, juveniles were left to do what they wanted with little supervision or support. This occurred because in these areas there was a breakdown in conventional institutions such as families, churches, and schools. As a result, there was little or no informal social control. The lack of control can all be attributed to certain common characteristics in these areas, including rapid urban growth, a high population turnover, ethnic heterogeneity, and poverty/ low socioeconomic status (Lilly et al., 2007). It is because of these conditions that there is a breakdown in conventional institutions that lead to a lack of social control, which in turn leads to a higher rate of delinquency. Because of rapid urban growth, ethnic heterogeneity, a high population turnover, and poverty, residents of these areas are not able to come together and have common values to maintain effective control of their neighborhood (Kornhauser, 1978). Although Shaw and McKay’s work has remained very important, during the 1970s and 1980s the study of crime tended to become more individually focused in that criminologists were more concerned about individual causes of crime rather than looking at contextual theories to explain crime. However,

881

in the late 1980s contextual theories of crime—that is, theories that emphasized that kinds of places mattered—began to re-emerge as viable explanations of crime. Stark’s work contributed to this resurgence in the study of contextual theories.

Deviant Places The unique aspect of Stark’s perspective is that he combines past criminological works that support contextual theory and creates 30 propositions producing a theory of ecology of crime. He incorporates not only past contextual works but also works centered on individuals. In so doing, he shows that different types of approaches can be intertwined to support contextual theories. In his 30 propositions, he included such theories as differential association, collective efficacy, social disorganization, concentric zone, deterrence, and social bond. Although Stark has 30 separate propositions, they build off of each other. The first nine propositions discuss dense and crowded neighborhoods. He discusses how the more dense a neighborhood is, the more social interactions there will be. With an increase in social interactions, non-criminal kids in the neighborhood will have more interactions with deviant kids, compared with a less dense neighborhood. His second proposition discusses moral cynicism. Stark theorizes that when people live in a dense neighborhood, they cannot keep up appearances as well as people in a less dense neighborhood. Because appearances are not kept up, these people are more exposed to conduct that would normally be kept behind closed doors. As a result, there is a greater likelihood that people are not credible as positive role models in dense neighborhoods. These first two propositions are unique in the contextual theory literature. In this article, Stark is able to combine social interactions of individuals with the result it will have on the deviance of an area. He was also able to combine the concept of a dense neighborhood with the concept of moral cynicism. In these first nine propositions, Stark also discussed crowding of homes in a neighborhood and how that would affect the deviance level of the neighborhood. He states that crowding in homes leads to people spending more time outside; spending more time outside leads to less supervision of

882

Stark, Rodney: Deviant Places

children. When children are unsupervised, they will potentially have poor school achievement and, as a result, less of a stake in conformity. Crowding within the home can also lead to more conflict with family members, which can result in weak attachments to family and less of a stake in conformity. Stark also discusses neighborhoods with mixed land use in his propositions. In his 10th and 11th propositions, he states that neighborhoods with mixed land use foster opportunity for deviance due to the displacement of more retail outlets. He also theorizes that with mixed land use, there are more places for people to congregate outside. In his 13th proposition, Stark points out that neighborhoods with mixed land use have a high rate of transience. With more transience, there are fewer attachments among residents in the neighborhood. Transience also weakens neighborhood organizations and institutions since people who are transient are less likely to form ties to neighborhood organizations. When there are fewer attachments among residents and weakened organizations, there will be less formal and informal social control. Also in neighborhoods where people are more transient, it is more difficult to determine who does not belong in the area, again reducing social control. In his 16th and 17th propositions, Stark points out that neighborhoods that are poor, have mixed land use, and have a higher rate of transience tend to be dilapidated as well. Stark then notes that dilapidation leads to social stigma. In proposition 18, Stark observes that, not only does dilapidation cause social stigma for a neighborhood, but high rates of deviance in a neighborhood create social stigma as well. According to Stark, people who live in a stigmatized neighborhood have less of a stake in conformity. This occurs because they have less to lose if they are caught being deviant. Another problem with stigmatized neighborhoods is that people who are successful and positive role models tend to move out as soon as possible. Additionally, people who could potentially be positive role models do not move into stigmatized neighborhoods. Therefore, the neighborhood as a whole is stigmatized and has less successful people to serve as positive role models. Proposition 22 through proposition 24 are concerned with demoralized people living in stigmatized neighborhoods. When Stark discusses the

demoralized, he defines them as people who are not able to function properly in society. Such people include the mentally ill, chronic alcoholics, and the mentally handicapped. According to proposition 23, the more demoralized people there are in a neighborhood, the more victims there will be. This occurs because there will be more opportunity to victimize. Further, the more demoralized people there are in a neighborhood, the less chance there is for people to succeed; therefore, they have a lower stake in conformity. In his 25th proposition, Stark asserts that stigmatized neighborhoods will have more lenient law enforcement. With more lenient law enforcement in a neighborhood, there will be an increase in moral cynicism. This occurs because people see crime taking place with no consequences, and thus they lose respect for conventional moral standards. In propositions 27 through 30, Stark explains the progression of what occurs when there is lenient law enforcement in a neighborhood. In short, lenient law enforcement leads to more crime and deviance—a reality explained by applying deterrence theory and opportunity-based theories. When there is less of a likelihood of being caught for a crime, more crimes will transpire. Also, lenient law enforcement draws deviant people to that neighborhood. When there are large numbers of deviant people in a neighborhood, there will be a higher visibility of crimes and more opportunity to engage in criminal activity. The more visible crime and deviance is in a neighborhood, the more rewarding and safe it will appear for offending purposes.

Conclusion The 30 propositions described above make up Stark’s theory of the ecology of crime. Not one of these propositions stands alone. Rather, they flow together to make a progression of what occurs in deviant places. In his article, he emphasizes the importance of studying not only individual explanations of crime but contextual explanations of crime as well. Since Stark has published his insights, research has assessed his theory. Steven Barkan tested the household crowding effect on area crime rates. This corresponds with the first eight propositions in Stark’s article. Barkan found support for this part of Stark’s theory. His analysis revealed that

Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld

household crowding is positively related to crime. In other words, neighborhoods with more household crowding have more crime than neighborhoods with less household crowding. Findings such as this support the conclusion that continued attention should be paid to contextual theories of crime—theories showing that place matters as far as an explanation of crime. Beth Ellefson See also Brantingham, Patricia L., and Paul J. Brantingham: Environmental Criminology; Crime Hot Spots; Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle; Physical Environment and Crime; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Wilcox, Pamela, Kenneth C. Land, and Scott A. Hunt: Multicontextual Opportunity Theory

References and Further Readings Barkan, S. E. (2000). Household crowding and aggregate crime rates. Journal of Crime and Justice, 23, 47–64. Kornhauser, R. (1978). Social sources of delinquency: An appraisal of analytic models. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lilly, R. J., Cullen, F. T., & Ball, R. A. (2007). Criminological theory: Context and consequences (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sampson, R. J., & Groves, W. B. (1989). Community structure and crime: Testing social disorganization theory. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 774–802. Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1969). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stark, R. (1987). Deviant places: A theory of the ecology of crime. Criminology, 25, 893–909.

Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld Darrell J. Steffensmeier’s “Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld” is one of the first criminological theories to hypothesize that organizational properties of offender groups can account for the roles, activities, and offending

883

be­­haviors of women. A seemingly ubiquitous finding in criminological research on offending is the gender gap in serious crime, combined with what Steffensmeier calls “institutionalized sexism in the underworld.” However, Steffensmeier posits that this is a variable to be explained, and “offer[s] a series of propositions and hypotheses linking female access to crime groups to their structure and methods of operation” (p. 1010). To do so, Steffensmeier draws from both criminological opportunity theories and sociological theories of labor market stratification. His goals are to explain the following: 1) The existence of sex-segregation in organized criminal enterprise, resulting in a) the exclusion or underrepresentation of women in organized crime and b) their allocation to less-valued roles within crime groups when they are allowed to participate; and 2) the variability of sex-segregation across the spectrum of organized crime activities. (p. 1010, emphasis in the original)

While the former goal has received the most attention from scholars in the intervening years since publication, the latter is perhaps equally or more significant in its import. Steffensmeier’s explicit concern is with crime that is organized for joint economic gain, rather than individual crime and/or that which is based on noneconomic motives. He begins by specifying the typical nature of women’s offending. First, he notes, it tends to be either individualistic in nature rather than organized, or in peripheral or supportive roles to male partners. Second, female crime groups are characterized as less stable, more obscure, and less serious and lucrative than male crime groups. Moreover, Steffensmeier documents the consistent finding that gender segregation is prevalent in such organized crime groups. Comparable to sociological explanations of gendered labor market segmentation—which reject human capital accounts for organizational explanations for such patterns—Steffensmeier seeks explanation for sex segregation in the organizational practices of crime groups. Specifically, he argues, “The fact that crime in its more organized and lucrative dimensions is a virtual male phenomenon is in large part attributable to three related factors: homosocial reproduction, sex-typing, and

884

Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex Segregation in the Underworld

the task environment of the crime” (p. 1012). Homosocial reproduction refers to the tendency within groups for in-group preferences and outgroup antipathy to affect decision making, resulting in exclusionary practices. As crime groups tend to be dominated numerically by men, women are denied access altogether or are relegated to less lucrative and more peripheral roles. Similarly, sex-typing is used to define women as less capable of participating in certain activities within criminal enterprises. For example, as Steffensmeier explains, “male offenders see much criminal work as too hard or too heavy, or too dangerous for women . . . [and] also see women as not as capable or not as skilled, or not as stable” (p. 1013, emphasis in the original). Likewise, “women are viewed as gossip-prone, emotional, and untrustworthy” (p. 1014). The cumulative effect is that women are blocked from opportunities to build sustained criminal connections. Finally, Steffensmeier argues that the task environment of such crime is one that is shaped by the threat of both criminal justice intervention and the use of violence. As a consequence, “a premium is placed on attributes such as trust and reliability and on physical characteristics such as strength and ‘muscle’” (p. 1014)— all attributes that women are defined as lacking. As a consequence, women are either excluded entirely from such criminal enterprises, or their roles and activities are either limited or sexualized. Numerous studies support Steffensmeier’s account of how and why women are excluded from or marginalized in criminal enterprises. However, an important but often overlooked facet of Steffensmeier’s theory is his account of the “variability of sex segregation across the spectrum of organized crime activities” (p. 1010, emphasis in the original). Like scholars who examine the impact of gender within the formal labor market, Steffensmeier argues that the organizational context of criminal groups affects the extent that homosocial reproduction and sextyping take place, and thus the degree and nature of women’s exclusion and marginalization. Specifically, he argues that women’s roles will vary “along five dimensions or organizational properties”: 1) The uncertainty of the environment facing crime organizations; 2) the modus operandi of criminal enterprise, i.e., whether crime organizations accomplish by fraud or stealth rather than force or fear;

3) the rationality of crime organizations in achieving illegal profits; 4) the complexity or extent which crime organizations are organized; and 5) the degree of professionalization of crime organizations. (p. 1017, emphasis in the original)

Steffensmeier argues that sex segregation will be more marked in illicit groups that require physical strength or violence, as these are defined as prototypically male characteristics. In addition, when such groups face competition or threat from other groups, have exclusively economic goals (rather than in combination with social and/or political goals), or exhibit greater organizational complexity and professionalization, women’s marginalization will be heightened. For example, increased uncertainty and greater rationality in goals will lead to more in-group preferences and out-group antipathy to increase a sense of security in operations; likewise, a “rational” focus may result in the utilization of women in sex-typed ways deemed most effective to the enterprise; and increased structural complexity and professionalization will result in greater hierarchical differentiation in the division of labor, which again will be shaped by homosocial reproduction and sex-typing. Steffensmeier proposes that the factors outlined in his propositions will be both additive and interdependent in their effects. To date, few studies have applied these propositions to examine the variability in the extent and nature of gender stratification in illicit networks. Such organizational level analyses offer great promise for enriching our understanding of the processes that create, sustain, and undermine the exclusion and marginalization of women in criminal networks and organized crime groups. Jody Miller See also Adler, Freda: Sisters in Crime; Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory; Simon, Rita J.: Women and Crime; Simpson, Sally: Gender, Class, and Crime; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

References and Further Readings Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4, 139–158.

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending Britton, D. M. (2000). The epistemology of the gendered organization. Gender and Society, 14, 418–434. Maher, L. (1997). Sexed work: Gender, race, and resistance in a Brooklyn drug market. New York: Clarendon Press. Miller, J. (2001). One of the guys: Girls, gangs, and gender. New York: Oxford University Press. Mullins, C. W., & Wright, R. (2003). Gender, social networks, and residential burglary. Criminology, 42, 911–940. Peterson, D., Miller, J., & Esbensen, F.-A. (2001). The impact of sex composition on gangs and gang member delinquency. Criminology, 39, 411–439. Reskin, B. F. (2000). Getting it right: Sex and race inequality in work organizations. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 707–709. Steffensmeier, D. J. (1983). Organizational properties and sex segregation in the underworld. Social Forces, 61, 1010–1032. Steffensmeier, D. J., & Terry, R. (1986). Institutional sexism in the underworld: A view from the inside. Sociological Inquiry, 56, 304–323. Zhang, S., Chin, K.-O., & Miller, J. (2007). Women’s participation in Chinese transnational human smuggling: A gendered market perspective. Criminology, 45, 699–733.

