The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice

Aaron Cicourel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138538603
• eBook ISBN: 9781351473910
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice recasts familiar sociological problems of research within a dramatically new and different theoretical and methodological perspective. In seeing law enforcement officers, no less than those accuse of criminal behavior, as locked into the creation of history, or more precisely, a series of retrospective and prospective interpretations of events both within and disengaged from, the social contexts relevant to what purportedly took place, Aaron Cicourel redefined the fault lines of contemporary criminology.The work makes imaginative use of a wide variety of new techniques of analysis from ethnomethodology to community studies—while at no point ignoring basic hard statistical data—in this study of juvenile justice in two California cities. Cicourel states the purpose of his book with clarity: The decision-making activities that produce the social problem called delinquency (and the socially organized procedures that provide for judicial outcomes) are important because they highlight fundamental processes of how social order is possible.This work challenges the conventional view that assumes delinquents are natural social types distributed in some ordered fashion, and produced by a set of abstract internal or external pressures from the social structure. Cicourel views the everyday organizational workings of the police, probation departments, courts, and schools, demonstrating how these agencies contribute to various kinds of transformations of the original events that led to law enforcement contact.This contextual creation of facts in turn leads to improvised, ad hoc interpretations of character structure, family life, and future prospects. In this way, the agencies may generate delinquency by their routine encounters with the young. His new introduction discusses with great detail the methodology behind his research and responses to earlier critiques of his work.

Chapter 1
Preliminary Issues of Theory and Method

In studying the agencies of social control in a "community"—empowered with the authority to prevent disorder and restrain or punish—I am able to provide an empirical setting for raising basic issues by focusing on how juveniles are labeled "delinquent." The present study of juvenile justice stems from general interests in a theory of social organization. My purpose is to go beyond agencies of social control (such as the school, the police, probation services, and the juvenile court) and ask how any set of activities we often label "bureaucratic"—punishment or otherwise—routinely processes persons. I assume all socially organized activites labeled "complex" or "bureaucratic" are bounded in similar ways: General procedural rules are laid down for members, and members develop and employ their own theories, recipes, and shortcuts for meeting general requirements acceptable to themselves and tacitly or explicitly acceptable to other members acting as "supervisors" or some form of external control. Case studies, therefore, should be designed to reveal invariant properties of the social arrangements observed and interpreted. To suggest there are invariant properties discernible in case studies means the researcher must search for and demonstrate the generalizability of his findings as applied to all forms of social organization.

I have, of course, not avoided but have pointedly discussed the theoretical and empirical problems studied under the labels of delinquency, crime, justice, broken homes, social class, and the like, since they can be primarily utilized to portray basic elements of social organization in general bureaucratic processing.

Because the most prominent theories of deviance (and, for the present purposes, delinquency) have stemmed from writers with a structural-functional perspective,¹ this chapter outlines an alternate perspective and critically discusses theoretical and methodological positions structural-functionalists utilize for recommending their work. The theoretical and methodological issues are difficult to separate but include (1) the sociologist's depiction of how the actor makes sense of an environment of objects so that his (the actor's) inferences and action produce the activities the sociologist labels "social structures," and (2) the alternative ways in which sociologists achieve solutions to problems of objectification and verification when studying social organization. The theoretical and substantive issues discussed throughout the remainder of the book presume a knowledge of these two problems.

