Alas ye scribes and lawyers,
hypocrites, You that tithe
mint, dill and cumin,
and you omit the weightier aspects of law:
justice, mercy and faith.
These you ought to do without
omitting the others.

        ....the teachings of Christ

INTRODUCTION:In this Lecture, you will examine the major theories of crime in American sociology today. Most of these theories are apologies for social arrangements from the 19th century rather than scientific theories based on carefully designed research.

You will start with the traditional theories and learn that these either are not good theories of crime...or that they are good theories of behavior generally rather than of crime as such. Thus most theories now used in criminology are of limited value in understanding social sources of crime.

Crime is too serious a matter for any such privileged analysis. If the sources of crime are found in social institutions, then the criminologist, the student and the citizen should know that.

. Perhaps the most commonly accepted explanations of crime are the prescientific theories. They have been around a long time...they have the common attribute of exculpating the social and cultural practices of a society from responsibility for the behavior of people who live in the social institutions and embody the values of that culture.

Since so many people believe these explanations, let us consider the more popular theories of crime and social problems generally:

Religious Theories. A great many societies have a religious theodicy (or explanation of how the world came to be, what social relations should be, where the sources of sin arise, and what to do about it).

There are three great religions in the world into which most people come to the fullness of their morality. These three religions share the idea of a creating god or gods. They are the Judeo-Christian theodicy, the Muslim and the Hindu theodicies.

The existing social norms are said to be given by God. Crime is a violation of God's will. Existing social arrangements are to be protected since they are part of God's larger plan.

The fourth great religious tradition in the world today, Buddhism, does not take this approach to explain crime and deviation. There are no gods in the Buddhist tradition...crime arises from the selfishness of the individual.

The common assumptions of a religious theodicy include:

--The existence of a God or gods.

--The existence of a divine plan for social relations

--The existence of a devil, evil spirits or other source of evil outside that plan.

--The view that crime arises from the willful decision of the individual to reject the divine plan.

--The view that the solution to crime requires that the individual live according to God's plan.

The conclusion which follows from a theodicy is that the solution to crime is to follow the ways of the Lord. There is much truth value to this solution. When people do follow the wisdom of their bibles, they do live in peace and in justice.

The problem with religious theories of crime is that they ignore the social and structural sources of crime; those sources built right into the very 'plan' to which obedience is required upon pain of everlasting damnation.

As with all self-fulfilling prophecies, such a policy might work well were that 'plan' oriented to social justice rather than to class, racial and gender inquality rather than to celebration of tribal claims of superiority...and were all people in a society to submit themselves to the "will of God."

But when people are excluded from the church or excluded from work or live a chauvinist, excluding or in a secular, materialistic society, the prophecy fails...and religion fades. [Philosophers call this the Death of God].

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the Centre cannot hold; Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, A blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction; while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

...Wm. Butler Yeats

You will find that it is not so much the idea of a god and the plan of a god which is important to the reduction of crime rates but rather orientation to solidarity, mutual aid and respect for others which is the soul of religion that produces prosocial behavior...there are many ways to be religious.

Critique The fact that there have been 3000 to 4000 different cultures in human history, each with its own god or gods and each with quite different philosophies of life, make it difficult to use religious theodicies in explaining crime. If there is only one god with one plan, then the other 2999 cultures must be sinful plans.

The fact that crime rates vary between societies means that some religious plans are better than others...or that people don't take their religion seriously.

Since Muslim countries usually have less crime than do the Christian countries, a Moslem holy man (there are no female ayatollahs) could well claim that the teachings of Allah are superior to the teachings of other gods...false gods in the eyes of the muslim world.

Low crime rates are also found in Buddhist societies which have no concept of God at all and no special plan; just a requirement that people live in harmony with nature and each other in a selfless sort of way.

The position put forward in this text is that, whatever one's religious views...and religion is very important to the human condition...we must include other factors as well as the adequacy of religion to explain crime. As you will learn, religious commitment in a society often helps produce a low-crime society.

PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. There are a number of theories in American criminology taught as fact over the past century which today are given very little space. You will note them in passing and go on to the theories which are more central to criminology today. You should know them but need not spend a lot of time on them.

Unlike self-fulfilling prophecies which become true in the consequence of belief and human action, these 'scientific' theories are mystifications which cannot become true in any sense but can deflect people from good policy.

NATURE AND SPACE Sometimes people explain crime in terms of geography or climate or astrological events. Overcrowding, natural cycles, cycles of the tides, of the moon, or of population transitions...all are brought in to explain why people rob, steal, murder, poison or oppress others.

Some say that people who live in the warm regions of the earth are more passionate and commit more crime. Southerners are supposed to commit more crime than Northerners. Latins are supposed to be more violent than Danes or Norwegians. People who live close together are supposed to lose their composure and fight, steal, and murder.

Critique This view ignores the history of the Vikings who plundered, raped, and murdered for centuries. It ignores the peaceful Hopi who lived for centuries in the American Southwest. It ignores the low-crime cultures of the muslims...some of whom live in cold climates and some of whom in very warm climates.

Corporate crime continues in good weather or bad. Organized crime ignores the seasons. White collar crime varies with the personal circumstances of the white collar thief not the weather.

Of course muggers don't hang about when it is cold out nor do victims spend as much time on the street. The fact that crime does not occur when people are not around is not sufficient to explain why there is crime when people are about.

Overcrowding, as a theory of crime, ignores all the places of the world where people live closely in peace and harmony; it ignores all the sparsely settled areas where outlaws, bandits, and thugs terrorize farmers, Indians, ranchers, and travellers.

Europe has 4 1/2 times the population density of the USA; crime rates are less than half of those found in the USA.

Cycles of the season or movements of the stars, planets and moons are little more than folk tales: these theories assign the good and evil people do in pursuit of their own purpose to Nature. It is self-serving to blame the gods, the stars, the climate or outsiders for the crimes we commit. Mother Nature is a fictive concept; not a cause of crime.

Physiological Theories There have been efforts to attribute crime to body type and body chemistry. The idea is that some physical process within one's body has gone wrong. This physiological mix-up somehow pushes people to rob, steal, murder, and rape.

There are very little data to support these views.

A. Chromosomal theory gives much credit to an extra Y chromosome for crime.

Critique However that theory overlooks those persons with the usual number of Y genes who also kill, rob, rape, and loot. It overlooks those with xyy Chromosomes who do not commit crime. It ignores the chromosomal nature of those who commit political crime, white collar crime, organized crime or corporate crime. It is a very convenient view which points to the impersonal, accidental combinations of inherited traits to account for crime while ignoring social conditions.

B. Endocrinal imbalance has regained interest with PMS, a syndrome in which women are supposed to be more violent and unstable during menses.

Critique Again this physiological theory ignores the fact that women have extremely low crime rates while all women have menses. It fails to notice that women sometimes kill the men who are beating on them whether they are in their menses or not.