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending The 1960s cultural revolution, including the women’s movement, focused attention and created a spate of research on female offending. Although it had long been known that male offending surpassed female offending in frequency and seriousness, theory testing in criminology rarely involved female samples and theories of female offending were not yet well developed. Due to the changing social context, however, questions about the origins of female offending and whether they differ from those of males became central to sociological criminology in the 1970s. Scholars debated and empirically tested whether genderneutral traditional theories of criminology or gender-specific theories could better explain female offending.

885

To develop a middle-range theory of gender and offending, Darrell J. Steffensmeier and Emilie Andersen Allan exhaustively reviewed theory and empirical research relating to female and male offending. Middle-range theory integrates general theories of behavior with empirical findings on group differences so as to better understand their origin and nature (Merton, 1957). Middle-range theory aims to integrate empirical observations and established social facts to drive theory building that generates propositions to be further tested. Middlerange theories converge into grander theoretical explanations as the subfield develops. Steffensmeier and Allan’s gendered paradigm draws on causal forces identified by traditional crime theories but also integrates theory and research on gender, pointing to the importance of the organization of gender and biological sex differences as a starting point for future inquiry. Steffensmeier and Allan’s gendered paradigm draws on traditional crime theories (e.g., social learning, control, rational choice), feminist theories, and extant research to explain gender differences in the frequency and nature of crime—that is, the greater offending rates of males, particularly for more serious violent crimes and lucrative property crimes.  Gendered approaches are most needed to understand serious offending where gender differences and gendered influences are greatest. The paradigm also addresses contextual differences in female and male offending, such as women’s greater victimization of intimates and family; their tendency to work alone or, if in organized crime groups, to play secondary or sexual roles; and female motivations and pathways that involve victimization by men, romantic involvements with men, and protection of children and relationships. Steffensmeier and Allan’s approach encompasses both general as well as gendered influences in elucidating the complexities of criminal behavior. This perspective takes the approach that the broad contours of traditional criminological theories can explain variation in both female and male offending, but that gendered concerns mediate how criminogenic factors shape the form and frequency of offending. The organization of gender mediates some of the effects of broad social forces on offending. The gendered paradigm explains differences in the form and frequency of women’s and men’s

886

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

offending as derived from the organization of gender, as well as physical and sexual differences. The organization of gender refers to gender differentiated identities, roles, and commitments and the institutions and social arrangements that construct gender and, consequently, shape motives and opportunities for offending. Steffensmeier and Allan identify five key elements of the organization of gender that increase the probability of prosocial responses by females and antisocial responses by males and condition gender differences in motives and opportunities for offending.  They are (1) gender norms and focal concerns, (2) moral development and affiliative concerns, (3) social control, (4) physical strength and aggression, and (5) sexuality. These factors impact the willingness (motives) and ability (opportunities) of women and men to commit various crimes. After briefly describing the five areas, their applicability to understanding patterns of female and male offending are highlighted.

and shape opportunities for illicit activity. In contrast, males are rewarded for acting independently and being adventurous, competitive, and unemotional. Men are expected to be brave, strong, aggressive, rational, independent, adventurous, and dominating. Stereotypes of women as caring, submissive, and domestic are incompatible with crime, whereas definitions of masculinity—being ingenuitive, aggressive, or a risk taker—are more consonant with what is criminal. Expectations that women should be more guarded of their sexuality and concerned about physical appearances contrast with expectations that men should be sexually adventurous or even aggressive and concerned with displaying symbols of success or status. These differing gendered expectations regarding sexuality shape the availability and acceptability of deviant roles. Women’s criminal roles tend to capitalize on female sexuality (e.g., prostitution, decoy) whereas men’s criminal roles are more varied. Moral Development and Affiliative Concerns

The Organization of Gender and Criminal Involvement Gender Norms and Focal Concerns

Gender norms are unwritten, though commonly understood, guidelines defining appropriate behavior, beliefs, and attitudes for females and males. Gender norms are enforced socially and through internalized gender role socialization. Two powerful focal concerns orient femininity norms and impose greater taboos against female crime: nurturant role obligations, and female beauty and sexual virtue. These focal concerns shape criminal opportunities, motivations, and risk-taking preferences and strategies both in general and by type of deviant response. Women are socialized to be responsive to the needs of others and attentive to the physical and emotional well-being of people they care about (Haynie et al., 2007). Enactment of nurturing roles and obligations offers informal rewards and reinforces gender-related identities. Women are expected to establish and maintain kin and neighborly relationships, accept familial obligations such as child or elder care, act in a submissive, accommodating manner, and attend to their physical appearance while protecting their sexual virtue. These relational concerns tend to constrain

Closely related to gender norms, gender differences in moral development restrain women from violence and criminal behavior harmful to others. Women are socialized to an “ethic of care” that encourages women to be more responsive to the needs of others and to fear separation from loved ones. Men, however, are exposed to an “ethic of independence,” conditioning men toward status-seeking, even at the expense of others. Gendered affiliative concerns are such that women act as health sentries, especially for their sons and husbands/boyfriends, and they produce or transmit moral culture. Affiliative concerns not only inhibit women from undertaking harmful criminal activities but also shape women’s motives, such as violence to protect a loved one or criminal activity to preserve a relationship. Examples include buying drugs for a partner going through withdrawal, a physical altercation with a rival love interest of her partner, or murder/assault to protect a child from abuse (Schwartz, 2007). In contrast, men’s ethic of independence encourages competitiveness, aggression, and status seeking. At the extremes of the seriousness spectrum, men predominate instrumental violent offenses such as profit-motivated kidnapping, extortion, bank robbery, dog fighting, and the trafficking/smuggling arms, drugs, human body parts,

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

or endangered species (Schwartz et al., 2009). The male code of the streets is based on intense masculinity norms, and violence often results from challenges to one’s reputation (Anderson, 1999). Social Control

Females’ behaviors are often more closely monitored and informally sanctioned, restricting female freedoms, associations with deviant others, and opportunities for illicit activities. Moreover, stricter supervision may also decrease women’s willingness to commit crime by reducing their appetite for risk (or channeling it toward sustaining valued relationships) and increasing attachment to family or other authority figures and prosocial peers. Males, however, are not as closely supervised and spend more unstructured time with peers, increasing their ability and willingness to engage in risky behaviors, particularly those oriented toward status or competitive advantage. Physical Strength and Aggression

On average, men are larger than women, have greater endurance, and possess more upper body strength. More controversial are sex differences in aggression and in the capacity for violence derived from hormonal or other physical features of men versus women. These physical differences may influence the frequency and nature of female and male offending because involvement in lucrative, violent, or organized crime often requires physical prowess for committing crimes, protection, enforcing contracts or agreements, and recruiting and managing criminal associates. Equally important as actual physical differences, however, are social and cultural perceptions of women as less powerful, lacking the potential for violence, and more vulnerable to victimization. These social and cultural interpretations of average sex differences may limit women’s willingness to engage in serious crime or hamper men’s willingness to involve female partners in crime. Real or perceived physical differences may help to account for women’s solo or secondary roles in crime, their disproportionate involvement in minor property offenses, and their defensive use of violence against partners and aggressive use of violence against smaller children.

887

Sexuality

Females may utilize their sexuality for criminal gain such as in prostitution or as a tool to gain entry into criminal groups. Female offenders may also use gender stereotypes by playing up their sexuality to dupe males, such as by appearing sexually available in order to set up a male robbery victim (Miller, 1998). Traditional notions of femininity and sexuality offer criminal opportunities for some and place limitations on others. For example, females are typically supervised more closely (e.g., by parents, partners) to guard against sexual exploitation or victimization but this monitoring may lessen girls’ opportunities for deviance. Sexual and strength differences also increase the likelihood that females will align themselves with males for protection (e.g., as co-offenders).

The Context of Offending Gender norms, biological differences, and gendered risk-taking preferences influence the context of offending—the circumstances and nature of the crime including the setting, victim, purpose of offense, and injury/loss. Therefore, females who commit violent crimes are more likely than males to target people they know and less likely to use weapons or cause severe injury. Female property offenders are less likely to confront their victims (e.g., embezzling versus robbery), and to steal lesser amounts and are more likely to justify their theft as for their family or spouse. Research highlights how social arrangements related to gender and gendered inequalities shape motives and opportunities and, consequently, patterns of offending. First, gendered social relations and dominant gender norms disadvantage females in terms of recruitment into crime groups and upward mobility within crime groups (Steffens­ meier, 1983). Within crime groups, women tend to function in one of two roles: sexual roles that use or exploit female sexuality as a resource (e.g., prostitution, to gain entry into a crime group by aligning with a male) or “cover” roles in which women conceal criminal activity because they are viewed less suspiciously and as less threatening or dangerous or can take advantage of males by playing on gender stereotypes (e.g., appearing sexually available to set up a robbery victim).

888

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Emilie Andersen Allan: A Gendered Theory of Offending

Crime groups tend to be male-dominated and controlled. The principle of homosocial reproduction suggests the powerful tend to reproduce themselves, particularly in highly stratified settings (Steffensmeier, 1983). Males, who control the under­world (as well as the upperworld), tend to choose other males with whom to work, associate, and do business. Existing gender norms and stereotypes further limit female opportunities for involvement in lucrative and more organized crime because male offenders typically view criminal work as too difficult or dangerous for women or as too degrading for them. Males are also reluctant to work with women because they are viewed as less skilled, more emotional and less trustworthy, and less capable of deploying violence (Steffens­ meier, 1983; Steffensmeier & Terry, 1986). Existing gender stratification and gender norms often preclude women from developing skills and criminal social networks necessary for lucrative property crimes (Steffensmeier, 1986; Steffensmeier & Ulmer, 2005). Rather women are placed in stereotypical gender roles within crime groups, which do not often lead to career advancement. Lisa Maher and Kathleen Daly’s research on women’s roles in the crack cocaine drug market provides an excellent illustration of how gender norms and cultural perceptions of physical strength and aggression limit and shape patterns of female offending. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 3 years, they conclude that the drug trade is highly gender stratified, with women sometimes playing lesser roles such as “advertising” the drug, copping for others, or selling drug accessories; infrequently acting as street-level drug dealers; and almost never occupying high-level owner/manager positions. Gender stereotypes of women as less threatening provided opportunities tangential to the drug trade for women as service providers to male patrons from outside the community. Less often, women were used temporarily as street dealers in high-risk situations because it was believed that they could operate under less suspicion from authorities. In this way, managers hoped to play on the “gendered blindspots” of law enforcement. Generally, though, women were perceived to lack the toughness and capacity for violence required for success in the drug trade. Females could not often develop criminal social networks or enhance

their skills, maintaining the skewed sex ratio in the underworld. Although a few women became dealers through their roles as wives/girlfriends of distributors, more often males were selected into higher level positions by other males, sometimes their kin—a process of homosocial reproduction. Female opportunities are somewhat more numerous in less organized, more amateur minor property crime operations (Steffensmeier & Terry, 1986). In their roles as girlfriends or wives, women are provided criminal opportunities for supportive roles as drivers, lookouts, and holders of stolen property, drugs, or weapons. Women also have unique advantages in cashing stolen or forged checks, welfare fraud, shoplifting, and other offenses that take place in the course of femaletypical activities such as shopping or banking. This accounts for the narrower gender gap for minor property crime.

Conclusion Steffensmeier and Allan’s gendered paradigm values contributions of traditional theories but also takes seriously gendered aspects of social life and social change to advance the field’s understanding of both male and female offending patterns. Steffensmeier and Allan systematized the proliferation of research on female crime and integrated it with existing scholarship on gender and on crime to develop a model that better explains females’ relatively greater involvement in minor property and violent crimes compared to males’ much greater involvement in serious violence and lucrative property crime. This theory has significantly enhanced understanding of the gendercrime relationship, one of the strongest identified by criminologists. Future research calls for empirical tests that operationlize and test variables from Steffensmeier and Allan’s gendered approaches. Intersectionalities between gender and race, ethnicity, and disadvantage also should be articulated and explored. There is much value as well in qualitative work focused on local contexts of female and male offending that reveal how gender and gender-related arrangements and conditions continue to powerfully influence offending patterns. Jennifer Schwartz

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence See also Messerschmidt, James W.: Masculinities and Crime; Miller, Jody: Gendered Social Organization Theory; Simpson, Sally S.: Gender, Class, and Crime; Steffensmeier, Darrell J.: Organization Properties and Sex-Segregation in the Underworld; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence

References and Further Readings Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the Streets: Decency, violence and the moral life of inner cities. New York: W. W. Norton. Haynie, D., Steffensmeier, D. J., & Bell, K. (2007). Gender and serious violence: Untangling the role of friendship sex composition and peer violence. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 5, 235–253. Maher, L., & Daly, K. (1996). Women in the street-level economy: Continuity or change? Criminology, 34, 465–491. Merton, R. K. (1957). Social theory and social structure (Rev. ed.). New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Miller, E. M. (1986). Street woman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Miller, J. (1998). Up it up: Gender and accomplishment of street robbery. Criminology, 36, 37–66. Schwartz, J. (2007). Comparing women and men who kill: Gender differences in homicide offending. In M. DeLisi & P. Conis (Eds.), Violent offenders: Theory, research, public policy, and practice (pp. 119–140). Boston: Jones and Bartlett. Schwartz, J., Steffensmeier, D. J., & Feldmeyer, B. (2009). Assessing trends in women’s violence via data triangulation: Arrests, convictions, incarcerations, and victim reports. Social Problems, 56, 494–525. Steffensmeier, D. J. (1983). Sex-segregation in the underworld: Building a sociological explanation of sex differences in crime. Social Forces, 61, 1010–1032. Steffensmeier, D. J. (1986). The fence: In the shadow of two worlds. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Steffensmeier, D. J., & Allan, E. (1996). Gender and crime: Toward a gendered theory of female offending. American Review of Sociology, 22, 459–487. Steffensmeier, D. J., & Terry, R. (1986). Institutional sexism in the underworld: A view from the inside. Sociological Inquiry, 56, 304–323. Steffensmeier, D. J., & Ulmer, J. T. (2005).Confessions of a dying thief: Understanding criminal careers and illegal enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Zhang, S., Ko-Lin, C., & Miller, J. (2007). Women’s participation in Chinese transnational human smuggling: A gendered market perspective. Criminology, 45, 699–733.