Objectification and Verification

I use the term objectification to denote the observer's and the actor's attempts to convince the reader (or listener) of the credibility of the properties or elements being attended and labeled "data" for purposes of making inferences and taking further action. To objectify some event or object or "mood," therefore, is to convince someone that sufficient grounds exist or existed for making specifiable inferences about "what happened." The basic question becomes, therefore: How does the subject and the observer preserve or seek to preserve the environment of objects he or others attended or presumably attended and used to generate something called "data?" Notice how the problem of verification—interpreting the materials labeled data as supporting a prior or ad hoc proposition about why and how something happened or is constituted according to specifiable procedural rules—may appear to be trivial if the problem of objectification is simplified by labeling the results of a questionnaire (the "answers") or the tables produced by the Census Bureau as objectified data. Throughout this book I seek support for the assertion that most sociologists, and particularly structural-functionalists, are glossing over the core of sociological research by utilizing oversimplified procedures for objectifying the collection of materials labeled "data," and verifying propositions called hypotheses. If we agree to accept census materials as adequate descriptions of specifiable phenomena, then the problem of verification is trivial even if there are competing theories as to the meaning of the results. But if we assume (for purposes of discussion) that our "best" efforts at objectification consist in the use of multiple video tapes of the same environment of objects over time to depict or "bottle" adequately the phenomena under study, then the problem of verification becomes complicated. The complication arises because we must attend to the problem of how the observer (subject or researcher) utilizes tacit knowledge (background information or what anyone "knows") in identifying and selecting materials from the video tapes, and recommending interpretations (as straight descriptions or coded shorthand accounts) of "what happened." Three or more video tapes, presumably of the same environment of objects, do not resolve the problem of objectification. There would be difficulties in presenting a convincing argument to a reader who has access to the video tapes while he reads the researcher's account of what happened. What sorts of agreements must both the researcher and the reader achieve as conditions for deciding the various meanings being rendered? Assuming both the researcher and the reader are members of the same society, it might be easy to agree on the meaning of physical items like chairs and tables, but I am interested in how we assign unequivocal meaning to the juvenile's tone of voice when a police officer or probation officer or judge labels such behavior "in defiance of authority" or an indication of a "bad attitude." Other problems include agreement on the meaning of gestures and dress, physical posturing, linguistic expressions suggesting double meanings, jokes, anxiety, and the like. The complications are enormous. I raise them in connection with video tapes to underscore their significance when the reader must rely on accounts far more complicated; when he seeks to understand how a set of questionnaire items impinged on a set of respondents, how each respondent interpreted each question, depending on what kinds of tacit knowledge vis-à-vis what kinds of personal experiences and situational contexts or abstract imagined contexts not revealed by the fixed-choice response categories provided. Also, in the same or a different situation where the descriptions, rendered by a researcher of action scenes he witnessed and now portrays for the reader, must be taken as "clear" because of the authority of the researcher. The problem is equally complicated when the researcher utilizes written reports by members of a complex organization and must determine the relevance of attributions such as social class, social character, mental illness, intelligence, and the like, made by members of the organization in the routine course of their daily activities, Unless the respondent's and researcher's decoding and encoding procedures are basic elements of the research enterprise, we cannot make sense of either the phenomena being studied or the materials labeled "findings."

Tacit Knowledge and Everyday Activities

I have stressed the problems of objectification and verification because sociologists seldom concern themselves with the properties of everyday social life, but take for granted the properties of daily life built into their identification and study of various collections of activities they label "social problems," or the "dynamics" of "social systems," or the "variables" crucial to the maintaining of a "system of social stratification." Both the "natural" and "laboratory" events studied by the sociologist are not established by asking first what a "natural order" is like, and then what would it take to generate activities members of the society would label as "unnatural" or "natural," Instead, the problems taken as points of departure are assumed to be "obvious" instances of the "real world." Any sociologist, insisting that the study of social order and disorder, society, or community, must begin with an examination of the properties of routine practical activities in everyday life, is not likely to meet the approval of colleagues who have already decided what the "real world" is all about, and they have been studying "it" for a long time. The following quotation from Charles C. Fries, a linguist recommending linguistic innovations to conventional grammarians, has a similar implication:

The point of view in this discussion is descriptive, not normative or legislative. The reader will find here, not how certain teachers or textbook writers or "authorities" think native speakers of English ought to use the language, but how certain native speakers actually do use it in natural, practical conversations carrying on the various activities of a community.

The scientific linguist doesn't attempt to investigate the creation of great literature; he has devoted himself to the difficult task of discovering and describing the intricate and complicated mechanisms which the language actually uses in fulfilling its communicative function and which the literary artist also must take as basic in his expression.

As a general principle I would insist that, in linguistic study and analysis, any use of meaning is unscientific whenever the fact of our knowing the meaning leads us to stop short of finding the precise formal signals that operate to convey that meaning.²

The central issue succinctly raised by Fries is natural social interaction, and how natural occurrences provide us with the raw material from which we infer or impute the existence of structure or patterning to everyday life. The use of English by native speakers in natural practical conversations provides the linguist with a basis for comparing formal structure with usage of communication in a community and also provides the sociologist with materials from which he can infer and construct descriptions of social structure. The crucial issue is how the observer objectifies the raw material he observes so that others can arrive at similar inferences. The structural-functionalists short-circuit the issue by the use of an unexplicated vocabulary that recommends structure by fiat; they take for granted the existence of activities they describe formally and presume no further explanation is necessary as to how they come to know their existence.³ The abstract vocabulary displaces both the objectification and description of the day-to-day social interaction from which inferences about social structures are made. The issue is sometimes resolved by the use of impressionistic accounts requiring the indulgence of the reader in what "any sophisticated social scientist knows" to be true about the way organizations operate, or by the use of "indicators" (for instance, census materials, attitude scales, rates) presumed to stand for a "known" behavioral environment of objects and events. But in both cases (impressionistic observation couched in elegant language about things that "anyone knows," or "indicators" based upon procedural "leaps" from census materials or surveys) the correspondence between what is claimed as observed and the language used to describe objects and events is never clear to the reader nor available for independent verification. The accounts are always truncated expressions the reader must fill in to make sense of presumed intended meanings. The standard response to this issue is that it is impossible to present the reader with such detail. This answer presupposes that details of decoding and encoding descriptions and questionnaires are technical problems. In this book I want to demonstrate the problem is not simply one of better methods or a better technology. It is a problem requiring a more elegant theoretical apparatus for making sense of what we have and are doing methodologically, and for showing how substantive studies change accordingly.⁴

