THE IMPACT OF POLICE INTERVENTION UPON JUVENILE DELINQUENTS

Police intervention is thought to have an impact upon the juvenile's perception of himself and his role expectations. The data indicate the degree to which the frequency and severity of official delinquency, as well as the severity of disposition, office the juvenile's see-satisfaction. delinquent identification, commitment to delinquent others, commitment to future delinquency, and attitudes toward police. the results of partial correlation coefficients and stepwise regression suggest that police intervention has little impact upon the juvenile when socioeconomic status and, especially, involvement in delinquent behavior are controlled. It is concluded that the juvenile's perceptions of himself and his attitudes toward others, as they relate to delinquency, are more likely to be grounded in the experience of his delinquency involvement than in the experience of coming to the attention of social control agents.     

SELECTIVE UNEMPLOYMENT: THE CREEPING CRISIS

"Machinery will go on developing, with the purpose of saving men labour, till the mass of the people attain real leisure enough to be able to appreciate the pleasures of life; till, in fact, they have attained such mastery over Nature that they no longer fear starvation as a penalty for not working more than enough…. They would soon find out that the less work they did, the more desirable a dwelling place the earth would be."     

Legal Needs of The Poor: Problems,Priorities and Attitudes*

The Legal Services Corporation is faced with the problem of allocating limited resources in order to meet the legal needs of the poor. It is forced into the dilemma of setting priorities, creating workable regulations to meet an ambiguously defined and elusive concept of legal need. Recently enacted regulations require annual reports by legal services programs that are based, in part, on the assessment of eligible clients' needs as expressed by their attitudes. These regulations are premised on unarticulated implicit assumptions relating attitudes, problems experienced, and legal need. This study examines these assumptions in an analysis of perceived problems, help seeking behavior, attitudes toward the allocation of legal services resources, and how these have changed over time for the eligible client population of one legal service program in California.     

Values and partisanship in left-right orientations: measuring ideology

Abstract. This paper analyzes whether left-right scales provide an interval measure of citizen issue attitudes that is comparable across eight Western European countries. Two commonly held views of left-right self-placement are juxtaposed: (1) the theory that issue attitudes are the primary component of left-right self-placement, and (2) the theory that partisanship is the primary component of left-right self-placement, which entails that left-right scales will take on different substantive meanings in countries with different types of party systems. Distance measures and least squares regression show that left-right scales are generally an appropriate instrument for cross-national tests of theories that have as an explanatory variable the ideological orientations of voters.     

THE TRANSFORMATION OF TROUBLE: Police Certification and State Compensation of Sexual Assault Claims

This article is concerned with the transformation of private troubles into social and legal problems. It is argued that this transformation process involves a micro-and macro-politics of claims-making. Data are presented on police certification and state compensation of sexual assault claims in a mid western state. The largest urban area in this state is distinguished by the collective claims-making of antirape activists, and by the resulting presence of a sexual assault treatment center, which we expected would reduce the influence of racial characteristics on police certifications of innocence, while correspondingly increasing the influence of police certifications on the success of compensation claims. Our results confirm the above expectations. An implication of our findings is that black victims of intraracial sexual assaults are more likely to see their compensation claims succeed, and to see their troubles recognized as social and legal problems in those settings where macro-level antirape efforts have been institutionalized in treatment and/or advocacy centers. More generally, our findings suggest that the transformation of private troubles into social and legal problems can be contingent on collective claims-making in the context considered.     

NONSOCIAL REINFORCEMENT AND HABITUAL CRIMINAL CONDUCT: AN EXTENSION OF LEARNING THEORY *

Drawing on a diverse literature, we explain how criminal behavior is maintained through a process of nonsocial reinforcement, and show that some persons find criminal behavior particularly rewarding. We test our assumptions using surveys of 295 incarcerated adult felons and 150 male college students and intensive focus groups with 40 habitual offenders currently serving time. Results suggest that the experience of committing nonviolent and, particularly, violent crime is intrinsically rewarding and tends to reinforce such behavior among habitual criminals. The endogenous rewards identified center on (1) the neurophysiological high such acts produce and (2) the symbolic meaning of the behavior as it relates to self-concept and identity formation. Findings from the surveys and the focus groups suggest that habitual criminality is sustained partly through the positive sensations (physiological and psychological) those crimes activate within the offender and that those sensations are instrumental in the maintenance and reinforcement of criminal careers. Based on what is known in the literature and what has been learned from our research, it seems that an effective way of integrating this knowledge lies in the direction of a nonsocial reinforcement arm of learning theory.