A recent study (1987) in Finland found that arsonists were more likely to have serotonin deficiencies than were a control group which contained no arsonists. They found as well that other criminals had lower serotonin levels than did the control.

Serotonin affects blood sugar levels and its deficiency results in hypoglycemia. People with hypoglycemia may be irritable, depressed or prone to violence. The problem with the study is that it contained only 20 subjects in the sample of arsonists and only 10 in the control group of nonarsonists.

The study did not look at the blood sugar level of corporate criminals who may order arson for insurance benefits, organized crime members who may burn buildings nor did it consider all the hundreds of thousands of hypoglycemic victims who lead quite normal lives.

Poor research designs lead to bad data; bad data leads to bad theory.

Genetic Theory Some people posit a series of stages of human evolution in which there are higher and lower 'races.' The idea is that the 'races' with the best genes are civilized and law abiding while those with inferior sets of genes are likely to be criminal.

Critique Crime rates vary within the so-called races. Crime rates vary over time within a given 'racial stock.' These variations would not occur were the genes of a 'race' producing crime. Each individual with that genetic pool would, necessarily, be criminal just as they necessarily have blonde hair, big noses, six toes or bleed easily.

There is no evidence to support that hypothesis. The members of the "race" would be criminal all the time, all over the world, generation after generation. That is not the case.

People who live in simple, tribal societies are thought to be more criminal since they are more 'primitive.' But such people are sometimes peaceful and cooperative and sometimes cruel and violent.

People who live in 'advanced' societies are sometimes criminal and sometimes not. In the 1920's Germany was considered civilized. During WWII, the German nation committed wholesale murder and theft. In much of history, Scandinavian countries pillaged, raped and looted. Today they are peaceful.

The genetic codes of Germans, Swedes, Finns and Danes have not changed while the rate of political crime committed changed dramatically over the centuries. The USA can change its crime rates in the 21st Century if your generation works at it.

Geneticists tell us that there is only one 'race,' the human race. The view that races exist and that some are more criminal than others is an ethnocentric view which has no basis in fact. There are four genetic pools [called stocks] in which a few genes vary in trivial sorts of ways...but genes don't cause crime.

Individual Genetic Deformities Criminals are said to be genetically inferior to upright citizens. The idea is that a birth defect produced individuals within a genetic pool who commit crime. Criminals are alleged to be criminal because they are malformed, handicapped, or stupid.

Cesare Lombroso taught generations of criminologists that criminals are born criminal. They are not made criminal by the social conditions in which they are born and live. Lombroso studied the inmates of Italian prisons and concluded that they were inferior organisms...atavistic is the term he used.

He found receding foreheads, peculiarly shaped skulls, eye defects, big ears and big lips, high cheekbones, long arms, and inverted sex organs. He also noted a lot of tattoos, vanity and cruelty. He thought they were less civilized that those who had high foreheads and small ears.

Charles Goring studied 3000 English convicts. He also concluded that crime was located in the muscle, bone, and blood of the criminal. Goring was found, later, to have falsified data to fit his theory....mmmmh.

Low foreheads, pinched noses, big jaws (or small), short earlobes, or low intelligence are said to be signs of such inferiority.

Critique Such views overlook the bright, well educated, handsome criminals. Such a theory ignores those of us who are ugly and live lives of productive and cooperative labor.

There is no history or sociology in such views. They do not look at the variations over time in crime rates. Since genes change very slowly, there should be a steady rate of crime over the centuries. That is not the case. Crime rates vary dramatically.

Crime rates in Cuba changed dramatically after the 1959 revolution. The Castro government quickly eliminated the organized crime groups who had made Havana their headquarters. The government stopped prostitutes serving North Americans on vacation. Corruption in police and armed forces was ended in the moment social conditions changed.

The genetic structure of Cubans remained the same...their body type remained the same. The foreheads, jaws, and eye defects did not change. What did change for the better were the social conditions.

Theories of racial genetic superiority call for policy in which whole peoples are to be eliminated from the genetic stock of the world in order to prevent crime.

Theories of individual genetic inferiority call for castration or hysterectomies of those said to be habitual criminals in order to prevent their producing more defective children who, presumably will be criminals.

Again, there are no data to support the view that I.Q. or any other human characteristic affected by genetic inheritance varies systematically with criminal behavior.

It is a form of reductionist thinking which ignores the social and cultural context in which crime arises.

Biosocial Theories A variation of evolutionary theory, this approach argues that the long history of animal evolution has left genetic predispositions for dominance, for aggression, for territoriality, for acquisitiveness.

Very solid facts from the lives of tigers, foxes, baboons, chickens and wolves support this view. The operative question is whether one can use tiger facts or chicken facts to explain human behavior.

Critique But to test the theory, one also could use the vast inventory of cooperative animal behavior of which Peter Kropotkin spoke in his classic book, Mutual Aid. Instead of facts from animals which are violent, territorial, aggressive or possessive, one could look at all the cooperative behavior within and between animal species. If one picks and chooses enough data from the world of animals, one can support most any "theory".

Several societies live in peace and nonviolence from the Hopi in the American Southwest to the Semai scattered over Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The Hutterites, Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites in the USA manage to live without beating each other or making manliness stand for violence.

Psychopathology Some scholars hold that mother and her bad behavior traumatizes children and leads them to crime 10, 20, or 40 years later. Sigmund Freud is given credit for the basic assumptions of psychopathology but there are thousands of psychiatrists who now teach it and testify to it in the USA.

 The story goes that mother withholds the breast or gets angry over dirty diapers or seduces the child because of her own distorted sexual life. Such mothering creates a childhood trauma which forever generates a cycle of neurotic behavior, some of which is criminal. In this theoretical house, the kind of trauma you experience in childhood; oral, anal, or genital...shapes the kind of crime you are likely to commit in adulthood.

Freudian theory is a very complex and very elegant theory. Unfortunately for those who like elegance, the data don't support it. This theory has been tested extensively and isn't worth much as explanation of crime. You can learn more about freudian theory later on in this Lecture when we give you theories of crime centering around socialization.

Critique Most crime arises out of current social conditions not out of painful experiences that happened a long time ago. Most people who had painful experiences grow up to be adequate human beings.

A lot of people who had quite good homes and healthy childhood now engage in the forms of white collar crime you will study later. They engage in political crime as well as corporate crime.

There is distorted sexuality. The question is whether mother is to blame for that distorted sexuality or whether alienated sexuality arises out of the political and economic conditions of a society. You can look ahead to the Lecture on crimes against women for a different answer from the one freudian psychology offers.

People do have trouble getting along with other people because they were not parented properly. Parenting is very important. But to blame mothers today for crime tomorrow is a piece of sexist politics which shifts the attention of the student from poorly organized societies to poorly organized women.

Political Philosophical Theories Some philosophers argue that humans are naturally hostile to one another. In this view, human nature is such that there can be no cooperative peaceful social relations. Only a brutal struggle of survival in which each is pitted against all.

