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Crime as an identity
The Social Science Journal 53 (2016) 1–6
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The Social Science Journal journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/soscij
THE 2015 WESTERN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Crime as an identity夽
a r t i c l e
i n f o
a b s t r a c t Beginning with a question about the motivation to study crime and based on the work of Edwin Sutherland and Howard Becker, I examine the implications of incorporating conceptions pertaining to personal identity and the self into the sociology of deviance and criminology. I illustrate the insights gained by reviewing findings from empirical research conducted on prison inmates in two countries, domestic violence perpetrators undergoing therapy and incarcerated gun violence offenders. © 2016 Western Social Science Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Why identity Every Western Social Science Association President who steps up to this podium arrived here following a particular trajectory and through a confluence of events and circumstances that determined his or her journey. My path here has been an unusual and varied one in that it involved three countries, eight educational institutions and five employers (including one state correctional system). Educationally, I am the product of basic schooling in Malaysia, undergraduate and Master’s-level training in criminology from India, and doctoral education in sociology in the US. In the following discussion of crime as a form of identity, I may wish to convey and you may wish to believe, that it has little to do with questions of personal discovery and the search for an authentic self (Vannini and Franzese, 2008). You and I will be right at a formal level, but we know such questions always lurk in the academic topics we study and the research questions we choose to investigate, even though they may not rise to the level of what some have referred to derisively as a “me-search”. As for the timeliness of this (self) examination, I note here
夽 This article is adapted from the Presidential Address delivered at the 57th Annual Conference of the Western Social Science Association in Portland, Oregon on April 10, 2015. A slightly modified version was presented at Tunku Abdul Rahman University in Kampar, Malaysia, on June 3, 2015.
that a New York Times Magazine writer declared 2015 to be “The Year We Obsessed over Identity” (Morris, 2015). Allow me therefore to begin with two personal anecdotes. When I was twelve, I accompanied my father to a small village near the rubber plantation at the edge of the Malaysian jungle where he was employed and my family lived. The village was the site for a periodic visit by a representative of the national Registration Department who received applications for Identity Cards (or “Kad Pengenalan” in Malay) which were required of all residents of Malaysia. When the card arrived along with the requisite fingerprints and my photograph, I was sorely disappointed to note that it had a red border (or in the words of my classmates, it was a “Red IC). This signified one who was a permanent resident and not a citizen of the country even though I was born in Malaysia. As a citizen, I would have received a “Blue IC” instead. It turned out that in the rush to get me home from the hospital where I was born, my parents had forgotten to register my birth with the proper authorities resulting in my non-citizen status twelve years later. At a very early age, I was introduced to the transitory and malleable nature of what passes for identity. In the late-1970s, I was a Master’s student at the University of Saugar in Central India and taking a class in criminological theory under the tutelage of our professor, S.C. Tewari. Given the Indian system of long essay examinations at the end of a program of study, one of our texts, Herman Mannheim’s (1972) book, Pioneers in Criminology
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was the subject of much trepidation and lively discussion among my cohort as we attempted to commit to memory the lives and contributions of the early theorists profiled in the book. The following passage from the Introduction caught my eye and stuck with me for many years: “Might at least some of these (criminologists) have undergone childhood experiences of the unhappy nature commonly regarded as criminogenic and might they have taken to the study of crime because of an early acquired feeling of fellowship with the offender and sympathy for the outcast?” (Mannheim, 1972, p. XX). What had been a personal decision made as an undergraduate a few years earlier to major in a relatively unusual subject (criminology) mostly out of curiosity and without much thought was now invested with seemingly deeper meaning and significance. I first had occasion to consider the implications of criminological and criminal identity while working on a research project (the equivalent of an M.A. thesis in the U.S.) studying prison work programs at the Central Prison in Chennai (then known as Madras) under the guidance of my mentor, Professor M.Z. Khan. I spent long hours interviewing a total of 95 prisoners about their work training, skills and attitudes (see Unnithan, 1976, 1986) and conversations were not particularly focused on whether they thought of themselves or identified as criminals. However, one of the questions on the interview schedule did ask about the nature of the criminal activity that resulted in their being sentenced to prison. To my surprise, the vast majority of them denied any such behavior and, if challenged, provided various exculpatory “accounts” (Scott and Lyman, 1968) for their arrest and conviction. While not assuming that every one of them was guilty of every criminal charge leveled, it seemed remarkable to me that only a handful of them accepted that they were indeed convicted offenders, let alone self-identified as such. In fact, even among the small group that accepted responsibility for committing crimes, there appeared to be considerable resistance to saying that they were “actually” criminals. So, who were those individuals that Mannheim suggested criminologists identified with in fellowship and sympathy and how would we find them? However, before you stop paying attention and conclude that this all about me and my reminiscences, it is important to introduce the professional and academic side of questions regarding identity and crime. 2. Identity and crime As in many other instances in sociological criminology, this examination begins with the pioneering work of Edwin Sutherland, described as the “leading criminologist of his generation” (Martin, Mutchnick, and Austin, 1990, p. 139), While known primarily for his theory of differential association (Matsueda, 1988) and his formulation of the concept of white-collar crime, Sutherland’s reputation also rests on his description of a form of criminal behavior that he identifies as “professional.” In the book, The Professional Thief: By a Professional Thief, Sutherland provides commentary and
Table 1 Types of deviant behavior.
