Crime, Delinquency, and Social Status

Abstract

This article summarizes the findings from 273 studies of the relationship between social status and criminal/delinquent behavior. The present review differs from others published on the same topic in recent decades partly in terms of comprehensiveness, both in terms of the total number of studies reviewed and in terms of our efforts to include research from all countries, not just the United States and other English-speaking industrialized nations. This review also explicitly separated studies according to the types of the operational measures used in defining offending and social status. The review suggests that individual social status is much more closely associated with criminal/delinquent behavior than is parental social status, particularly when offending behavior is persistent. Parental social status was found to be especially unlikely to be significantly correlated with offending probabilities in the case of self-reported offenses. Most surprising of all was that not a single study of self-reported drug use was found that reported a significant negative correlation with parental social status, and most studies actually reported a significant positive correlation. The implications for theories of criminal/delinquent behavior are discussed.