Development of Serious Criminal Careers and the Delinquent Neighborhood - Executive Report

• NCJ Number: 96011
• Author(s): L W Shannon
• Date Published: 1984
• Length: 43 pages
• Grant Number(s): 82-JN-AX-0004
• Sponsoring Agency: US Securities and Exchange Cmssn
• Corporate Author: University of Iowa
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This is the third study in a longitudinal research design using official police contact and referral data for three birth cohorts (1942, 1949, and 1955).

Abstract

Subjects were 6,127 males and females, of whom 4,069 had continuously resided in Racine, Wisconsin. Interviews also were conducted with 889 persons from the 1942 and 1949 cohorts. The guiding hypothesis of analysis was that at each step from police contact to court sanctions and continuity into adult crime, there would be an increasing relationship of these variables to social structure or organization of the community and differences in neighborhood milieu. Cohort delinquency and crime rates and official response to them were consistently associated with neighborhood arrangements, with the highest rates found in those milieus with high delinquency and crime producing characteristics (DCP's), high offense rates, and in inner city areas. Although neighborhood milieu had a substantial effect on the development of juvenile and adult careers, those careers were not distributed in a pattern closely related to the operational definition or social structure or organization of the community. Concentrations of serious careers in inner city neighborhoods increased from cohort to cohort. Neighborhood milieu did not account for much variance in consistency between measures of delinquency and official response (sanctions and referrals) or continuity in careers between juvenile and adult periods. Neighborhood milieu had a substantial effect on interventions and sanction types, with high DCP and high offense or inner city neighborhoods more likely to exhibit disproportional sanctions than other neighborhood types. There was no evidence that increasing the severity of sanctions had a specific or general deterrent effect. Interview variables and individual characteristics accounted for 50 percent of seriousness and seriousness/intervention scores, especially for inner city males. No high school diploma, a delinquency self-concept, juvenile friends in trouble with the police, and access to an automobile had recurring significance in accounting for juvenile delinquency. For adult crime, particularly for inner city males, associates, life experiences, attitudes, living arrangements, and prior record accounted for two-thirds to three-fourths of variance. Tabular data are provided.