Changing Patterns Of Delinquency And Crime

A Longitudinal Study In Racine

Lyle W. Shannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429715044
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The result of a 30-year longitudinal study in Racine, Wisconsin, this monograph tracks the criminal behaviour of juveniles and the persistence or decline of that behaviour into adult life. The author investigates the influence of the neighbourhood environment on the development of a criminal career and the utility of a criminal typology for the pur

Chapter 1
An Introduction to the Research on Delinquency and Crime

History of the Racine Research

This book is the product of 35 years of research on delinquency and crime in Madison and Racine, Wisconsin. The project was first conceived in 1955 by Professor Thomas C. McCormick, statistician/demographer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. As the most research-oriented member of the department, he captured the attention of Michael Hakeem and the author and we eagerly accepted his invitation to participate in a study of the changing ecology of delinquency in Madison.

Although Professor McCormick was struck down by a heart attack soon after data collection had commenced in 1956, Hakeem and Shannon continued the Madison research. What encouraged us at the outset was the unflagging cooperation of then Chief of Police of Madison, the late Bruce Weatherly. Several years later in the 1950s the author became acquainted with Chief LeRoy C. Jenkins of the Racine Police Department, a chief who had established a records system which was comparable to that in Madison. At his suggestion, we established a similar research project in Racine. No one could have been more cooperative or more tolerant. At times we had more researchers in the Records Division twenty-four hours a day than did the police department. At least six chiefs of police in Racine have continual to support our work during all these years, including the present chief, Karl Hansen. Judge John C. Ahlgrimm of the Juvenile Court was the first member of the judiciary to not only support the research but read our reports and acknowledge their importance for those who must make decisions about the futures of youthful and adult offenders.

Professors Harwin L. Voss (University of Kentucky), Austin T. Turk (University of California, Riverside), Robert M. Terry (University of Akron), and Charles H. McCaghy (Bowling Green State University) were among many graduate students who became involved in what was to become the continuing Wisconsin studies of delinquency and crime, first in Madison and then in Racine. Each not only used the Madison and/or Racine data for their theses or dissertations but have gone far beyond what we were doing at that time, distinguishing themselves in the field of criminology.

The Orientation of This Volume

Writing about all of these years of research is, in some ways, the most exciting part of the experience. It is almost as if the concluding chapter draws the characters into a penthouse high above the city's busy harbor for an answer to the causes of crime. By putting all of the strings of evidence together, by bringing our research findings up to the present, we are beginning to understand how various types and patterns of delinquency, crime, and drug use or drug offenses are the product of human interaction in every-day life. There are still, however, unanswered questions which should and could be settled by continuing the research in Racine.

In some walks of life (sociologists call them societal groups) daily activities are organized around work; one's life beyond family and friends, and even among friends, consists of a pattern of behavior acquired in what for some is an exciting world of work. In many other groups life is not organized around work because either there is none or the work available is distasteful, demeaning, and almost surely indicative of little but a dreary life ahead. Obtaining a job, never a position, does not provide much of a thrill, even though it may supply sustenance and shelter. Retirement, freedom from work at some distant time, is all that can be dreamed of.

With a perspective that enables us to go beyond simplistic explanations which attempt to account for delinquency and crime by characterizing people as sick or, even simpler, by saying that they are criminal types, we can see how delinquency may be as normal as Scouting, some kinds of crime may be as normal as accounting or sales work, and drugs and liquor may be as much an organizing principle for one's life as gourmet cooking is to people who have been integrated into the larger society. This perspective is not new (nothing is completely new) but the research that we have been conducting has reinforced our view that continuing within a sociological framework will produce answers to today's behavioral mysteries-what we sometimes see as the fascinating but dark and incomprehensible side of human behavior.

As the story unfolds, we shall learn how we (all of us in the larger society) have played a part, although we do not engage in most of these miscreant activities, in creating the arenas in which they are generated and perpetuated. If we wish to be severe with ourselves, we must reflect on the fact that we have sometimes in our uninformed concern also been unwitting accomplices.

On a recent visit to five major cities in Brazil, the author was impressed with the fantastic differences in the level of living between millions of favela residents (hillside and bayside) and those who live high on different hills or in the lush valleys in homes of such shocking beauty as to seem almost unreal to an Iowan. He could not help but note the difference in housing near the beaches of Rio de Janiero, Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, and the housing to be found only a few blocks away, like the Gold Coast and the slums in Chicago, much of the latter still remaining even with recent years of gentrification. At the same time, the fear of crime was ever-present among not only Rio's residents but those in every other major metropolitan area. This was a problem which its residents saw as explainable not in structural terms but in terms of "these people." That is not to say, however, that the Brazilian experience is unique. What we saw there is similar to what may be seen in every other urban, industrial/commercial metropolis in the Americas, it is only that the fear of ordinary crime, street crime, has been so intensified in Brazil's shimmering, even awesome, urban metropolises.

