6 - Conclusion

Summary

This book has been an effort to organize and evaluate the evidence concerning peer influence and criminal behavior. That delinquent behavior is predominantly group behavior is beyond dispute. That having delinquent friends is associated with delinquent behavior is equally indisputable. That these facts have any etiological significance when it comes to delinquent behavior, however, is disputable.

Some criminologists, as we have seen, dismiss these facts with scarcely a pause, either because they appear to be inconsequential, contradict a preferred theory, or can be readily explained away. In one of the more influential books in criminology in recent years, for example, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) utterly rejected the notion of peer influence and instead attributed criminal behavior to an absence of self-control. Gottfredson and Hirschi's distaste for peer explanations seems odd, however, when one considers that one of the principal ways by which groups seem to affect individuals is precisely by dissolving their self-control (see Chapter 4). The authors also make much of the similarities between criminal events and accidents – both ostensible consequences of low self-control. Yet among adolescents, the probability of a fatal motor vehicle accident increases in direct proportion to the number of adolescents in the vehicle (Chen et al., 2000).

Like a gorilla in the living room, the social nature of crime seems to push some investigators to extraordinary lengths in their efforts to ignore it.