ABSTRACT
After an introductory chapter outlining the social structural approach which guided our research, we turned to the second chapter, a picture of the ecology of the city and how arenas for different types and patterns of delinquency and crime developed, not only in the inner city but in some peripheral areas. These arenas provided a setting for the early learning of rationalizations for behavior that the larger society considers inimical to public order and safety and surely a threat to private and public property. Delinquency and crime have become traditions in these areas. Their residents have no more control over delinquency and crime than do citizens from other types of neighborhoods who are equally disdainful of the white collar offenses which may be every day phenomena in their worlds of work.
Social structure and social process theories of how delinquency and crime are generated, particularly in the inner city and interstitial areas, were supported by a variety of analyses described in the first two chapters. While the findings do not excuse those who commit offenses as juveniles, much less as adults, they provide a basis for understanding juvenile delinquency and adult crime. They focus attention on how delinquency and crime are generated among a large proportion of the youthful population in some neighborhoods, how there is a high incidence of some offenses in some neighborhoods, and why severe sanctions have only a minimal impact on the number of offenders and the number of offenses which take place.
Our numerous earlier attempts to predict adult Criminal or non-criminal status from juvenile status as delinquent or non-delinquent in the three birth cohorts found that juveniles who were at the extremely serious end of the continuum of any index of misbehavior or involvement in the justice system in their early years had a high probability of continuity into the adult period. Those who had few or no police contacts as juveniles were far less likely to have become involved in the justice system as adults. There were, however, so many errors, such high proportions of 144false positives (persons who committed offenses as juveniles but not as adults) and so many false negatives (persons who did not commit offenses as juveniles but did so as adults), that we could not recommend that the findings be used in any decision-making process which would involve intervention in the lives of juveniles, i.e., more interference than what might normally be expected in the course of referring Part I or felony-level serious offenders to the juvenile court.
Interviewing a sample of the 1942 and 1949 Cohort members had shed considerable light on how juveniles perceived their misbehaviors as having developed during their formative years as part of the process of social interaction at home, at school, and at work. Most had not become involved with the justice system as a consequence of sheer malicious intent but as a product of their search for fun and new experiences and a means of expressing themselves. As they grew older most ceased to behave in such a fashion as to become involved with the justice system for serious offenses. They had changed their self-concepts and rethought their notions of proper behavior as had their friends who had been involved in juvenile misbehavior.
In our larger metropolitan areas there are neighborhoods in which far over half of the youth are unemployed. In these neighborhoods crimes against property and crimes of violence related to the control of the illegal means to making money with which to purchase needed goods (even un-needed goods such as drugs) undoubtedly make up a larger proportion of the offenses and account for a larger proportion of the offenders than in Racine. The media suggest that delinquency and crime in Racine are becoming more and more like the metropolitan model. Only another cohort will tell us how much that is really the case.
The homogeneity of Racine's spatial units, neighborhoods, census tracts, police grids, and natural areas, was greater at the extremes of distributions (the inner city and transitional areas and the peripheral high SES areas) but areas in the middle tended to be more heterogeneous. How patterns of delinquency and crime shifted with the changing social organization and ecological structure of the city was described in the third chapter, indicating that the relationship between delinquency and crime and changing characteristics of spatial units was not as straightforward as expected.
Nevertheless, a variety of analyses indicated that, cohort by cohort, no matter which system of spatial units or measures of justice system involvement was used, the inner city areas were developing continuing patterns of delinquency and crime as were those persons who resided in the inner city. This was referred to as the hardening of the inner city. 145Moreover, multivariate analyses indicated that prior rates of delinquency and crime had a greater effect on continuing delinquency and crime rates than did the ecological variables in themselves. In sum, this chapter further focused our attention on structural variables as represented by neighborhood and cohort variation from 1950 to 1960 to 1970.
This drew us to Chapter 4 and a more detailed analysis of changing measures of delinquency and crime with emphasis on variation in the delinquency and crime producing (DCP) characteristics of neighborhoods as well as their historic rates of delinquency and crime. We next attempted to go even further with the idea of a snowballing effect following high rates of police contacts, referrals, and then court dispositions, the latter culminating in increasingly high severity of sanctions.
