NCJ Number
160229
Date Published
1996
Length
13 pages
Annotation
This study examines the delinquent activities, school achievements, social class, and community and police responses to two small-town gangs, the Saints and the Roughnecks, along with the adult careers of the gang members.
Abstract
Eight promising young men -- children of good, stable, white upper-middle-class families, active in school affairs, and good pre-college students -- were some of the most delinquent boys at Hanibal High School. Although community residents and parents knew that these boys occasionally "sowed a few wild oats," they were unaware that their antisocial behavior completed occupied the daily routine of these boys. The Saints were constantly involved in truancy, drinking, wild driving, petty theft, and vandalism. Yet no member of the gangs was arrested for any misdeed during the 2 years the author observed them. The author observed the Roughnecks over the same 2 years. This gang consisted of six lower class white boys, who were constantly in trouble with police and community, even though their rate of delinquency was similar to that of the Saints. The disparity of community and police response to the two gangs was probably due to the greater visibility of the Roughnecks' behavior, the tendency of the community and the police to expect delinquent behavior from lower class youth, and the Roughnecks' demeanor of hostility and belligerence when confronted by police and community members. Finding, processing, and punishing some kinds of criminality and not others means that visible, poor, nonmobile, outspoken, undiplomatic, "tough" kids will be noticed by the police and the community, whether their actions are seriously delinquent or not. Other kids, who have established a reputation for being bright, disciplined, and involved in respectable activities, who are mobile and affluent, will be invisible when they deviate from the law. The Saints will emerge from adolescence unsullied by negative images and police records. Most likely they will settle down and pursue a respectable middle-class life as adults. The Roughnecks, on the other hand will enter adulthood handicapped by their negative images and self-fulfilling prophecies about what they will become. Their noticeable deviance will have been so reinforced by police and community that their lives will be channeled into careers consistent with their adolescent background. Discussion question and suggested student applications of chapter material