The Delinquent Solution (Routledge Revivals)

A Study in Subcultural Theory

David Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135019068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1966, The Delinquent Solution presents a study of crime associated with the nature of subcultures. The book discusses issues such as the concept and theory of subcultures, the life of delinquent gangs, and the English experience of delinquent subcultures. It also takes an in-depth look at the Stepney and Poplar survey on crime from 1960, analysing both statistical data and more informal observations. Although the book was written over forty years ago, the issues discussed remain relevant and strong areas of interest.

1

THE CONCEPT OF THE DELINQUENT SUBCULTURE

SINCE 1955, when Albert Cohen first employed the concept of the subculture in relation to certain forms of juvenile delinquency, the term ‘delinquent subculture’ has become embedded in criminological vocabulary. To Cohen,¹ the concept applied to a ‘way of life that has somehow become traditional among … the boys’ gangs that flourish most conspicuously in the “delinquency neighbourhoods” of our larger American cities’. This way of life can be called a subculture, and can therefore be analysed as such, because it possesses ‘knowledge, beliefs, values, codes, tastes and prejudices’ which are peculiarly its own. Subcultures are ‘cultures within cultures’, for the concept of culture should not be reserved for ‘the distinctive ways of life of … large-scale national and tribal societies’. Moreover, there are ‘subcultures within subcultures’; for example, the subculture of a neighbourhood and of a family, clique or gang within the neighbourhood. ‘All these subcultures have this in common: they are acquired only by interaction with those who already share and embody, in their belief and action, the culture (i.e. the subculture) pattern’.

Cohen’s outline of what constitutes a subculture is more suggestive than definitive, since he regarded the task of ‘culture’ and ‘subculture’ definition as given and focussed his attention on the process by which a subculture emerges. He is avowedly more concerned with the process by which a subculture is created than with the mechanisms by which it is maintained. Yet the novelty of applying ‘subculture’ to certain forms of delinquency obscured the difficulties in the way of using the concept at all. That these difficulties are inherent in the concept of the ‘subculture’, rather than in the substance of Cohen’s theory about a particular ‘delinquent subculture’, is a point missed by many critics of his theory. To avoid the same pitfall, some indication of the difficulties inherent in the definition of ‘culture’ and ‘subculture’ seems in order. Before the value of the subcultural approach to an understanding of juvenile delinquency can be conveyed, difficulties of definition must be disentangled from those of substantive theory.

The concept of culture has largely been the preserve of the anthropologist. The central position of the concept in social anthropology largely derived from Malinowski,² whose classic definition of ‘culture’ as comprising ‘inherited artefacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits and values’ generated a concern to re-define and amplify the uses of the concept as a descriptive and explanatory tool. Sociologists have generally been cursory in their use of the concept, rarely attempting any definition more stringent than the ‘way of life’ criterion. Significantly, in their imaginary interdisciplinary conversation on the concept of culture, Kluckhohn and Kelley³ include anthropologists, a lawyer, psychologist, biologist and businessman, but not a sociologist. While sociologists usually give a working definition of ‘culture’ to serve specific purposes, they have contributed little to the ongoing debate about the basic questions ‘What is culture?’ and ‘How do culture and subculture intersect?’ To place Cohen’s particular application in perspective, and to clarify some important limitations on the whole field of delinquent subcultural theorisation, these questions must at least be touched upon.

Both ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are conceptual constructs or models: culture cannot be ‘seen’, but refers to the distinctive regularities—the ‘ways’—which are abstracted from actually seeing and observing human behaviour in a given collectivity. Firth⁴ clearly distinguished between culture and social structure, defining ‘… society, culture and community …’ as:

different facets or components in basic human situations. If, for example, society is taken to be an organised set of individuals with a given way of life, culture is that way of life. If society is taken to be an aggregate of social relations, then culture is the content of those relations. From the behavioural aspect, culture is all learned behaviour which has been socially acquired.

Culture is essentially that part of learned behaviour which is shared with others. In Ruth Benedict’s words, ‘culture is what binds men together’. This definition is fundamentally that of Malinowski, who viewed culture in functional terms, as the cement which makes a given collectivity cohere.

Yet culture also sets men apart. C. S. Ford⁵ viewed culture as consisting of ‘traditional ways of solving problems’ or ‘of learned problem solutions’. While stable cultures pass on answers to specific problems, the tendency is for cultures to create new problems in solving the old. Culture is both fulfilling and frustrating: hence the inadequacy of the purely functional approach. Culture is not simply ‘social heredity’, a term which connotes a dead, static weight. Men are not only carriers, they are also creators of culture. Moreover, culture displays organisation as well as content: mere enumeration of culture traits is a distortion of the reality, since the parts vary by arrangement, emphasis and intensity; values may be dominant or secondary, and so on. Part of the confusion springs from the two main uses to which the concept of culture is put: explanation and description. These uses overlap, but are quite distinct analytically.

