Discovery of Hidden Crime

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines Texan sociologist Austin L. Porterfield's discovery of hidden crime, including the broad cultural contexts of discovery and its immediate foreground. It also looks at the self-report delinquency survey as a modern method of discovering hidden crime and how it takes into account factors that are both internal and external to science. The chapter first considers the use of moral statistics in the discovery of hidden crime and the problems associated with the so-called official control barrier. It then discusses Magnus Hirschfeld's concept called per scientiam ad justitiam (‘justice through science’), along with the white-collar offender as a prototype of the hidden criminal, the work of Sophia Moses Robison, Edwin H. Sutherland's experiments in the 1930s, and Porterfield's groundbreaking survey that elicited anonymous confessions from college students about their delinquent behaviour. Furthermore, it explores other views on the discovery of hidden crime, especially the law-abiding law-breaker and normalisation of sex, along with the findings of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study. Finally, it describes the Americanisation of the hidden crime survey during the 1950s.