Sanctions in the inner city would, it was hypothesized, be disproportionately higher than those in areas successively further from the inner city, i.e., higher SES neighborhoods. Each stage in the justice system from contact to sanctions should reveal increasingly disproportional involvement in high DCP and high delinquency and crime rate neighborhoods. Although the cumulative nature of careers did reveal that intervention was more often followed by continuity than discontinuity, the evidence was strong only if inner city and other neighborhoods were compared. For example, 52.3% of all highly sanctioned juvenile cohort members were from inner city neighborhoods although only 24.4% of the cohort resided there as juveniles, 46.8% and 20.2% for adults. Disproportional sanctioning was highest for inner city Non-Whites followed by inner city Whites.
Since the development of serious careers in delinquency and crime could not be attributed entirely to the nature of inner city vs. other neighborhoods, we went on to the next step as described in Chapter 5 and investigated variation in the background (demographic) characteristics and life experiences (from interviews) of cohort members within various types of neighborhoods (ecological variation). The demographic variable (race/ethnicity) has an ecological distribution, sex does not, and the life experience variables had some ecological variation but also varied within types of neighborhoods.
The social process variables accounted for over half of the variance in some juvenile and adult measures of career seriousness for Non-Whites, a pattern of variable effects that differed with sex and race, significant but lesser amounts (circa 30-40%) of the variance for White males. They demonstrated that life experiences or combinations of experiences had different effects in their relationship to delinquency and crime in the 146worlds of males and females and the worlds of Whites and Non-Whites. Not even high school graduation (no significant effects for Non-White official seriousness scores) had the same effects across groups, all things considered. These interview variables generally accounted for more of the inner city variances than in other neighborhoods.
The proportion of Non-White and White differences in delinquency seriousness accounted for by life experiences were about the same during the juvenile period but more of the adult differences were accounted for among the Non-Whites. Unfortunately, it is difficult to say that the variables with the most consistent significant effects (NODIPLOMA, SELF617 [concept], and ADJFRTR [juvenile friends in trouble]) are entirely antecedent to career offender scores, particularly for the juvenile period.
When interview data were combined with juvenile delinquency scores (Chapter 5, Table 5.8) we saw that more than two-thirds of the variance in official adult seriousness scores for males, White or Non-White, was accounted for. From half to three-fourths of the self-report seriousness of inner city males, White or Non-White, was also accounted for by these variables, less for White males who resided in other neighborhoods and even less for all females residing in comparable neighborhoods.
What this commenced to add up to was that juvenile males from the inner city who had had serious official or self-report careers in delinquency and who had had friends in trouble with the police (antecedent or concurrently with their delinquency) who had not graduated from high school, who had access to an automobile, with some race differences in effects, had a greater likelihood of continuing into adult crime than did females or Whites from other neighborhoods (there were few Blacks in other neighborhoods). This is not new to those who have been involved in delinquency research but it does re-focus our attention on the necessity of developing a more detailed theory of how structural and processual variables should be combined to account for a greater proportion of the relationship between juvenile and adult encounters with the justice system.
The findings in Chapter 5 pointed to the importance of integrating juveniles into the larger society through school and into meaningful work that minimized associations with delinquent and criminal role models. Chapter 6, however, indicated that how the justice system functioned might be impeding the integration rather than facilitating the integration of juveniles even more than we had yet recognized. Institutionalization for a felony, it turned out, was more likely to have as its consequence another felony than were less punitive responses. Furthermore, the 147untoward effects of early institutionalization seemed to wear off slowly compared to the effects of less severe sanctions. The results of our various analyses led to the conclusion that greater use of institutionalization would probably do little to lower the overall delinquency and crime rate-certainly not a new conclusion but this time one based on longitudinal data.
Combinations of demographic, ecological, behavioral, and experiential (justice system) variables accounted for as much as 57% of future offense seriousness for the 1955 Cohort at the ninth police contact, lower proportions for the other cohorts or the combined cohorts but, no matter what we did, age at first police contact had the greatest and most consistent effects, followed by race, then sex. Some have seen this as support for labeling but it is problematical whether self-labeling or official labeling is the product of early contact, perhaps both depending on how representatives of the justice system interacted with the juvenile offender.
