Citation

Clinard MB. Am. J. Sociol. 1942; 48(2): 202-213.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1942, University of Chicago Press)

DOI

10.1086/219122

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The problem was the incidence of urban characteristics in the life-experience of property offenders and nonoffenders from areas of varying degrees of urbanization. Rural offenders were found to have had greater mobility than nonoffenders, their attitudes toward others tended to be impersonal, and they were not generally incorporated into the community where the offense occurred. Networks of criminal relationships were found to vary directly with the amount of urbanization of the areas from which offenders came. Delinquent gangs were not an important factor in the lives of farm offenders but were more so among village offenders. Offenders from areas of slight and moderate urbanization, in contrast to city offenders, were not definite criminal social types. Rural offenders were legal criminals but not criminal but not criminals in a sociological sense. Farm offenders did not conceive of their acts as crimes or of themselves as criminals. Among village offenders there was less of the fortuitous element in the criminal act and more of a realization that they were committing an act against society. Definite organized criminal behavior was the outstanding characteristic of the offenders from the cities. As long as there exists a predominant measure of personal relationship and informal social control in the farm and village areas, ti will be impossible for a separate criminal culture to exist. Without thew presence of criminal social types, the volume of crime committed by rural residents will continue to be small as compared with that of more urban areas.