Perceived as deviant Not perceived as deviant
Obedient behavior
Rule-breaking behavior
Falsely accused Conforming
Pure deviant Secret deviant
From: Becker, H, S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York. The Free Press. Page 20.
analysis on a monograph by Chic Conwell, a pseudonymous con-man, based on the latter’s own experiences in and observations of the underworld of those who take to crime as an occupation (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937). Nowhere in the text, is the term “identity” used; however, several observations relevant to the concept show up. Here are a representative few: “When thieves finish the day’s work, they generally congregate in hangouts. They are thieves together regardless of their rackets, with one common love—money—and one common enemy—the law.” (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937, p. 158). “The thief is somewhat suspicious of all individuals in legitimate society. . .. . .. He believes that whoever is not with him is against him. Any noncriminal individual not personally known to the thief is a possible danger, and as an individual, is somewhat disliked on that account.” (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937, p. 165). “The thief does not try to justify his stealing in general, but if he did, he would refer to the fact that thieves are not the only dishonest people.” (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937, p. 178). While much is made of Sutherland’s formal conclusions that the professional property criminals devote significant portions of their time and energy to crime and that they have a “craft” orientation to work (e.g., planning, skills) and are mostly migratory, lurking in the quotations above is the idea that they have internalized their status as a thieves. In other words, they have acquired and developed personal identities as criminals. So thoroughly is this status ingrained that they identify with similar others, are suspicious of dissimilar others, and feel no need for formal justification of their identity. So, most people, even convicted, incarcerated offenders shy away from self-identifying as criminals, as I learned tangentially from my study of Chennai prisoners. But according to Sutherland, there existed a class of offenders who willingly assumed this identity, even if they did so surreptitiously. Who were these people? Considering crime as a form of social deviance and learning more about the work of Howard Becker after I moved to the U.S. in 1980 seemed to provide a possible conceptual framework to find the niche where the self-identified criminal might conceivably be placed (see Table 1). In studying deviance and its ultimate exemplar, crime, it is impossible not to be seduced by the elegance of Howard Becker’s (1963) two-by-two table as shown above wherein he famously described the relationship (or lack thereof) between deviant behavior and the perception
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of others regarding a given individual. He identifies two categories that, according to him, are relatively nonproblematic in that the labels of “conforming” and “pure deviant” are ones where behavior and perception are in alignment with each other. Much of the fascination of the labeling or societal reaction approach to the study of deviance has been with the two other labels of “falsely accused” and “secret deviant” individuals. Usually, these two categories given the discordance between behavior and perception make for a better story perhaps on themes and grounds of injustice (falsely accused) and hypocrisy (secret deviant). At the same time, it is natural for those studying deviance to be less interested with the conforming (how boring). However, I did not understand the neglect of the “pure deviant.” Given my earlier curiosity about the personal motivations of those who choose to study crime as a form of deviance and Mannheims’s suggestion as to why that may be along with learning directly from offenders that very few stated such deviant identification, the pure deviant seemed to be one who we should pay attention to so that we can find what makes these presumably “bad to the core” individuals tick. Thinking further about Becker’s conceptual categories it is clear that the formulation helps us understand the interplay between behavior and social perception or what we would call interactional or social identity (how others or a group sees and categorizes an individual). There is, of course, justification sociologically for this interest and it is important to acknowledge what Holstein and Gubrium (2003, p. 119) point out: “As personal as they seem, our selves and identities are extremely social. They are hallmarks of our inner lives, yet they take shape in relation to others. We establish who and what we are through social interaction. In some respects, selves and identities are two sides of the same coin. Selves are the subjects we take ourselves to be; identities are the shared labels we give to these selves. We come to know ourselves in terms of the categories that are socially available to us.” But, in the case of the pure deviant, what is it that animates that individual’s personal identity?” I will, for the purpose of simplification, conflate the concept of personal identity (roughly, how an individual sees herself or himself) with what others, especially psychologists have come to call the self-concept or self-identity (Leary and Tagney, 2012; Wylie, 1974). Erikson (1951, 1968), for example, used the terms identity and self almost synonymously. The centrality of personal identity or self-concept has been touted ceaselessly in the work of self-psychologists (see Lessem, 2005). According to McGuire and PadawerSinger (1976, p. 743), “What we think of ourselves is probably the central concept in our conscious lives. Influential measurements such as the Twenty Statements Test (Kuhn and McPartland, 1954) and the Self-Construal Scale (Singelis, 1994) have been devised for the concept. On further investigation, it turned out that there indeed was a literature on the formation of the self-concept and its relationship to deviance, but it appeared focused more on juvenile delinquents than on adult offenders.
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Such research has followed three major lines. Reckless, Dinitz, and their colleagues examined the importance of self-concept as an insulator against (in young males they dubbed the “good boy”) and a promoter of (in those they called the “bad boy”) delinquency (Reckless and Dinitz, 1967; Reckless, Dinitz, and Kay, 1957; Reckless, Dinitz, and Murray, 1956; Reckless, Dinitz, and Murray, 1957). Schwartz and Stryker (1970) used a symbolic interactionist perspective to probe the “system of meanings attached to the self” (Stryker and Craft, 1982) that motivates delinquent behavior. Kaplan (1975, 1980, 1986) described the delinquent’s progression, given certain social-psychological conditions, from the experience of self-derogation to the motivation to deviate and the actual initiation of deviant behavior, which itself allows for self-enhancement. Tannenbaum (1982) commented that in the three lines of research mentioned above, the selfconcept is “rarely located in its appropriate situation” and that there is a failure “to deal with deviance itself as a matter of self-identification.” It should be noted also that the existing “self-concept” literature rarely focused on adult offenders, specifically of the confirmed and selfidentified variety along the lines of Chic Conwell and Edwin Sutherland’s professional thief or Howard Becker’s pure deviant. Three questions follow from this brief review: 1. Can a deviant category, i.e., by definition, a disreputable, degraded, soiled, spoiled, anti-social role, serve as a personal identity and part of one’s conception of self? 2. What do we know, based on an admittedly idiosyncratic review of research conducted during my career that directly or indirectly explores this question and its implications, when using crime as the focal category? 3. How do we integrate ideas derived from the concepts of self and personal identity into criminology’s traditional interest in congruence (or lack thereof) between behavior and perception? We turn now to this review of past research that I have been involved in that directly or indirectly pertains to these questions. 3. Along the way Answers to the question of how some people embraced the label of criminal have rarely been part of my research for the past 35 or so years I spent in the US. However, in retrospect, they have never been far away as the following description of various research projects I was involved in will show. This will also explain why I have chosen to mull over this topic at this stage in my career. In the mid-1980s, I taught for a short period as an instructor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s criminal justice program on the Lincoln campus (where I had just completed my doctorate in sociology). There, I worked with a senior colleague, Fred Holbert, on a study of prison inmates’ views regarding criminality with data drawn from the Lincoln Correctional Center (Holbert and Unnithan, 1990), a medium-custody institution. That study investigated what we referred to as
