Antisocial behavior of the elderly

Abstract

The elderly offender has only rarely been a subject of study, and relatively little has been written about him other than what is given in annual arrest and prison reports. The present study investigated the frequency and causes of arrests in San Francisco of individuals 60 years old or older, and certain characteristics of those arrested. Interviews were conducted with a sample of persons arrested for drunkenness. The data reported here do not include follow-up studies of the individuals arrested indicating whether they were brought to trial, acquitted or convicted, or data concerning their eventual disposition. Two types of data will be discussed. First, certain limited information was obtained for every person 60 years of age or over arrested during a period of four months during 1967–1968. Permission was obtained from the San Francisco Police Department to obtain data from the City Jail Arrest Ledger, which contains for every person arrested (over 18 years of age), name, address, sex, age, and charge. It should be noted that the United States Census 1 reveals that San Francisco is somewhat unusual in the age distribution of its population, in that 18.5 per cent of its total population (780,000) is 60 years of age or older, whereas for the state of California this figure is 12.5 per cent and for the United States as a whole, 13.4 per cent. Second, a randomly selected sample of persons aged 60 or older arrested for drunkenness was interviewed. A member of the project staff who identified himself as being associated with the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute and the University of California Medical Center requested permission of each prisoner to interview him. Only two persons declined to be interviewed, although many refusals were anticipated both by the police and by members of the study team. The Uniform Crime Reports for 1967 2 indicate a total of 4.2 million arrests of persons 18 years of age or over in the United States in 1967, from about 4566 arresting agencies concerned with a total population of about 146 million. Of these, 225,510, or 5.4 per cent of the total arrests, were persons 60 years of age or older. In San Francisco, it was found that during all of 1967 there were 2429 arrests of persons 60 years of age or older, which amounted to only 5.3 per cent of all persons 18 years of age or older arrested in that period, despite the relatively larger proportion of elderly resident.