Alcohol and Drugs, Delinquency and Crime: Looking Back to the Future

223 Pages·1998·15.58 MB·English

by  Lyle W. Shannon

ALCOHOL AND DRUGS, DELINQUENCY AND CRIME
Also by Lyle W. Shannon
CHANGING PATTERNS OF DELINQUENCY AND CRIME: A
Longitudinal Study in Racine
CRIMINAL CAREER CONTINUITY: Its Social Context
DEVELOPING AREAS: A Book of Reading and Research (editor with
V. J. Pillai)
MINORITY MIGRANTS IN THE URBAN COMMUNITY
SOCKS AND CRETIN: Two Democats Helping Bill with Presidency
UNDERDEVELOPED AREAS: A Book of Readings and Research
Alcohol and Drugs,
Delinquency and Crime
Looking Back to the Future
Lyle W. Shannon
Professor Emeritus of Sociology
and Director
Iowa Urban Community Research Center
The University of Iowa
Iowa City
with the assistance of
Judith L. McKim
Kathleen R. Anderson
William E. Murph
flfl
First published in Great Britain 1998 by
« MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-333-71912-3
m
First published in the United States of America 1998 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0-312-21437-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shannon, Lyle W.
Alcohol and drugs, delinquency, and crime : looking back to the
future / Lyle W. Shannon ; with the assistance of Judith L. McKim,
Kathleen R. Anderson, William E. Murph.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-21437-5 (cloth)
1. Juvenile delinquency—Wisconsin—Racine—Longitudinal studies.
2. Youth—Drug use—Wisconsin—Racine—Longitudinal studies.
3. Youth—Alcohol use—Wisconsin—Racine—Longitudinal studies.
4. Narcotics and crime—Wisconsin—Racine—Longitudinal studies.
I. McKim, Judith L. II. Anderson, Kathleen R. III. Murph, William
E. IV. Title.
HV9106.R33S53 1998
364.36'09775,96—<lc21 98-11064
CIP
© Lyle W. Shannon 1998
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with
written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by
the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Printed in Great Britain by
The Ipswich Book Company Ltd
Ipswich, Suffolk
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
1 Delinquency and Crime in the United States 1
A Sociological Perspective 1
Measuring Delinquency and Crime 8
Summary 20
2 Delinquency and Crime in Racine 22
Focusing on the Urban Scene in Racine 22
Season Fluctuations in Rates 24
The Longitudinal Birth Cohort Data 25
The Changing Number and Distribution of Offenses
in the Racine Cohorts 31
The Changing Incidence of Serious Offenses in the
Racine Cohorts* 34
The Changing Distribution of Serious Offenses by
Age Period, Sex, and Cohort 36
Summary 38
The Ecological Approach to Explaining Delinquency 39
Dangerous Areas 39
The Ecology of Racine 40
A City in Transition 44
Temporal Trends in Offense Rates by
Spatial Areas 45
Life in the Delinquent Neighborhood 48
Conclusion 52
The Justice System 54
The Increasing Prison Population 54
The Effectiveness of the Justice System 55
Public Perceptions of Crime 60
The Effects of Sanctions in Racine 63
Conclusion 68
V
VI Contents
5 The Prediction Problem 71
Introduction 71
Early Attempts to Predict Crime from Delinquency
in the Cohorts 72
A Different Way of Looking at the Prediction
Problem 79
Prediction from Numerous Background Variables 83
Conclusion 83
6 Career Continuity in Delinquency and Crime and the
Prediction Problem 85
The Typological Approach to Representing Criminal
Careers 85
Computer-constructed Typologies 88
The Complexity of an Offense Type Typology 92
Drug Offenders vs. Non-Drug Offenders in the 1955
Cohort 98
The Relationship of Juvenile Types to Adult Types:
Self-report Data 103
Adding a Persistence Dimension to Typologies 105
Conclusion 106
7 Narrowing the Focus to Increase Predictive Efficiency 108
The Ecology of Drugs and Serious Crime in Racine 108
Patterns of Substance Involvement 112
Continuity in Careers: Neighborhoods and Drug
Users/Offenders vs. Non-Users/Non-Offenders 113
Are Drugs at the Center of the Crime Problem? 115
The Changing Distribution of All-around Street
Offenders and Drug Offenders 116
The Development of Dangerous Neighborhoods 119
The Continuing Differential Impact of Drug Offenses
and Neighborhoods of Socialization on Continuity 119
Conclusion 124
8 Thinking About the Drug/Crime Relationship 125
The Diversity of Patterns of Drug/Crime Involvement 125
