• In Adam’s fall / We sinned all. – New-England Primer.

• Cain killed Abel / With the leg of a table – Children’s rhyme; catechism mnemonic.

• "Every society has offenders. We just never built prisons."– Stormy Ogden, American Indian Movement, speaking in Ann Arbor, April 5, 2007.

Crime is a social problem, and we devote immense resources to it. The summary tabulation in Appendix A of this paper indicates the magnitude of the problem. Despite the obviousness of crime, we have no good explanation for it. In fact, when it comes to theories, we suffer from an embarrassment of riches. Appendix B lists over 50 theories, most of them macro level or mid-range. I believe that the historical tenacity of crime and its depth and breadth in our society necessitate the plethora of theories. Furthermore, even the weakest of these theories offers a conceptual framework for some crimes. Therefore, even the weakest of these suggest policies that will lessen (if not remove) at least some crimes. While even the best of these theories – the ones most resilient to falsification – cannot explain all crime, the bottom line is that they need not.

Sociology claims to be a science on the basis of its positivism. We follow the scientific method of rational-empiricism. The scientific method can be encapsulated in three steps or elaborated into nine or more. Basically, we live in the world and are curious, so we ask questions. We answer those questions based on previous experience. We then test the proposed answer either with a controlled experiment or else by the discovery of new experiences. The answer may be accepted or rejected. If it is only partially rejected or only partially accepted, then the process begins anew with more careful (or broader) observations of a modified theory. Finally, we report what we have discovered. Hopefully, others can benefit from that. They might repeat our test themselves or seek new experiences as tests. Even if we "report" to no one other than ourselves, we record our theories, observations and discoveries in order to preserve and extend our knowledge.

That much is fine as far as it goes. For better or worse, however, human beings are not billiard balls. We can say that the force required to move an object is the product of its mass and the intended acceleration. We can say that kinetic energy of a moving object is proportional to the square of its velocity. We know that water is always H₂O and table salt is always NaCl and we can allow two different compounds to be called "salt peter" (KNO₃, potassium nitrate; NaNO₃ sodium nitrate) because they act very much alike in daily use. We are not surprised when dogs give birth to dogs. Explaining human action is not so easy.

To what extent do exceptions test the rules? Considering young men between the ages of 15 and 29, the distributions of those with college educations is:

As sociological theories, the theories of crime could be applied to these numbers. In other words, differential association (Sutherland and Cressey, 1966) explains crime as a behavior learned from associating with criminals. Similarly, it might be argued that young Asians live among those with college educations and so over one-third of them after leaving home continue to act as they were taught; and they find themselves differentially associated into baccalaureate programs. That leaves unanswered the question of what happened to the other two-thirds. Why do only a minority of youths in every ethnicity have college educations?

Sociology is a statistical science. As such, it ignores the individual. Consequently, there is no essential description to explain why the choice to commit a crime is different from any other choice. Sociology aggregates individual choices before attempting to explain them. The individual is lost. The very nature of the statistical foundation of sociology all but ensures that only partial explanations can be had. The key variable is the population. How the population is defined determines what theories will explain it.

We focus on race all too easily. (Gender and age come next.) Even as we proclaim the unfairness of discrimination against this group or that, we continue to place people into the very categories whose validities we deny. "There is no gene for race," says a poster pinned up in Pray-Harrold Hall. Yet, we measure income and education – and arrests – by race. We no longer tally Swedes and Irish (or Scots-Irish), lumping them all together as "White." However, that oversight may create a peculiar difficulty.

Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti theorized a "subculture of violence" among young African-American men in Philadelphia of the 1950s and 1960s. Their cohort study became a classic. Thirty years later, Snoop Doggy Dog (Cordozar Calvin Broadus, Jr ) was arrested and charged with the murder of 20-year old Philip Waldemariom. Waldemariom was allegedly a member of a rival gang. Broadus’s own gang involvement was a matter of public record. The social significance of all this is in the status of Snoop Dogg as a rap musician and producer, as well as film actor, in addition to his connection to others of the same genre with similar life histories. Perhaps iconic among them was Tupac Shakur who finally succumbed to the multiple wounds of the second attempt on his life, September 24, 1996. Shakur’s litany of violence began with the cries of his birth. His mother is former Black Panther Alice Faye Williams (Afreri Shakur). Seemingly cured of her communism, she successfully sued Snoop’s first producers and obtained rights to all of his works. She also launched her own fashion line in his name and protects all of the income via the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation. Oddly enough the obvious facts of this continuing culture of violence were successfully falsified by two acceptable studies.