Thomas Hobbes wrote a famous book entitled, Leviathan, in which he said that the natural state of men (sic) was a 'war of each against all.' Crime is natural in this philosophy.

Georg Frederick Hegel, another famous political philosopher, argued that men were naturally irrational. The state, run by a few 'supermen' could be rational. A lot of people agree with Hobbes and Hegel. This philosophy leads to the authoritarian state and lots of police and prisons. The word for this solution to crime is fascism.

Critique It well may be true in England, America or other societies with a lot of violence, irrationality, exploitation and oppression that each is in a war with all others, but there are many contrary cases which do not permit the universal assumption that such relations are an inevitable part of human nature.

Hutterites, Amish, Semai, Hopi, Japanese, Chinese, and many other societies are able to produce peaceful, cooperative children. The war of each against all is a convenient excuse for some to exploit others in the name of Mother Nature. One shouldn't treat Mother Nature like that.

Culture of Poverty Theories These theories hold that the children of the poor are deprived of the benefits of middle-class children...that children of poor families are caught up in social conditions not of their own making which tend to force them into crime.

Children of the poor are said to live only for the day since they have no future. They do not postpone gratification; work hard and save their money to get ahead as middle class people, presumably, did. They drop out of school early to work for pocket money. Lacking education, they cannot get ahead and are predisposed to turn to crime. Petty theft, shoplifting, prostitution, drug abuse, and other street crime is said to come out of the ghettoes and barrios of America.

The policy implications of this approach is to remove children from poor parents, teach them the middle class virtues of cleanliness, hard work, punctuality, thrift, obedience and acquisitiveness. They will become law abiding citizens and crime rates will drop.

Critique Poverty cannot be used as a cause of crime since there are many very poor societies with very little crime. Most poor people in China, in the Muslim societies, as well as most poor people in the U.S. do not commit crime.

On the other hand rich people routinely commit crime in both rich and poor societies. Studies of corporate crime and white collar crime find such behavior endemic among middle class persons.

Where there is poverty and where social solidarity is strong, as in religious or socialist societies, the relationship between poverty and crime disappears. Poor people share with each other in times of trouble and nurse each other in times of plague. Poverty...by itself...does not produce crime.

In privatized societies oriented to accumulation and with no dependable way to earn a living, one can be sure crime rates will be high among rich and poor alike. By collecting only the data on crime committed by the poor and by ignoring all the data from poor low crime societies, one can claim that poverty causes crime. But this is ideology; not theory. It celebrates wealth.

Pseudo-scientific explanations of crime have the effect of placing the origins of crime every place but in the ordinary, everyday operations of established social relations, social processes, social institutions and social formations. As such, they select and pick facts from here, there and another place to support the claim. In doing so, they preserve existing forms of power, privilege, and wealth.

In order to get a good sociological theory of crime it is necessary to look at the social differences between societies with high and low crime rates. Before you do that, let us look at some sociological theories which look only at the features of society one at a time.

. There are some very good theories which do use social factors as a way to explain crime. There are also some very bad sociological theories. Let us start with the very worse (but most popular theory) and explain why it is a bad theory of crime.

Structural Functionalism. The first series of theories widely found in criminology texts (and with which we disagree) come out of the structural-functional tradition. This tradition arises from the work of many people chief among whom is Emile Durkheim (1949.

The thought is that all social institutions work together to create an Organic Whole much like the organs and tissues in the human body work together to create a whole human being.

In Structural-functional theory, even crime is functional since it brings us together in reacting and responding to it. When there is rape, murder, child abuse or vandalism, we all become enraged and want to murder the rapist or murderer. Crime promotes social solidarity and thus is functional.

This seems to make sense but lots of things create solidarity which are much less than functional...wars, racism, dirty jokes among men, drug abuse, lynchings and patriotic songs. We must also ask whether there are not better ways to get solidarity than to have a lot of murderers, rapists, and theives among us.

The structures which are said to be useful and necessary included the division of labor between men and women, between Anglos and minority groups, between workers and owners, between rich and poor and between the authorities and the governed.

You will recognize these "necessary" structures as the Structures of Domination listed in Lecture 1 which violate human rights: sexism, racism, class, and bureaucratic elites!!

Structural-functional theory is a conservative apology for every existing society...as are all tribal-based religious theories of crime. Slavery, feudalism, bureaucratic communism or capitalism all escape criticism, change or destruction. All revolutions are merely the efforts of maladjusted people. The American revolution, the Cuban revolution or the Russian revolution are equally dysfunctional from this theoretical point of view.

It is still the leading theory of society in all conservative societies including the USSR. American criminology textbooks give it preferential treatment.

S-F sees crime as the result of weakened structures of social control. The solution to crime in S-F theory is to improve and strengthen the existing structures: family, school, the state and the economy as well as police, courts and prisons.

Existing structures of power and privilege are the final stage of social evolution according to structural functionalists. They are necessary and helpful. They should be respected and protected by law and the forces of the state.

Critique The idea that maybe crime is produced by existing structures is not permissible within the logics of S-F theory. The idea that social change may be a solution to crime is decidedly unthinkable in the S-F perspective. Thus, it fits conservative thinking excellently well.

Structural functional theory cannot be a theory of crime since it applies equally well to high crime and to low crime societies. There are structures in both which are, in fact, necessary to that kind of society. Whether that kind of society is necessary in itself is a question not examined by structural functionalists.

Structural functionalists use an analytic trick to account for the high rates of crime within a society. They do not look at the crime committed by those at the top of the structures. Political crime is always the crime of those at the bottom. They do not look at corporate crime. Theft is always produced by the single acting individual from motives deep within a defective psyche.

So S-F explains crime by labelling those who commit crime as deviants. Then to explain why there are deviants, those who use the theory point to outside sources of deviance. Existing structures are always protected by the logics of the theory.

Sources of Deviancy For structural-functionalism the question is not whether the social relations are a source of mischief but rather why do people resist and rebel? Why are some people so maladjusted that they refuse to fit in and adjust themselves to existing social rules? There are many theorists who point out that alternatives way of doing social life are far from deviant...rather they are useful experiments in social change. For other criminologists, the term 'deviancy' is a political term used to condemn behavior different from their own.

There are two general sources of deviancy in structural-functional theory:

1) social disorganization and

2) lack of social controls.

Social Disorganization Theory. In this approach, crime arises because of normlessness. The norms (or rules which govern behavior) are said to be weakened or challenged. When that happens, people have weakened or conflicting guidelines for behavior and are thought to turn into animals.

Critique: Social Disorganization theory ignores the fact the most of the most serious crime is very well organized indeed.  In corporate crime, political crime and in organized crime, there are roles, norms, groups, traditions, rewards for doing crime well and punishments for doing it badly.

Some of the sources of disorganization are said to be:

Social change. With social change come new ways which conflict with the old ways. In the gap between, people don't know what is right and what is wrong. They do both or neither. Crime rates increase when people are not sure of what is right or wrong.

