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Delinquency : Lecture 7
Université de Paris 8
Community & Crime
Recap :
We have seen that a predisposition to delinquency may be derived from personality factors, some of which may be innate, and from the structure, behaviours and attitudes of the family. We have also seen that the school career of the young person is a critical moment in the path towards or away from delinquency. It is here that a dynamic social process of delinquency creation may become visible. However, as adolescence progresses, the wider social milieu becomes increasingly important, particularly among working class families, in which social space is more likely to be restricted to the close environs of the family home, and in which patterns of behaviour which allow a relatively greater liberty to young people, and in which surveillance is lighter, appear to be prevalent, particularly amongst the families of unskilled and semi-skilled labourers. This is probably because working class children are expected to enter the work force earlier than their middle class peers, and are thus seen as autonomous far earlier.
Neighbourhood & Crime
The neighbourhood a young person is brought up in and lives in can influence behaviour. Certain areas have higher crime rates than others, and this is not simply a matter of there being more criminal people living there. It can be shown that young people who, living elsewhere, would not have become delinquent, are more likely to do so if they inhabit a high crime zone.
Thinking about the relationship between delinquency, criminality and neighbourhood relies on the tradition of the Chicago school. Noticing how the city grew and changed, under successive waves of immigrants, the Chicago school began to think of the city as an ecological system. The city was looked upon as a kind of superorganism, in which the different parts were functionally related to each other, living in symbiosis Delinquency represented a break-down in this order. This occurred because certain zones - the zones of transition - were in a state of rapid change, with groups moving in and groups moving out, which lead to an undermining of the community as an agent of social control.
Shaw and Mackay were able to show that high delinquency rates were associated with areas of transition - that is areas where one 'social species' was replacing another - not only in Chicago, but also in a number of other American cities - Birmingham, Cleveland, Denver, Philadelphia and Richmond. It needs to be noted here that
1. The definition of what constitutes a 'zone of transition' includes the crime rate, so their demonstration is, to some extent, tautological
2. The high crime rate of zones of transition may represent in part differential treatment of the inhabitants of this area by control agencies
3. The system of concentric circles which is the basis of the Chicago model does not work so well in European societies, where public authorities have intervened in the housing market.
In the UK, for example, as in France, many high crime areas are located outside the city, rather than in the centre, and are made up of council housing
Shaw and McKay's idea was taken up by Sutherland, and elaborated in his idea of 'differential organization' and 'differential association'
Differential organization
The city is made up of numerous different groups These groups are in competition with each other for space - Darwinism. But they also depend on each other - there is an ecology of the city.
Through the struggle for space, the different groups are distributed throughout the city Some areas of the city will become reserved for the losers and new arrivals - the zones of transition - in the zones of transition, a number of people, facing frustrations, will have taken delinquent choices
Differential association
People who are forced to live in transition zones will be more likely to meet delinquents than people who live in the suburbs, and association with delinquents makes it easier for them to become delinquents in their turn, because
a) delinquency becomes a 'norm' - in the inner city transition zones, young people learn the motives, drives, rationalizations and attitudes which make crime possible
b) delinquent techniques can be learnt within the milieu
The difference between Sutherland and the older members of the Chicago school lies in his emphasis on diversity rather than on consensus, upon the idea that different goups within the city are in conflict with each other, that they have different norms, values and means of achieving them. But his theory at times seems rather mechanical - if you add up the number of criminal associates that an individual has, and deduct the number of non-criminal associates, you will arrive at an estimate of the chances that the individual has of becoming criminal himself. This is why policemen and social-workers do not become criminal, even though they have extensive association with criminals. Sutherland and Cressey also add that the duration, the priority and the intensity of the relationship is important.
Glaser refines this by adding to the two concepts of differential association and differential organization, the concept of differential identification. This holds, in essence, is that a person pursues criminal behaviour to the extent that he identifies himself with real or imaginary persons from whose perspective his criminal behaviour seems acceptable. Such a theory focuses attention on the interaction in which choice models occur, including the individual's interaction with himself in rationalizing his conduct.
