Crime & Delinquency

It has been assumed that schools play a dramatic role in creating school crime. This paper, by using ethnographic data, demonstrates the interrelationships among administrative styles, deterrence, commitment, and dis ruption. It appears that legitimacy of rules even within a school's bureaucracy needs to be developed through negotiating order with students.

Theory and data are presented which indicate that certain alternative educational programs are a promising means of preventing and treating delinquent behavior. The theory proposes that delinquent behavior is a manifestation of a psychological defense against threats to self-esteem, and a substantial part of those threats originates in school experiences. Individualized educational programs that maximize success experiences and provide for more personal teacher-student relationships have the potential to reduce the provocations for and strengthen the controls against delinquency.

An aesthetic theory of vandalism is proposed. The theory posits that the variables accounting for the enjoyment associated with socially acceptable aesthetic experiences are similarly responsible for the pleasure associated with acts of destruction. Previous theory and research in aesthetics have identified many important factors, such as complexity, expectation, novelty, intensity, and patterning, which are responsible for the pleasure that accompanies an aesthetic experience. These same psychological processes are involved in the destruction of an object. Furthermore, aesthetic variables implicated in an object's initial appearance and in its appearance after being vandalized may serve as eliciting or discriminative stimuli for destructive behavior. Several studies provide support for hypotheses derived from the aesthetic theory of vandalism. In conclusion, we examine the theory's practical implications for reducing vandalism in the schools.

The systemic structure of a school provides opportunities for both prosocial and antisocial behavior. Actions in a school may be motivated by (1) the extrinsic mechanisms of discipline and grades, (2) the means-end rela tionship of school behavior to students' long-term goals, and (3) the immediate intrinsic satisfactions obtainable in different activities. This paper treats the third type, intrinsic motivation. Using previous research, the authors propose that the state of enjoyment occurs when a person is challenged at a level matched to his level of skills. According to the model, the experience of meetable challenges requires the perception of a constrained set of possible actions, clearly defined goals, and opportunities for unambiguous feedback. The system of rules in a formal game provides these prerequisites. The systemic structure of a school can also provide the conditions of enjoyable involvement. Ideally, learning should involve systemic involvement in sequences of challenges internalized by students. However, evidence indicates that such involvement is rare and is often subverted by the school itself. Without such opportunities, antisocial be havior provides an alternate framework of challenges for bored students. Disruption of classes, vandalism, and violence in schools are, in part, attempts by adolescents to obtain enjoyment in otherwise lifeless schools. Restructuring education in terms of intrinsic motivation would not only reduce school crime but would also accomplish the goal of teaching youths how to enjoy life constructively.

There is a growing trend in this country to blame youth crime on parental overpermissiveness. Available data fail to support this and show that all types of crime, including school crime, develop within families and school systems emphasizing aversive and authoritarian discipline techniques. Also, racism and personal injustice are more common in an authoritarian atmosphere. Of all types of aversive behavioral control, corporal punishment appears most apt to induce aggression. A theory relating delinquent aggression to the severity of parental discipline is sketched out, and it is suggested that a national effort be made to discourage the use of corporal punishment as a socially acceptable child-rearing technique. Since corporal punishment tends to produce both fear and anger, its continued use in the schools can only be counterproductive to the learning process. Forunately, many who strongly advocate corporal punishment in the classroom have expressed a willingness to forgo its use if more teachers and staff could be trained in alternative methods of effectively handling the troublesome pupil. Therefore, a joint effort should be made to train teachers thoroughly in nonaversive but effective techniques of pupil control. In addition, individual teachers need the support of well- trained guidance personnel who are willing to enter homes and work with the behavioral problems at their source.

Social scientists and others have maintained that schools contribute to delinquency by their failure to prepare students properly for later life. Thus, their solution is better schools and better education. I argue that schools create delinquents because of their success, not their failure. Under the present economic system, schools must prepare youths, especially of the lower classes, for alienated work and lives. Youths become "delinquents" when they reject this destiny. It follows that the society and economy must change first, since they demand alienated labor, before schools can prepare people for liberated lives.