Crime in America is a social problem that cries out for explanation and understanding. Of particular concern are U.S. rates of violent crime (especially homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery), which remain dramatically higher than in other industrialized Western nations, despite our considerable efforts to control them. The 1980s have seen record levels in numbers of arrests, prosecutions, convictions and, as a result, in numbers of people sentenced to prison, jail, or probation. While rates of violent crime declined moderately in the first half of the 1980s, they are now beginning to rise again.
Criminology
As social scientists seeking to understand the crime problem, many criminologists rely heavily on so-called background studies of crime. These studies utilize official data, self-reports, or victim surveys to examine the social, psychological, economic, or other characteristics of offenders. Aided by the use of computers, criminological journals are full of articles demonstrating that background variables such as age, race, class, place, and sex are correlated to crime. Indeed, it is worth noting that rates of violent crime are often found to be higher for younger than for older people, for blacks than for whites, for lower- than for upper or middle-class people, for urban than for suburban or rural dwellers, and for males than for females. Moreover, when these variables fall together, they interact so as to produce extremely high crime rates for young, black, lower-class, urban males.
Striking though the correlations between background variables and crime might be, they do not provide a theory that explains the dynamics of crime. For one thing, there are the nagging statistics of white-collar crimes, typically committed by middle-aged, white, middle- or upper-class males, which can be just as violent even if they are more likely to be overlooked. For another, they do not explain why individuals in the high-correlation categories commit violent crimes at such high rates. In other words, no matter how useful it may be in explaining the social distribution of crime, correlation does not explain the causation of crime.
There is another side of criminology that attempts to deal with the causation of crime by developing analytical case studies of criminals. Dating back to the 1800s, this so-called ethnographic research became part of the criminological literature through the work of what is known as the Chicago School. Forming a more colorful part of the subject, this tradition utilizes case studies of children to show when they started thievery, of gangs committed to violence and theft to show patterns of interaction among members, of professional criminals to show the dynamics of a life of crime. Working in this tradition, such criminologists as William J. Chambliss have articulated the natural symbiotic ties between the illegitimate structure of crime and the political institutions in American society (see his On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents, 2d ed., Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Just as the background side of criminology has failed to pin down the causes of crime, the ethnographic side has not explained the amount of crime in society and its distribution by age, race, class, place, and sex. In fact, insofar as the ethnographic side depends on case studies, it tends to leave us with sometimes-colorful examples to cite, but without sustained studies or
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