Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 73-83) Also available in print.

Social disorganization and social control are two seemingly competing theories attempting to explain crime and delinquency. In this study, social control and social disorganization are measured in a sample of college students via self-report surveys using questions derived from Hirschi's social control questionnaire and a previously employed social disorganization measure. Factor and reliability analyses were examined to validate each of these key constructs. Zero-order correlations, regression analyses, and path analysis were then used to test the key propositions of these theories. These tests provide full and qualified support for these theories. Implications for future research and criminal justice policy are discussed in light of these findings.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / L. Susan Williams / Since the early 1970s, the United States has grown increasingly reliant on the criminal justice system to manage a wide array of social problems. Aggressive drug control policies and an over-reliance on imprisonment helped produce the world’s largest prison and correctional population, often described as mass imprisonment. Within this context, the study provides an explanatory account of the political, cultural, and social conditions that encourage states like Kansas to pursue methamphetamine as a major public concern, and to a greater degree than other states with relatively higher meth problems. Ultimately, and most important, the study makes a theoretical contribution by demonstrating how meth control efforts, analogous to previous drug control campaigns, extends punitive drug control rationalities to new cultural contexts and social terrains beyond the so-called ghetto of the inner city, thereby reinforcing and extending the logics of mass imprisonment.

Social control theory focuses on why some people do not commit deviant behaviours, such as illicit drug use. It proposes that bonding to conventional society constrains deviant conduct. In the book Causes of Delinquency, Hirschi distinguished four elements of social bonds: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. This study draws upon data from the 2012 Canadian Alcohol and Drug Monitor Survey to examine the effect of social control theory, specifically the element of attachment, on controlling cannabis use. This study also uses the element of attachment to interpret gender and rural/non-rural area differences in cannabis use. Two hypotheses are offered: (1) females are less likely to use cannabis than males because females have greater attachment to others; (2) rural residents are less likely to use cannabis than non-rural residents because rural residents have greater attachment to others. The research methods in the study are cross-tabulation analysis and binary logistic regression. The statistical analysis results support both hypotheses: females have a significantly lower rate of cannabis use than males and rural residents have a significantly lower rate of cannabis use than non-rural residents. Having greater attachment to others may be associated with a decreased rate of cannabis use. Policy and further research recommendations are made.

published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation shows how organizations, including local government and police, and residents within Seattle, Washingtons East Precinct define and police the contours of community, neighborhoods and public space. Under the rubric of public safety, these players create territorial geographies that seek to include only those who fit the narrowly conceived idea of a neighbor. Territoriality is exercised against the social Other in an attempt to build a cohesive community while at the same time excluding those who are seen as different or as non-conformant to acceptable behaviors in the neighborhood. This research provides a framework through which to examine how community policing produces an urban citizen subject and an idea of who belongs in public space. This work also combines discourses of abjection and public space showing how the two are linked together to form a contingent citizenship. Contingent citizenship describes a particular relationship between geography and citizenship. As I frame it, contingent citizenship is a public citizenship where one must conform to a social norm and act in a prescribed, appropriate way in the public sphere or fear repercussions such as incarceration, public humiliation or barring from public parks. This dissertation, through a synthesis of the literatures on abjection, public space and social control, provides an empirical example of how community policing controls, regulates and/or expels those socially constructed as the Other in public space. This dissertation also brings a geographic lens to questions of abjection, public space and social control. This dissertation is a comprehensive survey and analysis of how discourses surrounding public space produce a space that is exclusionary of those who are not conceived as citizens by structures intact within the city. This research shows how not all citizens (in the legal sense) fit the socio-cultural model of citizenship. Such contingent citizens are subject to more surveillance and policing in public space. Additionally, this research contributes to growing literature regarding how abjection plays into representations and understandings of public space.

Using Taiwanese data this dissertation attempts to test five criminological theories against one another. Alternative models are derived from social control, strain, differential association, power-control, and conflict theories to obtain a critical test. Furthermore, social control, strain, differential association, and power-control theories assume the causes of official delinquency will be the same as the causes of self-reported delinquency. Conflict theory, focusing on judicial judgements, has been applied mainly to official delinquency. Various statistical techniques--crosstabulation, Pearson correlation, factor analyses, logit regression, ordinary least squares regression, and Chi-squares difference test computed from EQS--are used to identify the equations. These five theories are presumed to apply in the entire sample and in a male sample. The data show that social control theory and conflict theory are partly supported, but differential association, power control and strain theories are not. The best fitting model suggested in this analysis for an Asian society is comparable to prior models found in studies in the United States and Canada.