One can see that there is a built-in prejudice against social change in this theory. In point of fact, change can be beneficial or harmful. The only question is who is harmed and who benefits. Often social change benefits the poor and the oppressed. When this happens the rich and powerful regard change as bad. When change serves the interests of the rich and powerful, they regard it as part of the "natural" order.

Migration. Migration brings in people with other norms and the conflict between norms is or leads to criminal behavior. Thus the Irish brought in their "semi-savage" norms and challenged the norms of 'advanced' Anglo-saxon society in England and America. Or Hispanic peoples move North to the USA bringing with it their penchant to commit crime.  Or Asian peoples flood in from the Far East and, being un-civilized, cannot live in peace and harmony as 'we good folk' do.

Critique Again, one can see the bias in this theory of normlessness. Whatever differs from the way you do things is bad, whatever you do is good. So laws are passed to forbid whatever the Irish or other migrants do that which offends the people who got there first.

There is much evidence to support the view that migrants bring with them new ideas. There is evidence that the cross fertilization of ideas is one of the main engines of progressive social change. There is much evidence that migrants are hard workers, innovative and most grateful for opportunities. Perhaps their energy and hard work creates a bit more competition than existing elites would prefer.

The immigration of the lower classes from England, Germany, Italy and Poland was supposed to explain the higher rates of crime commited by these people.   The fact that crime rates among migrant fall when jobs are available, when social institutions are re-built, and when political rights come along...all this is ignored in such theories of crime.

When Anglos are the migrants, the customs and norms they impose upon native peoples in the Americas or the Indies are part of the "civilized" way to do things. Normlessness in not seen as the source of crime in this case but rather resistance to the new norms is defined as criminal...and the law is used to enforce the new norms.

The forcible adoption of the new norms is seen as a blessing for these "semi-savage" peoples. Such is the easy use of theories of migration to justify whatever is convenient to those who have the power to enforce their norms.

Natural Disaster War, Drought, Famine, Flood, Tornado or other 'natural' calamity all bring waves of crime, looting, rape and other heinous behavior. In this explanation, the ordinary ways of life are disrupted and people turn against each other in the struggle for survival.

Critique This explanation ignores the fact that, often, people go out of their way to help each other in times of trouble. In the famous Beecher Tornado of 1952, workers from all over the state of Michigan traveled to Flint to help rebuild the dozens of houses destroyed in the tornado.

When the South faced a catastrophic drought in the Summer of 1986, farmers from all over the North sent tons of hay to feed the cattle and milk cows. In the drought in the Midwest in 1988, farmers in the South sent tons of hay to help feed livestock.

In the Black-out of New York in the early 70's, crime rates dropped, strangers put up those who were stranded in New York (and the number of babies born nine months later increased dramatically). In the next Black-out, crime rates were much higher.

The conservative bias is readily seen here. One is to accept the existing norms. Who decides what is acceptable is always a question of power.

As to drought, flood, famine, and war, while it is fair to say that the lives of people are disrupted, disasters lead as often to supportive, sharing, caring behavior as to looting, shooting and selfish behavior. The social context is everything.

Personal Disorganization Many people think that, in times of trouble, people become emotionally disturbed and then commit crime. This view ignores all the stable people who work hard and carefully to commit corporate crime, white collar crime and organized crime. Political crime has always been the product of armies of careful, thoughtful, calculating men...and women.

Most people who are emotionally distressed do not commit crimes...they have a hard time doing the hundred little things that make up everyday life.

Personal stress and emotional instability may account for some crimes of violence and some petty theft but as a general theory of crime it is a mystification. Disemployed males are much more likely to beat and batter wives and children than employed males.

Such views lead one to treat crime as a medical problem to be cured by counselling and therapy. It is conservative since it ignores the larger social conditions, mentioned in the next Lectures, which converge to increase crime rates.

Family Disorganization The infamous Moynihan Report alleged that white children without fathers learn to work and to succeed because they see men working all around them...while black children without fathers flounder--and fail!

This theory exculpates the larger society from all responsibility and places it on mothers and fathers...mostly mothers for all the crime done under the sun.   Again, the families of white collar criminals, corporate criminals, political criminals and most organized crime families are well organized.

Roy Austin, Pennsylvania State, studied this thesis and found it quite wrong. The absence of the father had no negative effect on black boys and some favorable effect on black girls. Father absence did have detrimental effect on white children; especially white girls.

Michael Hennessy (Abt Associates), Pamela Richards (University of Florida) and Richard Berk (University of California, Santa Barbara) studied middle class high school students who lived in the suburbs and found very little connection between their broken homes and delinquency.

Neighborhood Disorganization One major theory is that crime is more likely to develop in neighborhoods marked by rapid racial or ethnic succession. The thought is that such neighborhoods are populated by people with few ties and fewer middle class values.

While comparable research is not available (studies report opposite findings), The latest work by Robert Kapsis, Queens College, New York, shows change in one neighborhood higher than two others in Richmond, California...and delinquency rates higher than in the more stable neighborhoods, one of which was almost all black and the other one 40% anglo, 40% black and 20% chicano.

The neighborhood with the highest delinquency rate was changing from one racial composition to another.

Critique Japan has been undergoing great social change in the same period as Richmond. The delinquency rates in Japan are virtually the same from 1966 to 1974 while those in the USA increased about seven hundred percent in the same period. Both countries had great rates of change but significantly different crime rates. In Cuba and Nicaragua, crime rates fell as social change increased.

Robert Martin, De Kalb Community College and R. D. Conger at the University of Georgia who reported the data, explained the difference in terms of the economic stability in Japan and the economic fluctuations in the USA; the social unrest in the USA; as well as the experiments with new life styles.

In contrast, Japan has a very stable social network in which children grow up with great emphasis on parental respect and the priority of communal needs over individual preferences. Social change can contribute to crime if change occurss in a context of racism, poverty, individualism, and false needs.

In a context of supportive social relations, social changes need not promote crime and delinquency; indeed, change can reduce crime greatly. It all depends upon what kind of change and who benefits from it.

SOCIAL CONTROL THEORIES. You understand without much thinking that control theories have much merit. These theories say that there are three systems by which human behavior may be controlled. When the control systems are working well, crime rates are low; when the control systems are inadequate, crime rates increase.

Before you look at control theory, take a bit of time to learn about the three levels of control which shape your behavior; for better or for worse.

The self system. A well-constructed self system with appropriate values can serve as a defense against peer pressure which might urge one toward criminal behavior.

One would think about urgings of peer groups to steal or harm someone, one would bring to bear basic religious or humanist values to meidate the urging of friends or the lessons of the media and then say 'no' if one were well socialized.

Critique Sometimes people who are well socialized to prosocial values are put into positions which call for them to do things that harm others. If one works at a job which entails polluting the environment or exploiting customers, such prior socialization often gets wiped out.

The Generalized Other George Herbert Mead argued that social control arises as people come to internalize the values and expectations of significant others into the self system. When babies take themselves as objects, they begin to see how other people judge them and, using that judgment, change their own behavior in prosocial ways.

