SOC 446 Exam 1 - Juvenile Delinquency

General information about Punished by Rios

Advantages: fun to read, answers some of the more nuanced questions about the subject, considered participant-driven - authentic.

Weaknesses: extremely time consuming, snowball sampling so not representative of the general population, inherent bias to the study - pleasing of the ethnographer in the subjects answers/actions

rooted in Critical Criminology - study of crime as it relates to power.

PINS/CHIPS

"persons in need of supervision" / "children in need of protection or services. These children do not have to have violated the law to be within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court, if parents are seen as negligent or abusive

Societal rules of age-appropriate behavior

Ideas of how children "should" be handled, "should" act

(Supervised, disciplined, modest, diligent, obedient)

Social sanctions influence what is seen as appropriate, normative

Official reports

A measure of delinquency consisting of arrest data or incarceration data, coming from official agents of social control (police departments, FBI, state police departments, bureau of justice statistics). Uniform Crime Report (UCR) most common

According to official reports, what are the best predictors of crime?

Two best predictors of crime? Age and Gender

Best predictor of future crime? Prior criminal history

Age: peaks around 17 (property a bit earlier; violence a bit later)

Gender: Males are 85% of violent index, 75% of total

Race: african-americans over 40 percent of all violent index ** African Americans overly represented in official statistics*

Class: kids from low census tracts most arrested

bivariate correlation

hows how much y will change when x changes. How is this different than causality? Correlations cannot prove causation

Social economic status (SES) is a measure generated by these three factors

education, income, occupational prestige

Problems with official reports

misses the Dark Figure of crime - most youth crime is concealed or under-reported, unless person is arrested.

Changes in police priorities can increase crime rates in UCR without any change in actual rate of crime committed

Little information on group offending, and most juvenile delinquency occurs with peers

Biases, misclassification (prejudice/discrimination) - AA overly represented at all stages of the criminal justice system independent of behavior

UCR stops at arrest (are people convicted?)

Self reports

a measure of delinquency consisting of surveys and ethnographic accounts. Questions aimed to measure prevalence (what is the scope of the crime, how common is it?), and incidence (how often does it occur?). Must be judged for its reliability (yields consistent results) and validity (how well it measures what it's intending to measure)

problems with self reports

response pattern biases - responses are subject to social desirability bias, where individuals will only admit to committing a crime when they see it as socially acceptable to do so. Violent crime therefore goes underreported, consistently (subject to social norms)

hard to find the perfect question that will fit everybody's definition or elicit highest repsponse, while also capturing individual experience

importance of comparison groups - comparing prospects of similar populations to come to conclusion, not comparing two very different groups

internal validity problems - reverse record checks

often lacking in external validity or generalizability

Victimization surveys

A measure of delinquency consisting of "some" ethnographic/ journalistic accounts, but largely surveys. Most useful in measuring criminal behavior that often goes unreported, such as sexual assault and domestic violence

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) measures bivariate correlates (age, gender, race) similar to other reports

critique of victimization surveys

interview problems: memory lapses, distrust, need to speek to head of household, don't know legal technicalities, language barriers

no status offenses (commited by juveniles)

no murders, white collar crime or kidnappings, since considered "victimless"

what are collateral consequences?

the additional shit that's dumped on you when getting involved in the justice system - civil state penalties that are put in place that limit a person's opportunities following imprisonment, independent of the sentence that's handed down by the judge

ie: losing health insurance, the right to vote, the right to public housing, to participate in school sports

ubiquitous criminalization

a term identified by Rios in Punished, describing how criminalization is seeping into all areas of boys' lives. boys viewed as criminal - for their lifestyles, clothing, and music tasts. Schools, police, probation officers, family, businesses, community centers and other institutions systematically treat the youth behavior as criminal -> interconnected and mutually reinforcing

criteria for determining causality

association - does y occur in the presence of x?

temporal order - does x occur before y?

lack of spuriousness - is there any other variable factoring into results?

Terri Moffit's typology

there are two groups of offenders: "life course persistent" or "adolescent limited".