No human being, even if only a few months old, reacts completely freshly to any stimulus situation. As an ‘explanatory’ concept, ‘culture’ is of use both in analysing the actions of people, whether individually or in groups, and in elucidating the geographical distribution of artefacts, forms of behaviour and historical sequences of behaviour. In this context, it might be defined as ‘those historically created selective processes that channel men’s reactions both to internal and to external stimuli’. ‘Internal’ refers to man’s basic biological drives—hunger, procreation etc.; ‘external’ to whatever stimulus situations confront him. ‘Selective’ connotes man’s preference for one solution as opposed to a variety of other solutions available; ‘channel’ indicates that culture influences, rather than determines, an outcome: other interactive factors are always present. The extent to which even ‘innate’ endowments are culturally modifiable testifies to the great plasticity of ‘human nature’. The very way we look at the world depends to a large extent on our cultural preconceptions as to what we will see there. As an explanatory concept, ‘culture’ is most usefully defined as ‘… among other things … a set of ready-made definitions of the situation that each individual only slightly re-tailors in his own idiomatic way…. The human mind can know “reality” only as sieved through an a priori net.’ Related concepts, such as ‘culture diffusion’, ‘culture conflict’, ‘culture lag’, ‘acculturation’, are best understood in this context.

Selectivity is the process most basic to ‘culture’, for ‘culture’ is possible only where two or more functionally equivalent choices are available for the attainment of an end: hence, to state that men catch fish is not a statement about culture if those men depend on the catch for their lives: only a description of their mode of catching and eating the fish would be a statement about culture. As a descriptive concept, Kluckhohn and Kelley define ‘culture’ as ‘all those historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational and nonrational, that exist at any given time as potential guides for the behaviour of men’ or ‘that tend to be shared by all or specially designated members of a group’. ‘Designs for living’ subsumes both ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ facets; ‘at any given time’ insists that ‘culture’ is never static; ‘tends to be shared’ implies that no-one, even in primitive societies, can know ‘all’ of a culture: such knowledge is limited and differentiated by age, sex, prestige, and role differentials. Similarly, no culture can be regarded as a completely integrated system. Most cultures, like personalities, can be regarded as permeated by apparent contradictions.

The concept of the ‘subculture’ embodies one such contradiction. What constitutes the ‘culture’ of a complex society: all its subcultures, their uniformities only, or the dominant subculture? Where, to put it crudely, does culture end and subculture begin? Does subculture merely refract or totally displace culture? Any vagueness over the boundaries of the overall culture will automatically extend to subcultures. Hoijer⁶ asserts the importance of language: ‘To the extent that a culture as a whole is made up of common understandings, its linguistic aspect is its most vital and necessary part.’ Yet the main importance of language lies in its implicit assumptions: every language is a device for categorising experience, as well as for communication, emotion-rousing, etc., as the study of comparative linguistics has stressed. When major obstacles to inter-class communication in language appear—as demonstrated, for example, by Bernstein’s discussion of the general limitation of the working-class child to a ‘public’ language—are we to assume totally disparate cultures? Levi-Strauss has related the culture-subculture question of definition to the scale of research planned: ‘significant discontinuities’ between culture(s) and subculture(s) can be assessed only within a given frame of reference. Any other approach is bedevilled by the all-embracing nature of the concept; ‘Western’ culture subsumes American, British, French, etc. cultures; which subsume numerous regional cultures, and so on, to the ‘subculture with a subculture’ of a factory or a neighbourhood. The broad criteria of mutual intelligibility and self-sufficiency perhaps help to divide distinct ‘cultures’ but are of little use in hiving off subcultures from the larger culture. Such statements as: ‘When people from two groups, despite perceptible variation in the details of their lifeways, nevertheless share enough basic assumptions for reasonably comfortable communication, then their cultures are only variants of a single culture,’⁸ are provocative, but barely scientific. Again, their three questions to distinguish between cultures: ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ criteria; attributes of a ‘good’ person; and what is desirable in experience and in what rank order, are more pertinent to civilisation than to subculture differentiation. They conclude that: ‘The dividing line between “a culture” and “subculture” or “cultural variant” has not yet been firmly staked out.’⁹

What, then, is particularly to be gained by using the subculture concept?¹⁰ It is not very illuminating to label as ‘subcultures’ well-known differences between the ways of life of different sectors of complex societies. The answer is that certain kinds of questions can most usefully be posed within the subcultural frame of reference. If the resulting answers make sense, can be nullified or verified scientifically, or—better—are simply of use, then the weaknesses inherent in the conceptual source are not crucially relevant.

