The Origins of American Criminology

Advances in Criminological Theory

Francis T. Cullen, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Andrew J. Myer, Freda Adler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412814676
• eBook ISBN: 9781351477840
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Origins of American Criminology is an invaluable resource. Both separately and together, these essays capture the stories behind the invention of criminology's major theoretical perspectives. They preserve information that otherwise would have been lost. There is urgency to embark on this reflective task given that the generation that defined the field for the past decades is heading into retirement. This fine volume insures that their life experiences will not be forgotten. The volume shows criminology to be a human enterprise. Ideas are not driven primarily-and often not at all-by data. Theories are not invented solely as part of the scientific process; they are not inevitable. American criminology's great theories most often precede the collection of data; they guide and produce empirical inquiry, not vice versa. Theoretical paradigms are shaped by a host of factors-scholars' assumptions about the world drawn from their social constructs, disciplinary content and ideology, cognitive environments found in specific universities and the field's scholarly networks, and, quirks in a person's biography. The volume demonstrates that humanity is what makes theory possible. Diverse experiences-when we were born, where we have lived, the unique trajectories of our personal life courses, the disciplines and academic places we have ended up-allow individual scholars to see the world differently.

Part I

The Chicago School of Criminology

1

Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay: Chicago Criminologists*

Jon Snodgrass

The sociological studies of juvenile delinquency conducted by Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay in the 1930s and early 1940s were considered extremely important contributions to criminological thought in their day and continue to be highly regarded in the social sciences today. The persisting interest in their work is reflected in the fact that Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, their most comprehensive book, has been updated recently with new chapters by McKay and re-issued as a paperback, along with an introduction by James F. Short, Jr. (Short 1972). Also, it is common to find Shaw and McKay’s articles reprinted in modern anthologies (Radzinowitz and Wolfgang 1971; Voss and Peterson 1971).

The contributions of Shaw and McKay can be divided into three main areas: (a) collection of autobiographies of juvenile delinquents, (b) research on the geographical distribution of delinquents, and (c) creation of a delinquency prevention program known as the Chicago Area Project (CAP). These efforts were actually integrated theoretically: the geographical material located delinquency in “high delinquency areas,” contiguous to commerce and industry and usually near the centre of the city. The autobiographies illustrated an individual case in one of the areas, and the CAP was a community organization movement which attempted to reform the areas in the interest of delinquency prevention.

Little critical attention has been paid to Shaw and McKay, today or in the past, with the exception of reviews of technical-methodological issues. This paper attempts to provide an overview and criticism of their work. A biographical sketch preceding the analysis affords information about the background of two “social pathologists” and the social conditions under which their ideas developed. A critique follows which attempts to pinpoint theoretical limitations in their ecological studies which have been overlooked to date. The final part presents analysis of the CAP. The relationship between biographical origins and criminological ideas and practices is most developed in this section. Because of space limitations, no analysis of the life history material is presented in this paper. It is hoped that this article will serve as a small contribution to the history of criminological thought and provide some information about two important figures in, and the kind of work which developed out of, the Chicago School of sociology.

The work of Shaw and McKay within criminology was a part of a larger movement in the social sciences usually known as “the social ecology school.” The school was centered in the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, and was principally under the direction of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess. As University of Chicago students in the early 1920s, Shaw and McKay’s attention was drawn to the study of the city itself, and especially to those portions which constituted “social problems.” “Social ecology” provided a general theoretical orientation to explain the causes of social problems in terms of ecological laws. The Sociology Department encouraged fieldwork, empirical research, participant observation, and first-hand contact with residents and areas of the city. The efforts of Shaw and McKay in criminology were only one of a number of sociological studies which used ecological theory and case study methods to investigate “urban behaviour.” The same basic orientation was used by Dai in the study of opium addicts, Cavan of suicides, Faris and Dunham of mental disorders, among numerous others (Faris 1967: 64-67).

The Backgrounds of Shaw and McKay

Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, two farm boys who came to Chicago in the 1920s to undertake graduate work in sociology at the famous university, were both born and brought up in rural, mid-western areas of the United States, both received Christian upbringings, and both attended small, denominational country colleges. Shaw was from an Indiana crossroads that barely constituted a town, and McKay was from the vast prairie regions of South Dakota. Following graduate school, Shaw and McKay worked together for 30 years as a research team at the Institute for Juvenile Research near the Chicago Loop.

Although their social origins were quite similar, the personalities of the two men were strikingly different. McKay was the quiet statistician, a man who stayed removed at the Institute and plotted the maps, calculated the rates, ran the correlations and described the findings which located empirically and depicted cartographically the distribution of crime and delinquency in Chicago. Shaw, on the other hand, was an activist, who “related” to delinquents and got their life stories, and an organizer who attempted to create a community reform movement. McKay was the professional scholar and gentleman—polite, kind, thoughtful—an academic out to prove his position with empirical evidence. Shaw was the more emotional practitioner, a professional administrator and organizer—talkative, friendly, personable, persuasive, energetic, and quixotic—out to make his case through action and participation.