In 1997, Liqun Cao, et al, took on the theory and in 2004, Lance Hannon followed. According to Cao:

The key is the phrases are "unique subculture" and "among the general population of …" It is also true that "among general population of African Americans in the United States" there exists no "unique subculture" of wealth that disdains to admit mere social workers and postal carriers. Yet, such a subculture exists as a subculture.

First of all, there is a definitional problem in placing a "unique subculture" within a "general population." What does that mean? Obviously, within the general African-American population, there is indeed on strict empirical grounds, a subculture of violence. There is also a subculture of wealth and grace. Lawrence Graham’s social portrait Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class describes them. Demographers and biographers argue over who the first African-American millionaire was. That Blacks began their ascent, even in the face of reactionary laws passed against free people of color, cannot be denied. Following the Civil War, former slaves moved into professional life and began acquiring the physical attributes of wealth. Money, of course, came first, but with it came the leisure for elegance. In Atlanta, New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago, of course, but mostly in New York and Washington D.C., the same paths that led Whites to power took Blacks there as well: law, medicine and real estate. While noblesse oblige is one thing, actually rubbing elbows with common working people is something else. The matrons and their husbands prefer to socialize among their own kind.

Is there a unique subculture of grande bourgeois charm within the general population of African-Americans? If not, why not?

What about the subculture of violence among Whites? Whence the "Fighting Irish" of Notre Dame? When we moved to Traverse City in 2003, my father-in-law warned me, "Don’t make fun of no Finlanders." That was fine with me because all the Scandinavian jokes I know are about Swedes. Of all the Caucasians infamous for their violence, Italians, especially Sicilians are unexcelled. Wiseguy: life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi was made into the movie Goodfellas. Unlike the iconic Godfather novels of Mario Puzo which are only nominally based on "true life" stories, the biographies in Wiseguys were first outlined as testimonies in federal court. How familiar Italian-Americans are with federal court depends on whom you ask. According to the Sons of Italy Commission for Social Justice, they are under-represented. Although Italians are the fifth-largest ethnic minority at 6% of the general population, only 3% of federal judges are Italian-Americans. However, to bring the Supreme Court down to that metric, either Justice Samuel Alito or Justice Antonin Scalia would have to go.

Recent publications by EMU sociologist Fatos Tarifa point to centuries of ritualized bloodfeuds among Albanians. Some of these norms are also found among Corsicans. We could make the same investigations among many cultures. It remains the hard work of anthropologists to remind us that not all people have such covert rage boiling over. Generally speaking, there is a "subculture of violence" everywhere.

That being so, what then of Wolfgang and Ferracuti? Does their thesis hold? It seems to among some people. On the other hand, finding it among the wealthy of any ethnicity would be difficult even to imagine. Then, does poverty breed violence? Again, the matter is complicated. While conflict theorists would like to believe that simply spreading more money (or "opportunity") would make life better, the facts seem to stack up both ways. The results of the study depend on the assumptions of the researchers.

Similarly, falsifying a theory is not always rigorous. Intervening variables are the easiest spirits to conjure. The "differential" theories (association, learning, reinforcement) all hinge on proximity. It would be easy enough to examine arrest records to show a pattern of deviance, delinquency and crime by family and neighborhood, even to within the same building. Yet, conflict theorists could point to inequalities of class and race as intervening variables. In the autobiographical Honky Dalton Conley tells of the time that he was visiting a friend and the boys began playing with matches and the inevitable happened. After the fireman left, the police asked a few questions and decided that there was no problem with delinquency. Not only was Conley white, but the apartment of his black friend was, like his own, subsidized for artists. Using their social capital, intellectuals in Greenwich Village and Soho had arranged for a system of low-rent spaces, based, in large part, on peer review. City Hall relied on professors, publishers, gallery owners and others in deciding to whom to mete out these goodies. Thus, the police decided that these people, being intellectuals and artists, did not need the harsher lessons available for those without culture. Is there a subculture of violence among intellectuals?

