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Lecture
Three
2. The Extent and Causes of Youth Crime.
The explanations for criminal activity that have been developed by the various academic disciplines that have created the specialism of criminology, have, over time taken into account biological, psychological, social and economic factors. Biological explanations, which are once again fashionable, have their genesis in the 19th century pseudo sciences of morphology and phrenology. These specious and intellectually untenable "sciences" ignored all other factors above the merely physiological. One could identify a potential criminal by, for example, the proportionate width and height of the forehead- or even if their eyebrows met in the middle. Whilst we can now see these as infantile, is there a great difference between these theories and the modern, fashionable, quest to identify specific genes which are supposed to determine the predisposition to a particular behaviours?
The most risible of these recent discoveries is, of course the "gene for Homosexuality". The problematic of the transition method is beyond the ability of the intellectual pygmies who promote this particular theory.
Psychological explanations of crime have in the main drawn on early work developed from from the Psychoanalytic school, where aggressive, selfish, anti-social impulses are the result of a person's inability to develop adequate control of pressures from the ID. All thus emphasise parental background and personality traits. This tends to have been adopted from Freudian psychology.
Throughout the 20's, 30's & 40's questions about children from broken homes were seen as vitally important, but this was also because of the prevalence of the phenomena in the aftermath of the economic turmoil of the time and the war itself. During the relatively stable and prosperous 50's and 60's relaxation in divorce legislation produced more single parents and, later, the increase in women working full time allowed the use of another gender orientated scapegoat, the "latch key kid". What I am suggesting is that the explanations offered by academic psychology for all crime and deviant behaviour have reacted to social and economic change, my real point of course, being that the definition of deviant behaviour is fundamentally relative - socially, historically, and culturally constructed and will vary even within the same society, for example, between parents and young people.
If the notions of youth, of crime and of what constitutes deviant behaviour are culturally specific it follows that attempts to quantify the phenomenon may be problematic. However, much of conventional criminology uses a methodology rooted in the restricted mind set of empiricism.
These origins have produced a concentration on empirical evidence -that is, in our case crime statistics- which promotes and validates the commonsense concepts of proof and, of cause and effect. It may, however, also be the case that the external social, cultural and historical context will have an effect on the production of empirical evidence itself. For example the British governments long term statistical database would indicate that the number of murders committed over the last hundred years has shown an increase. Given the brutality of the existence of the working class poor in the late nineteenth century, or during the social chaos of the years between the Wars, it is simply not credible that there were fewer fatal bar room knife fights in 1900 or in 1928 than there were in 1997
Official crime statistics are dependent on, first and foremost, the way that crime is defined and constructed socially. In this regard the process of reporting crime has a number of factors that can distort their interpretation. The first hurdle in the production of official crime statistics is the police themselves. As many examinations of the recorded data have shown, both here and in the USA, official statistics have consistently under recorded the level of petty or minor crime when compared to for example the self reported British Crime Survey. This occurs for a number of factors, firstly the victim may consider the incident trivial, or in the case of criminal damage there may not even be a clear victim. In incidents of violence men are very reluctant to to report their assailants, because of fear or shame. Domestic violence is, and has been, consistently under reported for similar reasons by women. Some minor crimes will be unreported because the victim may not have any confidence that the police will pursue the case, or in some cases may fear that they too will criminalised, though a recent case in the US provoked some amusement when a victim called the LAPD to report that he had been burgled and that they had taken his VCR, his CD player, a case of Bud .... and 250grms of Cannabis resin.
In the UK even when a crime is reported by the victim, or others, the individual officer has the discretion not to record as do others in the hierarchy all the way up to the CPS. The CPS is relatively new to England and Wales but a similar office- the Procurator Fiscal has been a feature of Scottish Criminal Law for Centuries.
You now have available to you (here) a spreadsheet of figures published by the Home Office, but more a accurate picture of the overall extent of crime is probably the British Crime Survey last published in 1998. The BCS uses a self reporting methodology based on a large sample of the British population. This does indicate that the procedural structure of the Criminal Justice System has had and continues to have the effect of under estimating the crime rate.
It also should be borne in mind that the Police themselves are often subject to Political pressures that can distort the figures in either direction.
Indeed if the police feel, for example, that they are underfunded in a particular area there is an incentive to inflate the recorded crime rates. Whilst the BCS may be a better guide to the extent of all crime, here have many surveys going back to the late 1950's particularly in the USA that the reaction to deviant behaviour is largely governed by other social factors. In short what is criminal in the inner city is merely high spirits in the suburbs.
It is undoubtedly the case that social class and ethnicity are, by conventional measures, significant predictors of criminal behaviour in both the official figures and the BCS, however many self reported studies indicate that crime and deviance is commonplace in adolescence to an extent that transcends those constraints.
As Anderson (1994) and Graham & Bowling (1995) have found middle class children are just as likely to have offended as working class, though in all self reports we should be cautious of the respondents ability to boast and lie - these are totally uncorroborated accounts. That being said as Box (1981) shows the class bias indicated in crime statistics may have more do do with the way we are policed than the pattern of offending.
Despite a higher level of street apprehensions, all self reported studies in the UK indicate that children of South Asian ethnic origin have significantly lower rates of offending behaviour than their indigenous counterparts, and despite the very high proportions, demographically, of Afro-carribbeans charged and convicted of offences, they as a group offend no more frequently that whites.
All children offend as do all adults, the real indicators show merely that police behaviour, political pressures and social forces are more significant in constructing notions of crime in general and of youth crime in particular.