Michael J. Hindelang

Intelligence and delinquency: a revisionist review.

Recent research on intelligence and delinquency suggests that (1) the relation is at least as strong as the relation of either class or race to official delinquency; (2) the relation is stronger than the relation of either class or race to self-reported delinquency. In an analysis of the history of the research on the IQ-delinquency relation, we trace the developments leading to the current textbook position that IQ is not an important factor in delinquency. This position, which came into vogue about forty years ago and is still held by many sociologists, has its roots in: (1) a medical to sociological paradigm shift in this century; (2) the failure of subsequent research to substantiate the early exorbitant claims that low IQ was a necessary and sufficient condition for illegal behavior; (3) early negative reviews of research on this question by Sutherland and others; (4) reservations about the validity of the measurement of both IQ and delinquency; (5) erroneous interpretation of research findings; (6) speculation regarding factors which might account for the relation. It is noted that many currently prominent sociological theories of delinquency implicitly or explicitly use IQ as a crucial theoretical element. We show that IQ has an effect on delinquency independent of class and race, and we argue that this effect is mediated through a host of school variables. (abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1977. Copyright

Correlates of Delinquency: The Illusion of Discrepancy between Self-Report and Official Measures.

This paper reviews the research literature concerning the extent to which studies of delinquency that use official records produce results compatible with studies of delinquency that use self-reports of adolescents. Particular attention is given to sex, race, and social class as correlates of delinquency. The notion that official and self-report methods produce discrepant results with respect to sex, race, and class is largely illusory. In reaching conclusions of discrepancy several techniques have been used in the literature; the most general is the assumption that self-reports and official data tap the same domain of behavior. When the domain limitations of self-reports are recognized (and other illusory techniques are abandoned), the conclusion of general consistency between self-reports and official correlates for sex, race, and class emerges. This consistency and other evidence from victimization surveys, studies of the reliability and validity of self-reports, and studies of biases in criminal justice processing, suggest that both official data and self-reports provide valid indicators of the demographic characteristics of offenders, within the domain of behavior effectively tapped by each method. (abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1979. Copyright

Causes of Delinquency: A Partial Replication and Extension

Focusing primarily on urban males, Hirschi (1969) presents research findings which are generally consistent with the propositions of his control theory. In an effort to examine the extent to which Hirschis basic research results can be replicated, groups of rural male and female students in grades six through 12 of one school were asked to respond to a self-report delinquency questionnaire and a series of items which Hirschi used to test propositions of his control theory. Indicators of “attachment” to parents and the school; “commitment” to, and “involvement” in, conventional activities; and “belief,” were found to be related to reported delinquent involvement among these rural respondents to about the same extent as among Hirschis urban males. However, his findings that attachment to peers and attachment to parents are positively related (to each other) and attachment to peers and reported delinquent involvement are negatively related, were not replicated; rather, the former relationship was found to be nearly orthogonal and the latter variables were found to be positively related.

A Study of the Behavior of Law

In The Behavior of Law, Black (1976) sets forth a theory of law that he argues explains variations in law across societies and among individuals within societies. Black argues that law can be conceived of as a quantitative variable, measured by the number and scope of prohibitions, obligations and other standards to which people are subject. Law varies, according to Black, with other aspects of social life, including stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and social control. Many of Blacks principal propositions regarding the quantity of law are tested in this paper with National Crime Survey data on the victims decision to report a crime to the police. An alternative model that views the quantity of law as depending largely on the gravity of the infraction against legal norms is posed and tested against Blacks theory. The data are generally inconsistent with the propositions derived from The Behavior of Law and strongly suggest that a theory attempting to explain the criminal law cannot ignore the gravity of the infraction against legal norms.

The uniform crime reports revisited

Abstract Of all criminal justice statistics in the United States, the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) are the most widely known, used, and criticized. While the criticisms leveled at the UCR have been many and varied, attempts to assess the effects of the shortcomings of the UCR have been rare. Unfortunately, national sources of data against which the UCR can be gauged are very limited. There are, however, two such sources which may be used—homicide statistics collected by the Center for Health Statistics and the 1967 National Opinion Research Center victimization survey. While only very crude comparisons can be made between the UCR and data from these two sources, the results suggest that for homicide trends and the geographic distribution of “index” offenses, UCR and non-UCR sources depict similar patterns. Finally, procedures which various researchers have proposed for constructing a “crime index” are compared to the simple-sum method used by the UCR. When counties are used as the unit of analysis, most of the weighting schemes examined are found to order the counties in similar fashion. The implications of these results are briefly discussed.

Age, Sex, and the Versatility of Delinquent Involvements

An analysis of the self-reported delinquent involvements of 763 male and female adolescents revealed that although the males generally had engaged in the 24 activities with a greater frequency than the females, the patterns of involvement were quite similar for both sexes. An intercorrelational analysis of the activities indicated that participation in the activities was more a generalized than a specialized phenomenon; the behaviors showed a tendency to be more generalized among the females than among the males; generalization-specialization was not found to be related to age.

Sex Differences in Criminal Activity

National victimization survey data for the years 1972 to 1976 are examined in order to investigate the extent to which they are in accord with Uniform Crime Report arrest data regarding the offenders sex. The results for common-law crimes–both the personal crimes of rape, robbery, assault, and personal larceny, as well as the household crimes of burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft–parallel arrest data in showing that male involvement in these crimes is proportionately much greater than is the involvement of females. Except for a slight recent increase in female involvement for larceny, there did not appear to be systematic changes in the proportionate involvement of females across the few years of victimization data now available. Victims of female-offender crimes reported them less often to the police than was true for victims of male-offender crimes. But the latter crimes are usually more serious and male-offenders dominate commercial robbery, almost always reported to the police. The chivalry hypothesis–that male victims of female offenders are reluctant to report female-offender crimes to the police–was not supported. Even with seriousness of victimizations controlled, males tended to report their victimizations to the police more when they were victimized by females; the opposite was true for female victims. Overall, the results are consistent with the argument that sex is an important nonartifactual correlate of involvement in criminal behavior. Theories that fail to recognize and accommodate the importance of sex–and other traditional demographic correlates (e.g., race) of involvement in common-law crimes–are ignoring important factors accounting for criminal activity.