Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency

In view of the shortcomings of sociological theories on crime and deviance this paper urges a research strategy aimed at the discovery of empirical regularities. As one such example, data from Uniform Crime Reports and the U.S. Census are used to study the relation of criminal differentiation to age and occupa tional differentiation. Criminal differentiation is high among the young, decreasing until the early thirties and then increasing. That is, individuals in the late teens tend to be arrested for of fenses that are relatively rare in other age groups. The increase in criminal differentiation after age 30 does not reach the high levels of the late teens. Criminal differentiation and occupational differentiation are found to be directly related for two census years, 1950 and 1960. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Results of surveys of public opinion regarding topics of im portance to criminal justice are widely available from a variety of sources. In addition to national pollsters who regularly in clude such questions in their periodic polls, governmental com missions often conduct in-depth surveys on specialized topics. Although these public opinion data offer a wealth of critical information which can be of value to criminal justice planners, practitioners, and academicians alike, these data have been largely ignored. The primary purpose of this paper is to explore the nature, scope, and sources of public opinion data which are currently available.

The Rotter I-E Scale was given to 84 defendants referred from the Lucas County Common Pleas Court; a revision of the same scale (revised for lower educational level) was given to 76 similar defendants. Seven variables were analyzed with the Internal- External variable to determine whether there was any significant relationship between them and the I-E variable. Multiple of fenses were significantly related to the Internal variable on the revised I-E Scale (an unexpected direction). Age approached significance in that almost four times more of the older de fendants scored higher on the Internal variable than the External variable on the revised I-E Scale (an unexpected direction). The original I-E Scale did not discriminate on any of the variables studied. The data suggest that as the defendants grow older, commit more offenses, they come into contact with social agen cies which teach Internal values, and respond with "institution alized" answers.

A correlation analysis of the severity and certainty of punish ment and offense rates for the major index crimes produces results consistent with the predictions of deterrence theory. Certainty of punishment proves to be the chief deterrent for most crimes. Homicide, however, is influenced by severity, pos sibly reflecting the differences between homicide and other of fenses. Little evidence of interaction is found between certainty and severity in effects on crime rate. A powerfunction proves to better describe the relationship between the punishment varia bles and crime rates than a rectilinear equation-a conclusion which, even apart from the date, appears more reasonable than the reverse.

More useful criminal justice evaluation research would differentiate offenses and offenders on the basis of causal theory and would interrelate several levels of abstraction. This is illus trated in correctional practice evaluation by a linkage of be havior modification, symbolic interactionist, and sociocultural diffusion theory, from which three propositions on the effective ness of specific treatment methods for particular types of offenders are derived. Research thus far supports the validity of these propositions. Boards of autonomous criminologists and public representatives supervising criminal justice statistics and research agencies would foster more grounding of inquiries in policy- relevant theory.

Training and manpower development in correction has become an increasingly important issue. Most such training on the cor rectional officer level is based upon an academic model of educa tion. This kind of training approach is likely to be ineffective because of a hypothesized officer subculture, the values of which are antagonistic to the policy and values implicit in the training. Three scales, measuring correctional policy, supervisory behavior, and social climate of institutions, were administered in the correction department of a northeastern state in order to test the hypothesis. It was found that officers differed considerably from managers on both policy and social climate. A major ex planatory factor appeared to be the way in which the officers perceived themselves to be managed. Suggestions are made for changing the officer subculture values based upon small group dynamics techniques that affect the way in which officers perceive themselves to be managed and alter the perceived rewards for behaving in ways compatible with managerial policy.

Staff members in correctional institutions are caught between the demands of the administrative subculture and the inmate subculture. As part of a larger project, data were gathered on the perceptions and attitudes of administrative personnel, staff personnel, and inmates toward "restricted" boys-youths judged potentially harmful to themselves or others and labeled as such -within one juvenile correctional setting. Official directives in dicated that the administration discriminated between the re stricted youth and the other boys and regarded their restrictive labels as valid. The boys themselves generally displayed no such discrimination and evaluated the restricted boys as being no different in behavior or attitudes from the other boys in the institution. Responses by the staff personnel indicated that they, in agreement with the boys, saw no differences in behavior or attitudes between restricted and nonrestricted youths. Yet these same staff personnel indicated that they regarded the label at tached to the restricted boys as accurate and valid, thus agreeing with the administration evaluation. It was suggested that the necessity for staff to reconcile these apparently irreconcilable attitudes produces a set of values and norms unique to the staff, containing situational definitions and meanings related to both the administrative and inmate cultures, yet beyond evaluation or understanding solely in terms of either one.

This study measured the effects of organizational changes taking place over a six-year period on residents' perceptions of a maximum-security juvenile institution. Four of six scales measuring institutional impact were able to discriminate signifi cantly between three different organizational time periods and also between six different years of release of 426 residents. Staff perceptions of the institution's impact on the residents moved in the same direction as those of the residents, but not as strongly. Evidence suggests that the construction of impact scales to measure institutional climate may have a potentially significant input to the understanding of our institutions and their effects on their clients. The efficiency of such impact scales, however, would appear to depend on factors not now considered in their construction.