889

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence Following in the tradition of Edwin Sutherland’s The Professional Thief and William Chambliss’s Box Man, Darrell J. Steffensmeier’s The Fence: In the Shadow of Two Worlds and Steffensmeier and Jeffery T. Ulmer’s Confessions of a Dying Thief: Understanding Criminal Careers and Criminal Enterprise provide a close-up view into the dynamics of criminal careers and the social organization of criminal enterprise, as experienced by a veteran thief and fence (stolen-good dealer) and his network of key associates. Sam Goodman, the key informant for the research, was a longtime thief, fence, and quasi-legitimate businessman. He had a criminal career that spanned 50 years, beginning in his mid-teens and ending with his death when he was in his 60s. The study is based on continuous close contact with Sam over several decades, multiple interviews with his network of associates in crime and business, and an intense series of interviews with him shortly before he died. These two works together—The Fence and Confessions—represent the most significant treatments of “fencing stolen goods” in criminological literature. But equally important, they also represent two of the most significant works in criminology over the past quarter century for their substantial contributions to research and theory on crime and criminal careers and for their detailed accounts of underworld criminal operations and enterprise and how the criminal underworld has changed since Sutherland’s classic treatment in The Professional Thief. Before addressing the “fencing” side of The Fence and Confessions, it is important to first recognize some unique contributions and the broader significance of these works. First, beyond their descriptions of fencing, these two works offer detailed and vibrant accounts of the ins and outs of running burglary crews, the rewards and pitfalls of crime, the importance of networking and developing “spider webs” of contacts for success in criminal enterprise, the ways that people seek out and create crime opportunities (rather than simply assuming that people

890

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence

passively respond to opportunities), and the many intersections and blurred boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate activity that often exist in criminal enterprise. Second, they provide a rich depiction of the criminal underworld, including its stratification or pecking order, elements of racism and sexism in its organization, and its changes throughout the 20th century. Third, Confessions spells out four basic categories of thieves and burglars, along with the stages of career development they typically go through: greenies or rookies (stage 1), in-between or roughhouse burglars (stage 2), a small subset of decent or good thieves (stage 3), and semiretired or moonlighters (stage 4). Fourth, these works provide one of the most intimate and detailed descriptions of the criminal career of a persistent and active offender, accounting for more than 50 years of his life and criminal career up to his death. Through these accounts, The Fence and Confessions make a fifth contribution by offering keen insight into the sources and complexities of criminal persistence/desistance, commitment, turning-points and transitions, specialization, displacement, and other life-course processes in criminal careers. At the same time, they also challenge mainstream perceptions about criminal careers and methodological approaches for studying them. For example, Steffensmeier and Ulmer illustrate that offenders often do not completely desist from crime but instead “moonlight” or drift in the gray areas between conventionality and deviance. However, they also argue that even the most persistent career criminals are rarely deviant in all areas of their lives. Furthermore, Confessions returns several times to the issue of whether offenders generally specialize or exhibit versatility in crime, arguing that specialization varies by age/career stage, criminal skill level, and place in the underworld. Methodologically, Steffensmeier and Ulmer also send a clear message to students and scholars illustrating the usefulness of long-term, in-depth qualitative interviews (compared to one-shot surveys) for obtaining more nuanced and richer pictures of criminal offending and criminal careers, particularly in light of the fact that some of the most noteworthy elements of Sam’s criminal career remained hidden from the interviewers for decades until a final series of intense deathbed interviews.

Last, Confessions provides an integrated learning-opportunity-commitment life-course framework that incorporates elements of key criminological theories and that is illustrated in a reader-friendly way for both students and scholars through captivating real-life examples offered in Sam’s personal accounts and then tied back to criminological theory more explicitly through the authors’ commentary on Sam’s narratives. This framework extends and elaborates Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s opportunity theory in particular, treating the concept of opportunity in a more agency/choice–centered way by emphasizing how skilled, committed offenders often actively seek out or create opportunities for learning and performing criminal skills. Confessions also delineates in a meaningful way the key dimensions of what constitutes access to learning (civil, preparatory, technical) and performance (tools, targets, contacts) opportunities for pursuing crime and how these opportunities may vary by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and place in society.

Fencing Perhaps the most substantial and most specific contribution of The Fence and Confessions is in the information these works provide about the trade in stolen goods and fences who are at the heart of it. Fencing—the crime of buying and reselling stolen merchandise—is one of the links that binds theft to the larger social system. Without receivers and dealers to dispose of stolen property, thieves would have to rely on their own connections, and both the costs and the risks of crime would increase substantially. The fence in turn provides opportunities for interested people to buy goods at less than market prices. Steffensmeier and Ulmer explain that fencing remains a rather poorly researched area in criminology, for several reasons. First, it often wears the cloak of legitimate business and is carried out in a rational, businesslike manner, so that it has few of the qualities traditionally associated with crime. Second, because fencing is a crime with low visibility and is conducted in secrecy, researchers have directed their attention to more visible crimes such as theft, or to violent crimes against persons for which statistics are available. Third, the cloak of secrecy and fences’ typical practice of maintaining a legitimate “front” (i.e., a legitimate business as a

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence

cover for illegal activity) make detailed investigation difficult.

The Business of Fencing The Fence and Confessions describe fencing as an enterprise requiring resourcefulness, charisma, ingenuity, and a good grasp of market practices and economic competition. Along with prevailing market conditions, pricing norms are determined by what is fair, and a sense of justice is developed based on the risks borne both by the thief and by the fence. Fences must pay a fair price so that thieves will come back to them again with stolen goods. However, because of their greater experience and knowledge, fences tend to dominate thieves in the pricing of stolen goods. The thieves often need money quickly, have few options other than to agree to the fence’s offer, and are under pressure to get rid of the stolen merchandise. Fences also often use chicanery to pad their profits by duping thieves (especially small-time thieves) about quality, quantity, and price. These studies document that “wheelin and dealin” fences (i.e., professional dealers) rely on extensive networks, developed through word-of-mouth, referrals, and sponsorship by underworld figures. Major fences also play an active role in coaching thieves on techniques of theft and product identification, and in developing long-term relationships with buyers. Rewards of fencing include money, reputation in the criminal community, excitement, a sense of mastery over one’s life, and pride in being a sharp businessman. Sam, and dealers like him, justify their fencing involvement by claiming that the fence is not the same as a thief, does little harm to the victims of theft, does not differ much from legitimate businesspeople, is able to operate only with the support of legitimate people (including the police), breaks no more rules than most people, and does a lot of good for others. All fences are by definition businesspeople: they are middlemen in illegitimate commerce, providing goods and services to others, regardless of whether they operate from a legitimate business or rely solely on individual resources. Although a few operate independent of any business front, most fences are simultaneously proprietors or operators of a legitimate business, which provides a cover or front for the fencing. Businesses most often favored

891

are those having a large cash flow (e.g., coin and gem shop, secondhand store, auction house, pawn shop, restaurant) and the flexibility to set one’s own hours (salvage yard, bail-bonding). For some fences, the trade in stolen goods is the major source of income and the central activity of their business portfolio. For others, fencing is either a profitable sideline to their legitimate entrepreneurship or one of a number of illicit enterprises they are involved in. Contrary to some accounts, the typical fence is hardly a “respectable businessman.” Instead, according to Steffensmeier and Ulmer (2005), the typical fence is characterized by one or more of the following: (1) prior criminal contact or background in criminal or quasi-legal activities, such as theft, hustling, or the rackets in general; (2) operation of a quasi-legitimate business such as a secondhand discount store, salvage yard, an auction house, a foundry, or a bail-bonding business; (3) affinity with the underworld, such as ongoing business interactions and leisure activities (e.g., poker games, drinking beer) with established members of the underworld to acquire the skills and contacts necessary to run a fencing business; and (4) business interactions that may require force or the threat of “getting rough” to enforce prior agreements and keep others from taking advantage of the fence in business deals.

The Professional Fence and Other Types of Stolen Goods Handlers By the late 18th and early 19th century, with the growth of fencing operations accompanying industrialization, it was commonplace for students of fencing to distinguish among receivers according to their criminal intent and scale of operations (Colquhoun, 1800; Crapsey, 1872). Jerome Hall subsequently distinguished professional dealers from other “occasional” or “lay” criminal receivers based on whether they intend to resell the stolen property or plan to use it for personal consumption and based on the regularity or frequency with which they purchase stolen goods. Paul Cromwell and colleagues added that receivers could be further differentiated by the scale or volume of purchases of stolen property and by the level of commitment to purchasing stolen goods. Sub­ sequently, Steffensmeier and Ulmer (2005) proposed that criminal receivers and other buyers of

892

Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence

stolen goods may be differentiated by (1) whether they deal directly with thieves, (2) the frequency with which they purchase stolen property, (3) the scale or volume of purchases of stolen property, (4) the purpose of purchase (for personal consumption or resale), and (5) the level of commitment to purchasing stolen property. Steffensmeier and Ulmer delineate four major groupings of criminal receivers or handlers of stolen goods, including the late-20th-century emergence of online or cybercrime fences involved in dealing stolen goods on the Internet. The four major groupings include the following: 1. The amateur or “Joe Citizen” buyer refers mainly to the “ordinary Joe Blow” who once in a while buys stolen goods to use himself or to peddle to one of his friends or close acquaintances. Amateur buyers tend to exhibit the lowest level of commitment and experience in buying stolen goods. 2. The occasional or part-time dealer is an in-between dealer, the guy who buys off-and-on and then peddles it out of his store or maybe on the street or at an auction, and may include drug dealer fences and neighborhood hustlers who occasionally dabble in low-level fencing as a sideline activity within his primary occupation or business. 3. The professional fence refers to the “regular” or “bigger” dealer whose buying and selling stolen goods is more frequent and lucrative than lowlevel fencing and is “a main part of what he does” (e.g., Sam Goodman throughout the height of his criminal career in fencing). Professional fences also include so-called master fences, which are characterized in Confessions of a Dying Thief as referral fences or as the fence’s fence, who do not deal directly with thieves but instead stay behind the scenes and deal only with other fences and underworld contacts. 4. The online buyer and seller fences stolen goods through websites. This type has accompanied the rise in popularity of online auctions (like eBay. com) and is a fast-growing distribution path that emerged in the late 1990s. The online trade in stolen goods overlaps the other forms of criminal receiving and is also a major avenue for selffencing stolen goods today.

In The Fence, Steffensmeier further elaborates that fences or dealers can also be distinguished

along other dimensions. One dimension is their vulnerability to law enforcement based on how much they are able to conceal their fencing trade by their legitimate business identity—that is, whether the trade in stolen goods is fully covered, partly covered, or uncovered by their legitimate business front. The second dimension is their product specialization based on the kinds and variety of stolen goods they handle. At one pole is the specialist, who handles only certain kinds of goods such as auto parts, jewelry, or antiques; at the other pole is the generalist, who will buy and sell virtually anything a thief offers.

Fence’s Relationship to Theft The fence does play a primary role in the marketing of stolen property, but The Fence and Confessions explain that this role is often exaggerated by commentators and law enforcement officials. The old saying “if no fences, no thieves” assumes that thieves are not autonomous in their stealing behaviors and that theft is largely attributable to the existence of fences. However, this also ignores the involvement of a variety of other participants in an illegal trade. Instead, as these books delineate, other participants that support the exchange of stolen goods include merchants who are tempted to purchase stolen goods at cheap prices in order that they may sell at a higher profit; budget-conscious consumers who are often willing to buy stolen goods “no questions asked” with little encouragement; victims of theft who are willing to forego prosecution once their stolen goods have been restored to them or they have received compensation; insurance companies and private detective agencies that protect the fence from public or legal reaction to the theft, either by diluting the rightful owner’s desire to pursue those responsible by providing compensation, or by cooperating with him for the return of stolen property; and, notably, cooperating authorities who, in exchange for muted investigation, are receptive to good deals on merchandise or are willing to accept information offered by fences to help recover particularly important merchandise and to arrest thieves. Official complicity of some kind is often a requisite for lengthy career involvement in fencing stolen goods, without which professional fences would be unable to “deal” regularly and over a period of time.