Clifford R. Shaw

Shaw, the fifth of 10 children, was born in August 1895 in Luray, an Indiana farm community 30 miles south-east of Muncie. “A dozen little old-fashioned houses snugly hidden among the hills” is the way Shaw once described it. “The houses were neatly and compactly gathered in four right angles made by the intersection of two roads.” ² Shaw’s father owned and cultivated an eighty-acre tract of land, owned the small general store, and often worked as a harness-maker and shoemaker. Although Shaw represented his family as poor dirt-farmers, it appears that they were more substantial small-town people; Republican, Scottish-Irish, Protestant, established in Indiana for several generations.³

Shaw began school when he was seven and went irregularly until he was fourteen. “At that age I was forced to leave school and work on the farm with my father,” Shaw wrote. The reasons why he was “forced” to leave school are not completely known; perhaps his labor was needed at home, apparently he had not done especially well, and there is some indication that his departure was not totally involuntary. Shaw’s disenchantment with farming grew over the next several years. He studied vocabulary while working behind the plough, read books at night, longed for brighter lights, and aspired to the ministry.

During public addresses Shaw often, and somewhat fondly, mentioned his own childhood delinquencies in Luray. In one of these, he was caught stealing stove bolts from the blacksmith’s shop in order to repair a toy wagon. The blacksmith shook him upside down by the heels, Shaw said, and the bolts fell to the ground. This experience was used to illustrate the typical small-town reaction to delinquency—the blacksmith then helped him repair the wagon.

When Shaw was 15, a Methodist minister from Adrian College in Michigan spoke at the Luray church and encouraged him to pursue his studies. “He told me that there was opportunity for a young man to work his way through college without much financial aid.” That fall, Shaw went off to Adrian to study for the ministry.

The religious education, however, prompted a deconversion. Shaw was exposed to more liberal ideas than he had known in his home community. While he remained a non-institutional Christian in principle all his life, Shaw gave up the ministry and left the church. His experiences at Adrian created a deep conflict: “By the end of my junior year I had abandoned the thought of becoming a minister. This radical change in my life-purpose was due to the fact that my religious views were quite liberal and could not find favor in the church to which I belonged, and secondly, I found that I had idealized the ministry as a profession and on finding that my previous conception of the minister was wrong, I suddenly became very intolerant with the profession. My attitude toward ministers and ministerial students became very inimical, especially if their religious views were conservative. My attitude toward religion in general was very hostile. I even came to the place where I considered religion a barrier to the progress of humanity.”

In the spring of 1917, after his junior year, and while his mind was still very unsettled, Shaw went from God to arms and joined the U.S. Navy. He was trained at Johns Hopkins University as a pharmacist’s mate for the submarine corps, but the war ended before he went to sea. In the fall of 1918, he returned to Adrian to complete the A.B. The next year, having fallen backwards out of the church, Shaw fell forward, as it were, into graduate school in sociology, at the University of Chicago. This shift in career line further substantiates C. W. Mills’ (1962) frequently-cited observation that many of the “social pathologists” were “fathered” by the rural, protestant ministry. In Chicago, Shaw lived in a settlement, “The House of Happiness,” in an Eastern European neighborhood, near the inner city. This introduction to the slum sections served to awaken a consciousness to the starker realities of American social life. Similarly, we know that Edwin H. Sutherland, who came to Chicago out of a background resembling Shaw’s, once wrote: “When I became an officer of the Juvenile Protective Association I saw for the first time in my life the conditions of life in the immigrant sections of a large city. These impressed me very much, as had some of the earlier literature I had read (Jacob Riis, etc.) and I developed a somewhat radical attitude” (Sutherland 1973). The qualification “somewhat radical” was entirely appropriate both for Sutherland and for Shaw. The experience “liberalized” the conservative orientation “naturally” acquired in their rather strict home communities.

From 1921 to 1923, Shaw worked part-time as a parole officer for the Illinois State Training School for Boys at St. Charles. From 1924 to 1926, he was employed as a probation officer at the Cook County Juvenile Court. He continued course work at the University through 1924. Shaw did not complete the Ph.D., mainly because of the language requirement, though he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Adrian in 1939. Toward the end of his graduate studies, Shaw was offered a professorship at McGill University, and nearly took it to be nearer his prospective wife, a Smith graduate who had practiced social work in Chicago and then returned to Boston. She agreed to marriage and to return to Chicago, however. They had two children. Shaw subsequently taught criminology, in addition to his research at the Institute, at the George Williams College and the Central Y.M.C.A. College and, after 1941, at the downtown center of the University of Chicago. He belonged to and participated in professional organizations only briefly in the early part of his career.

In 1926, The Behavior Research Fund made provisions for a research section at the Institute for Juvenile Research. The Institute was formerly the Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, directed by the well-known criminologist William Healy.⁴ The Psychopathic Institute was taken over officially by Cook County in 1914 and by the State of Illinois in 1917. In the 1920s it was renamed the Institute for Juvenile Research and the Sociology Department became the site for Shaw and McKay’s researches. Shaw was appointed Director in October 1926 and Henry D. McKay, who had known Shaw as a fellow graduate student, was employed in January 1927 as a clerical research assistant.