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the “criminal self-perception” of adult offenders, using the free will/determinism dichotomy. Inmates were surveyed and asked to identify themselves as having committed offenses due to either “free will” or “deterministic” reasons and to indicate, on the same dichotomy, how they believed their criminality was viewed by fellow inmates, the public, judges, police, correctional officers, treatment personnel, etc. The results indicated that these offenders could place themselves and the perceptions of others on this dichotomy. The correlates of the offenders’ self-perceptions of criminality were identified using discriminant analysis. Age, type of offense, indeterminate/determinate sentence, participation in counseling, and perceptions of the views of treatment staff, other inmates, custodial staff, and the police all were found to be important in predicting each offender’s criminal selfperception. While 47.8% of the inmates perceived their criminal behavior as freely chosen, 52.2% thought that deterministic reasons were to blame. This raises the question as to whether those who gave free will choice as the source of their criminality are closer to the “pure deviant” category and/or that of the self-identified offender. I suspected so, but have not made this conceptual leap on the basis of any further empirical research. My research projects after I began working full-time in academe did not center on interactional questions that would have resulted in further insights into the selves of offenders. However, after nearly two decades marked by a focus on other matters and as a Sociology faculty member at Colorado State University (CSU), I returned to the topic in an early to mid-2000s study of guilt and shame among domestic violence offenders in Denver, Colorado. This study was dubbed the Odyssey Project, after the treatment program we were evaluating and was carried out with Chris Loeffler (a licensed clinical social worker and the Odyssey therapist), a colleague, Mark Pogrebin from the University of Colorado-Denver, and Andrew Prelog (who was then a graduate student in my Department at CSU). Two papers (Loeffler, Prelog, Unnithan, and Pogrebin, 2010; Prelog, Unnithan, Loeffler, and Pogrebin, 2009) resulted. Our major goal was to measure the rehabilitative efficacy of the treatment process that Odyssey employed called “shame transformation” which was partially informed by the success of restorative justice conferencing (Zinsstag and Vanfraechem, 2012). The treatment was based on having offenders “experience” victims’ feelings by differentiating, and then activating, shame and guilt. Our research on and observations of 156 male and 26 female domestic violence offenders led us to elaborate on three specific groupings according to how early shame affected the offender’s life. The three types were: the Guilt-Ridden (individuals who react to shame so as to avoid or deny it by creating and utilizing rigid standards of conduct or an idealization of the self); the Shame-Driven (persons who experience shame acutely and react to it by “running from shame,” using it as a motivator to avoid any instance of future shaming); and, the Shame-Bound (individuals who are “stuck in shame” that is “toxic” wherein this emotion magnifies and heightens any negative evaluations of the self, Kaufman, 1989). We later focused specifically on the male domestic violence offenders and used a two-group
comparison of those received the “shame transformation” treatment and those who did not. We found when measurements were taken on three sets of scales in assessing the outcome of the shame transformation process that statistically significant effects existed for self-esteem and empathetic concern. Finally, I was part of a team consisting of the aforementioned Mark Pogrebin, Paul Stretesky (one of my earliest undergraduate students at CSU in the early 1990s who later on became a colleague) and Gerry Venor (who was then an instructor at CSU) that studied of accounts of violent events where guns were used in the mid- to late-2000s. The study consisted of in-depth interviews with these “shooters,” a random sample of 73 Colorado inmates convicted of gun-related violent crimes, at various prisons around the state. Our observations, drawn from these interviews were many (Pogrebin, Stretesky, and Unnithan, 2009) but I will point out three relevant ones. First, we noted that there was little, if any hesitation, among our interviewees in providing examples of their understanding of violence and in acknowledging their own participation in such behavior. More specifically, the narratives gun offenders provided for engaging in their violent acts illustrated how they continued to preserve a conventional sense of self. The shooters provided justifications or “accounts in which one accepts responsibility for the act in question, but denies the pejorative quality associated with it” (Scott and Lyman, 1968, p. 47), the most common being that the victim deserved it (denial of victim). Also proffered were excuses or “socially approved vocabularies for mitigating or relieving responsibility when conduct is questioned” (Scott and Lyman, 1968, p. 47), the most common being appeals to defeasibility or claims that untoward behavior resulted from a lack of knowledge and will. Third, we also found that those who argued their victims deserved the injuries rarely offered additional reasons for their violence. Socialization by gangs leading to a personal identity centered intensively on that membership appeared to be a factor in such almost “matter of fact” responses. In contrast, shooters who claimed their own violent behaviors were beyond their control tended to offer additional accounts in the form of the justifications and excuses mentioned above along with others. 4. Discussion The findings described above were from projects where the issues of personal identity in the process of deviance were tangential to the main research goals. However, they allow me to answer in a brief and speculative way the three questions I raised earlier. I should caution that such theoretical and conceptual exploration is, given my predilection for empirical social research, very tentative. First, yes, a deviant category such as thief, “bad boy,” gang banger, spouse abuser, convict, or shooter can serve as a personal identity and part of one’s conception of self. Such individuals appear, however, to be uncommon and unlikely to be easily identifiable offenders of any category as most are likely to try to exhibit a conventional self to others no matter they may self-identify with. Depending on the nature of the offense and how they think they came to commit
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it (with free will choice a greater likelihood than deterministic forces as the perceived source of the behavior) the chances of formal deviant self-identification become greater. Second, when using crime as the focal category, the self-identified deviant appears more likely to be of the shame-bound type and willing to argue that their victims deserved whatever had been meted out to them. Obviously, from a purely therapeutic perspective, selfidentified shame bound individuals are likely to be more difficult to work with and change as suggested by the Odyssey Project. Regardless of this difficulty, the good news is that therapy that focuses on “transforming” shame may be helpful (see Kaufman, 1989) in rooting out the deviant self-identification locked away in the offender’s psyche. Third, we should integrate considerations of personal identification and self-conception into the sociology of deviance and criminology’s traditional interest in the relationship between deviant behavior and social perception (i.e., social or interactional identity) and examine the results. Let me illustrate by taking the two categories that Becker (1963, p. 19) terms as requiring “very little explanation.” This is true insofar as the interaction between deviant behavior and social or interactional identity is concerned. However, the so called “pure deviant” may not necessarily have assimilated that negative label, ever self-identified as such, or may even have become disenchanted (perhaps though self-reflection or talk therapy) with that conception of his or her self. Therefore, this “type” of deviant who is viewed as a pure deviant is, in truth, a shameful deviant. The story is the same if we take the other nonproblematic type that Becker identifies as “conforming.” How do we account for people who do not engage in actual deviant behavior and are not perceived as deviants, but who nevertheless self-identify as such? These exaggerators feel that they are “badasses” regularly in their thoughts and may even imply the same in their words. By adding the conceptual category that results from asking the question, “What is this person’s sense of his or her own personal identity and self” to our usual assessments of behavior and social identity, our discussions of can be enriched and deepened. Rosenberg and Kaplan (1982, p. 3) state that “Whatever decision we make, whatever action we take, is inevitably predicated on some implicit assumption of what we are like.” I am not sure if I am closer to answering Hermann Mannheim’s original question of what motivates people like me to make a career of the study of crime and if underlying it is an unspoken but internally understood assumption of what I am like. Nevertheless, I believe it is clear from the above that I have enjoyed this self-examination motivated journey along with the forays exploring crime, deviance and personal identity that resulted from various efforts to answer it.
References Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: The Free Press.
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Conwell, C., & Sutherland, E. H. (1937). The professional thief: By a professional thief. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Erikson, E. H. (1951). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton. Holbert, F., & Unnithan, N. P. (1990). Free will, determinism and criminality: The self-perceptions of prison inmates. Journal of Criminal Justice, 18(1), 43–53. Holstein, J., & Gubrium, J. (2003). Inner lives and social worlds. Oxford University Press: New York. Kaplan, H. (1975). Self-attitudes and deviant behavior. Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear. Kaplan, H. (1980). Deviant behavior in defense of self. New York: Academic Press. Kaplan, H. (1986). Social psychology of self-referent behavior. New York: Plenum Press. Kaufman, G. (1989). The psychology of shame: Theory and treatment of shame-based syndromes. New York: Springer. Kuhn, M. H., & McPartland, T. S. (1954). An empirical investigation of selfattitudes. American Sociological Review, 19(1), 68–76. Leary, M. R., & Tagney, J. P. (2012). Handbook of self and identity (second ed.). New York: Guilford. Lessem, P. A. (2005). Self psychology: An introduction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Loeffler, C. H., Prelog, A. J., Unnithan, N. P., & Pogrebin, M. R. (2010). Evaluating shame transformation in group treatment of offenders. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 54(4), 517–536. Mannheim, H. (1972). Pioneers in criminology. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation. Martin, R., Mutchnick, R. J., & Austin, W. T. (1990). Criminological thought: Pioneers past and present. New York: Macmillan. Matsueda, R. L. (1988). The current state of differential association theory. Crime & Delinquency, 34(3), 277–306. McGuire, W. J., & Padawer-Singer, A. (1976). Trait salience in the spontaneous self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33(6), 743–754. Morris, W. (2015, October 6). The year we obsessed over identity. New York Times Magazine. Prelog, A. J., Unnithan, N. P., Loeffler, C. H., & Pogrebin, M. R. (2009). Developing a shame-based typology to guide treatment for offenders. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 48(2), 249–270. Pogrebin, M., Stretesky, P., & Unnithan, N. P. (2009). Guns, violence, and criminal behavior: The offender’s perspective. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Reckless, W., & Dinitz, S. (1967). Pioneering with self-concept as a vulnerability factor in delinquency. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology & Police Science, 58, 515–523. Reckless, W., Dinitz, S., & Kay, B. (1957). The self-component in potential delinquency and potential non-delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 566–570. Reckless, W., Dinitz, S., & Murray, E. (1956). Self-concept as an insulator against delinquency. American Sociological Review, 21, 744–746. Reckless, W., Dinitz, S., & Murray, E. (1957). The ‘good boy’ in a high delinquency area. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology & Police Science, 48, 18–25. Rosenberg, M., & Kaplan, H. B. (Eds.). (1982). Social psychology of the selfconcept. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson. Schwartz, M., & Stryker, S. (1970). Deviance, selves and others. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. Scott, M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33(1), 46–62. Singelis, T. M. (1994). The measurement of independent and interdependent self-construals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 580–591. Stryker, S., & Craft, E. A. (1982). “Deviance, Selves and Others” revisited. Youth and Society, 14(2), 159–171. Tannenbaum, S. (1982). The self and youthful deviance: Some comparative notes. Youth and Society, 14, 235–254. Unnithan, N. P. (1976). Work programs at the Central Prison, Madras (Unpublished Master’s Project Report). Sagar, MP, India: University of Saugar. Unnithan, N. P. (1986). Research in a correctional setting: Constraints and biases. Journal of Criminal Justice, 14(5), 401–412. Vannini, P., & Franzese, A. (2008). The authenticity of self: Conceptualization, personal experience, and practice. Sociology Compass, 2(5), 1621–1637. Wylie, R. C. (1974). The self-concept: Theory and research on selected topics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
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Zinsstag, E., & Vanfraechem, I. (Eds.). (2012). Conferencing and restorative justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
N. Prabha Unnithan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University where he has been employed since 1987. He edited the Journal of Criminal Justice Education between 1999 and 2002 and the Social Science Journal from 2006 to 2011. Unnithan’s recent books include an edited collection, Crime and Justice in India (2013); a text, Policing and Society: A Global Perspective (2011, with M.J. Palmiotto); and, a monograph, Guns, Violence, and Criminal Behavior: The Offender’s Perspective (2009, with M.R. Pogrebin and P.B. Stretesky). Unnithan was President of the Western Social Science Association in 2014–2015 and is now the organization’s Immediate Past President. He serves currently as Secretary of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
N. Prabha Unnithan ∗ Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA ∗ Correspondence
to: Department of Sociology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1784, USA. Tel.: +1 970 491 6615; fax: +1 970 491 2141. E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 23 February 2016
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THE 2015 WESTERN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Crime as an identity夽
a r t i c l e
i n f o
a b s t r a c t Beginning with a question about the motivation to study crime and based on the work of Edwin Sutherland and Howard Becker, I examine the implications of incorporating conceptions pertaining to personal identity and the self into the sociology of deviance and criminology. I illustrate the insights gained by reviewing findings from empirical research conducted on prison inmates in two countries, domestic violence perpetrators undergoing therapy and incarcerated gun violence offenders. © 2016 Western Social Science Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Why identity Every Western Social Science Association President who steps up to this podium arrived here following a particular trajectory and through a confluence of events and circumstances that determined his or her journey. My path here has been an unusual and varied one in that it involved three countries, eight educational institutions and five employers (including one state correctional system). Educationally, I am the product of basic schooling in Malaysia, undergraduate and Master’s-level training in criminology from India, and doctoral education in sociology in the US. In the following discussion of crime as a form of identity, I may wish to convey and you may wish to believe, that it has little to do with questions of personal discovery and the search for an authentic self (Vannini and Franzese, 2008). You and I will be right at a formal level, but we know such questions always lurk in the academic topics we study and the research questions we choose to investigate, even though they may not rise to the level of what some have referred to derisively as a “me-search”. As for the timeliness of this (self) examination, I note here
夽 This article is adapted from the Presidential Address delivered at the 57th Annual Conference of the Western Social Science Association in Portland, Oregon on April 10, 2015. A slightly modified version was presented at Tunku Abdul Rahman University in Kampar, Malaysia, on June 3, 2015.
that a New York Times Magazine writer declared 2015 to be “The Year We Obsessed over Identity” (Morris, 2015). Allow me therefore to begin with two personal anecdotes. When I was twelve, I accompanied my father to a small village near the rubber plantation at the edge of the Malaysian jungle where he was employed and my family lived. The village was the site for a periodic visit by a representative of the national Registration Department who received applications for Identity Cards (or “Kad Pengenalan” in Malay) which were required of all residents of Malaysia. When the card arrived along with the requisite fingerprints and my photograph, I was sorely disappointed to note that it had a red border (or in the words of my classmates, it was a “Red IC). This signified one who was a permanent resident and not a citizen of the country even though I was born in Malaysia. As a citizen, I would have received a “Blue IC” instead. It turned out that in the rush to get me home from the hospital where I was born, my parents had forgotten to register my birth with the proper authorities resulting in my non-citizen status twelve years later. At a very early age, I was introduced to the transitory and malleable nature of what passes for identity. In the late-1970s, I was a Master’s student at the University of Saugar in Central India and taking a class in criminological theory under the tutelage of our professor, S.C. Tewari. Given the Indian system of long essay examinations at the end of a program of study, one of our texts, Herman Mannheim’s (1972) book, Pioneers in Criminology
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was the subject of much trepidation and lively discussion among my cohort as we attempted to commit to memory the lives and contributions of the early theorists profiled in the book. The following passage from the Introduction caught my eye and stuck with me for many years: “Might at least some of these (criminologists) have undergone childhood experiences of the unhappy nature commonly regarded as criminogenic and might they have taken to the study of crime because of an early acquired feeling of fellowship with the offender and sympathy for the outcast?” (Mannheim, 1972, p. XX). What had been a personal decision made as an undergraduate a few years earlier to major in a relatively unusual subject (criminology) mostly out of curiosity and without much thought was now invested with seemingly deeper meaning and significance. I first had occasion to consider the implications of criminological and criminal identity while working on a research project (the equivalent of an M.A. thesis in the U.S.) studying prison work programs at the Central Prison in Chennai (then known as Madras) under the guidance of my mentor, Professor M.Z. Khan. I spent long hours interviewing a total of 95 prisoners about their work training, skills and attitudes (see Unnithan, 1976, 1986) and conversations were not particularly focused on whether they thought of themselves or identified as criminals. However, one of the questions on the interview schedule did ask about the nature of the criminal activity that resulted in their being sentenced to prison. To my surprise, the vast majority of them denied any such behavior and, if challenged, provided various exculpatory “accounts” (Scott and Lyman, 1968) for their arrest and conviction. While not assuming that every one of them was guilty of every criminal charge leveled, it seemed remarkable to me that only a handful of them accepted that they were indeed convicted offenders, let alone self-identified as such. In fact, even among the small group that accepted responsibility for committing crimes, there appeared to be considerable resistance to saying that they were “actually” criminals. So, who were those individuals that Mannheim suggested criminologists identified with in fellowship and sympathy and how would we find them? However, before you stop paying attention and conclude that this all about me and my reminiscences, it is important to introduce the professional and academic side of questions regarding identity and crime. 2. Identity and crime As in many other instances in sociological criminology, this examination begins with the pioneering work of Edwin Sutherland, described as the “leading criminologist of his generation” (Martin, Mutchnick, and Austin, 1990, p. 139), While known primarily for his theory of differential association (Matsueda, 1988) and his formulation of the concept of white-collar crime, Sutherland’s reputation also rests on his description of a form of criminal behavior that he identifies as “professional.” In the book, The Professional Thief: By a Professional Thief, Sutherland provides commentary and
Table 1 Types of deviant behavior.
