The Relationship of Juvenile Delinquency, Race, and Economic Status

Abstract

A most common statement about the relationship of race to delinquency is that non-white children have a greater propensity for delinquency. The evidence usually is a series of crude rates for native-born white children, foreign-born white, and nonwhite children, often uncorrected for age, sex and other differences in the child population. Such conjecture is based upon single factors and the failure to consider the fact that human behavior is determined by a tenuous complex of factors which must be isolated, tested for reliability and validity under some degree of control, and integrated into an adequate theoretic frame in order to produce fruitful scientific generalizations. Particularistic explanations of delinquency have been adequately refuted; only the naive persist in offering single-cause explanations. A listing of causal factors involved in delinquency would include spacial, temporal, sociological, economic, political, the physical environment, and the physical and mental equipment of the individual delinquents.' Only two of these, race and economic status, are being considered in this study because data are lacking for others. We are interested in investigating their individual relationship todelinquency when the effect of each is held constant by statistical techniques. The fact that we are seeking the relation-