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Delinquency 3
Université de Paris 8
Other ways of counting
Recap :
We have seen that the Official Crime figures are the product of a social accounting process. Among the factors that shape this process are the interests of the social actors, as defined by those actors.
From a multitude of 'candidate behaviours', only a certain number are finally designated criminal. Although the majority of non-designated acts are probably quite trivial in their consequences - minor acts of vandalism, petty theft or violence between consenting adolescents - some of them may be of a very grave nature indeed - major frauds or murder may escape the crime statistics.
At this stage, the sociologists needs to make a choice :
- either he is interested in crime as a socially constructed phenomenon - in the tradition of Weber, Schutz, and the phenomenological sociologists - Symbolic Interactionists or Ethnomethodologists
- or he is interested in the social conditions which produce rule-breaking behaviour in some members of society.
In the former case, he will move on from a consideration of how the statistics are produced to an analysis of the other functions of the CPIs, and of the belief systems which underlie them. In the latter case, he will try to find better measures of antisocial activity.
Measures of anti-social activity
Victimization Surveys
In this kind of survey, a sample of people from the general population are asked to report any crimes which have been committed against them over a given period of time - six months or a year. It came into fashion in the United States in the mid 60s. One of the first was a survey of people living in Washington, Chicago and Boston. The responses to this particular survey showed that
- the amount of personal injury crime was almost twice the official rate
- the amount of property crime was more than twice the official rate
- the numbers of forcible rapes was more than 3.5 times the official rate
- the number of burglaries were 3* the official rate
- aggravated assaults were 2* the official rate
On analysis, the figures suggested that the official police records for Chicago recorded only one quarter of serious crimes actually committed.
In the 1970s, the American Government refused to fund any further such surveys, probably because the results were too embarrassing, showing that the increased financial and technological resources poured into the war against crime were not, in fact, having any effect.
Results of such surveys in the UK have shown that black people, the young and the poor are more likely to be victims of crime than are whites, older people and middle class people.
How reliable are these surveys - can they be said to provide us with a clear picture of the 'real' crime rate? Unfortunately, they are far from perfect :
1. Selective memory - events may be forgotten, may be made to seem less or more important, according to the social position and post-event biography of the witness. In the UK, a survey carried out by Sparks et al in 1977 was probably biassed in its results by both ethnic group and social class according to the authors : - whites and middle class people were more likely to report threats and attempted thefts than were blacks and the poor, who regarded such events as unworthy of report.
2. Embarrassment or modesty - victims of rape remain less likely to report - indeed, some women who have reported rapes to the police do not do so to Victimization surveys - thus according to Hindelang, only 67% of women in the survey who had reported rapes to the police went on to report them to the surveyors. This is particularly true when the assailant is related to the victim.
3. Unconcern or lack of knowledge - people tend not to report such acts as vandalism.
Also, as we have already seen, these surveys cannot discover those candidate acts that are perceived by no-one.
Victimization surveys, then, suggest that a great deal of unpleasant behaviour is never reported to the police, but they still cannot be said to give us a clear and accurate picture of such behaviour in itself. Like the official figures, they are the negotiated result of social work.
Self-report Studies
The self-report study is an attempt to discover what kinds of people commit offences - in this case, a sample - or a sub-sample more often - of the population is asked to report any crimes or any anti-social behaviour that they may have committed themselves in the course of a given period of time. Usually, a list of offences is submitted to the respondent - usually a young person - and they are asked to indicate whether they have committed the act, how often they have done so, and whether they have come to the attention of the police.
The results have usually shown that the great majority of young people have undertaken delinquent acts of some kind. West & Farrington - sample of boys from inner London :
- 90% travelling without a ticket or paying the wrong fare
- 82% breaking windows of empty houses
- 65% receiving stolen goods
Belson found that 70% of his respondents had stolen from a shop, and 35% from family or relations.
Willcock found that only 2.6% of his respondents refused to admit to a single offence, and that the mean number of offence types per person was 5.6, with 40% admitting to between 4 & 6 types of offence.
Were they caught? West & Farrington found that
- only 8.3% of young people who admitted to shoplifting had been prosecuted.
- However, 38.3% of those who had 'borrowed' motor cars had been convicted and
- 61.9% of those who admitted to breaking and entering - burglary - were convicted
How reliable are these surveys? One may suspect that the respondents may not be willing to admit to activities that could lead to their being convicted of a criminal offence. This might be dangerous, or at the least might lead to their being negatively perceived by the questioners. Also, it is conceivable that some people may over-report, so as to give themselves a rakish image. A number of investigators have tried to investigate this possibility - Gold, for example, gathered information about the delinquent activity of his respondents from other observers - and then checked with the results of his survey. He found that 72% of his sample had told the truth - and this did not vary with social class - but on the other hand, something like a quarter of his respondents did not tell the truth. West & Farrington checked their results against the boys' criminal records, and found that there was a good fit
However, none of these results can control for the possibility that boys who commit delinquent acts extremely discretely, and are never brought to the notice of the police or of others, may remain discrete when questioned in a self-report study. Furthermore,
- small-scale studies which are difficult to generalize
- tend not to ask about the more serious crimes
- indeed, they miss completely
- large-scale drug dealing,
- corporate crimes of any nature,
- political corruption,
- tax-evasion,
- wilful pollution of the environment or
- the sale of toxic drugs as medication and of poisonous food-additives.