Early age, it would seem, told us little more in an explanatory sense, than did the early Philadelphia research or our earliest analyses dating back to the 1970s. Neither number nor severity of prior sanctions had effects of sufficient impact to more than suggest that number of prior sanctions was slightly more important than was their severity. If labeling was a major explanatory variable, shouldn't number of sanctions have had considerable impact on future seriousness? It did not and even suggested that number of sanctions, as opposed to their severity, had a slight deterrent effect.
When age at contact and race were eliminated as independent variables, total prior offense seriousness, number of prior sanctions (court interventions), and inner city residence produced the only significant effects but only 9% to 15% of the variance in future offense seriousness was accounted for. In other words, there was still no evidence that increasing severity of sanctions would be effective in delinquency and crime control. Increased institutionalization would only further accelerate the acquisition of delinquent and criminal patterns of behavior for, even if it had a temporary impact on those who were institutionalized, their return to society would place them back in society with the same peers, poising them for a return to serious misbehavior and another institutional experience.
If we reflect on this acceleration in delinquent behavior, it is apparent that age of contact and race must have been quite important explanatory variables. Was age at contact important simply because it was an indicator of early delinquent activity and early learning rather than evidence of early labeling? Or are early police contacts a product of the 148way of life of inner city males or, even more, of inner city Non-Whites? Do we hear middle, upper middle, and upper class youth referred to as being street-wise? Unless we asked police officers a series of questions about how much a part name- and face-recognition played in the attention that they paid to youth in their patrol areas, it would be difficult to perceive the data as evidence for labeling. Looking back, the interview questions on self-concept were not sufficiently time- and event-related to support an argument for self-labeling.
At this point in our research (Chapter 7) we turned to what has been a provoking topic for many years, criminal typology. We were concerned about the possibility of using typology as an approach to better categorizing cohort members than had been possible with unidimensional measures. A variety of offender typologies were developed which not only had considerable heuristic value but which also enabled us to place people in relatively discrete types based on their miscreant behavior and their justice system experiences. Some were what could be called constructed typologies and some were computer-generated. All enabled us to delineate that very small proportion of the cohorts (less than 5%) who were responsible for a large proportion (circa 80%) of the felonies such as burglary and robbery.
In the next chapter we continued to explore typology development, turning back to types based on the nature of the offenses which characterized an offender's career. These types were arrayed so that it was possible to see not only the frequency of the offenses which had placed a person in a type but the frequency with which each cohort member had had police contacts for all other reasons. This highlighted what we had referred to as the heterogeneity of delinquent and criminal careers.
Our major question remained. Would types permit better prediction of adult careers from juvenile careers than did the unidimensional measures? It was apparent that they did not as long as they were manipulated as though each type had a position on an interval scale, but that was not the end because it appeared that continuity was more complex. This led us to further examination of types, the place of juvenile drug offenders and other types of offenders in terms of their relationship to adult offenders, and the possibility that drug offenses have a catalytic role in career continuation beyond the behavior to increased justice system involvement upon recognition that drugs have played a role in one's career.
Chapter 9 leaves no question about the existence of a drug and delinquency/crime nexus but still does not permit causal inferences. First police contacts for drugs appear in the careers of cohort members before 149and after ordinary street offenses. That those who had official police contacts for drug offenses had more serious offender careers than did other cohort members is unquestioned (even with drug offenses removed) and that a large proportion of the officially recorded serious offenders had drug offenses in the panoply of offenses in their careers is unquestioned. Henry Ford once wrote, "If you will study the history of almost any criminal you will find that he is an inveterate cigarette smoker." But cigarette smoking is probably no more the cause of crime than are drugs. Even a common cause is problematical.
Unfortunately for those who see the war on drugs as the war which will take an enormous bite out of crime, our analyses revealed that the role of drugs in delinquency/crime continuity is not simple. What that role might be became more complex through the introduction of controls for neighborhood of socialization and whether or not respondents had had a police contact for a drug offense. Rather than a link between drugs and delinquency/crime, there are probably different kinds of links, some more stable than others. In some cases the link between drugs and delinquency/crime or drugs and career continuity is only there because the use of specified drugs is a crime.
In the end one could develop a rationale for focusing attention on drug users/offenders who work in the inner city but reside in peripheral, high SES neighborhoods, as well as on serious offenders who reside in the inner city.