Onset of LCP is much earlier and tied to learning deficits due to neurodevelopmental processes in early childhood (hyperactive, subtle cognitive deficits), complicated by high risk social environment (poor parenting, disrupted social bonds, poverty)

AL follows age-crime curve - fewer deficits, more opportunities.

a biological/psychological understanding of crime

differential association's conceptual tools

normative conflict: when scoiety isn't in agreement on how to behave in a certain situation (vs. normative consensus)

Culture (knowledge, beliefs, norms, shared understandings) and subculture (group with its own norms, values and beliefs distinct from dominant culture

differential association process (9 steps)

differential social organization (rates of disorganization)

according to differential association theory, the process of learning behavior (deviance) involves

1) techniques, 2) motives, 3) attitudes, 4) definitions (about crime)

according to differential association theory, the process of learning behavior can change based on

priority (time in your life), intensity (prestige of association), and frequency & duration (time of exposure to particular definitions)

extensions of learning theories (differential association) - techniques of neutralization

delinquents develop a special set of justifications for their behavior when such behavior violates social norms. These techniques allow delinquents to neutralize and suspend their commitment to societal values, providing them with the freedom to commit delinquent acts

Sykes and Matza's Techniques of Neutralization

1. Denial of responsibility

2. Denial of injury

3. Denial of the victim

4. Condemnation of the condemners

5. Appeal to higher loyalties

Critiques of Differential Association Theory

chicken or the egg- what comes first, the peer delinquency or the behavior and then rationalize it afterwards?

birds of a feather flock together - selection issues (people "select themselves" into groups)

deterministic - assumes that if you're exposed enough, you have no choice but become deviant. Doesn't leave any room for individualization

only explains routine crime, not violent

control theories conceptual tools

assume normative consensus - central value system in agreement across society. How connected are you to conventional societal agents?

Motivation is assumed - tendency to commit crime is "natural"

Lack of social controls allows deviance (formal - police, parents, and informal - have work the next day, sense of self)

Hirschi and the Social Bond

social bond represents your connection to conventional society. As social bond increases, your criminal behavior decreases

4 measurable elements of the social bond (Control Theory)

Attachment: affection and sensitivity to others

Commitment: investment in conventional society or stake in conformity

Involvement: time aspect. Being busy restricts opportunities for delinquency

Belief: degree to which person thinks they should obey the law

Labeling theories assumptions

cultural relativism - we have no "core values" or universals; rules develop out of interaction

labels affect behavior - being caught and publicly labeled changes future behavior. they interact with each other

power affects rulemaking and enforcement

primary and secondary deviance (Lemert 1951) (Labeling theory)

primary deviance - original act of non-conformity, often situational

secondary deviance - deviance that results from the label and identity

Rule creators/moral entrepreneurs (Becker 1963) (Labeling theories)

those who create the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders

sequence of labeling (labeling theory)

1) Rule making behavior - rule creators/moral entrepreneurs

2) Rule breaking behavior (primary deviance)

3) Official label - given by the group about the rule breaking behavior

4) Delinquent self image/ identity - internalized. Opportunities decrease

5) More delinquency (secondary deviance)

critiques of labeling theory

-Overly-deterministic, denying individual agency

-No explanation for primary deviance

-Some crimes are more likely to contain labels than others

Rios and "hyperlabeling"

youth are hypercriminalized by law enforcement

spatial demarcation - areas are under policed or over policed, based on how the police view disputes or issues as being in their purview

almost all youth in the study saw themselves as "inherently criminal"

extension of labeling theory - symbolic interactionism, Matsueda

differential association + social interaction + labeling

role-taking: project oneself into the eyes of others and imagine how they see you, the situation, and possible actions

reflected appraisals: how you perceive others to see you

core ideas

1) parental appraisals & prior delinquency predict reflected appraisals

2) reflected appraisal as rule-violator increases future delinquency

3) reflected appraisals mediate effects of parent appraisals, prior delinquency, & background