This is called the looking glass process. You see how others judge you, you accept their judgments and you change your behavior in order to look better in their eyes.

After years of such intensely personal interaction, people should begin to judge themselves and adjust their behavior without others reacting positively or negatively to them. One begins to look at one's own behavior through the eyes of others. When that happens, the other is part of you. The 'they' becomes a 'we.'

Critique The problem is that, in mass society, there is little in the way of a 'we' which serves as the social base for a 'generalized other.'

People don't get personal response to their behavior in a mass society, they get treated as part of an undifferentiated bloc of people and so the 'looking glass process doesn't work to provide internal controls.

Mead did not consider what might happen when people were hired by someone and were required to sell something that would be dangerous or would cheat the customer. He did not appreciate that the generalized other might be an ugly, antisocial set of values and interests forced upon most of us by political, economic or cultural forces.

As you will see later, socialization to the values of the society and internalization of these is, in fact, important to prevent crime...if the values are prosocial values.

Informal Controls. Many experiments show that people shape their own ways of thinking, of feeling, and of acting by taking into account the thoughts, the feelings or the responses of others.

Indeed the human capacity for such mutual influence underlies the construction of all social reality. If you begin to act in ways that harm others, those who are significant others to you can steer your behavior by their reactions. Their displeasure at your undesirable behavior tends to discourage it. Their delight and pleasure when you do approved things tends to steer you toward that behavior.

The well known experiments at Oklahoma University by the Sherifs demonstrate that young people learn early to adjust their thinking to those of people around them. The Sherifs asked people about the length of lines and the movements of light. People tended to agree with others even when the others deliberately gave false answers to questions about which way points of light in a dark room moved.

As Mead suggested, peers, family, and co-workers seem to be the most significant to most people. When people don't respond to the informal control of others, we call them 'sociopaths.'

Good parenting (mothering by anyone) helps build social bonds and sets the stage for response to others in shaping of our own behavior.

Mind, self and society are born in the same moment that you are put in social roles and when others in a role set affect what you think, how you feel and, most importantly, how you act. Perhaps as much as 95% of your behavior is shaped by others.

The major source of social power is in the role-sets you occupy. When you are in a role relationship, you must allow others to shape your behavior and others must allow you to shape theirs. If you did not do this, you could not work together or talk together. Society would be impossible without the social power to affect each other's ways of thinking, feeling and acting.

Critique So, prosocial behavior as well as antisocial behavior comes out of the social relationships you have. Most of those relationships are not of our personal choosing. Informal controls produce both crime and noncrime...so control theory cannot be a theory of crime.

Formal Controls. There are many who think that crime increases when formal control systems are weak or missing. If we are to control crime, we must control people. Strong controls at work, in school, in family, and in religion are thought to minimize crime rates. Some theorists call for a lot of formal controls...so do a lot of Americans.

These formal controls include the criminal justice system as well as the various government agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, FTC, FDA, SEC, and many formal control systems in our society. In Lectures 17 and 18, you will get a look at eight formal control systems. Its all right to look ahead.

Critique Societies with very few formal systems of control often have low crime rates. There is little evidence that spanking children reduces crime. There is little evidence that religions which preach Hellfire and Damnation reduce crime. There is little evidence that putting more and more people in prison reduces crime. There is a lot of evidence that such practices teach people to be more violent and less responsive to informal controls.

Most kinds of crime occur within the structure of formal controls. Political crime, organized crime and corporate crime are the direct result of formal systems of control. Only some kinds of street crime and some white collar crimes are committed by solitary individuals acting outside the structures of formal control.

The basic idea is, then, that crime arises when these controls don't work. It is a very appealing and very popular idea.

Containment Theory One such theory is that of Walter Reckless (1967). It is called containment theory. Reckless held that one is continually tempted to crime by poverty, unemployment or other factor. Internal and external structures serve to contain these temptations.

Internal restraints include character, morality, and a good self concept as well as the generalized other you learned about above. External constraints include social relations and social institutions...especially the formal controls mentioned above.

Critique This theory fails to explain the origins of temptations. Containment theory ignores the fact that much criminal behavior originates within the role structures and social institutions. Behavior is contained but crime is produced by the social "container." Thus, one cannot explain political crime, organized crime or corporate crime with containment theory.

Social Bond Theory Travis Hirschi (1969) has a similar theory called social bond theory. In this theory, social ties (or bonds) to family, friends, and school or work tend to minimize crime.

The idea is that when people are bonded to others, they respond to the others who are then able to control the behavior of the first party. If the theory is limited to an explanation of low crime rates within bonded social groups it is a valid theory. If it says that bonding as such will prevent crime, there is a problem which is discussed below.

Critique Again there is no explanation in bonding theory about why there are increases or decreases in bondings among individuals within the same social unit. It ignores that crime which is due to the expectations, incentives and sanctions held forth by family, and friends to whom we are deeply bonded. It ignores the social, economic and moral power that overrides bonding and leads people to do grievous harm to each other. It fails to explain why people who are not bonded to each other are, at times, very helpful and make great sacrifices for each other.

Bonding theory certainly does not explain why soldiers murder, rape, loot and pillage all across history. Most soldiers did bond to their mothers, sibs, and friends when young but still they rob, loot, rape, and pillage. There is no failure to bond but rather a great deal of bonding within small military units as the many studies of the American soldier and other soldiers will testify. During civil wars, people who were bonded enough to help each other are perfectly willing to kill, rob and rape each other.

Bonding theory does not explain the political and corporate crime committed by the English aristocracy who were bonded deeply in the public schools of England and constitute an 'old boy' net work which protects its members when they are caught.

Critique of Control Theories. Many forms of crime occur within well ordered and stable social systems. Political crime, for example, is committed by people with strong self systems, well organized peer groups and enabling formal organizations. Indeed one suspects that most crime is produced within controls rather than outside them.

The case of Colonel North is a case in point. He is a very disciplined person, very dedicated and he committed all sorts of crimes in his efforts to get weapons to the Contras in Honduras to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He was part of a circle of people who provided formal and informal support for his crimes.

White collar people work in the midst of overlapping controls put in place by their employers to check them and to control them. Still some manage to find new and creative ways to steal from their companies no matter how closely they are monitored.

Most corporate crime and most organized crime and most political crime occurs within well regulated organizations. So control theory cannot be an adequate, comprehensive theory of crime. It is simply a theory that states, true enough, that most human behavior is shaped by others rather than by individual actors all by themselves.

In many cases, the bonds and the social control mechanisms are, in fact there, but they work to produce crime rather than to end it.

Policy Implications These social control theories have the policy implication of arguing for a well organized society with strong social bonds, and social acceptance for all. In this respect they are progressive and helpful ideas.

The most negative policy implication upon which some politicians and social pundits seize is the idea that more controls will eliminate crime. More police, more prisons, heavier fines and punishments will be necessary to reduce crime in this theory. But the theory does not suggest that capitalism, racism, or patriarchy be changed at the same time.