While this may seem a divergence from the story of our research, it helps place what we shall describe in a sociological perspective which will permit better understanding of why so much attention has been paid to the structure and growth of the city, to its transition from small town to urban industrial, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from lakeside serenity to urban conflict. Some of Racine's residents have not always seen our accounts of what goes on in the community as helpful in solving community problems. They are probably correct but accounts and descriptions of the complexity of relationships lead to understanding the nature of problems. Understanding must precede effective approaches to amelioration.

Although our research on delinquency commenced in Madison in 1956 and in Racine in 1960, it was not until 1974 that our longitudinal birth cohort studies were underway in Racine. The design of the research, definitions of variables, and analytic techniques will be described as the volume progresses. Suffice it to say at this point that there were a total of 6,127 persons in the three birth cohorts (1942, 1949, and 1955) and, of these, 4,079 had continuous residence in Racine, these constituting the group who were analyzed most intensely. Lengthy interviews were also conducted with samples totalling 889 persons from the 1942 and 1949 Cohorts.

Since 1974 the National Institute of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the National Institute of Justice have supported research proposals from the Iowa Urban Community Research Center. The first was about the relationship of juvenile delinquency to adult crime, A second project investigated the relationship of delinquency and crime to the changing ecological structure of the city. This was followed by research on the development of serious criminal careers and the delinquent neighborhood. The next project involved an evaluation of the effect of sanctions. Our fifth project dealt with prediction and typology development. Most recently we have been analyzing patterns of drug use and their relationship to delinquency and crime.

The Chapters Which Account for the Development and Persistence of Delinquency and Crime

The second chapter presents the theoretical and empirical foundations of the early Racine research. It commenced with the ideas which guided our first project and explains how the findings were not only related to them but how, as the project progressed, some support was found for a variety of sociological explanations.

Theories are sufficiently overlapping that propositions derived from them produce research findings that may be strongly supportive of two somewhat similar but supposedly competing theories. The trick is to set up the analysis so that all but one of the sets of competing propositions is rejected by the analysis. This sounds quite scientific but is not that easy if the tests of propositions derived from theories involve theories that were non-existent before the data were collected. Even more likely, a many-faceted and broadly structured research project may lend weak support to a number of major sociological theories while rejecting none; each relevant theory appears to account for some delinquency and crime.

The answer to accounting for delinquency and crime lies in developing an integrated theory which, as we shall come to see, commences with the ecology of the city and cultural deviance, proceeds through the social structure and social processes types of explanations, and then adds social psychological variables which account for differences that occur within groups of people in the larger structural framework. This involves the testing of hypotheses or propositions that have evolved from different levels of perception. Although the demographic variables, race/ethnicity and sex, are not explanatory in themselves, they do enable us to better understand how people are positioned in the larger structure of society and thus have quite different chains of experiences during the process of socialization, even throughout their lives.

Having presented our theoretical position which builds upon the empirical research of generations of sociologists who came before us, most notably from the University of Chicago, the incidence and prevalence of delinquency and crime are described within an ecological framework which demonstrates how the changing structure of the city produces changing patterns of delinquency and crime. Although much of these data have appeared in earlier articles and/or in Criminal Career Continuity: Its Social Context (Shannon, 1988), they are again presented in summary form to emphasize the importance of ecology as a starting point.

What is going on in the minds of juveniles and adults and their ensuing behavior brings them to the attention of the police. That this is mediated by what is going on in the minds of police officers and other justice system persons and plays a part in the chain of events in persons' lives is again emphasized in order that the reader understand what we mean by social processes and chains of experiences. How all of this was internalized by members of the 1942 and 1949 Cohorts is only briefly mentioned at the outset but is dealt with in more detail in a later chapter.

Data from the first project in Racine were supportive of, or at least consistent with, what would be expected based on various social structure theories, cultural deviance as represented by the ecological approach, and various subcultural theories. At the same time, the findings were consistent with what one would expect to find based on social process theories. One could go a step further by saying that social conflict theories are not inconsistent with some of the findings. Our interpretation of the findings and methodological problems that gave us concern explain why our theoretical and methodological focus developed as it did for the second project, which in turn led to the third project, and so on.

Chapter 3 continues the ecological analyses with comparison of the findings utilizing census tracts, police grid areas, natural areas, and neighborhoods as spatial units, concluding that the smaller and more homogeneous neighborhoods enable us to better capture the relationship of urban social structure to delinquency and crime and ensuing temporal changes. This is followed by analyses which indicate how cohort, age, and time period variation are related to major areas in the city, particularly as the inner city and interstitial neighborhoods are differentiated from other types of neighborhoods in terms of the incidence of offenses, offense seriousness, the incidence of police referrals, and severity of court sanctions. All of this leads to how the cyclical nature of events has culminated in some deviations from the basic pattern of delinquency and crime rates in urban/industrial cities even though the most striking and readily recognizable consequence has been the hardening of the inner city.