In this version of the theory, we notice, actual face-to-face contact with delinquents is no longer absolutely necessary. It introduces wider sociological considerations into the argument, seeing crime and delinquency not simply as the result of a break-down in order in one particular part of the city, but as shaped by the norms, values and group images of the wider society. It is also difficult to see how the hypothesis could be falsified.
This brings us to a theory of how the wider society may affect delinquent behaviour. We shall turn to look at how Merton elaborated upon Durkheim's theory of anomie. Merton used the concept to elaborate a typology of reactions to the restrictions of opportunities within American society. The main goals of this society are seen to be riches and happiness. The means that the qualities that are socially sanctioned are intelligence, drive and hard work. However, the number of positions offering success are far more limited than the number of possible candidates.
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Modes of adaptation
Cultural Goals
Institutionalized Means
Comment
Conformity
+
+
Innovation
+
-
The adoption of illegitimate means to pursue and obtain success - typically working class
Ritualism
-
+
Abandon the goals, but strive to maintain respectability - typically lower middle-class
Retreatism
-
-
In society but not of it - the outcast, the vagrant, the drunkard or drug-addict - highly individualized
Rebellion
+/-
+/-
Rejects both goals and means, but wishes to replace them with others.
Cloward and Ohlin brought together Merton's theory of anomie and the concept of differential association - that is, a theory of the origin of deviance with a theory of its cultural transmission. From an individualistic conception, as Merton's may appear to be, they move to a collective conception. They show how sub-cultures of resistance may arise, which form a basis for a political conception of the problems generated by the misfit between the system of values and the system of means. But they also suggest that the subcultures can be conceptualized as 'already there', offering alternative values and alternative norms, some of which may be deviant in terms of the overall culture.
This points to a phenomenon which is a consciously celebrated aspect of American civilization - the city as a magnet for many groups from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The population of the city at any one time is made up of groups who may come from very different parent cultures, speaking different lanagues, and different sets of values.
In European and other cities, the same thing is true, but is there regarded as an exception, and perhaps as an aberration. Neverthelss, the experience of people from Brittany, or from the Auvergne, who came to Paris in the 19th Century, was in many ways similar to the experience of the Irish, the Italians, and Jewish people who settled in waves in the cities of North America.
One can criticize both Merton's original formulation and Cloward and Ohlin's refinement of it by asking whether the conceptualisation of American society as being made up of on the one hand a dominant culture, which is generally accepted, and on the other, of deviant sub-cultures which share the same goals but differ as to the means, is fully valid. Is the USA as simple a social system as this?
Albert Cohen, in his book Delinquent Boys : The Culture of the Gang takes some steps away from Merton's theory. Juvenile delinquency, he claims, does not have the same roots as adult criminality, and cannot be understood as simply an attempt to achieve by illegal means what others are achieving through legal ones. Instead, he points to some fundamental differences between working class norms and values and those of the middle classes. These come into conflict in the school, where the working class boy absorbs some middle class values, but is not equiped to succeed. Working class boys therefore feel status frustration, and this leads to 'reaction formation' - the boys collectively develop a counter culture, in which middle class values and norms are turned up-side down.
Far from being a means to achieve acceptable ends, the counter culture is anti-utilitarian - it is hedonistic, seeking immediate gratification rather than looking to long-term goals, it is destructive and malicious. Delinquency, or some at least of its forms, then can be seen as arising out of 'playfulness'. The adolescent boy, out on the streets with the group of peers, looks for 'kicks', for something to make the day appear out of the ordinary, and for something which affirms his identity, and gives him the feeling that there are areas of his life which he controls.
The anti-group culture that we noticed in the school is not simply the product of school processes. It is founded upon an already existing set of culturally shaped behaviours and relationships, which are in themselves to be understood as conditioned by the social forces acting upon the daily lives of the manual labouring classes.
Within the working population itself, definitions of property are 'stretched'. Thus, traditionally, workers regareded as part of the 'perks' of a job the opportunities that it offered for skimming off articles and material with which they worked. Lifting a bunch of bananas from the cargo of a boat that they were unloading was seen as almost a 'right' for the docker - hence the considerable resistance to 'containerisation' in the 1960s.