Stinchcombe, Arthur L.: Rebellion in a High School

Conclusion Both The Fence and Confessions are part of a long and rich tradition in criminology of studying people who approach crime as their work or as a business. As in conventional lines of entrepreneurship, access is facilitated by having a background and skills conducive to the trade or line of criminal work. These skills, in turn, are taught and transferred by way of tutelage and sponsorship. The Fence and Confessions also show (1) how conventional career concepts such as apprenticeship, work satisfaction, and networking are applicable to crime as work and (2) the parallels between legitimate and illegal enterprise. Planned theft, racketeering, running a bookmaking operation, and fencing stolen goods involve many of the same laws of supply and demand and the same fundamental assumptions that govern entrepreneurs in the legitimate marketplace. Indeed, the similarities appear sufficiently strong, as Confessions documents, that it is common for seasoned thieves, racketeers, and illicit entrepreneurs like Sam Goodman to view themselves as businessmen and to perceive little difference between their actions and the behaviors of legitimate entrepreneurs. Both The Fence and Confessions contribute to a real-life understanding of crime and the underworld, including the meaning and elaboration of crime skills, how contacts are made, how older career offenders may moonlight at crime while mainly engaging in conventional work, and how offenders justify their criminality. Additionally, Confessions discusses the underworld as a “field” in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense and elaborates how career property offenders and criminal entrepreneurs may be located in and committed to the underworld as a field of status, striving, and achievement. Finally, although criminologists know quite a bit about the “careers” of low-level and ordinary offenders who have typically slowed or exited crime by age 30 or 40, The Fence and Confessions provide a rare glimpse into the criminal career of a persistent active offender and into the inner workings and practices of theft (including the trade in stolen goods) and the underground economy. Both works make substantial scholarly contributions to criminology, while also being very reader friendly. Ben Feldmeyer

893

See also Convict Criminology; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Criminal Career Paradigm; Shover, Neal: Great Pretenders; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

References and Further Readings Bradley-Engen, M. S. (2009). Naked lives: Inside the worlds of exotic dance. Albany: SUNY Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. London: Cambridge University Press. Cloward, R. A., & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and opportunity: A theory of delinquent gangs. New York: Free Press. Colquhoun, P. (1800). A treatise on the commerce and police of the River Thames. London: Printed for Joseph Mawman. Crapsey, E. (1972). The nether side of New York. New York: Sheldon and Co. Cromwell, P., Olson, J., & Avary, D. (1996). Who buys stolen property? A new look at criminal receiving. In P. Cromwell (Ed.), In their own words: Criminal on crime (pp. 47–56). Los Angeles: Roxbury. Hall, J. (1952). Theft, law, and society (2nd ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Klockars, C. (1974). The professional fence. New York: Free Press. Matsueda, R. L., Piliavin, I., Gartner, R., & Polakowski, M. (1992). The prestige of criminal and conventional occupations: A subcultural model of criminal activity. American Sociological Review, 57, 752–770. Steffensmeier, D. J. (1986). The fence: In the shadow of two worlds. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Steffensmeier, D. J., & Ulmer, J. T. (2005). Confessions of a dying thief: Understanding criminal careers and criminal enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Steffensmeier, D. J., & Ulmer, J. T. (2006). Black and white control of numbers banking in black communities, 1970–2000. American Sociological Review, 71, 123–156. Ulmer, J. T. (2000). Commitment, deviance, and social control. Sociological Quarterly, 41, 315–336.

Stinchcombe, Arthur L.: Rebellion in a High School In the classic study Rebellion in a High School, Arthur L. Stinchcombe presents his theory of

894

Stinchcombe, Arthur L.: Rebellion in a High School

expressive alienation, which he defines as the psychological attitude that underlies rebellious behavior. The work has helped criminologists understand deviance and rebellious behavior among adolescents in high school. Strain theorists Robert Merton and Albert Cohen influenced Stinchcombe, whose work contributes to an understanding of youth delinquency, particularly in schools. Stinchcombe describes in detail the main tenets of expressive alienation, and he highlights the structural, cultural, and psychological underpinnings of this attitude.

Study and Method Rebellion in a High School presents the results of a study that was completed in a California high school with approximately 1,600 students. The school was located in a logging and sawmill town. Stinchcombe completed 6 months of anthropological observation followed by a survey of the student population. Seventy questions measured attitudes toward the school and toward future careers and also assessed levels of deviance and rebelliousness.

Rebellion and Expressive Alienation Stinchcombe defines rebellion as a form of deviance. As such, it cannot occur without the prior existence of a norm. School authorities determine school norms pertaining to processes such as attendance, participation, and assignments. Stinchcombe measures rebellion with an index of three indicators: skipping school with a gang of kids, receiving a flunk notice in a non-college-prepatory class, and/ or being sent out of class by a teacher (p. 12). Stinchcombe highlights three main sources of expressive alienation. The first of these is social structural. Rebels perceive a low degree of articulation between future status and the present activity in the school. In other words, from the perspective of the student, school activities do not seem to prepare them for future jobs. For example, future manual workers are alienated by school because it does not teach them the skills that they will need in the labor market. The second source of expressive alienation is cultural. Rebels do not identify with the system of symbols that are used by adults to describe adolescents; they identify with adult symbols related to

their class perspective. For example, for students who are bound for the bureaucratic and professional labor market, good grades and respect from teachers are self-affirming. Alternatively, future working-class laborers and housewives look to dating, smoking, and car ownership to evaluate both current and future status. The third source is psychological. Rebels have internalized the system of success—the rewards and privileges that govern both the school and the professional labor market. However, they do not possess the means to achieve middle-class jobs, and so they reject the social world that evaluates them in terms of middle-class success. As a result, expressive alienation replaces the success orientation.

Attitudinal Manifestations The psychological state of expressive alienation has four attitudinal manifestations. The first state is short-run hedonism. For hedonists, “the world is interpreted as a place in which it does not pay to sacrifice existing pleasures for uncertain goals. . . . [It is] indicated by an inclination not to see the connection between work and future rewards” (pp. 17–19). A primary indicator of short-run hedonism was boredom in class. The second state is negativism. Negativism is an attitude that rejects all conforming behavior and all moral attachment to legitimate institutions. Conformists and people with attachments to legitimate institutions are rejected and disrespected. This attitude was most common in rebels who reported a combination of the indicators of rebellion (i.e., skipping and flunking, being sent out and skipping). The third state is alienation from the status system. Inherent in any formal organization is a status system established by authorities. A status system involves (1) a group of judges, (2) a set of standards, (3) a recognized process according to which people present themselves for judgment, (4) a set of arrangements by which the judges receive information on which to base judgment, and (5) a set of status rewards allocated by judges (pp. 26–27). A rebel is alienated from the status system when any or several of these elements are, or appear to be, unfair or illegitimate. In addition to the status system that the authorities impose is the one that students use to rank among themselves. Rebels are more alienated from both the authoritative status

Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes

system of the school and the status system of the student community. The fourth state is autonomy. Rebels deny the morality of the school. The status system in the school is considered to be illegitimate and a demand for autonomy is a positive moral claim against the school. In many cases, autonomy can be found in a delinquent clique or subculture which defines itself in opposition to the school and its systems of meaning. This solidarity can be used to garner rights in the adult community with which rebels identify. “The delinquent subculture, then, claims for adolescents the personal autonomy ordinarily associated with adulthood” (p. 41).

Conclusion Stinchcombe’s distinctive contribution is the “expressive alienation” concept. Expressive alienation results from the structure of the school and explains adolescent rebellion in terms of alienation from adult authorities. Importantly, it is the anticipated social class of students—as opposed to the social class of parents—that explains rebellious behavior and the underlying expressive alienation attitude. Expressive alienation is a response to what many criminologists call “strain” and anticipated Robert Agnew’s contribution to strain theory, where crime and deviance are not necessarily tied to class or culture, but are responses to self-generated norms based on perceived failure, actual or anticipated. Cathy Borck See also Agnew, Robert: General Strain Theory; Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin: Delinquency and Opportunity; Cohen, Albert K.: Delinquent Boys; Merton, Robert K.: Social Structure and Anomie; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

References and Further Readings Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a General Strain Theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30, 47–87. Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. New York: Free Press. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3, 672–682. Stinchcombe, A. L. (1964). Rebellion in a high school. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

895

Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes A normal crime is a crime in which the features of the criminal and the features of the crime align in such a way to fit preconceived notions about who commits what crimes and how. As opposed to stereotypes of crimes and criminals, the system of normal crimes is organized around the penal codes and formal classifications of crimes, as well as around the routine experiences of those who use the codes to organize their everyday work—namely those involved in the criminal justice system. This system of conceptions of crimes and schemas of criminal behavior then organize the behavior of those in the judicial system. The concept of the normal crime, as first described by David Sudnow in his classic 1965 article in Social Problems, “Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the Penal Code in a Public Defender Office,” has been adopted into a wide variety of criminological and sociological understandings of routine court activity and other arenas where a “typical” expectation is taken among many, sometimes competing, actors.

Normal Crimes in the Public Defender Office In this study of meaning and practice in a public defender’s office, Sudnow demonstrates how crimes and criminals become “normal” and how the designation of normal affects the way in which the various constituents of the court community act toward a given case. In this analysis, he engages in dialogue with two groups of criminologists and sociologists who critique the ways in which penal codes are analyzed in research. The first group, which he terms the revisionist perspective, seeks to create categories of crimes that are enriched by information about motive and background on the criminal. The second group, with which he initially aligns himself, seeks to understand penal codes as the way in which the workers of the criminal justice environment orient themselves toward their work. Critiquing this second perspective as “more promissory than productive,” Sudnow wants to expand on John Kitsuse and Aaron Cicourel’s position regarding how to use official statistics and understand how legal officials use criminal codes in their daily work.

896

Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes

To understand the everyday meanings of the penal code, Sudnow analyzes the practices of the public defender’s office. In his county of analysis, over 80 percent of cases are pled out, whereby defenders settled the case by pleading guilty instead of going to trial. The defenders usually plead guilty to charges that are lesser than the charges with which they were originally charged, lesser here implying a shorter or more lenient sentence. Often, however, these lesser charges are neither “necessarily included lesser offense” nor explicitly “situationally included lesser offense.” Necessarily included charges are those that are implicit in the greater charge; assault with a deadly weapon, for example, necessarily includes the lesser charges of weapons possession and simple assault. Situationally included charges are those that are committed by the way in which the greater charge occurred; Sudnow uses the example of a child molestation situationally being associated with an adult loitering in a school yard. It is not necessary to the crime of child molestation that an adult loiter in a school yard, but instead it is a common way in which child molesters find their victims. In this example of the child molestation charge and the lesser charge of loitering in a school yard, Sudnow found that many cases of molestation were pled down to the loitering charge regardless of the mode of the molestation. The defendant may or may not have been in or around a schoolyard before, during, or after the crime occurred, but because loitering is a typical feature of such a crime, it became an expected lesser charge when pleading down molestation charges. While loitering might be a situationally included lesser charge of child molestation, it might be a part of the plea despite the actual facts of the crime, that is, whether or not the offender did loiter in a school yard. Sometimes, however, the lesser charges are merely potentially related to the crime, and could be a lesser charge related to a necessarily included charge. Burglary does not always necessarily include theft, though petty theft is often the lesser charge for burglary; child molestation does not always situationally derive from loitering, though loitering is often a lesser charge for molestation. Sudnow seeks to answer why some situationally included, or potentially necessarily included, but factually inaccurate charges, become the lesser plea. The first part of this answer is that the actors involved in the criminal court, specifically public defenders, have mutually come to a schema of who

commits certain crimes. The background of a person—including race, class, gender, education level, and criminal record—combines with the kind of crime and patterns in the ways those crimes are typically committed to produce an expected template of criminal and crime. As Sudnow states, “I shall call normal crimes those occurrences whose typical features . . . are known and attended to by the [public defender’s office] for any of a series of offense types the [public defender’s office] can provide some form of proverbial characterization” (1965, p. 260, emphasis in the original). There are six components of this concept: (1) a focus on characterizations of offense types, (2) the features attributed to offenders and offenses are not important for the type of charge but factor into the plea arrangements, (3) those features are specific to the community in which the public defender operates, (4) routine offenses constitute the normal type of crime, (5) geographic and socio-economic variables play into the status of normal crime, and (6) mastery of what is considered a normal crime is an important part of the socialization of the public defender. The second part of Sudnow’s answer as to why factually inaccurate charges end up being the charge to which an offender pleads guilty focuses on the practices of the public defenders and their relationship to other members of the criminal court community. Public defenders have a series of goals, usually in line with the goals of the prosecutors, judges, police, and so on. Their goal is not to prove the innocence of their clients, nor even to provide good defense at trial. Instead, the mutual goals of public defenders and prosecutors are to avoid trial and get a guilty plea out of the offender, all while making sure the offender is somehow held accountable for his or her actions while not making punishment so onerous as to cause the offender to reject the plea deal. The scheme for normal crimes thus guides what is an acceptable offer of a plea bargain, as each crime has a typical lesser charge depending on whether or not the offender fits a given profile of a typical criminal. Sudnow shows how a public defender might delineate between a regular criminal and a crime of opportunity in deciding which type of normal crime was committed, and thus for which lesser charge to bargain. Beyond the schemas for normal crimes, then, the practices of the public defenders show how normal crimes are socially constructed and deployed in