Perceived as deviant Not perceived as deviant
Obedient behavior
Rule-breaking behavior
Falsely accused Conforming
Pure deviant Secret deviant
From: Becker, H, S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York. The Free Press. Page 20.
analysis on a monograph by Chic Conwell, a pseudonymous con-man, based on the latter’s own experiences in and observations of the underworld of those who take to crime as an occupation (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937). Nowhere in the text, is the term “identity” used; however, several observations relevant to the concept show up. Here are a representative few: “When thieves finish the day’s work, they generally congregate in hangouts. They are thieves together regardless of their rackets, with one common love—money—and one common enemy—the law.” (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937, p. 158). “The thief is somewhat suspicious of all individuals in legitimate society. . .. . .. He believes that whoever is not with him is against him. Any noncriminal individual not personally known to the thief is a possible danger, and as an individual, is somewhat disliked on that account.” (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937, p. 165). “The thief does not try to justify his stealing in general, but if he did, he would refer to the fact that thieves are not the only dishonest people.” (Conwell and Sutherland, 1937, p. 178). While much is made of Sutherland’s formal conclusions that the professional property criminals devote significant portions of their time and energy to crime and that they have a “craft” orientation to work (e.g., planning, skills) and are mostly migratory, lurking in the quotations above is the idea that they have internalized their status as a thieves. In other words, they have acquired and developed personal identities as criminals. So thoroughly is this status ingrained that they identify with similar others, are suspicious of dissimilar others, and feel no need for formal justification of their identity. So, most people, even convicted, incarcerated offenders shy away from self-identifying as criminals, as I learned tangentially from my study of Chennai prisoners. But according to Sutherland, there existed a class of offenders who willingly assumed this identity, even if they did so surreptitiously. Who were these people? Considering crime as a form of social deviance and learning more about the work of Howard Becker after I moved to the U.S. in 1980 seemed to provide a possible conceptual framework to find the niche where the self-identified criminal might conceivably be placed (see Table 1). In studying deviance and its ultimate exemplar, crime, it is impossible not to be seduced by the elegance of Howard Becker’s (1963) two-by-two table as shown above wherein he famously described the relationship (or lack thereof) between deviant behavior and the perception
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of others regarding a given individual. He identifies two categories that, according to him, are relatively nonproblematic in that the labels of “conforming” and “pure deviant” are ones where behavior and perception are in alignment with each other. Much of the fascination of the labeling or societal reaction approach to the study of deviance has been with the two other labels of “falsely accused” and “secret deviant” individuals. Usually, these two categories given the discordance between behavior and perception make for a better story perhaps on themes and grounds of injustice (falsely accused) and hypocrisy (secret deviant). At the same time, it is natural for those studying deviance to be less interested with the conforming (how boring). However, I did not understand the neglect of the “pure deviant.” Given my earlier curiosity about the personal motivations of those who choose to study crime as a form of deviance and Mannheims’s suggestion as to why that may be along with learning directly from offenders that very few stated such deviant identification, the pure deviant seemed to be one who we should pay attention to so that we can find what makes these presumably “bad to the core” individuals tick. Thinking further about Becker’s conceptual categories it is clear that the formulation helps us understand the interplay between behavior and social perception or what we would call interactional or social identity (how others or a group sees and categorizes an individual). There is, of course, justification sociologically for this interest and it is important to acknowledge what Holstein and Gubrium (2003, p. 119) point out: “As personal as they seem, our selves and identities are extremely social. They are hallmarks of our inner lives, yet they take shape in relation to others. We establish who and what we are through social interaction. In some respects, selves and identities are two sides of the same coin. Selves are the subjects we take ourselves to be; identities are the shared labels we give to these selves. We come to know ourselves in terms of the categories that are socially available to us.” But, in the case of the pure deviant, what is it that animates that individual’s personal identity?” I will, for the purpose of simplification, conflate the concept of personal identity (roughly, how an individual sees herself or himself) with what others, especially psychologists have come to call the self-concept or self-identity (Leary and Tagney, 2012; Wylie, 1974). Erikson (1951, 1968), for example, used the terms identity and self almost synonymously. The centrality of personal identity or self-concept has been touted ceaselessly in the work of self-psychologists (see Lessem, 2005). According to McGuire and PadawerSinger (1976, p. 743), “What we think of ourselves is probably the central concept in our conscious lives. Influential measurements such as the Twenty Statements Test (Kuhn and McPartland, 1954) and the Self-Construal Scale (Singelis, 1994) have been devised for the concept. On further investigation, it turned out that there indeed was a literature on the formation of the self-concept and its relationship to deviance, but it appeared focused more on juvenile delinquents than on adult offenders.
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Such research has followed three major lines. Reckless, Dinitz, and their colleagues examined the importance of self-concept as an insulator against (in young males they dubbed the “good boy”) and a promoter of (in those they called the “bad boy”) delinquency (Reckless and Dinitz, 1967; Reckless, Dinitz, and Kay, 1957; Reckless, Dinitz, and Murray, 1956; Reckless, Dinitz, and Murray, 1957). Schwartz and Stryker (1970) used a symbolic interactionist perspective to probe the “system of meanings attached to the self” (Stryker and Craft, 1982) that motivates delinquent behavior. Kaplan (1975, 1980, 1986) described the delinquent’s progression, given certain social-psychological conditions, from the experience of self-derogation to the motivation to deviate and the actual initiation of deviant behavior, which itself allows for self-enhancement. Tannenbaum (1982) commented that in the three lines of research mentioned above, the selfconcept is “rarely located in its appropriate situation” and that there is a failure “to deal with deviance itself as a matter of self-identification.” It should be noted also that the existing “self-concept” literature rarely focused on adult offenders, specifically of the confirmed and selfidentified variety along the lines of Chic Conwell and Edwin Sutherland’s professional thief or Howard Becker’s pure deviant. Three questions follow from this brief review: 1. Can a deviant category, i.e., by definition, a disreputable, degraded, soiled, spoiled, anti-social role, serve as a personal identity and part of one’s conception of self? 2. What do we know, based on an admittedly idiosyncratic review of research conducted during my career that directly or indirectly explores this question and its implications, when using crime as the focal category? 3. How do we integrate ideas derived from the concepts of self and personal identity into criminology’s traditional interest in congruence (or lack thereof) between behavior and perception? We turn now to this review of past research that I have been involved in that directly or indirectly pertains to these questions. 3. Along the way Answers to the question of how some people embraced the label of criminal have rarely been part of my research for the past 35 or so years I spent in the US. However, in retrospect, they have never been far away as the following description of various research projects I was involved in will show. This will also explain why I have chosen to mull over this topic at this stage in my career. In the mid-1980s, I taught for a short period as an instructor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s criminal justice program on the Lincoln campus (where I had just completed my doctorate in sociology). There, I worked with a senior colleague, Fred Holbert, on a study of prison inmates’ views regarding criminality with data drawn from the Lincoln Correctional Center (Holbert and Unnithan, 1990), a medium-custody institution. That study investigated what we referred to as