This study tests the validity of two theories of crime: economic choice (as manifest in the criminal career paradigm) and social control. The test of these two theories is primarily methodological, in that four types of crime data (official and longitudinal (Uniform Crime Reports), official and cross-sectional (Bail Decisionmaking Study), self-report and longitudinal (National Youth Survey), and self-report and cross-sectional (Seattle Youth Study)) and a variety of graphical and statistical techniques are used to compare findings on (1) the stability of the age distribution of crime, (2) the prevalence of offense specialization, and (3) the differences in the causes of participating in crime compared to the causes of frequency of criminal activity among those individuals committing crimes. The findings on the relation between age and crime show the general shape of the age-crime curve is stable across year of the data or curve, type of data, cohort, and age group. The tests for offense specialization reveal that offenders are versatile. An individual's current offense type is not predictable, with much accuracy, on the basis of prior offending. Again, the lack of offense specialization held across type of data, but age, race, and gender distinctions also failed to alter significantly the observed pattern of versatility. Findings on the causes of participation in crime and frequency of criminal activity among active offenders showed only trivial differences in the set of statistically significant predictors for each operationalization of crime and delinquency. Two distinct operationalizations of frequency also showed no substantial difference in the set of statistically significant predictors. Similar to the findings on age and crime, and offense specialization, the pattern of results for the participation and frequency analyses held across type of data. In sum, the results tended to support the predictions of social control theory over those of the economic choice-criminal career view of crime.

As the population ages and income disparities increase, issues affecting older adults and marginalized individuals are examined more frequently. Despite this, little attention is paid to the community experiences of women over the age of fifty who face marginalization, criminalization and homelessness. This study is an institutional ethnography of older marginalized women in Ottawa, focusing on their identities, lives and their experiences of community life. Its findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as interviews with 27 older marginalized women and 16 professionals working with this group. The women described their identities, social networks, daily activities and navigations of their communities as well as the policy and discursive framework in which their lives are situated. Regardless of whether the women had housing or were staying in shelters, upheaval, uncertainty and change characterized their experiences in the community, reflecting their current circumstances, but also their life courses. Their accounts also revealed how, through social support, community services, and personal resilience, older marginalized women negotiate daily life and find places and spaces for themselves in their communities. As an institutional ethnography, this research foregrounds participants’ responses, framing these with theoretical lenses examining mobilities, identity, social capital, governmentality, and stigma. Specifically, it uses the lenses of mobilities and identities to understand the nature of their community experiences, before moving outward to examine their social networks and the world around them. Governmentality theory is also used to describe the neoliberal context framing their community experiences. The study concludes with a reflection on the research and a set of policy recommendations arising from the study.

Rome was among the largest cities in Europe during the Republic era, with a population that was diverse in social status and ethnicity. To maintain public order and social control of such a large, continually growing and shifting population that encompassed mixed cultures and Roman citizens, the Roman elites had to use various methods to keep the peace and maintain social stability. As religion was so deeply ingrained into every aspect of Roman life, it is worth taking a deeper look into how those in charge used it to maintain peace and relative control in Rome and its territories. Chapter 1 offers a brief look at the history of Roman religion, its terms and definitions, and the idea of social control as it pertains to this thesis. Chapter 2 shows the motivations of the Roman elite classes in their use of religion to maintain public order and enforce social control of the mass population. Couched in the need to uphold the Pax Deorum or Peace of the Gods, religious piety and order was cultivated as a means to protect the Republic from harm. Chapter 3 explains how the Patrician and Plebeian classes directed the attention of the residents of Rome with a calendar that was filled with rituals, sacrifices, festivals, and market days. In keeping a busy religious schedule, the people of Rome maintained a constant and direct relationship with the gods. Chapter 4 discusses the importance of women in the roles of priestesses and officers in religious cult to sustain the religious health and welfare of the city of Rome and the smaller communities within the city they inhabited. Chapter 5 examines the use of execution as a religious means of enforcing public order and social control. The chapter explores different means of execution and how they were placed into the realm of religion as a means to rid the populace of impurity and cultivate the piety of the Republic. Chapter 6 brings all of these elements together to show that the people of the Roman Republic believed in their gods and believed that the religious rites and practices that they maintained were instrumental in keeping the Pax Deorum. It was this belief that the ruling Patrician and Plebeian classes regulated to make sure that public and social order were upheld and preserved.