Sudnow, David: Normal Crimes

interactions. Sudnow analyzes the routine of the public defender regarding each case. First, the defender meets with the accused in the jail. Each defender might meet with any number of clients on a given day. During this brief encounter, the defender asks the client for his or her version of the events. Based on the kinds of questions asked by the defender, it is clear to Sudnow that the defender presumes guilt on the part of the client. The goal of the defender is to determine the facts of the case only to determine the kind of normal crime that occurred; the defender is uninterested in pursuing a plea of innocence. Sudnow cites an example of a defender asking a man accused of child molestation as to the mode of the crime, despite the man’s denial that he had abused the child. His goal is to determine whether a plea for loitering is appropriate or not, as Sudnow describes two types of normal child molestation (familial and stranger) and the defender’s goal of determining which kind of normal molestation the crime fits. Typically, however, most of those clues are in the original charges filed by the district attorney and supporting police evidence. After the first interview, the defender will primarily deal with the defendant in court, with very little contact outside of court. In the courtroom, the defender is a routine actor, to the extent that the defense table becomes the defender’s own desk. In Sudnow’s court of study, the public defender’s office assigned different defenders to different situations: some attended to the first interview, while others handled the pleas, and still others handled sentencing. Typically, a defendant would see at least two different defenders, and the preparation for the case for each defender would come from the sometimes paltry case file. The importance of having a shared conception of what to expect from a given situation is, therefore, important, because it helps to align the actions of the different defenders across the same case as well as the same defender across what are seen to be similar cases. The plea bargaining process is quite routinized, based upon the shared goals of the defender and the prosecutors and the shared conceptions of normal crimes. Typically, the defender and the prosecutor will meet informally to discuss the plea bargain, but in normal situations, this is very brief. The prosecutor and defender are thus a kind of team, working backstage to coordinate their actions in an efficient manner with the front-stage appearance of justice served.

897

Since most of the cases that are dealt with by public defenders are pled out, the cases that do go to trial are considered exceptional. Sudnow identifies two cases in which this happens: the case is not a normal crime or the defendant is “stubborn.” The first situation is quite rare; because public defenders are only dealing with indigent clients, many of whom have criminal records already, the atypical criminal or crime rarely appears on their docket. Atypical crimes are crimes where the typical features do not align in some way. This could be because of the particular kind of crime, in its scale or heinousness, or the attention of the public on the outcome of the case. A guilty plea, in this case, would undermine the morality of the district attorney’s office and the overall judicial system; to avoid this, a trial is held. In contrast, most of the trials encountered by the public defender are cases of the stubborn defendant, one who refuses to plead guilty to a lesser charge and maintains his or her innocence. In this instance, a defender is obligated to go to trial in order to continue to cover for the backstage nature of the plea bargain. Were a defender to go directly to a prosecutor with a plea that the defendant later rejected in open court, the entire system of plea bargaining might be revealed to public scrutiny. While a public defender tries to convince the client to plea to a lesser charge, this does not always work. In either trial situation, however, the public defender must change position regarding the prosecutor and perform the duties of a defense attorney. The public defender’s behavior in each trial, however, can be very different. For the normal crime with a stubborn defendant, the defender plays the part of a dutiful but compliant attorney. While the defender may object when called for and cross-examine witnesses, the defender does not introduce evidence or witnesses himself or herself, nor does he or she take great pains to attend to the client’s version of events. Instead, the defender does just enough defense work to avoid a mistrial or grounds for appeal. The defender is still complying with the system of shared conception of normal crimes and the presumed guilt of the defendant. In the case of an exceptional, non-normal crime, however, the public defender must drastically change the performance and, due to greater public scrutiny of his or her behavior, act as if in opposition to the prosecutor’s stance. This is not done because the

898

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

underlying assumptions about the crime or criminal have changed, but because of the nature of the backstage operation between the defenders and prosecutors that keep the routine judicial system running that might be exposed through deviations from that routine. Kate Jenkins See also Becker, Howard S.: Labeling and Deviant Careers; Spector, Malcolm, and John I. Kitsuse: Constructing Social Problems; Vaughn, Diane: The Normalization of Deviance

differential social organization as well as current areas of research in which it is being used.

Differential Association Theory Sutherland stated differential association theory as a set of nine propositions, which introduced three concepts—normative conflict, differential association, and differential group organization—that explain crime at the levels of the society, the individual, and the group. This section discusses relationships among these concepts, drawing from Ross L. Matsueda’s “The Current State of Differential Association Theory.”

References and Further Readings Kitsuse, J. I., & Cicourel, A. V. (1963). A note on the official use of statistics. Social Problems, 11, 131–139. Sudnow, D. (1965). Normal crimes: Sociological features of the penal code in a public defender office. Social Problems, 12, 255–276. Sudnow, D. (1967). Passing on: The social organization of dying. New York: Prentice Hall.

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization Edwin Sutherland’s development of differential association theory in 1947 marked a watershed in criminology. The theory, which dominated the discipline for decades, brought Chicago-style sociology to the forefront of criminology. It is well known that differential association explains individual criminality with a social psychological process of learning crime within interaction with social groups. Less well known is Sutherland’s attempt to explain aggregate crime rates across groups and societies. Here, he specified the theory of differential social organization to explain rates of crime with an organizational process that implies group dynamics. This entry reviews Sutherland’s theory of differential association, discusses attempts at revision, and assesses the empirical status of the theory. It also examines recent attempts to revisit and elaborate the concept of

Normative Conflict: The Root Cause of Crime in Society

At the societal level, crime is rooted in normative conflict. For Sutherland, primitive, undifferentiated societies are characterized by harmony, solidarity, and consensus over basic values and beliefs. Such societies have little conflict over appropriate behaviors and, consequently, little crime. With the industrial revolution, however, societies developed advanced divisions of labor, market economies, and a breakdown in consensus. Such societies become segmented into groups that conflict over interests, values, and behavior patterns. These societies are characterized by specialization rather than similarity, coercion rather than harmony, conflict rather than consensus. They tend to have high rates of crime. Sutherland hypothesized that high crime rates are associated with normative conflict, which he defined as a society segmented into groups that conflict over the appropriateness of the law: some groups define the law as a set of rules to be followed under all circumstances, while others define the law as a set of rules to be violated under certain circumstances. Therefore, when normative conflict is absent in a society, crime rates will be low; when normative conflict is high, societal crime rates will be high. In this way, crime is ultimately rooted in normative conflict, according to Sutherland and Donald Cressey. Differential Association Process: Explanation of Individual Criminal Acts

At the level of the individual, the process of differential association provides a social psychological

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

explanation of how normative conflict in society translates into individual criminal acts. Accordingly, criminal behavior is learned in a process of communication in intimate groups. The content of learning includes two important elements. First are the requisite skills and techniques for committing crime, which can range from complicated, specialized skills of computer fraud, insider trading, and confidence games, to the simple, readily available skills of assault, purse snatching, and drunk driving. Such techniques are necessary but insufficient to produce crime. Second are definitions favorable and unfavorable to crime, which consist of motives, verbalizations, or rationalizations that make crime justified or unjustified, and include Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s techniques of neutralization. For example, definitions favorable to income tax fraud include “Everyone cheats on their taxes” and “The government has no right to tax its citizens.” Definitions favorable to drunk driving include “I can drive fine after a few beers” and “I only have a couple of miles to drive home.” Definitions favorable to violence include “If your manhood is threatened, you have to fight back” and “To maintain respect, you can never back down from a fight.” These definitions favorable to crime help organize and justify a criminal line of action in a particular situation. They are offset by definitions unfavorable to crime, such as “Tax fraud deprives Americans of important programs that benefit the commonwealth,” “All fraud and theft is immoral,” “If insulted, turn the other cheek,” “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive,” and “Any violation of the law is wrong.” These examples illustrate several points about definitions of crime. First, some definitions pertain to specific offenses only, such as “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive,” whereas others refer to a class of offenses, such as “All fraud and theft is immoral,” and others refer to virtually all law violation, such as “Any violation of the law is wrong.” Second, each definition serves to justify or motivate either committing criminal acts or refraining from criminal acts. Third, these definitions are not merely ex-post facto rationalizations of crime but rather operate to cause criminal behavior. Sutherland recognized that definitions favorable to crime can be offset by definitions unfavorable to crime and, therefore, hypothesized that criminal behavior is determined by the ratio of definitions

899

favorable to crime versus unfavorable to crime. Furthermore, he recognized that definitions are not all equal. Definitions that are presented more frequently, for a longer duration, earlier in one’s life, and in more intense relationships receive more weight in the process producing crime. The individual-level hypothesis of differential association theory can now be stated. According to Matsueda, a person will engage in criminal behavior if the following three conditions are met: 1. The person has learned the requisite skills and techniques for committing crime. 2. The person has learned an excess of definitions favorable to crime over unfavorable to crime. 3. The person has the objective opportunity to carry out the crime.

According to Sutherland, if all three conditions are present and crime does not occur, or a crime occurs in the absence of all three conditions, the theory would be wrong and in need of revision. Thus, in principle, the theory is falsifiable. The process of differential association with definitions favorable and unfavorable to crime is structured by the broader social organization in which individuals are embedded. This includes the structures and organization of families, neighborhoods, schools, and labor markets. This organization is captured by the concept of differential social organization. Differential Social Organization Explanation of Group Rates of Crime

At the level of the group, differential social organization provides an organizational explanation of how normative conflict in society translates into specific group rates of crime. According to differential social organization, the crime rate of a group is determined by the extent to which that group is organized against crime versus organized in favor of crime. In industrialized societies, the two forms of organization exist side by side— and indeed are sometimes interwoven in complex ways, such as when police take bribes and participate in organized extortion, or baseball players take steroids in full view of teammates. Sutherland hypothesized that the relative strength of organization in favor of crime versus organization

900

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

against crime explains the crime rate of any group or society. Thus, compared to suburban neighborhoods, inner-city neighborhoods are weakly organized against street crimes and strongly organized in favor of such crimes. Compared to other groups, the Mafia is strongly organized in favor of crime and weakly organized against crime. Compared to the United States, Japan is strongly organized against crime and weakly organized in favor of crime. Moreover, the group-level process of differential social organization is linked to the individual-level process of differential association. Groups that are strongly organized in favor of crime display numerous and intense definitions favorable to crime. Conversely, groups that are strongly organized against crime display numerous and intense definitions unfavorable to crime. Matsueda suggests that it follows that differential social organization explains group crimes rate by influencing the availability of definitions favorable and unfavorable to crime within the group. When groups are strongly organized in favor of crime and weakly organized against crime, they will present an abundance of definitions favorable to crime and few definitions unfavorable to crime. Individuals in such groups have a high probability of learning an excess of definitions of crime. Whether they do, depends on their actual learning. Even in high crime communities, some residents are isolated from the abundant criminal definitions and exposed to the few anticriminal definitions in the community. Those residents will refrain from crime because of an excess of definitions unfavorable to crime. The opposite also holds. In low-crime communities, some residents are exposed to the few criminal definitions in the community, and isolated from the abundant anti-criminal definitions. Given the opportunity and skills, they will engage in crime because of an excess of definitions favorable to crime.

in which individuals identify with either criminals or non-criminals, and differential anticipation, in which individuals anticipate the consequences of delinquent or non-delinquent behavior. Perhaps the most elaborate revision is associated with Ronald Akers, who incorporated social learning principles into the theory, which posits that crime is initially learned through direct imitation or modeling. Then, the probability of continuing criminal behavior is determined by differential reinforcement, the relative rewards and punishments following the act. Reinforcement can be direct or vicarious, whereby simply observing another’s criminal behavior being reinforced will reinforce one’s own criminal behavior. Definitions of crime are learned through this process and affect behavior directly, as well as indirectly by serving as cues (discriminative stimuli) for law violation. A more recent extension of differential association theory, proposed by Karen Heimer and Matsueda in 1994, incorporates the symbolic interactionist concept of taking the role of the other as a link between group control, cognition, and behavior. Here, taking the role of significant others and considering delinquency from the standpoint of others is a cognitive process by which anticipated reactions of others, reflected appraisals of self from the standpoint of others (the looking-glass self), and delinquent peer associations (along with habits) lead to future delinquency. Such processes produce group social control of both delinquent and non-delinquent acts; delinquency is a result of differential social control, the relative strength of conventional versus delinquent group controls. Differential social control specifies specific mechanisms by which groups control the behavior of members, while retaining Sutherland’s emphasis on the learning of delinquency and the importance of definitions of law violation.

