Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book deals with the social climate in which juvenile delinquency crops up time after time. It explores certain aspects of the sub-cultures within respectable society which appear to breed behaviour that is officially classed as delinquent. The research is based on "Radby", a working class town in the Midlands which has a high proportion of miners. The book provides a description of Radby. The methods adopted for the research were based on house to-house interviewing and on participant observation. In Radby it had been noticed that delinquency was concentrated in five, relatively small, areas. The people were in similar types of occupation and were of about the same economic level. But while one of the pair was “white” i.e., had almost a delinquency-free record, the other had such a long-standing history of trouble that Radby itself classified it as a “black” street.