What the Literature Suggests 130
Recent Surveys of Correctional Facilities 132
NIJ's Drug Use Forecasting 133
DUF and the Development of a Cross-sectional
Model 134
Contents vn
Beyond DUF and Outside Prison 136
The Racine Findings and the Broader Problem 137
Conclusion 138
The Relationship of Alcohol and Drugs to
Delinquency and Crime in Racine 140
Comparing Drug Users/Offenders and Non-Drug
Users/Offenders 140
Seriousness Scores for the 1942 and 1949 Drug
Offender Types 142
Comparing the Distribution of Official and
Self-report Types for the 1942 and 1949 Cohorts 143
Comparing Juvenile and Adult Offender Types
in the 1955 Cohort 144
The Temporal Sequence of Drug Contacts and
Other Offenses in the 1955 Cohort 145
Updating the 1955 Cohort and Recoding for Illegal
Substance Involvement 149
Variation in Drugs and Reasons for Police Contacts 150
Involvement with Liquor 152
Summary and Conclusion 153
Alcohol and Drugs and Criminal Career Continuity
in the 1955 Cohort 155
Introduction 155
The Cohort in 1970 and in 1988 155
Frequency Types and the Alcohol/Drug and
Delinquency/Crime Relationship 156
The Delinquent Career and the Adult Career:
The 1955 Cohort Updated to 1988 161
The Delinquent Career and the Adult Career:
Augmented 1955 Cohort 165
Continuity Among Males from Inner-city and
Transitional Neighborhoods 172
Summary 175
Summary and Conclusions 176
A Framework within which to Examine Patterns
and Rates of Delinquency and Crime 176
Variation in Delinquency and Crime Rates 177
The Ecology of Delinquency and Crime 178
The Effectiveness of the Justice System 178
viii Contents
The Prediction Problem 179
Types of Delinquent and Criminal Careers 180
The Racine Computer-constructed Typologies 180
Drugs, Delinquency, and Crime and the Ecology of
the City 181
The Drug/Crime Relationship and Career Continuity 182
Alcohol vs. Drugs and Career Continuity 184
Conclusion 186
Bibliography 192
Index 202
Acknowledgments
Literally hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students from
the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the University of Wisconsin-
Parkside, and the University of Iowa have assisted us in our re
search in Madison and Racine over a period of more than 40 years.
They assisted us in interview schedule construction and pretesting,
in self-report construction and pretesting, and later in many waves
of interviewing for our two major projects. They coded official records,
checkcoded, entered data in the computers, helped us construct
tables, collapse categories of data, and wrote preliminary assess
ments of the findings. We sat around the table and discussed what
we were learning and what we should be doing that we were not
doing. The students said that it was not just a job because they
had become part of the project. Many developed research papers
based on the data and some did their MA and PhD theses with
the data. We welcomed their participation and always told them
that if they eventually did a reanalysis of the data which found
that something the professors concluded must be modified or com
pletely thrown out, that would indeed be a feather in their hats.
Numerous citations in the text and items in the bibliography are to
theses and papers by graduate students and now more and more
to professors of sociology in other academic institutions, many of
whom got their start at interviewing and data collection on the
Madison and Racine projects.
Most of the funding for research on juvenile delinquency and
adult crime came from the National Institute of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention and the National Institute of Justice
of the Department of Justice. The numerous lengthy reports which
we have made to these agencies are cited and listed in the bibli
ography. Our basic data have been made available by the Depart
ment of Justice though the National Institute of Justice's Data
Resources Program on a CD-ROM, Violence Research, NCJ - 151523,
and through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and So
cial Research at the University of Michigan. More recent data may
be obtained from the Consortium and the Sociometrics Corpora
tion in Los Altos, California, Data Set JU 86, Patterns of Drug Use
and Their Relation to Improving Prediction of Patterns of Delinquency
IX