These are all crimes which are committed by powerful adults, and which arguably cause far more harm, injury and suffering than does the petty delinquency of working-class adolescents.
- often a very high non-response rate
-non-respondents having characteristics of a nature to make them probably more delinquent than respondents - Herschi & Selvin (1967) - only 38% of boys with a police record & with a low grade in English completed questionnaire as against 79% of boys without a police record & with a high grade in English
The results of such studies do suggest, however, that we can distinguish two different kinds of delinquency
a) - normal delinquency, which the vast majority of young people commit at one time or another - riding free on public transport, petty theft from shops or low-level vandalism - and
b) - pathological delinquency, in which a small number of boys commit a large number of serious offences which are likely to bring them to the notice of police and social workers.
As we shall see, these pathological deviants also appear to differ in a number of other ways from the normal youngsters. As Rutter & Giller put it," 'official' delinquents are those youths who are most seriously delinquent. To that extent, the use of findings based on convicted offenders are likely to be valid." This is particularly true of recidivists.
What is the psycho-social profile of the typical delinquent?
Today we shall have a first look at the question, which we will need to refine later - so this is just an overview, putting forward some of the findings, and some of the problems that we may have with those findings
1. The official figures show that boys are more likely than girls to be delinquent by a factor of around 6 to 1. Self-report studies have mainly taken young males as their target population, but some evidence suggests that though girls do commit more minor delinquent acts than the official figures record, they do not commit the more serious offences.
Weiss (1976) divided offences into
social - drunk under age, drug offences -
property - theft, burglary - and
aggression - gang fighting, assault with weapon, etc.
Girls were very similar to boys for the first two categories, but were less likely to be involved in the third. However, the differences should not be exaggerated - Johnson (1979) concluded that 'the overall male-to-female frequency rates of delinquent behaviour just exceeds 1.5:1. It seems that, for some reason, female delinquents are less visible than male ones.
2. According to the official figures, delinquency is overwhelmingly a working-class phenomenon. Self-report studies, according to Steven Box, do not show a similar bias. There is some reason to believe that middle-class delinquents are not being processed. Thus, Gold (1966) writes :
... the official records exaggerate the difference in delinquency among boys of different status levels. They make social status ... seem more important than it really is as far as researchers and practitioners are concerned. About five times more lowest than highest status boys appear in the official records; if records were complete and unselective we estimate that the ratio would be closer to 1.5:1
Studies in Norway and Finland have found very similar results. Christie & Jaakkola (1970), on the Finnish study, report that
Contrary to what the information provided by the crime statistics gives reason to expect, there are no clear systematic differences in the actual crime rates of the different social classes (and) members of the higher social classes and the better educated run a smaller risk of having to answer for their crimes.
3. Delinquent boys come from deviant family backgrounds - their fathers are far more likely to have had trouble with the law themselves, and to have an erratic employment record.
Some observers argue that the reason why such boys show up more often in the official figures is because such families attract greater surveillance on the part of the police and other CPIs. However, the self-report studies suggest that this is not the case.
4. Delinquent boys tend to have been trouble-makers at school. Teachers also rate them as more daring, and more dishonest than normal children.
Once again, we may question the direction of the causality - could it be that children who are labelled as trouble-makers by teachers, for one reason or another, go on to fulfill the prophecy and behave in ways that attract the attention of the police for reasons to do with the attitudes of teachers and other authority figures towards them? We know that punitive behaviour on the part of an authority figure can produce worse behaviour in a child. Is this what is happening here? Or have teachers identified a real problem?
5. There is some evidence that delinquent boys have lower IQ scores than non-delinquent boys, particularly on verbal intelligence.
This may, to some extent be a social class measure, in so far as official delinquents are concerned - or it may be that less intelligent boys are both more likely to get caught, and more likely to boast about their exploits to sociologists! It is also suggestive of a link between school-failure and delinquency, for we know that IQ correlates closely with school success. It should however be noted that not all studies have found this relationship between IQ and delinquency, and that Cloward and Ohlin have even argued that :
'all available data support the contention that the basic endowments of delinquents, such as intelligence, physical strength and agility, are equal to, or greater than, those of their non-delinquent peers (Cloward & Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity, 1960)
Over the following weeks we shall need to look carefully at these different factors, bearing in mind the arguments both of the realists, and the institutionalists.
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