Remember, some societies with very few police and very few people in prison are among the low-crime societies. Internal and external controls are helpful but in some kinds of societies, they do very little to reduce crime.

People are either in one social control system or another or they are not people. Those who have no self system, no peer group membership or are not in formal organizations simply do not live in society. They are said to be feral. Feral individuals may do things we don't want them to do but they are not criminal...they are as innocent as the beasts of the field.

SOCIALIZATION THEORIES. These theories argue that faulty socialization of people when they were young accounts for crime when they are older.

The psychological harm done by one's parents in failing to be good parents is expressed in one way by the freudian theory mentioned above. Lets look at FREUDIAN THEORY in more detail.

Freudian theory. In a wide ranging work, Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, argued that every person had to go through three stages of psychosexual development: the oral, the anal and the genital. In each, the pleasure principle shaped behavior.

In the first stage, one got pleasure from oral incorporation of food or in oral aggressive biting and chewing. In the second stage, one found gratification in defecating and in urinating...or in pleasing mother by containing one's feces or urine until one was on potty.

In the third stage of psycho-sexual development, one found pleasure first in one's own body, then in the shared erotic pleasure of adult heterosexual love. In Freudian theory, normal people went through the first two stages to the third one.

If things went badly in any stage, a person could be fixated and not move on to adult ways to find pleasure. For Freud, the end of childhood meant the repression of some sexual energy and its diversion to productive labor in field, forest, shop, or laboratory.

If all went well, healthy individuals grew to maturity and lived good and decent lives in loving and sharing ways. If things went badly, one failed to mature and, in the endless cycle of destructive, compulsive behavior, lived out the childish effort to gain pleasure in primitive modes.

The amount of crime one commits and the kind of crime one commits depends upon how much one was frustrated and in which stage of psychosexual development one failed to experience pleasure...or experienced too much of it.

Things went badly when mother, herself neurotic, withheld the breast or enjoyed too much the giving of it and prolonged the oral stage. Mother, again, could praise the child too much for going potty or punish it too much for soiling itself. And mother could interfere with the normal transfer of affection from herself to other women and thus create sexual pathologies.

Some forms of crime are said to be oral incorporative. Greedy, acquisitive behavior is said to come from fixation of libido (desire) at this stage. Vicious lying, libelling, informing is a form of oral aggressive behavior in the primitive language system of the neurotic child-like adult.

The distorted anal expulsive stage results in untidy vandalism. The anal incorporative stage involves a fixation of money (as a symbolic form of feces). People swindle, con, steal or rob out of a compulsion to store up these precious commodity and show mother what big boys are they...they keep the feces where it should be.

Homosexuality, among other forms of sexual expression, is said to arise when mother continuously destroys the efforts of the boy to connect with girls in dating and courtship. Or when father is not strong enough to dominate mother...or when the father threatens the son with castrating humiliations.

In freudian theory, all resistance and rebellion are neurotic substitutes for murdering one's father who is the major obstacle to finding sexual pleasure. One fixes on mother as the object of sexual desire but father has claimed an exclusive sexual monopoly on mother. Unconsciously, the boy child wants to destroy father and possess mother.

But father is too powerful and dangerous...he threatens to castrate the son. So the son destroys father substitutes by rebelling against all authorities other than father: teachers, priests, police, bosses, and political leaders.

A freudian analysis of political assassins is that they are murdering their father by substitution when they murder presidents and popes.

Critique All this is a very elegant theory and very appealing Again, however elegant it might be, the data do not validate the theory. It is great fun to use freudian theory to explain the behavior of people you don't like or to tease your friends but one should be careful.

Freudian theory locates all political rebellion in the pathological angers of father hate. It tends to blame mother for most of the other kinds of crime. It tends to ignore social injustice, institutional oppression, and other real problems in society.

Freudian theory is progressive in that psychology should help people reflect on their own behavior, build ego strength, know when they are systematically deceiving themselves and be able to be honest with themselves.

As you shall see later, psychology today all to often is used to mystify and to alienate rather than to emancipate the full human potential as did Freud intend.

Anomie Theory Robert Merton (1968) has set forth a very popular theory of crime and other forms of non-institutional behavior by his means-values scheme of resistance and rebellion.

In brief Merton says that we all are socialized to aspire to the values of American culture: success, career, and wealth. But some of us are denied the means to achieve these values.

The theory of anomie (a=without; nomy=order) notes that there is not a good connection between the social means to achieve and them and the social values inculcated into every child by family, church, media, and political socialization. This means that the society is not well organized...or anomic. When the institutional means fail to allow people to achieve these values, people turn to other means.

When society permits achievement, people tend to accept and to work within the social institutions.

1. Conformists Those of us who are socialized and who can succeed within the existing structure of society will tend to conform. In this case the institutional arrangements work.

Merton's theory has a fatal flaw; it ignores all the crime done within existing institutional arrangements; political crime, corporate crime and a great deal of white collar crime done by church-going, high-status, well-educated Anglo-Saxon males.

Merton's theory is called blocked opportunity theory and predicts three major kinds of response for those who cannot succeed within the existing structures.

2. Innovators Those of us who are excluded from the institutional arrangements but still aspire for the values will tend to be innovative and try to invent new social arrangements within which we can succeed. In other words, we may turn to crime.

3. Rebels Those of us who give up on society's values because the means are not there may become rebels. We may form underground structures of sexuality, of economics or politics which embody new values.

4. Retreatists Or, if the means are not available for the accomplishment of established goals, we just may become retreatists and turn to forms of escape (drugs, alcohol, or psychotic states for example).

All this makes eminent good sense and there is quite a bit of research which supports Merton's theory of anomie. And the theory shows a lot of sympathy to minorities and those in poverty.

Policy Implications There are three logical policy implications in Merton's theory and one big flaw. Let's consider the policy options first:

1.Change the institutional arrangements so every child can succeed.

2.Change the values of the poor and the minorities so they won't aspire to success. Try to lower the expectations as did both Carter and Reagan in their turn.

3.Improve the social controls so the present system can be retained.

Critique The problem with anomie theory is that it doesn't speak to the basic question of why there are no means to achieve goals. It assumes that there is a discrepancy between means and values and doesn't ask why.

A radical theory begins with that question as you shall see below.

Another, related problem is that there is no reflection on the desirability of the goals such as success as measured by material goods. Many low crime societies socialize their children to cooperative, undemanding structures of self. Success is measured in more communal and spiritual terms. Success in not measured by how much wealth you have but how decent you are in local terms. Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu societies stress community and spiritual values.

Radicals tend to question the wisdom of the goals found in capitalist societies. In the radical view, individualism, acquisivity, ruthless competition, elitist planning, inequality, and great concentrations of power and wealth are goals which might better be seen as the source of crime and injustice rather than as desirable goals for society.

