Delinquency Treatment in the Controlled Activity Group

Abstract

A FUNDAMENTAL problem of social control in a complex society is the maintenance of social ties to those personalities who breach the conventions. In simpler societies the great strength of primary relationships serves to prevent serious breach, or where serious breach has occurred, of drastic severance of social ties. But in industrial societies, breach of convention as defined especially in the criminal law leads to the application of sanctions which weaken the ties to family, kin and community. By a widening of social distance accomplished by the withdrawal of social contact and sympathy the recidivist offender is as effectively separated from his society as though he were physically exiled. Repeated application of punishment extends the separation into a cleavage from which finally emerges a segregate culture-group, the criminal underworld, equipped with its variant philosophy and culture values, its occupational techniques, and its social roles. Paradoxically, it is only through success in this half-world that the criminal personality can achieve a role in organized crime or in crime-politics. The control of organized crime, criminal syndicates and racketeering, then, involves the elimination of the social process which creates the backbone of organized crimethe criminal personality. This paper proposes to deal with the genetic aspect of this problem, namely the process of differential association. The earliest genetic phases of the segregation process in the history of the individual delinquent have been described by psychiatrists and sociologists. They have emphasized severally the motivations and the social processes involved. William Healy, studying the motivations of youthful delinquents as