That should not be dismissed. Fugitive Days by professor of education, William Ayres, Ed. D., tells of his life on the run after planting bombs in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol as a member of the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. His book tour was cut short by the events of September 11, 2001. Suddenly, blowing things up was not so popular. It fact, it was embarrassing. It need not have been. The intellectuals could have borne proudly the mantle of delinquency. The entire history of civil disobedience from Antigone and Thoreau to Gandhi and King fits the theory of neutralization proposed by Sykes and Matza. According to them, the delinquent suppresses normal social restraints with five broad excuses:

1. Denial of responsibility.

2. Denial of injury.

3. Denial of the victim.

4. Condemnation of the condemners.

5. Appeal to higher loyalties.

It is true that the paradigmatic cases of civil disobedience are confrontations in which denial of responsibility is impossible. More to the point, such denial would be contrary to the purpose of the protest. However, it is far more common for "responsibility" for an action to be taken via telephone or now via email or posting on a website. Moreover, the other four points fit without much effort. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s upset the social order, but there was no harm in that. The victims were not really hurt, and besides, they deserved it. The authorities were wrong and wrongful. The protestors were following a higher law, natural law or God’s law.

We have come to accept it as normal that when something seems contrary to your expectations, you have every right – even a duty – to break the rules. We might accept a special burden of guilt, that American is an especially violent society. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of overthrowing the government. We had 200 years of rough frontier justice. No wonder we are immersed in crime. That would be fine, except for the fact that the same neutralization applies to the wahabbi, mujahideen, Islamists and others who have supplanted the radical Marxists and anarchists of the industrial era.

The fact is that the terrorism of SDS can be explained all too easily by its own Marxist conflict theory. Labeling theory would say that these young people learned to identify themselves with violent protestors of the past. Their college professors and the newspapers and the rightwing Nixon administration all called them "radicals" so they acted in accordance with the label. That might seem facile, but the theory is well developed and very deep. Erving Goffman’s many studies of "presentation management" and the "social self" reinforce well most of the other mid-range theories.

Numbers matter to some sociologists. It is not enough to observe a behavior and describe it and make a good prediction of how this might play out later. Regression analysis is the high road to truth. On the other hand, society changes. When William Whyte wrote The Unadjusted Girl, the social facts were new. Previously, unattached girls did not live on their own – certainly not if they were respectable. In the three generations since then, it might be said that even unadjusted boys have stopped seeking dominance and instead wish for companionship and recognition. Operationalizing that theory and finding it tabulated in a database might be interesting.

The overarching problem is that there is no single rigorous program in sociology to do that with every expression of every theory. A NASA-style program equivalent to Apollo would have most the nation’s sociologists examining most of the nation’s trends and then mathematically validating each of the fifty or so existing theories against the hard data. Unlike reaching the Moon, the prospect fails to compel awe.

Appendix A: Measures of Crime

In 1973 the violent crime rate was 47.7 incidents per 1000 but by 2005 had fallen to 21.0 per 1000. The murder rate remained constant at about 0.1 per 1,000

In 1986 there were 240,132,887 Americans and they suffered 1,489,169 violent incidents or about 620.1 per 100,000.

In 2005 there were 296,410,404 Americans and they suffered 1,390,695 violent incidents or about 469.2 per 100,000.

In the same year (2005), there were 1.2 million motor vehicle thefts, 2.1 million burglaries, 417,000 robberies, 93,000 forcible rapes and 16,992 murders.

From 1986 to 2005 the overall victimization rate for reported crimes fell from was 8.6 per 100K to 5.6 per 100K.

Years Rate/100K Reported/100K

1992-1993 42.7 33.4

2004-2005 48.7 39.3

The US Department of Justice has an annual budget of about $24 billion.

In the United State, private security officers are a $40 billion market and they represent 75% of the market for direct peacekeeping. Including alarm services and other ancillary hardware, the market for security might be as high as $150 billion annually.

Retailers lost $30 billion in merchandise in 2006.

ASIS, NASCO set record straight.(ASIS NEWS)

"The private security industry employs nearly two million security officers protecting 85 percent of our nation's most critical and vulnerable infra-structure. With three times more private security officers than law enforcement currently serving our nation's communities, security officers are the backbone of our nation's security, working with other first-responders to protect millions of people everyday.

Security is a $150 billion industry.

Appendix B: Theories of Crime

So far, we have these:

All have been suggested by competent academicians. Some have been questioned and perhaps falsified, yet none has been abandoned.