Culture Conflict and Delinquency. I. Culture Conflict and Misconduct

Abstract

T HE history of criminology as a science is a record of the successivefumbling with anthropological, psychological and sociological hypotheses which have not brought us appreciably nearer to an understanding of the problems of misconduct. In the attempt to explain delinquency we have been repeatedly shifting our attention from the personality to the surroundings and have emphasized first one, then another biological, psychological or cultural fact, usually to the exclusion of all others. In stressing culture conflict as one of the possible factors in delinquency we are merely selecting for special investigation one of the items in the sociological approach and are neglecting for the moment other factors both situational and personal. In the face of the imposing series of exploded theories of criminality, prudence dictates that a new theory avoid the persistent error of claiming universal applicability. It should be frankly stated at the outset, therefore, that not all delinquency is explained by culture conflict and not all of life's experiences and social relations involve culture conflict. But, if the social psychologists are correct, conscious mental life arises out of conflict situations. Still it would be an exaggeration to speak of conflict as a universal etiological principle. There are so many significant problems on which it has an immediate bearing that it is not necessary to magnify the importance of this principle to convince others of its usefulness. There have been several widely accepted theories of sociologv which have been constructed around the central notion of conflict. For our purposes, however, we need a much more specific and workable conception than these universalistic theories imply. It is the merit of William Healy to have called attention to the relationship between mental conflicts and misconduct. The sociologist might raise the question whether these mental conflicts as they appear on the inner, personal side of life are not sometimes paralleled by culture conflicts when viewed from the standpoint of the social world. The records of social agencies concerned with the behavior problems of individuals, in their emphasis on the details of biological heredity, on psychometric tests, on psychiatric diagnoses generally reflect the fashion that happens to prevail at the moment with reference to the sciences of human behavior. In our conventional case records we often find, largely due to medical, psychological, and psychiatric bias, a fairly detailed account of the personal characteristics of the individual, but relatively little about the cultural setting, the group customs out of which the individual's behavior at least in part flows. One is tempted to ask: Is it not as important to record the sometimes grossly conflicting family traditions of the paternal and maternal ancestors as to trace their respective childhood diseases? Whatever may be the physical, the psychological and the temperamental differences between various races and societies, one thing is certain, namely that their cultures are different. Their traditions,