NCJ Number
152358
Date Published
1994
Length
286 pages
Annotation
This study describes the meanings that guide juveniles to delinquent acts and assesses the extent to which adult controller meanings and self-reported juvenile offender meanings have a common cultural context.
Abstract
One chapter explains the theoretical frame of reference used in the bulk of the study. It addresses an ethnographic tradition whose philosophical background is embedded, both analytically and from the perspective of the history of ideas, in the linguistic controversy or the social argument. This is followed by a chapter that examines how the juveniles studied explain the origins of their self-reported delinquent acts. Self-reported meanings were studied by interviewing juveniles and by collecting 207 essays by Helsinki juveniles in three schools on the subject, "When I/We Committed a Crime." In the next chapter, the same essays are content-analyzed to determine how the juveniles "neutralize" or rationalize their offenses and transgressions. In another chapter, the author examines the manner or style in which, and the extent to which, teachers understand pupil transgressions. This is followed by a chapter that addresses the possibility that the modern cultural custodians have become accomplices in the cultural formation of juvenile transgressions, in that they influence the meanings that juveniles attach to their transgressions. The final chapter concludes the argument by claiming that a new, relaxed, but internally contradictory control culture is intimately connected with more comprehensive trends in the constitution of increasingly consumerist Western societies. A 216-item bibliography and chapter tables and notes