Criticism of anomie theory arises as well from the disregard of the institutional sources of racism, sexism and poverty. It is the very values and the means working well together which produces crime, poverty, inequality, and exclusion rather than their disjointed character...in the view of the radical camp.

The solution to crime for the radical camp is to change to a new set of values and a new mode of production...one without racism, sexism and without great inequality in social power or economic power.

Anomie theory violates a cardinal canon of causality. That which does not exist (anomie) cannot cause that which does exist (crime). Constraint theory violates another canon. That which is a constant (constraint) across both criminal and pro-social behavior cannot be used to explain that which varies. Such theories violate basic experimental design theory in science.

Deviant Subculture Theory A different theory of socialization altogether is that of Albert Cohen (1966). Cohen says that crime is a result of the FAILURE of children to be socialized to existing values and codes of behavior. Of the gangs, Cohen observed he says that they

"...not only reject the dominant value system but do so with a vengeance. They stand it on its head; they exalt its opposition; they engage in malicious , spiteful, ornery behavior to demonstrate not only to others, but to themselves as well, their contempt for the game they have rejected." (1966: 66)

But those who know about youth gangs understand that they embody many established cultural values:

--Such gangs are stratified.

--They value courage.

--Members are loyal to each other.

--They are territorial.

--They embody the masculine ideal

--They exploit nonpersons but tend to respect those defined as persons.

--In their private moments, gang members are witty, playful, and spontaneous.

What do which we don't like is to use physical power to achieve the life style that advertisements urge upon young people. Money for clothes, cars, concerts, stereos, and fast food is hard to come by for young, minority males. They take it from those who are weaker. Middle class children have economic power to get the same things that lower class boys...and some girls...steal.

Gang members don't work from 8 til 5. They don't save their money and start a small business. They don't go to night school and get a law degree. They don't attend church always nor do they often volunteer to collect for the Red Cross. In these respects, they are deviant but to say that theirs is a deviant subculture violates the anthropological standards for defining culture and for determining deviancy.

One should note that most young men drop out of street gangs sooner or later. When they find work, get married, have children and join clubs, they cease being criminals. It is their relationship to the means of production that changes; not their subculture.

Cohen fails to consider the crime of nice polite corporate executives, well behaved white collar workers, deeply patriotic FBI or CIA agents, of presidents and priests or professors for that matter.

Cohen doesn't consider the nasty, meanspirited people who go live in the dominant culture and then vote to do quite nasty things to workers, students, women, the elderly, the poor and the hungry at home and abroad in order to play the game they have accepted... a game that comes out of the dominant value system.

A better analysis is the one that Richard Quinney of Northern Illinois University has given us. Such gangs accommodate themselves to the political economy of capitalism. Gang members are the economic discards of advanced monopoly capitalism. They survive in the cultural nooks and crannies as best they can.

DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION THEORY. Edward Sutherland (1949) set forth a series of assumptions from social psychology which, as a variety of socialization theory, states that people who associate with criminals tend to accept the definitions of those and embody their behavior. It is called Differential Association Theory [DAT for short].

Here are the basic assumptions of DAT:

1. Criminal behavior is learned.

This means that it does not originate in the genes, in body chemistry nor is it to be located in instincts.

2.Criminal behavior arises out of interaction with others.

That means it is socially determined behavior...it is not a product of the isolated individual.

This means that mass media and prior socialization takes second place to what goes on here and now with close associates.

3. A person becomes criminal when the primary groups in which behavior is organized communicate more definitions in support of criminal behavior than definitions opposing criminal behavior.

This means that the self system is not as important as the source of criminal behavior as are group memberships.

4.Frequency and intensity of interaction determine which tendencies are likely to prevail.

Those who like differential association theory point out that sending people to prison only increases the likelihood of crime since young people differentially associate with hardened criminals. And that is a good point.

They also point out that young people learn about crime from the older men and women in their neighborhood. They are not born criminals. Genetic and physiological theories of crime do not combine well with DAT.

Critique. Of the major theories of crime differential D.A.T. association theory (D.A.T.) is, in America, the most commonly used perspective. But D.A.T. cannot be a theory of crime since it is also a theory of all kinds of socialization, learning and mutual influence in role relationships.

Chinese are Chinese because, among other things, they differentially associate with Chinese people ... as do French, German and the British. D.A.T. is equally a theory of ethnocentric behaviors. It is a theory of helping behavior too.

Physicians differentially associate with medical school professors, residents, interns, nurses and ill people. Physicians are constructed by and organize their behavior as if they were physicians through and only through such interaction. One cannot be a "physician outside such a social life world.

D.A.T. is a valid theory of socialization in general but it is not a theory of crime in particular. So while it is true that D.A.T. is important to the organization of criminal behavior it may not be used in a special theory of crime.

That which is a constant across human behavior generally may not be used to explain a variable. To do so is a scientific sin as serious as to explain that which exists with that which does not exist.

The fact that eyes, ears, hands and feet are all necessary in order to commit crime does not mean that they cause crime nor does it mean that they constitute an adequate theory of crime. Differential association is a necessary but not sufficient factor. As such it is not a theory of crime.

D.A.T. ignores the question of why the young men and women with whom one is interacting are engaging in crime in the first place. It avoids the question why it is that one comes to learn and practice crime as a way of life. Still less does it tell us why the total population of criminals increases or decreases in a given society or why crime varies greatly in size across societies.

In as much as it is a theory of all human behavior, D.A.T. cannot be a particular theory of crime.

D.A.T. ignores the ability of people to resist the social power of those who urge them to commit crime. Even under the worst conditions in the army, in prison, in ghettos, and in corporate headquarters, there are people who will not go along with

D.A.T. also ignores the vast amount of crime done outside of intense, long lasting criminal groupings. White collar crime is far more wide spread in the population than is street crime but white collar criminals don't gather together in prisons and teach each other how to violate income tax laws, codes of professional ethics or company rules for property use. White collar criminals figure it out alone.

SOCIALIZATION AND SOCIAL IDENTITIES Socialization theories focus in on social identities as the source of crime. Before you look at the more respected of these theories, take a look at the way in which you come to be what you are.

The basic assumptions of socialization theory are:

1. The core of the self system is made up of a set of social identities. There is a social identity for every major social role-set in a society.

2. These identities are the product of a social process in which the skills, the values and the style of a given social role are taught to one during socialization.

3. People go through stages of 'moral' development, at the end of which one goes through role allocation ceremony. People are allocated a social identity in that ceremony.

4. When you have your first social identity, you begin the long journey to becoming a person. You have face rights and social power when you have standing as a person.

By the time you are 25 or 30 in our society, you have five or six social identities which you use to organize your own behavior...almost all of your behavior.

These social identities usually include, in the order you get them:

1. family identities. [I am a Dupont]

2. religious identities. [I am a Catholic]

3. gender identities [I am a woman]

4. ethnic identities [I am Irish]

5. occupational identities [I am an engineer]

6. nationality [ I am an Australian]

5. You use one or another of your social identities to organize your own behavior in socially appropriate social occasions.