That this is a deeply rooted tradition can be seen in the struggles over the definitions of property that accompanied the development of wage labour in the early phases of the industrial revolution - a silversmith might see the waste material left over after the production of a candlestick as rightly belonging to him, just as weavers might set by a part of the thread which they were making up into finished articles as their own. The definition of such material as belonging to the capitalist rather than to the hand-worker was not a simple matter of legality, but a thoroughly political process.
The resistance to the process built up a culture in which opportunism was seen as a positive value. To the young, opportunistic 'lifting' from shops or street-traders barrows might seem to be little different from the job-centred perks system which encouraged their fathers to help goods to 'fall off lorries'. Such activities can be justified in terms of a pre-class consciousness of social differences which Jackson, Hoggart and others have described as being strongly anchored in the British working class - a belief that society is divided between 'Us' and 'Them' - 'Them' being defined in a pragmatic way as all those who dress differently, (dress 'posh') talk differently (talk with 'la-di-da' accents) and, in particular behave in ways that indicate social superiority and greater power.
Paul Willis describes how the working class 'lads' who he observed entered the world of work well before leaving school - part-time jobs, and also momentary labour, which would involve truanting from school for a few days - sometimes involving quite large sums of money. He says :
This contact with the world of work, however, is not made for the purposes of cultural edification. It is made within the specific nexus of the need for cash, and responded to and exploited within that nexus. The very manner of approaching the world of work at this stage reproduces one of its characteristic features - the reign of cash. The near universal practice of 'fiddling' and 'doing foreigners', for instance comes to 'the lads' not as a neutral heritage, but as a felt necessity: they need the cash. As Spansky says, 'If you go out even with just enough money in your pocket for a pint like, you feel different.'
It is only the part-time job, and particularly its 'fiddles', which offers the extra variable capacity in their world to supply this free cash... Often, the last resort for getting money in your pocket is stealing. Shortage of money should not be underestimated as the compelling material base for theft. In a very typical articulation of mixed motives, however, 'thieving' is also a source of excitement rather like fighting. It puts you at risk, and breaks up the parochialism of the self. 'The rule', the daily domination of trivia and the entrapment of the formal are broken for a time. In some way a successful theft challenges and beats authority. A strange sort of freedom - even though it is only a private knowledge - comes from defying the conventions and being rewarded for it.
Willis points to the way in which the material need - money in your pocket' - is allied to the desire to create a free space in which the lads exercise mastery and control over their lives, and in which they can create the incidents out of which a mythology of 'getting away with it' , with its near escapes from the police, with its reinforcement of the belief that they are more knowledgeable aobut the world than their teachers, than the police, or than the 'earholes'.
Bill: It's just hopeless round here, there's nothing to do. When you've got money, you know, you can to to a pub and have a drink, but, you know, when you ain't got money, you've either got to stop in or just walk around the streets and none of them are any good really. So you walk around and have a laff.
Joey: It ain't only that it's enjoyable, it's that it's there and you think you can get away with it ... you never think of the risks. You just do it. If there's an opportunity, if the door's open to the warehouse, you'm in there, seeing what you can thieve and then, when you come out like, if you don't get caught immediately, when you come out you'm really happy like.
Bill: 'Cos you've showed the others you can do it, that's one reason.
Joey: 'Cos you're defying the law again. The law's a big tough authority like and we're just little individuals yet we're getting away with it like. (p. 41)
Delinquency, then, is produced by a number of different pressures ;- the desire for excitement, the belief that the system is unfair, the desire for material possessions. This goes along with the belief that youth is short, that they will be spending their lives doing 'shit jobs' and that if they don't enjoy themselves now, they never will do.
These sociological explanations, although they are rooted in the ecological Darwinistic interpretations of the early Chicago school, do reach towards an understanding of delinquency at a level of analysis which sees the meaning system of actors as being all-important - we have shifted from pure Durkheim to the terrain of Max Weber.
Whereas psychologistic explanations of deviant behaviour often appear to adopt a billiard-ball model of causality, the ethnological accounts which were generated by the Chicago school, and which have been continued in the UK by Willis, by Phil Cohen and others, depicted the delinquent as fully conscious of the decisions that he took, and generally capable of accounting for them in ways which made those accounts available for others. In the next lecture, we shall look more closely at some of those accounts.