Edwin H. Sutherland

Is there No Place for Culture in a Sociology of Legal and Illegal Enterprise

in this exchange with Jennifer Lee about our article. Lee gave our article a thoughtful reading. We believe this exchange is very useful for ASR’s readership in that it presents an opportunity to debate some very fundamental sociological questions: The role of structure and culture in social activity and organization, and whether either structure or culture should be assigned primacy in explaining social behavior. Our article and Lee’s comment represent two important broader positions found throughout sociology today. Our position is that ethnic cultural capital is interrelated with social capital and that such cultural capital—which Light and Gold (2000) include as a component of what they call “ethnic resources”—shapes how groups respond to structural opportunities and provide illegal goods and services. Lee’s position is a much more structuralist stance. Is there a place for culture in sociological explanations of illegal (or legal) enterprise? Lee would apparently answer, “No.” Her position seems to be that social structures (including opportunities, market conditions, financial capital, class resources, economic barriers, and perhaps also networks) are paramount in explaining ethnic differences in enterprise. Culture, especially cultural variations between ethnic groups, really has no place in explanations of enterprise. In fact, she sees significant danger in such explanations. According to Lee, assigning cultural factors a role in explaining how groups respond to structural conditions risks confirming negative stereotypes about groups (in this case, African Americans) or blaming them for “cultural shortcomings.” She reminds us of the Thomas’s famous theorem that what people define as real becomes real in its consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Ironically, W. I. and D. S. Thomas spent their careers being vitally concerned with the role of culture in social organization and disorganization. Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) also invoked both culture and structure to explain the actions and experiences of Polish immigrants. In fact, we stand behind a long line of sociologists who have recognized culture, including ethnic culture, as being interrelated with social structure across a wide range of phenomena, such as the following: Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Robert Merton, Edward Banfield, Robert Park and Louis Wirth, Edwin Sutherland, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Pierre Bourdieu, and most contemporary symbolic interactionists. Furthermore, Herbert Blumer (1990) pointed out that the causal impact of economic forces is indeterminate and conditioned by social and cultural features of local group life. Our analysis of numbers gambling is congruent with the idea that structural conditions shape and sometimes change cultures, but also that cultural repertoires influence how groups respond or adapt to structural conditions. When we speak of culture in our article, we follow Berger and Luckmann (1967) in viewing culture as “stocks of knowledge” and Bourdieu (1977) in viewing culture as “habitus.” It is useful to revisit our major empirical findings and our theoretical conclusions from them. Our main findings are that black independent ownership of numbers banks was once very common in East City, and black-owned banks once thrived there. Beginning in the late 1970s to early 1980s, however, black ownership and control declined to the point where, by circa 2000, there was only one large, durable, indeReply to Lee, ASR, February 2006

The Prison as a Criminological Laboratory

Successful methods of dealing with the problem of crime are either accidental or else are based upon adequate knowledge of the processes by which criminality develops. The failure of most of the methods of dealing with criminals is explained by the a priori and obsolete theories of behavior upon which the methods are based. Improvements in the methods of dealing with criminals are likely to be the outgrowth of more adequate knowledge regarding the criminals upon whom the methods are used. This knowledge of the processes by which criminality develops may be secured in part by a study of the relation between changes in crime rates and changes in other impersonal phenomena, in part by a comparison of criminals and non-criminals in respect to particular traits or conditions, in part by intensive case histories of criminals, and in part by observation of the results of experimental methods of control. At the present time, no one of these approaches to the problem has attained sufficient success to justify an assertion that no other approach should be used. All of these means of study should be continued in the hope that one or more of them may throw light upon this problem.

TEETERS, NEGLEY K. Penology from Panama to Cape Horn. Pp. xiii, 269. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for Temple University Publica tions, 1946.

lodging. In Britain, the accommodation for poor people needing legal assistance has until recently been extremely limited. This small volume reviews the situation and suggests some reforms. Before 1914 there was practically no help afforded in England for poor persons facing legal problems, other than waiver of court fees and resort to relatively unscrupulous solicitors. The Poor Persons’ Procedure in effect during the following three decades was deficient, and voluntary efforts by settlement houses and groups of socially minded lawyers’ were not an adequate suuplement. This deficiency was ac,centuated when the liberalized divorce law become effective in 1938: almost half of all divorce cases were brought under the Poor Persons’ Rules. It remained for the

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use has been made of the laws, statutes, officials regulations, and so forth, which deal with the treatment of criminals in the respective countries. Needless to say, the Library of Congress has an excellent collection of such materials, and there are English translations in many instances. Besides, several governmental agencies have recently conducted surveys of the penal systems of some foreign countries. The author should be commended for his

ABRAHAMSEN, DAVID. Crime and the Hu man Mind. Pp. xii, 244. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944.

developments in the modern metropolis do raise some fundamental questions that need to be followed through. Thus, there is no more than a hint of the possibility of decentralization, and scarcely any mention of such matters as are raised, for example, by Wright in The Disappearing City. The significant relation of the city to the region is hinted at most clearly in two sentences late in the book. In attempting to introduce materials from many fields, the author makes the book unduly sketchy. There is oversimplification, so it seems to the reviewer, and much that is presented might, it would seem, be assumed as already a part of the general reader’s or the college student’s background, as in the chapters on business, government, common defense, uplift, and public service. Further, there are times when the au-