You are now part of the social base of society and you are unlikely to commit crime if all goes well.

Labelling Theory. We readily accept that when people are labelled, they often respond in ways compatible with that label.

Solid social psychological evidence points to a labelling process. People are isolated from society, put through a socialization regime, labelled at the end of that learning time in an emotionally charged ceremony and, for a good long time, act in ways compatible with the social identity [label] they have been given if they are also given the status-role which calls forth that behavior.

Priests, army officers, marine corps soldiers, doctors, brides and grooms all go through a labelling process. A rite of passage celebrates the right of the person to identify with the social identity [label] for the rest of the life of the person so processed. The social identity of the priest, or of the soldier or of the wife serves an internal guide for behavior in most social occasions.

Deviants also go through an identity allocation process. It has the same form but is set forth a bit differently.

Here are the assumptions of Labelling Theory:

1. All people engage in criminal or deviant behavior.

2. Some are caught and are put through a degradation ceremony.

Arrest, trial, and conviction are elements of the degradation process of a person not much different from anybody else. Indeed, some may not have engaged in the behavior defined as deviant.

3. In prison, one is stripped of one's valued social identities and given a deviant identity.

One is stripped of clothes, hair, self respect as a worker, as a Catholic or as a Republican. The person is given a new identity kit, complete with a number and the label of 'con.'

4. After being given that identity, you begin to act as if you really were one of those.

Some people are able to resist the labelling process. They do not internalize the label. Most do.

Those who do say to themselves: 'I've got the name, I may as well play the game'. Remember the 12 year old girl whose stepfather molested her? She said, 'I'm getting fucked, anyhow; I might as well get paid.'

5.After release from prison, you are more likely to organize your behavior in criminal ways since you now think of yourself as a criminal and others react to you as if you were a 'con.'

This is called secondary deviance. It is the deviance which comes as a result of having the label.

6.The secondary deviance greatly increases the probability that your undesirable behavior will continue and... ensures that you will be arrested, tried and the label reinforced. The police now know you as a trouble maker and react to you as if you were a deviant.

After a few cycles through the criminal justice system, you are thoroughly criminalized.

Prostitutes, thieves, 'tinmen,' or other con artists are given a deviant social identity as a label which shapes (patterns) behavior for the rest of their lives.

In this theory, which is very important, society produces criminals by its treatment of young people as if they were born that way and as if punishing them by putting them in prison would change they way they are born to act.

William Chambliss reports two youth groups: the Saints and the Roughnecks. The Saints were the kids of middle class professionals. They were adept at committing crime and getting away with it by lying.

The Roughnecks were working class boys who were seen to be troublemakers and not believed when they lied. Both groups committed about the same amount of crime: truancy, underage drinking, theft, vandalism and such. Their fate was very different.

The young men who were not labelled grew to become solid citizens. Some of the young men who were labelled deviants had a lot of trouble.

Howard Becker of Northwestern University (1963) put labelling theory in coherent form in a study of outsiders and how they came to be outside society. Most of us respond favorably to labelling theory but it has some very serious shortcomings.

It is very progressive theory in that it stresses the arbitrary way in which some people are caught and punished, have their lives ruined while most of us are not caught and grow to be good and decent citizens. And it brings out the arbitrary way in which some actions are held to be deviant while other actions equally or more harmful are said to be normal.

Critique. As with differential association theory, labelling theory and other societal reaction theories cannot be theories of crime. labelling theory is valid for noncriminal behavior as well as criminal behavior.

It is certainly true that people labelled as thieves, prostitutes and criminals usually are, in reaction to such labels, more likely to behave in ways compatible with those labels. But the same is true for doctors, police as well as criminologists.

The same technical objections to D.A.T. hold for labelling theory. That which is a constant across all behavior cannot be used be explain variable behavior. Labelling occurs across all socially approved behavior as well as most socially disapproved behavior.

There are additional disqualifiers of labelling theory as a special theory of crime. Many people who routinely commit crime are never so labelled, never associate differentially with such criminals and still do crime. Political criminals, corporate criminals and white criminals are not so labelled and still systematically engage in crime over their careers.

Yet again many people do not accept labels nor do they organize their behavior in ways consonant with labels even under the most difficult circumstances. I have in mind ethnic groups some members of which resist labelling -- "jews, niggers, wops, polacks, and japs." They try to maintain their dignity in spite of such labelling practices.

CONCLUSION. There are low-crime societies with all the factors currently used to explain high crime rates in America. Differential association, labelling processes and much personal freedom is found in some societies but these have low crime rates. Switzerland and Sweden are cases in point.

There are societies which are crowded, industrialized, ethnically diverse and have much lower crime rates than the USA. Belgium, England, and Yugoslavia are cases in point.

A good theory of crime must have "causes" which vary with criminal behavior, must be uniquely associated with the form of crime under examination and must be useful to lower crime rates as social policy is based on them.

Pretheoretical ideas about devils, genes, body chemistry, or racial inferiority are political devices which help preserve and celebrate existing social relations...by condemning as inferior those who engage in behavior that challenges the status quo.

When you examine carefully the wide variety of genetic, physiological, psychological as well as interactionist theories which are currently advanced to explain criminal behavior you find them flawed. You find them exculpating of the larger social, political, economic and historically variable factors which, in the socialist perspective, are closely associated with crime.

They are poorly designed to test the central factor in their theory of crime. They ignore the cases where that factor exists but does not produce crime or they ignore the cases where the factor is absence but still crime continues.

These theories locate crime everywhere but where it requires change of social structures which benefit the rich and powerful. It is a particularly pernicious practice to argue for crime control policies which focus upon the poor and upon minorities and require control or sacrifice from them in order for the rich and the privileged to live in peace. But it is a false peace and a fraudulent peace bought at the costs of social justice.

You are now invited to turn to Lecture Three and begin to learn about socialist ideas about the sources of crime. As you read it remember that democratic socialist theory by itself is not adequate to understand all kinds of crime in all of human history. Many kinds of crime existed long before capitalism came along.

Patriarchy existed long before class relations and still informs a lot of crime against women as you will see in the Lecture 16. Religious ideas and spiritual values tend to be underestimated in traditional socialist theory. You will be invited to add this important factor to your understanding of the sources and solutions to crime.

In every society, there will be 2, 3, 5 or so per cent of the people who act as if they had the right to exploit others, to beat others, to vandalize, pollute, and to dominate the groups in which they find themselves. No society will be completely free of crime.

But some societies have considerably less...much less crime than others. Socialist theory helps you understand much of the source of crime which comes from alienated politics, alienated economics and the alienated sexuality of advanced capitalist societies.

Socialist theory will not fit well with the understandings you have internalized about capitalism. You have learned well the positivities of capitalism along with the negativities of socialism. It is now time for you to learn about the negativities of capitalism as they produce crime...and about the positivities of socialism as they encourage prosocial behavior. Turn the page and begin now.