The referents for our observations and inferences provide the reader with grounds for evaluating what we report as findings. Field research (which includes films of natural occurrences where not only linguistic features of conversations are preserved but also paralinguistic elements such as voice intonation, physical gestures or general body motion, and ecological setting and physical distances between participants) at least demands an explicit theoretical apparatus from researchers. But even work using verbatim transcripts seems to question unequivocally the credibility of impressionistic accounts, as well as the significance of information based upon attitudinal questionnaires about hypothetical social interaction divorced from the contingencies of actual encounters between actors. Attitudinal accounts, such as structural descriptions by fiat, idealize the actor's environment of objects, so that how the observer decides the behavioral properties and meaning structures (assumed to be present to infer that the "goals," "values," or "rules" of the organization are being achieved, violated, or changed) remains obscured by the procedures employed. Verifiability is truncated. Recommending the same procedures when they are truncated does not guarantee the "same" findings, but merely suggests a practical solution to an obscure problem. How the observer decides what he "knows" and "observes"—much less how the actor accomplishes the same tasks—is not a variable feature of conducting and reporting conventional sociological research. Recent trends in psycholinguistics, componential analysis or ethnoscience or ethnographic semantics, the ethnography of communication, the analysis of conversation, and ethnomethodological studies have sought to provide rules for moving from the actor's experience to verbal and nonverbal communication, and from an act or event or sequence of events to a description of activities that can be examined independently by other researchers.⁵

But recent work in psycholinguistics and the several anthropological approaches to the study and use of language for ethnographic work seldom examine a prior problem: How are natural sequences of descriptive accounts recognized as meaningful by members of a group or collectivity? How do members decide that particular accounts (in specifiable sequential form) are "adequate" for understanding what is being communicated, so that a response, also taken as "adequate," is forthcoming? How can we show certain conversations reveal agreements between speakers about particular issues, even though there is no manifest evidence for such agreements in the actual utterances being analyzed? Or that antinomies establish quite a different meaning from the immediate apparent semantic presentation? (Notice that the observer's view is always dependent upon the actor's conception of objects and events even though an outside model is invoked.)

Our task is similar to that of constructing a computer that would reduce the information obtainable by means of the perspectives of differently situated video tapes, so that the information (or parts of it) could be retrieved while maintaining intact the fidelity of the original natural occurrence. Sacks⁶ speaks of this problem as one of constructing an apparatus capable of producing conversational sequences that could be recognized by members of the society as "correct" or "appropriate" utterances of known objects and events. Such an apparatus would also analyze various categories members of the society use in everyday descriptive accounts. The researcher is interested in how such categories, as used by members in specifiable sequences, signify events and allow members to recognize "what happened." The analysis of conversations within a paralinguistic context (1) makes explicit the problem of objectification, and (2) provides a basis for both researcher and reader to compare the inferences made without having merely to urge the reader that the observer's remarks are to be taken on faith as accurate portrayals of "what happened."

A vital assumption of the above discussion is that the syntactic information, contained in a descriptive account by a member of a tribe or society, is not adequate for understanding how members generate or transform accounts into a meaningful interpretation of what is happening or "what happened." Nor, therefore, can the researcher merely content himself with the syntactic information assumed to be inherent in the account, regardless of its form (that is, as a one-word utterance or a lengthy text). Any and all information imputed or extracted from members' descriptive accounts requires the utilization and assumes the existence of "background expectancies"⁷ or tacit knowledge.

Chomsky and Halle assert that for a grammar to be descriptively adequate, it must account for "the tacit knowledge (linguistic intuition) of the native speaker."⁸

Without reference to this tacit knowledge there is no such subject as descriptive linguistics. There is nothing for its descriptive statements to be right ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Preliminary Issues of Theory and Method
• Chapter 2 Theories of Delinquency and the Rule of Law
• Chapter 3 Delinquency Rates and Organizational Settings
• Chapter 4 Conversational Depictions of Social Organization
• Chapter 5 Routine Practices of Law-Enforcement Agencies
• Chapter 6 Law-Enforcement Practices and Middle-Income Families
• Chapter 7 Court Hearings: The Negotiation of Dispositions
• Chapter 8 Concluding Remarks
• Index
• Subject Index