Extensions and Empirical Tests of Differential Association

Empirical studies of differential association generally use self-report surveys of adolescents and young adults. A key issue is how to measure an excess of definitions favorable to crime, a prerequisite for testing the theory. Long ago, Matsueda argued that if definitions of law violation can be viewed as a single continuum, they can be treated as a latent variable with operational implications for fallible survey measures of definitions. This strategy

Extensions

Although the core features of differential association theory have persisted to the present, the theory has undergone several modifications and extensions. Early attempts to modify the theory specified hypotheses of differential identification,

Empirical Tests

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

found that definitions of delinquency mediated effects of parent and peer attachment on delinquent behavior, and therefore that differential association is supported over social control theories for nonblack (Matsueda, 1982) and black youths (Matsueda & Heimer, 1987). Panel studies have also supported the hypothesis that definitions are causally linked to delinquency and violence for males and females (Heimer & DeCoster, 1999) and that techniques for monetary crimes are important (McCarthy, 1996). Empirical research has also found some support for the hypothesis that differential reinforcement adds explanatory power in models of delinquency. The concepts of imitation and anticipated social rewards from crime appear to add to the explanation of delinquency. Finally, recent research suggests that delinquent peer association has a smaller effect on delinquency when estimated longitudinally, when disentangling peer selection from peer effects, and when measuring delinquent peers from the peers themselves. Dana Haynie has linked differential association to social network theory and found that network density and centrality of delinquent peer groups are key predictors of delinquency. In sum, most empirical research finds general support for differential association and social learning theories.

Specifying Theoretical Mechanisms for Differential Social Organization Sutherland spent considerable time refining his individual-level theory of differential association, but devoted less time to his more sociological theory of differential social organization, which consequently never progressed beyond its original rudimentary form. In 2006, Matsueda tried to resurrect the concept of differential social organization, pointing to a little-known chapter Sutherland wrote on wartime crime—in which he identifies a number of mechanisms by which social organization may affect crime rates during war—and developing the dynamic collective action implications of the theory. This discussion draws from that work. The concept of differential social organization, like social organization more generally, can be separated into two analytically distinct forms. From the standpoint of a snapshot or cross-section, social organization consists of structures, including social network ties, norms and sanctions, consensus versus

901

conflict, and access to resources. Here, the extent to which those structures are used for crime versus used to combat crime determines the instantaneous distribution of crime. From the standpoint of a dynamic process over time, social organization consists of collective action, social change, and the process by which consensus and conflict are built up. The latter process has been largely ignored in the criminology literature on social organization and crime. Nevertheless, the role of collective action can be inferred from Sutherland’s own words, when he wrote that organization against crime and in favor of crime consist of two principal elements: “consensus in regard to objectives and in implementation for the realization of objectives” ([1943]1973, p. 126). In other words, such organization is the result of collective action, and it entails building consensus over a problematic situation and then translating that consensus into action. The Structure of Social Network Ties

If we first consider differential social organization cross-sectionally, a key element is the structure of network ties. James Coleman argued that closed network structures enable greater social capital and social control. Imagine a diagram of a triangle, with points A, B, and C at each corner. In this diagram of an open structure, points A and B are linked by a line (or side) to C, but not connected to each other. This would be like a triangle in which two sides are connected but not the third. In this situation, A and B can independently and additively influence C by using individual sanctions, developing trust, establishing norms, using moral persuasion, and the like. But they cannot engage in joint behavior because they lack social ties. Now imagine another figure in which all sides of a triangle are connected. In this diagram of a closed structure, points A and B are linked not only to C but also to each other. As a result, they not only can influence C independently, but— because they interact with each other—can jointly (multiplicatively) influence C by developing coordinated strategies, simultaneous sanctions, similar rhetorical arguments, and the like. Coleman gives a second example of parents and children. In an open structure, the two children are friends but their parents do not know one another. In a closed structure, not only do the children know one another but the parents are

902

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

also friends. In the open structure, the parent can only influence their own child’s behavior. But in the closed structure, because the parents know one another, they can now work collectively to control or influence all the children. Thus, they can monitor each others’ children, call each other, and coordinate their punitive strategies, rhetorical arguments, and so on. Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls find support for the hypothesis that intergenerational closure, as an element of neighborhood collective efficacy, is negatively associated with neighborhood rates of violence. The Strength of Weak Ties

Closed structures tend to form dense networks of like-minded actors because assortative matching is typically based on homophily, which creates close relationships among similar individuals. Strong ties within a homogenous group not only encourage conformity but also lead to the circulation and recirculation of similar ideas. Such groups will tend to be stable and have strong internal social control—through shared information, consensus over goals, and strong norms and sanctions. On the down side, the group’s homogeneity and closed structure will cause it to be rigid, lack cognitive flexibility, and have difficulty adjusting to changes in the environment. In contrast, groups that are not entirely closed, but have weak ties to other groups, will benefit from information flows between groups through bridging ties. The information flowing across the bridge will expose members of each group to novel ideas, since it is coming from a set of comparatively dissimilar individuals. Mark Granovetter argues that weak ties provide group members with information on the latest ideas, fashions, and job openings, as well as increasing the likelihood of members being organized into social movements. Conversely, the absence of weak ties not only isolates members but also presents obstacles to building a critical mass necessary to produce a political movement or goal-oriented social organization. Such structures provide a basis for theorizing about organization for and against crime. For residents of affluent neighborhoods, who enjoy regular employment, good incomes, and sufficient time and resources to address local problems

(e.g., delinquency), a mix of strong and weak ties is empowering. Strong ties enable such residents to reach consensus about shared problems, agree on promising solutions, and work collectively to try out such solutions. Weak ties to outsiders enable them to introduce innovative solutions by providing fresh ideas and information, and to draw directly on ties to outside social agencies. For residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods, high rates of residential mobility, poverty, and lack of time and resources undermine their ability to reach consensus about crime control beyond the kinship network, identify novel ways of controlling crime, link to other agencies, and act collectively. Moreover, in such neighborhoods, disadvantaged youths, who have high rates of school failure and bleak labor market trajectories, have a strong incentive to develop alternate ways of gaining status, perhaps in illicit ways. Such innovation may be more likely when the group of disadvantaged youths have weak ties to other disadvantaged groups who share the same objective situation. To link these structures to instrumental action, we turn to theories of collective action. Collective Action Frames

Structures of network ties, political opportunities, and institutional support help explain opportunity structures for collective action but have little to say about the moment-to-moment dynamics of emerging collective action and, in particular, about how the framing of grievances may foster social movements. David Snow and Robert Benford argue that individuals actively produce, maintain, and fight for meanings about issues they hold dear by using collective action frames, which are emergent beliefs and meanings that foster social movements by framing a problematic situation as calling for an action-­oriented collective solution. The process of frame alignment—linking the interpretive frameworks of individuals and social movement organizations—is the key task for social movement organizers. Moreover, collective action frames are more effective when they define the problem and its solution collectively rather than individually, define the opposition as them versus us, and define an injustice that can be corrected through collective action. Collective action frames can help us understand the dynamics of differential social organization.

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

Effective collective action frames can be instrumental for concerned residents to mobilize their neighbors to create neighborhood watches, assist in supervising children, and contact law enforcement to create a safer neighborhood. This form of organization against crime, of course, requires the existence of social network ties—including strong and weak ties. In the case of neighborhood collective efficacy, residents use a neighborhood frame, in which they draw upon values of a safe and clean neighborhood, appeal to neighborhood pride, and create collective identities as neighbors, and an anti-crime frame, which emphasizes the evils of delinquency, drugs, and misbehavior. Collective action frames may also contribute to organization in favor of crime. One can speak of a street frame that is used to make sense of situations on the streets of inner-city impoverished neighborhoods. Like other frames, street frames contain vocabularies of motive, rules, and tacit sanctions for violating rules. Elijah Anderson has identified the dimensions of rules or norms within the street frame. The most fundamental norm is “never back down from a fight.” Violations of this rule will result in a loss of street credibility, social standing, and self-esteem, and an increase in the likelihood of being preyed upon in the future. Status on the street is achieved by demonstrating “nerve”—a willingness to express disrespect for other males by getting in their face, throwing the first punch, pulling the trigger, messing with their women—which builds a reputation for “being a man.” Moreover, the phrase, “I got your back,” implies that street youths will protect friends and loved ones from insult, disrespect, or attack from others. Indeed, an insult or assault on one’s “crew” calls for revenge or payback. Finally, decent youths, not just street youths, have an incentive to learn the tenets of the code of the street. Ignorance of the code may provoke a violent confrontation by staring too long at a street youth, stepping on someone’s toe, or failing to project a look of someone not to be messed with. The street frame is available on the streets to use instrumentally to incite collective action, maintain a sense of honor, and gain respect and status. For example, knowing the tenets of the frame, youths in search of a reputation seek to increase their status by “campaigning for respect”—by challenging, humiliating, or assaulting others, and disrespecting them by stealing their material possessions or

903

girlfriends. When a member of a group is disrespected or assaulted, other members need only invoke the street frame, with its attendant rules, motives, and sanctions, to mobilize the group to exact payback. Social Efficacy: The Intersection of Structural Networks and Collective Action

Individuals will vary not only in the value they place on safety or criminality but, more importantly, in their own ability to persuade others to pursue an objective. In this context, social efficacy is defined as an individual’s ability to create consensus over group objectives and procedures and to translate the procedures into action. Such individuals use higher stages of moral reasoning to consider not merely the parochial issues that affect their own self-interest but also the community as a whole, including the way in which various roles operate within the neighborhood and between the neighborhood and relevant institutions. They would likely be capable of code-switching. Social efficacy is a more specific application of Albert Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy, which refers to “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives” (p. 71). Social efficacy refers to an objective ability to organize social groups to realize a common goal, rather than a perceived belief about one’s capability to produce general effects important to one’s life (Matsueda, 2006). The way in which an efficacious individual is embedded in a neighborhood’s social relationships may be critical for collective efficacy. For example, in a network highly centralized around a well-­connected hub (a node with high degree centrality and between-ness centrality), if the hub is occupied by a socially efficacious individual (who values the neighborhood), the neighborhood’s structure is conducive to collective efficacy. With social ties to nearly all residents, the socially efficacious hub is in a position to mobilize residents to improve the neighborhood. In contrast, in an identical neighborhood network structure, but with an inefficacious hub, the presence of efficacious residents on the network’s periphery is unable to compensate for the inefficacious hub. This is because their structural location limits their ability to mobilize their neighbors. Social

904

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

efficacy can also be crucial to organization in favor of crime: gang leaders may be particularly effective, structurally and personally, in mobilizing street youths into gang membership and violence. It may also be crucial for genocide, to which we now turn. Differential Social Organization and Genocide in Darfur

John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s provocative theory of genocide draws on differential social organization viewed dynamically, in which access to resources, collective action frames, and social efficacy play key roles (Matsueda, 2006). The authors focus on organization in favor of crime and specify a multilevel model, in which a macro-level relationship is explained by a microlevel causal process. They argue that, at the macrolevel, the Sudanese genocidal state is a function of two intersecting events: competition for land and resources between Arabs and black Africans and a state-led pro-Arab ideology emphasizing the supremacy of Arab Muslims over African Muslims. The macro-level constructs, competition and ideology, produce two conflicting, meso-level, locally organized interest groups—Arabs and black Africans. According to Hagan and RymondRichmond, individual members of the Arab groups, having internalized the racist ideology, engage in violent acts accompanied by dehumanizing racial epithets—micro-level purposive action consistent with their interests in the competition for land and resources. The authors show that the racial epithets derived from the collective action frames dehumanize Africans in stark and disturbing terms. Moreover, such individual actions coalesce into collective action, including collective violence, rape, and other atrocities, justified by a collectivized racial intent, culminating into a “fanatical fury.” This collective action, which occurs not only with the tacit knowledge, but also active participation of the Sudanese state, creates widespread genocidal victimization. Hagan and Rymond-Richmond creatively use the concept of social efficacy to explain the crucial role of Janjaweed militia leaders in fostering collective acts of genocide. These military leaders, particularly Musa Hilal, are already in positions of authority, well-networked, and skilled leaders. The term social

efficacy refers to a person whose social skills and location in the social structure—a network node— make the individual particularly adroit at mobilizing others into action (Matsueda, 2006). The military leaders prove instrumental in mobilizing Arab militia and, in particular, in promoting a racist collective action frame to justify mass killings, rapes, and other atrocities. Hagan and Rymond-Richmond analyze survey data on Darfur, finding strong support for their multilevel theory of genocide. Differential Neighborhood Organization

Recent research has applied differential social organization to neighborhood social control. Robert Sampson and Corina Graif analyze survey data for Chicago and cluster analyze communitylevel indicators of collective efficacy, local networks, organizational involvement, and conduct norms, and leadership-based social capital—the latter, which identifies positional leaders, taps into the concept of social efficacy (although they do not use the term). They then apply multidimensional scaling to cluster communities based on indices of differential social organization into distinct clusters of communities (urban village, cosmopolitan efficacy, conduct norms, and institutional alienation), and then regress the clusters on neighborhood structure. They find that neighborhood disadvantage is negatively associated with collective efficacy and organizational involvement and positively associated with leadership capital, and that residential stability is positively associated with local networks conduct norms, organizational involvement, and leadership-based capital. Elsewhere, Matsueda has specified a multilevel model of differential social organization, in which individual investments in social capital (e.g., reciprocated exchange) follow a rational choice process (Matsueda, in press). Social capital, in turn, results in positive externalities for the community, such as providing social capital that translates into collective efficacy, a form of organization against crime, and negative externalities, such as providing social capital that translates into a social system governed by the code of the street, a form of organization in favor of crime. This framework raises additional questions, such as coordination problems (e.g., the free-rider problem), the origin of norms and sanctions, and solutions based on game theory.

Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

Conclusion Differential association theory remains an important theoretical perspective in criminology, continuing to stimulate empirical research and attempts at revision. Although historically most research has focused on the individual differential association process, the last few years has seen a resurgence of interest in the sociological counterpart, differential social organization. The latter has opened new puzzles and provided a framework for incorporating sociological mechanisms governing social structure and social organization. Ross L. Matsueda See also Akers, Ronald L.: Social Learning Theory; Burgess, Robert L., and Ronald L. Akers: Differential Association-Reinforcement Theory; De Fleur, Melvin L., and Richard Quinney: A Reformulation of Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory; Heimer, Karen, and Ross L. Matsueda: A Theory of Differential Social Control; Peers and Delinquency; Sampson, Robert J.: Collective Efficacy Theory; Sellin, Thorsten: Culture Conflict and Crime; Shaw, Clifford R., and Henry D. McKay: Social Disorganization Theory; Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief; Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

References and Further Readings Akers, R. L. (1998). Social learning and social structure: A general theory of crime and deviance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence and the moral life of the inner city. New York: W. W. Norton. Bandura, A. (1994). Self efficacy. In V. S. Ramachaudran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 71–81). New York: Academic Press. Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glaser, D. (1956). Criminality theories and behavioral images. American Journal of Sociology, 61, 433–444. Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380. Hagan, J., & Rymond-Richmond, W. (2009). Darfur and the crime of genocide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

905

Haynie, D. (2001). Delinquent peers revisited: Does network structure matter? American Journal of Sociology, 106, 1013–1057. Heimer, K., & De Coster, S. (1999). The gendering of violent delinquency. Criminology, 37, 277–318. Heimer, K., & Matsueda, R. L. (1994). Role-taking, rolecommitment, and delinquency: A theory of differential social control. American Sociological Review, 59, 365–390. Kubrin, C. E., Stucky, T. D., & Krohn, M. D. (2009). Researching theories of crime and deviance. New York: Oxford University Press. Matsueda, R. L. (1982). Testing control theory and differential association: A causal modeling approach. American Sociological Review, 47, 489–504. Matsueda, R. L. (1988). The current state of differential association theory. Crime and Delinquency, 34, 277–306. Matsueda, R. L. (2006). Differential social organization, collective action, and crime. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 46, 3–33. Matsueda, R. L. (in press). Rational choice research in criminology: A multi-level approach. In R. Wittek, T. Snijders, & V. Nee (Eds.), Handbook of rational choice social research. New York: Russell Sage. Matsueda, R. L., & Heimer, K. (1987). Race, family structure, and delinquency: A test of differential association and social control theories. American Sociological Review, 52, 826–840. McCarthy, B. (1996). The attitudes and actions of others: Tutelage and Sutherland’s theory of differential association. British Journal of Criminology, 36, 135–151. Sampson, R. J., & Graif, C. (2009). Neighborhood social capital as differential social organization: Resident and leadership dimensions. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1579–1605. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924. Small, M. L. (2002). Culture, cohorts, and social organization theory: Understanding local participation in a Latino housing project. American Journal of Sociology, 108, 1–54. Snow, D. A., & Benford, R. D. (1992). Master frames and cycles of protest. In A. D. Morris & C. M. Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 133–155). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1947). Principles of criminology (4th ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott.

906

Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

Sutherland, E. H. (1973). Wartime crime. In K. Schuessler (Ed.), Edwin H. Sutherland on analyzing crime (pp. 120–128). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1943) Sutherland, E. H., & Cressey, D. R. (1978). Criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Sutherland, E. H., Cressey, D. R., & Luckenbill, D. F. (1992). Principles of criminology (11th ed.). Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664–670.

speaking ability, manual dexterity, specialization, and contacts is needed to plan and execute crimes, dispose of stolen goods, and manipulate the criminal justice system in those cases involving arrests.

Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

• Differential Association. Professional thieves tend to associate chiefly with other professional thieves and to maintain barriers between themselves and members of “straight” society.

Much of what is known about professional criminals comes from journals, diaries, autobiographies, and first-person accounts given to writers and criminologists. The best-known account of professional theft is Edwin Sutherland’s classic book The Professional Thief. A fascinating glimpse into the underworld of professional thieves and con men, the account is based on the recollections of Broadway Jones, alias Chic Conwell—a thief, ex-drug addict, and ex-con who worked for 20 years as a pickpocket, shoplifter, and confidence man. Conwell’s recollections include details about the roles of members of the mob (a criminal group), their criminal argot (slang) and code (unwritten norms and rules of the thief subculture), the fix (ways of avoiding conviction and/or doing time in prison), and thieves’ images of the police, the law, and society at large.

Sutherland’s Professional Thief Much of the book was actually written by Conwell, but Sutherland edited it for publication and wrote two interpretive chapters. His analysis concluded that professional thievery has five basic features: technical skill, status, consensus, differential association, and organization. • Technical Skill. Professional thieves (like bricklayers, lawyers, and physicians) possess a set of talents and skills. Some combination of wits,

• Status. Like other professionals, the professional thief holds a certain status based on ability, character, lifestyle, wealth, and power. Professional thieves often show contempt for amateur, smalltime, and snatch-and-grab thieves. • Consensus. Professional thieves share similar values and develop a philosophy or rationale regarding their activities and criminal specialty that aids them in their criminal careers.

• Organization. Professional theft is organized in the sense that technical skills, status, consensus, and differential association entail both a core of knowledge informally shared by thieves and a network of cooperation. Sutherland further concludes that the professional thief is a graduate of a developmental process that includes the acquisition of specialized attitudes, knowledge, skills, and experience; makes a regular business of stealing—it is his occupation or a principal means of livelihood; and identifies with the world of crime. The recruitment of persons into professional thievery involves a process of recognition, selection, and tutelage. Recognition by other professional thieves, according to Sutherland, is a necessary and definitive characteristic of the professional thief. Without such recognition, no amount of knowledge and experience can provide the criminal with the opportunities and contacts for a successful career in profit-seeking crime. In turn, after acquiring at least some recognition, selection (e.g., being recruited, vouched for) and tutelage (learning of skills, techniques, and attitudes favorable to theft through informal means) are interrelated and continuous processes in the course of more crime opportunities and advances to greater recognition and commitment to crime as “work” or a “business.” Sutherland and

Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

Conwell view professional theft as an occupation or business with much of the same internal organization and socialization processes as that characterizing legitimate professions like law, medicine, or carpentry. They write, A person can be a professional thief only if he is recognized and received as such by other professional thieves. Professional theft is a way of life. One can get into the group and remain in it only by consent of those previously in the group. Recognition as a professional thief by other professional thieves is the absolutely necessary, universal and definitive characteristic of the professional thief. (Sutherland, 1937, p. 212)

However, some contemporary criminologists have criticized Sutherland’s depiction of professional thieves (circa 1900–1925). Some critics note that in sociology, the concept of “profession” refers to occupations that entail esoteric, useful knowledge after lengthy training, a code of ethics, and a claimed service orientation for which they are granted autonomy of operation and various concomitants such as high prestige and remuneration (Hagan, 1998, p. 294). In this light the term professional may be inappropriately applied to criminal activities and criminals, even very skilled ones. A second criticism is that Sutherland’s treatment restricts professional crime to thieves or hustlers who rely on wit and nonviolent techniques (Steffensmeier & Ulmer, 2005). It excluded criminals involved in “heavy” theft such as truck hijackers, stickup men, arsonists, and “hit” men. Excluded, too, are those practitioners of crime and vice who are involved in the “rackets” and illicit businesses such as bookmakers, dealers in stolen goods, drug traffickers, sex merchants, mafioso, and racketeers and background operators more generally. Many of those involved in these activities fit the elements of “professionalism” enumerated by Sutherland as much or likely more so than did Conwell. Third, it is arguable that many “skilled” criminals are only slightly better than other crooks at lying, cheating, and stealing; labeling them “professionals” should be done carefully. Some criminologists who have studied career criminals suggest alternate terms for those who

907

commit more sophisticated crimes and face a lesser chance of arrest or conviction; for example John Mack suggests able criminal, Neal Shover suggests good thief, and Darrell Steffensmeier suggests seasoned offenders. Still others, such as Frank Hagan, suggest the term semi-professional. Fourth, although many writers (including Sutherland) insert the wording into their reports on crime, the category “professional criminal” is seldom, if ever, applied by criminals themselves. Even seasoned thieves and hustlers do not use the word professional or nonprofessional. Instead, they refer to themselves (or others) as thieves or hustlers; as good thieves, good hustlers, or good people; as aces-in-the-hole, firstclass or decent thieves, wise-guys, and so forth. Nevertheless, thieves are aware of the word’s meaning in the larger society, and may use it as a shorthand way of communicating with members of straight society.

Significance and Contributions of The Professional Thief The Professional Thief was a foundational work that shaped the early theoretical and empirical development of the field of criminology. In addition to conceptualizing and detailing core aspects of the professionalism of theft and the process of becoming (and continuing to be) a seasoned thief or con artist, The Professional Thief makes numerous contributions to theory and research in criminology. First, along with White Collar Crime (the first large-scale sociological analysis of upperworld criminality), The Professional Thief was instrumental in Sutherland’s efforts to develop differential association as a general theory of criminal behavior. Thieves and white-collar criminals overlap in many ways, according to Sutherland. Both sets of activities require tutelage and specialized skill, and prestige among colleagues was enhanced, not diminished, because of criminal activity. But they also differ, apparently because they identify with different social worlds. As Sutherland saw it, “Professional thieves, when they speak honestly, admit that they are thieves,” while white-collar criminals “think of themselves as honest men,” defining what they’ve

908

Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

done as nothing more malevolent than “shrewd business practice” (1937, pp. 95–96). Since criminality is learned, it can be and is learned at all social levels. Furthermore, differential association is very much a process-­oriented, lifecourse perspective, although Sutherland did not use the terminology that life-course criminology does today. Second, although the concept “criminal opportunity” is not spelled out in Professional Thief, it is strongly implicit and was subsequently rendered explicit by Richard Cloward who drew heavily from the work. Cloward observed that criminal opportunities, like conventional opportunities, are not evenly distributed throughout society. They consist of opportunities to both learn and perform skills and lines of activity, and are differentially available according to one’s social statuses (e.g., race, gender, ethnicity, age, social class) and the groups or networks in which one’s life is embedded. Steffensmeier (1983) and Steffensmeier and Jeffrey Ulmer (2005), in turn, extended Cloward’s and, by extension, Sutherland’s notions about criminal opportunity. They further spell out the operational meaning of learning and performance opportunities for crime as involving (1) different types of criminal knowledge: civil (conventional knowledge that can be easily transferred to criminal activity), preparatory (orientations and techniques/skills that are obtained by simply being around groups or settings where crime takes place), and technical knowledge (knowledge and skills that are mainly or only acquired by access to tutelage from experienced criminals); and (2) the means for performing or “conducting” the crime itself, which include physical, and perhaps mental, capabilities. It also can entail access to requisite tools or hardware, to suitable places and targets, and to contacts or support networks (which may include “criminal” as well as “respectable” persons). A third contribution involves Sutherland’s ranking or status hierarchy of criminal specialties. Sutherland set forth a five-level status hierarchy (pecking order) that existed across criminal specialties in the early 20th century, as shown in Table 1 (left side). As already noted, however, Sutherland dealt only with the theft subculture while ignoring racketeers and syndicate figures who—on the basis of money,

power, and prestige—both then and now constitute the highest-status criminal roles. Also, recent changes in the underworld, especially the expanding drug market, have contributed to some shifts in the money, power, and prestige of criminal roles. Thus, the underworld stratification system as set forth in The Professional Thief differs somewhat from Steffensmeier and Ulmer’s contemporary update of the pecking order of criminal specialties in the late 20th/early 21st century, as displayed in the right side of Table 1. A fourth contribution is Sutherland’s application of an occupational perspective in The Professional Theft, which helped establish a long and rich tradition in criminology of studying people who approach crime as their work. A number of criminologists and sociologists after Sutherland have analyzed crime as work, and The Professional Thief at least implicitly inspired their work. David Maurer, a linguistic scholar, focused on con men and pickpockets in The American Confidence Man and The Wiz Mob. Ned Polsky later wrote about pool hustlers and their work situation, Shover studied the skills and contacts of “good burglars,” the careers of aging property offenders, and lifestyles and worldviews of ordinary thieves. Peter Letkemann examined the work methods of robbers and safemen in Crime as Work, and Robert Prus and C. R. D. Sharper concentrated on the careers of professional card and dice hustlers in Road Hustler. Malin Akerstrom, in Crooks and Squares, described the work methods of types of thieves and drug addicts. Steffensmeier in The Fence and Steffensmeier and Ulmer in Confessions of a Dying Thief further extended this type of analysis by examining the skills and work habits of burglars and professional fences or large-scale dealers in stolen goods. These works also show (1) how conventional career concepts such as apprenticeship, work satisfaction, and networking are applicable to crime as work and (2) the continuities between the socialization patterns of those criminals for whom crime is an occupation or business and conventional workers and business people. These are only a few of many other worthy examples could be cited. All these studies emphasize the lifestyle and work habits of criminals as much or more than analyzing the reasons or motivations for their criminal activities. They address questions such as