Using the Neighborhood Data to Focus Attention on the Present

The neighborhood data are analyzed in even more detail in Chapter 4 where each of sixty-five neighborhoods is classified as more or less delinquency and crime producing. Persons residing in neighborhoods variously characterized in such a way (milieu effects) are shown to have had proportionately different justice system involvement. This leads us further and further toward delinquency and crime as the product of learning experiences rather than as inner compulsions of types of people who are distributed more or less evenly throughout the population. The detailed data presented in the various tables in this chapter reveal considerable consistency in ecological patterns from measure to measure and considerable continuity in delinquent and criminal careers, particularly in inner city and interstitial neighborhoods. Increasing severity of sanctions from cohort to cohort had its greatest impact on serious, Non-White offenders who resided in the inner city.

To this point the chapters have, in a sense, been rather simple because they have dealt with delinquency and crime per se, ignoring the fact that the process may differ between inner city, interstitial, and other types of neighborhoods, by sex, and by race/ethnicity. In Chapter 5 these complexities are explored utilizing both official and self-report data, concluding that even the effects of the process of intervention differ by race/ethnicity, sex, and inner city vs. other neighborhood of residence. Still the experience variables account for large proportions of adult offender seriousness among inner city males, White or Non-White (the two groups which would encapsulate most of Racine's structural underclass as it is now referred to).

The Effectiveness of the Justice System

The consequences of sanctions are examined in some detail in Chapter 6, the data again revealing that sanctions failed to result in specific deterrence and produced even more serious misbehavior in the following period, the more severe were the sanctions. No matter how the data are manipulated, we find little to please those who believe that early and severe sanctioning, particularly institutionalization, as a policy will deter juveniles from further delinquent behavior. Since this is an issue which has been controversial for many years, particularly for those on the firing line, considerable effort was made to produce a finding that would be of use to those who are involved in day-to-day decision-making. Aside from the conclusion that sanctions in themselves are ineffective, the data did suggest that frequency of intervention was related to less serious offender careers as time progressed. On the other hand, more success was attained in accounting for career continuity.

Type of Offender Careers and the Prediction Problem

Prediction and offender typology development has been one of our most challenging concerns. At the same time, it is one of the most frustrating problems for those who must categorize offenders in a meaningful way and from that predict their future behavior. Creating a typology of institutionalized offenders is not the same as creating a typology from an entire cohort. Institutionalized offenders are skewed toward the more serious types while most members of a cohort are found in the least serious types. Although a number of approaches to typology development are presented, their greatest usefulness is in delineating the most serious types of offenses (felons and Part I offenders). This, however, is done after the fact and a typology based on only the juvenile proportion of careers fails to predict the nature of adult careers without considerable error, as shown in Chapters 7 and 8.

The first eight chapters provide a background for the chapter which may be of the most current interest, Chapter 9, "Drug Offender Types and Their Relationship to the Ecology of the City." Here we investigate the relationship of juvenile drug use and juvenile drug offenses to delinquency and adult crime. Our emphasis is on the role of drugs and alcohol in other delinquent and criminal activities, since they are linked among a large proportion of the young people in the study as well as among adults. How the connection between drugs and alcohol, delinquency and crime, and continuity in delinquency and crime differs by types of residential areas is the major concern of this next-to-concluding chapter. It even further points to the importance of focusing our attention on the structure of society and on-going social processes if we are to understand how people come to behave and misbehave as they do.

Chapter 10 summarizes the findings and indicates why it is so difficult to control delinquency and crime. If it seems to be a bit of a let-down, this is because we are so hesitant to make the kinds of claims that many others find so easy. What we should do if we are seriously concerned about delinquency and crime may be costly but, as we suggest in the concluding chapter, no one who knows anything about delinquency and crime has said that there are simple solutions to such complex problems.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Introduction to the Research on Delinquency and Crime
• 2 Assessing the Relationship of Adult Criminal Careers to Juvenile Careers
• 3 The Relationship of Juvenile Delinquency and Adult Crime to the Changing City Structure
• 4 The Development of Serious Criminal Careers and the Delinquent Neighborhood
• 5 Variation in the Process of Developing Serious Criminal Careers
• 6 A More Precise Evaluation of the Effects of Sanctions
• 7 Prediction and Typology Development
• 8 Typologies Based on Offense Seriousness or Severity of Sanctions
• 9 Drug Offender Types and Their Relationship to the Ecology of the City
• 10 Summary and Conclusions
• References
• Index