Henry D. McKay

McKay was born near Orient, in Hand County, South Dakota, on a 300-acre farm, in December 1899. His grandfather immigrated from Scotland in 1873 and his father had migrated from Minnesota in 1883. It is not surprising then that ideas of race and nationality, migration and immigration, played a large role in his criminology. McKay was the fifth in a family of seven children. In addition to farming, his father was active in county politics. The family was religious, but not as strongly as was Shaw’s. McKay worked on the farm and attended public schools, prior to receiving an A.B. from Dakota Wesleyan University.

McKay arrived in Chicago to do graduate work four years after Shaw (1923). He stayed only one year before leaving to teach and study at the University of Illinois. At Illinois, he became acquainted with, though he did not study under, Sutherland, who had begun teaching there in 1919. A very close friendship developed over the years. McKay married in 1926 and had one daughter. He returned to Chicago in 1926 and took courses intermittently through 1929, but did not complete his degree for the same reason as Shaw.

The major question which haunted McKay over the years was whether race and nationality had an effect on delinquent behavior. He now has long outlived the excitement over this issue in criminology, and publishers considered his overdue manuscript, devoted entirely to the subject, likely to prove unprofitable. The McKay and Shaw researches originally answered this question firmly in the negative by repeatedly showing that the delinquency rates for each nationality were high only while the group resided in a deteriorated area. As assimilation took place and the nationalities were dispersed to outlying areas of Chicago, their delinquency rates approximated to those of “native Americans.” Thus, crime and delinquency were caused by the social conditions, not by racial and ethnic origins. The generalization broke down, however, when assimilation was not the natural course for black Americans. Stuck in the ghetto, blacks had crime rates that remained high over generations. This not only threatened the generalization, it also implicated American society. Stubbornly, trying to support his thesis in regard to blacks as well, McKay persisted with the calculation of rates with each decennial issue of the national census. Finally, the 1960 delinquency rates began to show that for a few ghetto areas on the south and west sides of Chicago, delinquency had declined (McKay 1967). This finding tended to vindicate the generalization and exonerate American society. It took a few decades longer, McKay thought, but delinquency dropped as the black American was “accepted” and as the black community was “stabilized.” When last interviewed in 1972, McKay was patiently waiting for the rates based on the 1970 census further to confirm this trend.

Shaw and McKay

The character of Shaw and McKay’s intellectual and research relationship changed over the years. Until the initiation of the CAP in 1932, the writing and research seem to have been shared. Afterward, Shaw’s contribution fell off sharply, perhaps partly as a result of his involvement in the sociology department and the action projects, but also because of his health. Although he was rugged in appearance, Shaw’s health progressively declined; this lessened his activism and dampened his reputation during the last decade of his life. Shaw was a spent man in the process of being forgotten toward the end. Paradoxically, his death resurrected his contributions and standing in the field. Shaw reached the peak of his creativity and productivity before he was 40; McKay’s intellectual maturity seemed to develop more slowly, and was sustained over a longer range of time. The characterization of Shaw as the hot crusader and McKay as the cool researcher is drawn mostly from the 1932-45 period.⁵ At the Institute, McKay took over more and more responsibility for correspondence, memoranda, progress reports and other written material (including the books), many of which were for Shaw’s signature or presentation. McKay has described Shaw’s activities during this period: “Shaw was a great organizer. He kept a research department alive throughout a long depression, and a great war, which is no mean achievement. First as a participant in the Behavior Research Fund and later as director of the Chicago Area Project he developed private sources of support which were coupled with the State facilities with which both of us were connected. Clifford coupled charisma with organization talent with very interesting results” (McKay 1971).

Shaw was an impressive, and extraordinary figure. He had a charming and affectionate personality, organizational and leadership ability and a talent for obtaining funds. Friends often jested that it was a pity he became a sociologist, for the world thereby lost one of its ablest con-men. Shaw perhaps exemplifies Gouldner’s (1973: xiii) remark that the Chicago reformer “… was soon recognized as a kind of hustler, on the make in his own way—”

Great affection and respect were accorded Shaw by almost everyone he came to know, and this reverence seems to have grown over the years. In 1967, for instance, there was a memorial service in Chicago to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death. Outside the movement he founded there was criticism, however. Professional social work resented the utilization of untrained, indigenous workers, a fundamental element in his philosophy of prevention. Shaw and Joseph Lohman parted company (for unknown reasons). And Saul D. Alinsky, an early community organizer for the CAP near the Chicago stockyards, later fired by Shaw, differed sharply on the goals and type of direct action required for social change.⁶

Alinsky once characterized the activities of the area projects in the following terms: “Finally, I quit Joliet and took a job with the Institute for Juvenile Research, one of those outfits that were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Preserving the Origins of American Criminology
• Part I. The Chicago School of Criminology
• Part II. Merton’s Columbia University Tradition
• Part III. Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania
• Part IV. New Visions of Crime
• Part V. The Control Theory-Social Learning Theory Debate
• Part VI. The Development of Life-Course Theory
• Contributors
• Index