Sutherland, Edwin H.: The Professional Thief

909

Table 1   Status Hierarchy of Criminal Offenders Sutherland’s Professional Thief

Steffensmeier and Ulmer (2005)

1. Big con operators and bank burglars

Illicit businesses: racketeers, mafiosi, background operators

2. Forgers and counterfeiters, safe burglars

Big-time fences, major bookmakers (who “bank” or control their own pool of betting money), upper-level drug dealers, black market specialists

3. Short-con operators, “penny-weighters,” house and store burglars, armed robbers or “stick-up men”

Big con operators, safecracker burglars, truck hijackers

4. Shakedown workers, hotel and sneak thieves

House and commercial burglars, armed robbers, forgers and counterfeiters, cartage thieves, auto thieves

5. Pickpockets and shoplifters

Short-con operators, small time fences, bookmakers, midlevel drug dealers Shoplifting and other varieties of small time theft, check kiting, pimping Street level hustlers, snatch and grab thieves, low-level drug dealers Drug addict thieves

Source: Steffensmeier, D. J., & Ulmer, J. (2005). Confessions of a dying thief: Understanding criminal careers and criminal enterprise (pp. 215–219, 231–235). New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction.

the following: What problems are faced by criminals, and what strategies do they use to solve them? What are the pros and cons of a criminal lifestyle in comparison with a more conventional one? What skills are involved in a criminal lifestyle? How are contacts made? What is the mix of rewards and motivations? How does aging affect crime skills and rewards? These works (and others) also confirm that many aspects of Sutherland’s characterization of the processes involved in becoming a professional thief, the thief’s relationship to the general society, and the larger subculture of theft are largely applicable today. As was true when Sutherland sketched it, one becomes an established thief (racketeer) today through stealing with, and tutelage by, other seasoned thieves. From them, one learns criminal techniques (physical, interpersonal, perceptual, and definitional) and how to manipulate the criminal justice system; and, in the process of learning all this, the offender becomes connected into a network of criminal and quasi-criminal actors with whom the person can establish mutually advantageous working relationships. More so than

the ordinary thief, professional or good thieves can be characterized as having a lot of criminal capital—including physical capital (tools like guns and wire cutters, physical strength or threat), human or personal capital (resourcefulness, criminal insight, violence, conning ability), social capital (reputation, networks of useful people, kinship ties), and perhaps even cultural capital (e.g., knowledge of underworld culture, argot, meanings). Having a lot of criminal capital both reduces the risks of crime and increases the prospects for safer and more profitable crime opportunities, for example, by increasing the offender’s attractiveness to co-offenders and crime networks (Morselli et al., 2006; Steffensmeier, 1983, 1986). Last, Sutherland observed that professional thieves tend to specialize on a relatively small number of crimes that are related to one another, although they may transfer for longer or shorter periods of time from one specialty to another. Years later, some criminologists argued that selfreport survey data, primarily from juvenile or young adult samples, show that offenders typically did not specialize but instead exhibited diversity in

910

Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

offending. They argued that this was evidence against differential association and social learning theory. Steffensmeier and Ulmer helped to clarify this issue by noting that Sutherland’s differential association theory (and The Professional Thief) did not imply specialization as a general principle of offending, and they presented evidence that specialization varies by offender age/career stage, criminal capital and skill level, crime type/category, and niche in the underworld. In reality Sutherland’s differential association theory leaves specialization as an empirical question—different learning processes, messages, and settings can produce diversity in offending or specialization. Darrell Steffensmeier and Jeffrey Ulmer See also Cloward, Richard A.: The Theory of Illegitimate Means; Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller; Steffensmeier, Darrell J., and Jeffery T. Ulmer: The Professional Fence; Sutherland, Edwin H.: Differential Association Theory and Differential Social Organization

References and Further Readings Akerstrom, M. (1985). Crooks and squares: Lifestyles of thieves and addicts in comparison to conventional people. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Cloward, R. A. (1959). Illegitimate means, anomie, and deviant behaviour. American Sociological Review, 24, 164–176. Hagan, F. (1998). Introduction to criminology (4th ed.). Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Letkemann, P. (1973). Crime as work. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Mack, J. (1975). The crime industry. London: Saxon House. Maurer, D. (1964). The whiz mob: A correlation of the technical argot of pickpockets with their behavior pattern. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Maurer, D. (1974). The American confidence man. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas. Morselli, C., Tremblay, P., & McCarthy, B. (2006). Mentors and criminal achievement. Criminology, 44, 17–44. Polsky, N. (1967). Hustlers, beats, and others. Chicago: Aldine de Gruyter. Prus, R., & Sharper, C. R. D. (1977). Road hustler: The career contingencies of professional card and dice hustlers. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath.

Shover, N. (1972). Structures and careers in burglary. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 63, 540–549. Steffensmeier, D. J. (1983). Organization properties and sex-segregation in the underworld: Building a sociological theory of sex differences in crime. Social Forces, 6, 1010–1032. Steffensmeier, D. J. (1986). The fence: In the shadow of two worlds. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Steffensmeier, D. J., & Ulmer, J. (2005). Confessions of a dying thief: Understanding criminal careers and criminal enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Sutherland, E. (1937). The professional thief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutherland, E. (1949). White collar crime. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime The concept of white-collar crime, introduced by Edwin H. Sutherland in his presidential address to the 34th annual meeting of the American Sociological Society in 1939, had two fundamental themes. First, it called attention to serious occupational law-breaking by upper-level persons in business, politics, and the professions. Second, it tied the portrait of such criminal activity to a theoretical construct that Sutherland, in his presidential address (published in 1940 as “White-Collar Criminality”) had labeled “differential association.” Sutherland’s presidential address and a decade later his classic monograph White Collar Crime embedded the words white-collar crime in our language. The term appears constantly in and on the mass media, statutes employ it as a catch-all designation for certain illegal behaviors, and judges refer to it in decisions and sentencing justifications in ways that indicate a common public understanding of what is meant. In his presidential address, Sutherland referred to notorious swindlers, many of whom, in Matthew Josephson’s colorful term, were labeled “robber barons”—business tycoons who bought legislatures, robbed investors, and ran roughshod over competitors. But these wrongdoers could not be grouped and examined in a manner that would

Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

yield scientifically useful theoretical generalizations. At best, they were case histories—war stories—that had among them only some similarities that might be molded into a superficial explanatory scheme. The title of Sutherland’s presidential address printed in the program was “The White-Collar Criminal,” but the published version was called “White-Collar Criminality” and the subsequent monograph bore the title White Collar Crime. The shift in emphasis is significant. By the time he published the book, Sutherland largely had abandoned his focus on human malefactors and had resorted to the only approach reasonably available to him at the time by presenting case histories of violations by corporate entities. Sutherland had been employing graduate students since 1928 to locate and codify reports of corporate wrongdoing (Sutherland, 1956). But as Donald Cressey, Sutherland’s intellectual acolyte, would point out, Sutherland had to anthropomorphize the corporations, that is, to treat them as if they were individuals whose actions could best be interpreted by the social psychological theory that Sutherland advocated. For Cressey, this was a feckless enterprise: only people could think and act; organizations were mindless entities. In promulgating his material on white-collar crime, Sutherland belittled, indeed ridiculed, ideas that served as then-current explanations of crime, including feeblemindedness, poverty, immigrant status, broken homes, and Oedipal complexes. In what would become a much-quoted observation, Sutherland wrote, “We have no reason to think that General Motors has an inferiority complex or that the Aluminum Corporation of American has a frustration-aggression complex” (1956, p. 96). This polemic, however, was more a reflection of Sutherland’s antipathy toward psychiatric theory that a strong debating point. To truly carry his argument, he would have had to demonstrate (or at least argue) that such pathologies could not be located in those running the corporations rather than in the businesses themselves. White-collar crime was Sutherland’s polemical trump card in debates regarding criminological theory. If elite offenders, such as violators of antitrust laws, did not manifest personal or social characteristics tied to criminal activity, then those conditions could not be presumed to account for all crime. Sutherland’s differential association theory presumed to explain every form of crime. It

911

maintained that criminal behavior is learned from social interactions. Considerations such as tutelage in regard to illegal tactics and the inculcation on the job of values and attitudes that deemed law breaking as the preferred course of action were asserted to underlay white-collar crime. It did not appear to occur to Sutherland that there might not be any satisfactory theory, then or thereafter, that could provide an acceptable interpretation of all crime and that white-collar crime might better be understood by theoretical constructs that did not explain domestic violence, rape, or other offenses.

The Impetus for White Collar Crime There are hints in Sutherland’s life story and academic career that indicate why he would turn for the first time and so forcefully to the subject of white-collar crime when he was in his mid-fifties. By all accounts, Sutherland was a cautious man but also a well-meaning one. He favored the capitalist system, but he deplored its excesses and its insensitivity to the public welfare. He had the courage to criticize his government as “racist” during World War II for its interment of 120,000 Japanese, more than half of them U.S. citizens, who obviously posed no threat to the United States. But he was reluctant to offer an assistantship to a black graduate student in the Indiana University sociology department, which he chaired, not because he was prejudiced against the student or his race but because to do so would go against the prevailing sentiment of the times (Snodgrass, 1972). In his academic life, Sutherland had been indoctrinated into the ethos that muckraking was propaganda and that the true social scientist should adopt a neutral pose toward his or her study material. At the same time, he rebelled against what he saw as the sterility of much of the criminological and sociological enterprise—his devotion was to research and writing that advanced the common good, not work that drew scholarly plaudits from a handful of other specialists. His crusade against white-collar crime meshed with his reformist inclinations. A one point, shortly before the publication of White Collar Crime, Sutherland wrote in his criminology textbook that the definition of whitecollar crime should embrace behaviors which “are not even a violation of the spirit of the law, for the

912

Sutherland, Edwin H.: White-Collar Crime

parties concerned have been able by bribery and other means to prevent the enactment of laws to prevent wrongful and injurious behavior” (1947, p. 37). It is difficult to imagine a more radical (and, in some regards sensible) criminological concept. Sutherland retreated from that position in White Collar Crime, but that he enunciated it at all indicates his strong moral revulsion against what he labeled white-collar crime. Family Background

Sutherland was born in Gibbon, Nebraska, on August 13, 1893, the third of seven children. His father, a Baptist minister, soon moved the family to Ottawa, Kansas, where he taught history for 9 years. He then relocated to Grand Island in Nebraska to assume the presidency for 20 years of Grand Island College, a Baptist school from which Sutherland graduated in 1904. The populist fervor that permeated the Midwest during Sutherland’s youth undoubtedly played a leading role in forming his ideological mindset. Typical was the platform of the AllianceIndependence, a populist Nebraska newspaper, that argued that “corporations, which have so long dominated and corrupted our politics and robbed our people through extortionist charges, [should be] retired from power” and inveighed against office holders who were “selfish men who ignore the law and violate their official oaths that they may enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayers” (Cherney, 1981, p. 41). Sutherland largely abandoned churchgoing in later life, and one of his jabs at organized religion appears in White Collar Crime where he writes that “in the earlier years the religious journals were notorious as accessory to misrepresentation in advertising” (p. 126). Nonetheless, the powerful Christian precepts regarding moral behavior in human transactions clearly influenced Sutherland’s repugnance for exploitative business practices, even though he sought to camouflage these views as neutral social science inquiry. As sociologist Jon Snodgrass observed, Sutherland veered away from religious orthodoxy, but he remained “a man of compulsive virtue and integrity. . . . While he may have given up the orthodoxy of his Baptist upbringing, he never lost its scruples” (p. 223).

Academic Career

Sutherland began teaching at Sioux Falls College in South Dakota in 1906 and soon thereafter enrolled in the sociology department at the University of Chicago, staffed by a group of preeminent scholars. Sutherland received his Ph.D. in 1913, with majors in both sociology and political economy. He taught for 6 years (1913–1919) at William Jewell College in Liberty, Kansas, before joining the University of Illinois faculty (1919– 1926), then moving to Minnesota (1926–1929), followed by a year of overseas research on prisons for the Bureau of Social Hygiene. He joined the Chicago faculty from 1930 to 1935 and then became founding chair of the Indiana University department, a position he held until his death on October 11, 1950.

The Presidential Address Sutherland, then 56 years old, introduced the term white-collar crime in his presidential address in Philadelphia at a joint meeting of the American Sociological Society and the American Economic Association. He reviewed major instances of financial fraud by business magnates such as the railroad entrepreneurs and monopolists. He also catalogued legal actions taken by the criminal courts and the regulatory agencies against most of the prominent corporations in the United States. The o