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the “criminal self-perception” of adult offenders, using the free will/determinism dichotomy. Inmates were surveyed and asked to identify themselves as having committed offenses due to either “free will” or “deterministic” reasons and to indicate, on the same dichotomy, how they believed their criminality was viewed by fellow inmates, the public, judges, police, correctional officers, treatment personnel, etc. The results indicated that these offenders could place themselves and the perceptions of others on this dichotomy. The correlates of the offenders’ self-perceptions of criminality were identified using discriminant analysis. Age, type of offense, indeterminate/determinate sentence, participation in counseling, and perceptions of the views of treatment staff, other inmates, custodial staff, and the police all were found to be important in predicting each offender’s criminal selfperception. While 47.8% of the inmates perceived their criminal behavior as freely chosen, 52.2% thought that deterministic reasons were to blame. This raises the question as to whether those who gave free will choice as the source of their criminality are closer to the “pure deviant” category and/or that of the self-identified offender. I suspected so, but have not made this conceptual leap on the basis of any further empirical research. My research projects after I began working full-time in academe did not center on interactional questions that would have resulted in further insights into the selves of offenders. However, after nearly two decades marked by a focus on other matters and as a Sociology faculty member at Colorado State University (CSU), I returned to the topic in an early to mid-2000s study of guilt and shame among domestic violence offenders in Denver, Colorado. This study was dubbed the Odyssey Project, after the treatment program we were evaluating and was carried out with Chris Loeffler (a licensed clinical social worker and the Odyssey therapist), a colleague, Mark Pogrebin from the University of Colorado-Denver, and Andrew Prelog (who was then a graduate student in my Department at CSU). Two papers (Loeffler, Prelog, Unnithan, and Pogrebin, 2010; Prelog, Unnithan, Loeffler, and Pogrebin, 2009) resulted. Our major goal was to measure the rehabilitative efficacy of the treatment process that Odyssey employed called “shame transformation” which was partially informed by the success of restorative justice conferencing (Zinsstag and Vanfraechem, 2012). The treatment was based on having offenders “experience” victims’ feelings by differentiating, and then activating, shame and guilt. Our research on and observations of 156 male and 26 female domestic violence offenders led us to elaborate on three specific groupings according to how early shame affected the offender’s life. The three types were: the Guilt-Ridden (individuals who react to shame so as to avoid or deny it by creating and utilizing rigid standards of conduct or an idealization of the self); the Shame-Driven (persons who experience shame acutely and react to it by “running from shame,” using it as a motivator to avoid any instance of future shaming); and, the Shame-Bound (individuals who are “stuck in shame” that is “toxic” wherein this emotion magnifies and heightens any negative evaluations of the self, Kaufman, 1989). We later focused specifically on the male domestic violence offenders and used a two-group
comparison of those received the “shame transformation” treatment and those who did not. We found when measurements were taken on three sets of scales in assessing the outcome of the shame transformation process that statistically significant effects existed for self-esteem and empathetic concern. Finally, I was part of a team consisting of the aforementioned Mark Pogrebin, Paul Stretesky (one of my earliest undergraduate students at CSU in the early 1990s who later on became a colleague) and Gerry Venor (who was then an instructor at CSU) that studied of accounts of violent events where guns were used in the mid- to late-2000s. The study consisted of in-depth interviews with these “shooters,” a random sample of 73 Colorado inmates convicted of gun-related violent crimes, at various prisons around the state. Our observations, drawn from these interviews were many (Pogrebin, Stretesky, and Unnithan, 2009) but I will point out three relevant ones. First, we noted that there was little, if any hesitation, among our interviewees in providing examples of their understanding of violence and in acknowledging their own participation in such behavior. More specifically, the narratives gun offenders provided for engaging in their violent acts illustrated how they continued to preserve a conventional sense of self. The shooters provided justifications or “accounts in which one accepts responsibility for the act in question, but denies the pejorative quality associated with it” (Scott and Lyman, 1968, p. 47), the most common being that the victim deserved it (denial of victim). Also proffered were excuses or “socially approved vocabularies for mitigating or relieving responsibility when conduct is questioned” (Scott and Lyman, 1968, p. 47), the most common being appeals to defeasibility or claims that untoward behavior resulted from a lack of knowledge and will. Third, we also found that those who argued their victims deserved the injuries rarely offered additional reasons for their violence. Socialization by gangs leading to a personal identity centered intensively on that membership appeared to be a factor in such almost “matter of fact” responses. In contrast, shooters who claimed their own violent behaviors were beyond their control tended to offer additional accounts in the form of the justifications and excuses mentioned above along with others. 4. Discussion The findings described above were from projects where the issues of personal identity in the process of deviance were tangential to the main research goals. However, they allow me to answer in a brief and speculative way the three questions I raised earlier. I should caution that such theoretical and conceptual exploration is, given my predilection for empirical social research, very tentative. First, yes, a deviant category such as thief, “bad boy,” gang banger, spouse abuser, convict, or shooter can serve as a personal identity and part of one’s conception of self. Such individuals appear, however, to be uncommon and unlikely to be easily identifiable offenders of any category as most are likely to try to exhibit a conventional self to others no matter they may self-identify with. Depending on the nature of the offense and how they think they came to commit
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it (with free will choice a greater likelihood than deterministic forces as the perceived source of the behavior) the chances of formal deviant self-identification become greater. Second, when using crime as the focal category, the self-identified deviant appears more likely to be of the shame-bound type and willing to argue that their victims deserved whatever had been meted out to them. Obviously, from a purely therapeutic perspective, selfidentified shame bound individuals are likely to be more difficult to work with and change as suggested by the Odyssey Project. Regardless of this difficulty, the good news is that therapy that focuses on “transforming” shame may be helpful (see Kaufman, 1989) in rooting out the deviant self-identification locked away in the offender’s psyche. Third, we should integrate considerations of personal identification and self-conception into the sociology of deviance and criminology’s traditional interest in the relationship between deviant behavior and social perception (i.e., social or interactional identity) and examine the results. Let me illustrate by taking the two categories that Becker (1963, p. 19) terms as requiring “very little explanation.” This is true insofar as the interaction between deviant behavior and social or interactional identity is concerned. However, the so called “pure deviant” may not necessarily have assimilated that negative label, ever self-identified as such, or may even have become disenchanted (perhaps though self-reflection or talk therapy) with that conception of his or her self. Therefore, this “type” of deviant who is viewed as a pure deviant is, in truth, a shameful deviant. The story is the same if we take the other nonproblematic type that Becker identifies as “conforming.” How do we account for people who do not engage in actual deviant behavior and are not perceived as deviants, but who nevertheless self-identify as such? These exaggerators feel that they are “badasses” regularly in their thoughts and may even imply the same in their words. By adding the conceptual category that results from asking the question, “What is this person’s sense of his or her own personal identity and self” to our usual assessments of behavior and social identity, our discussions of can be enriched and deepened. Rosenberg and Kaplan (1982, p. 3) state that “Whatever decision we make, whatever action we take, is inevitably predicated on some implicit assumption of what we are like.” I am not sure if I am closer to answering Hermann Mannheim’s original question of what motivates people like me to make a career of the study of crime and if underlying it is an unspoken but internally understood assumption of what I am like. Nevertheless, I believe it is clear from the above that I have enjoyed this self-examination motivated journey along with the forays exploring crime, deviance and personal identity that resulted from various efforts to answer it.
References Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: The Free Press.
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Conwell, C., & Sutherland, E. H. (1937). The professional thief: By a professional thief. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Erikson, E. H. (1951). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton. Holbert, F., & Unnithan, N. P. (1990). Free will, determinism and criminality: The self-perceptions of prison inmates. Journal of Criminal Justice, 18(1), 43–53. Holstein, J., & Gubrium, J. (2003). Inner lives and social worlds. Oxford University Press: New York. Kaplan, H. (1975). Self-attitudes and deviant behavior. Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear. Kaplan, H. (1980). Deviant behavior in defense of self. New York: Academic Press. Kaplan, H. (1986). Social psychology of self-referent behavior. New York: Plenum Press. Kaufman, G. (1989). The psychology of shame: Theory and treatment of shame-based syndromes. New York: Springer. Kuhn, M. H., & McPartland, T. S. (1954). An empirical investigation of selfattitudes. American Sociological Review, 19(1), 68–76. Leary, M. R., & Tagney, J. P. (2012). Handbook of self and identity (second ed.). New York: Guilford. Lessem, P. A. (2005). Self psychology: An introduction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Loeffler, C. H., Prelog, A. J., Unnithan, N. P., & Pogrebin, M. R. (2010). Evaluating shame transformation in group treatment of offenders. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 54(4), 517–536. Mannheim, H. (1972). Pioneers in criminology. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation. Martin, R., Mutchnick, R. J., & Austin, W. T. (1990). Criminological thought: Pioneers past and present. New York: Macmillan. Matsueda, R. L. (1988). The current state of differential association theory. Crime & Delinquency, 34(3), 277–306. McGuire, W. J., & Padawer-Singer, A. (1976). Trait salience in the spontaneous self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33(6), 743–754. Morris, W. (2015, October 6). The year we obsessed over identity. New York Times Magazine. Prelog, A. J., Unnithan, N. P., Loeffler, C. H., & Pogrebin, M. R. (2009). Developing a shame-based typology to guide treatment for offenders. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 48(2), 249–270. Pogrebin, M., Stretesky, P., & Unnithan, N. P. (2009). Guns, violence, and criminal behavior: The offender’s perspective. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Reckless, W., & Dinitz, S. (1967). Pioneering with self-concept as a vulnerability factor in delinquency. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology & Police Science, 58, 515–523. Reckless, W., Dinitz, S., & Kay, B. (1957). The self-component in potential delinquency and potential non-delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 566–570. Reckless, W., Dinitz, S., & Murray, E. (1956). Self-concept as an insulator against delinquency. American Sociological Review, 21, 744–746. Reckless, W., Dinitz, S., & Murray, E. (1957). The ‘good boy’ in a high delinquency area. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology & Police Science, 48, 18–25. Rosenberg, M., & Kaplan, H. B. (Eds.). (1982). Social psychology of the selfconcept. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson. Schwartz, M., & Stryker, S. (1970). Deviance, selves and others. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. Scott, M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33(1), 46–62. Singelis, T. M. (1994). The measurement of independent and interdependent self-construals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 580–591. Stryker, S., & Craft, E. A. (1982). “Deviance, Selves and Others” revisited. Youth and Society, 14(2), 159–171. Tannenbaum, S. (1982). The self and youthful deviance: Some comparative notes. Youth and Society, 14, 235–254. Unnithan, N. P. (1976). Work programs at the Central Prison, Madras (Unpublished Master’s Project Report). Sagar, MP, India: University of Saugar. Unnithan, N. P. (1986). Research in a correctional setting: Constraints and biases. Journal of Criminal Justice, 14(5), 401–412. Vannini, P., & Franzese, A. (2008). The authenticity of self: Conceptualization, personal experience, and practice. Sociology Compass, 2(5), 1621–1637. Wylie, R. C. (1974). The self-concept: Theory and research on selected topics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
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Zinsstag, E., & Vanfraechem, I. (Eds.). (2012). Conferencing and restorative justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
N. Prabha Unnithan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University where he has been employed since 1987. He edited the Journal of Criminal Justice Education between 1999 and 2002 and the Social Science Journal from 2006 to 2011. Unnithan’s recent books include an edited collection, Crime and Justice in India (2013); a text, Policing and Society: A Global Perspective (2011, with M.J. Palmiotto); and, a monograph, Guns, Violence, and Criminal Behavior: The Offender’s Perspective (2009, with M.R. Pogrebin and P.B. Stretesky). Unnithan was President of the Western Social Science Association in 2014–2015 and is now the organization’s Immediate Past President. He serves currently as Secretary of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
N. Prabha Unnithan ∗ Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA ∗ Correspondence
to: Department of Sociology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1784, USA. Tel.: +1 970 491 6615; fax: +1 970 491 2141. E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 23 February 2016