In outlining a ‘general theory of subcultures’, Cohen’s¹¹ basic premise was that what people do depends upon the problems they contend with, echoing Ford’s definition of culture (and, by extension, subculture) as consisting of ‘learned problem solutions’. Whatever factors and circumstances combine to produce a problem derive from either the individual’s ‘frame of reference’—the way he looks at the world—or the ‘situation’ he confronts—the world he lives in and where he is located in the world. All problems arise and are solved via changes in one or both of these classes of determinants. The ‘situation’ limits the things we can do or have, and the conditions under which they are possible. But the situation and the problem it implies are always relative to the ‘actor’. ‘The facts’ never simply stare us in the face: so much is already evident from the discussion of ‘culture’. ‘Opportunity’, ‘barrier’, ‘ambition’: these concepts are never ‘fixed’, but depend upon our goals and aspirations. The ‘same’ world, the ‘same’ situation, strikes terror in one person, but to another can appear a calm and peaceful haven.

A good solution creates no new problems: it leaves no residue of anxiety, tension or despair. The really hard problems are those to which no ready-made solution has been provided by a ‘culture’: the ‘situation’ remains inflexible. Any satisfactory solution to these problems entails, therefore, some change in the frame of reference itself. For example, giving up a long-cherished goal is an effective solution only if that goal is deemed irrelevant or of little importance: otherwise, its hold over us persists, nags and worries. In short, our values must change to accommodate this solution: ‘projection’ and ‘rationalisation’ are well-known psychological mechanisms to this end.

Human problems are manifestly not distributed randomly among the ‘roles’ that make up a social system. ‘Frames of reference’ vary by age, sex, ethnic group, occupational, class and prestige-group categories. The ‘same’ problems affect people differently according to the sectors they occupy: ‘growing old’ involves vastly different problems for the manual worker, whose job places a high premium on physical vigour, and for the white collar worker. The patterned distribution of problems accounts for the creation and selection of similarly distributed solutions. This explanation is inadequate, however, if there exist good alternative responses to the specific problems involved.

To say that the best solutions create no new problems implies, above all, that they must not impair our standing with those whose friendship and esteem we value most. It is not only that the assent of our reference groups matters, and enhances our solutions: more than any other single factor, such assent validates our solutions. So strong is the need for reference-group support for our solutions, that if they prove unacceptable to the group’s standards, we are very likely to look for a group that will assent: the continual realignment of groups, the constant search for foci for new loyalties, is a common form of social process.

The migration of an individual from one group to another does not, however, constitute subcultural innovation: this can emerge only where there exist, ‘in effective interaction with one another, a number of actors with similar problems of adjustment’, for whom no effective solution as yet exists for a common, shared problem. Only on this basis is the joint elaboration of a new solution possible: and it emerges on a group basis, via a process of mutual conversion to a new point of view.¹² That the group basis is a necessary catalyst is illustrated in extreme form by the behaviour of ‘crowds’ or ‘mobs’. These kinds of ‘collective behaviour’ embody quickly worked-out collective solutions to common problems: the moral frame of reference is not so much obliterated as rapidly transformed. This emergence of new ‘group standards’ is synonymous with that of a new subculture: it is simply that, in the case of ‘collective behaviour’, the subculture so hastily created is short-lived. For, once generated, a subculture will generally persist only as long as the problems to which it provides a solution persist (although, if it comes to serve different needs equivalently, it will outlast the problem which generated it).

One particular category of problems are those that derive from our need for ‘status’, which might be defined as our need to achieve and maintain the respect of our fellows (our reference group). They accord us their respect on the basis of certain criteria, which form one aspect of their ‘cultural frame of reference’. The more severely we are found lacking by these criteria, the more we are faced with a ‘problem of adjustment’. Those sharing such a problem could respond to it by gravitating towards one another and establishing new criteria of status, based on attributes they do possess: these new criteria may be different from or even antithetical to those of the former group. The more the former group rejects the new, the more the new is strengthened in its e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1. THE CONCEPT OF THE DELINQUENT SUBCULTURE
• 2. DELINQUENT GANGS
• 3. AMERICAN THEORISATION ON DELINQUENT SUBCULTURES
• 4. EXTENSIONS AND CRITIQUES OF SUBCULTURAL THEORISATION
• 5. DELINQUENT SUBCULTURES-THE ENGLISH EXPERIENCE
• 6. DELINQUENT SUBCULTURES IN STEPNEY AND POPLAR: STATISTICAL SURVEY
• 7. DELINQUENT SUBCULTURES IN STEPNEY AND POPLAR: INFORMAL OBSERVATION
• 8. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX