ABSTRACT
In the adult world, occupations are the major source of social identity. The jobs themselves are used to classify and rank, while the norms governing performance are the principal criteria by which competence and character are judged. There may be a parallel between the apparently "senseless violence" engaged in by very young boys and the more serious instances of "random violence" sometimes found among gang boys at the very end of their "delinquent" careers. The gang boy thus aspires to an identity that puts him in a special relationship to risk. When he is around his friends, he often creates the situations in which he chooses to exist, an act of creation that involves selecting out certain features of the social environment and then transforming them into the conditions that allow him to define a self. The posture of premature autonomy is carried directly into the schools and the result is the "predelinquent."
