To form a more accurate estimation of seriousness, I began by studying the descriptions of the crimes given to me in the interviews; then I examined the court records and police reports relating to the cases. For a standard of seriousness I turned to a national survey of crime severity conducted in 1980 by the Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania.1 In this survey 52,000 respondents nationwide evaluated the relative severity of crimes by assigning a numerical score to a short description of each of 204 criminal acts listed in a questionnaire. For example, two of the acts described were “a person steals property worth $10 from outside a building” and “a woman engages in prostitution.” The center reduced the total scores given to each of the acts to ratio scores. The scores, being derived from the judgment of a very large sample of Americans, serve as excellent relative measures of crime seriousness—which is ultimately a matter of subjective public judgment.
Table 2 Distribution of Charges in the Misdemeanor Sample (100 arrests)
When the acts of a member of my felony sample closely corresponded to one of the 204 acts described in the survey, I assigned the sample member the survey’s score for crime seriousness. But in most cases this could not be done: the acts that led to arrest in my sample did not correspond closely enough to any acts listed in the survey questionnaire. In order to deal with these, I selected similar acts from the survey and read them and their ratio scores to my classes in sociology (about 100 students in all); I instructed my students to use the survey’s ratio scores as a scale of seriousness and to give the acts by the men in my sample a score on this scale.2 After the student scores were averaged and the averaged scores assigned to the remaining men in my sample, the 100 felony arrests had the scores shown in Table 3. Although the lines between crimes that classified as petty (0 to 4.9), medium (5.0 to 9.9), and serious (10 and above) are somewhat arbitrary, they do help define three qualitatively different classes of crime. Petty crimes involve at most a small amount of money and no injury. Medium crimes involve some other element, such as taking a large sum of money, breaking into a house, or using strongly stigmatized drugs such as heroin (heroin use received a score of 6.54 in the center’s survey). Serious crimes involve injury or possess some other reprehensible quality; for example, enticing a minor into a car for immoral purposes received a score of 25.72 in the center’s survey.
Table 3 demonstrates that seriousness of crime was not a major factor in the arrests: the large majority of the felony arrests fall into the petty category, and seven have a score of zero; the median score is 3.0. Three of the crimes from the felony sample with a score of approximately 3.0 were as follows:
J. was standing outside a residence “stoned” on drugs and injured from a fight. (He said: “I had just been beat up.”) The police pulled up, searched him, and found amphetamine pills in his pocket. They arrested him for public intoxication and possession of dangerous drugs. He received a severity score of 2.5.
A. was caught leaving an expensive men’s clothing store with a shirt priced at over $200. He was arrested and charged with grand theft. He received a score of 3.0.
M. and a friend left M.’s house to find a part for M.’s wife’s car. They found a similar model car a few blocks away and were breaking into it to steal the part when they were caught by the police. They were both drunk. M. received a score of 3.5. (“A person breaks into a parked car, but runs away when a police car approaches” received a score of 3.62 in the center’s survey.)
Table 3 Crime Seriousness
Offensiveness
My interviews and observations in the jail convinced me that in the making of arrests, offensiveness of acts is a more important factor than crime severity. Offensiveness is a definition that conventional witnesses or their agents (the police) impose upon events; it is a summation of the meanings they attach to the acts, the context, and, above all, the character of the actors. When a given act is performed by a disreputable—a person who is deemed worthless or of low character—it is not considered the same as when it is performed by an ordinary citizen. Thus, “horsing around” on a street corner is seen quite differently when it is done by “clean-cut” white teenagers or by “rowdy” black teenagers. A group of Hollywood celebrities and their followers snorting cocaine in an expensive Malibu Beach home is not seen in the same way as a group of lower-class Chicanos shooting heroin in a skid-row “shooting gallery.”
An example from my own experience also illustrates the part that imputation of character plays in constituting offensiveness and in precipitating arrest. My wife and I were attending a play at a theater in downtown San Francisco on the edge of the Tenderloin, a neighborhood populated by many types of disreputables—prostitutes, drug addicts, petty hustlers, and derelicts—as well as poor people, most of them elderly. At intermission the audience spilled out of the crowded lobby onto the sidewalk—in fact, slightly beyond the curb onto the street. Many, myself included, had purchased an alcoholic beverage in the lobby and were drinking openly on the sidewalk. If even a small group of Tenderloin denizens had been doing what we were doing—blocking traffic and drinking in public—it would certainly have provoked some action by the police. But when two police officers approached us on foot, they stepped into the street to get around us and walked by.
It is essential to distinguish between seriousness and offensiveness, even though they usually appear together. In the national survey of crime severity, the descriptions of the crimes included no information about the character of the offender and said very little or nothing about the context. If the same 204 crimes had been presented with full descriptions of the persons who performed the acts and the contexts in which those acts occurred, the scores would vary according to the perceived values of these additional aspects.
Repeated examinations of the 100 interviews taken from our felony sample revealed several common types of offensive acts that are likely to result in arrest if they are witnessed by the police or brought to their attention.3 These types may be ranked as follows according to degree of offensiveness:
Mild: (1) Disreputable person is too blatant in his display of deviant behavior in neighborhoods where disreputables live and congregate (such as skid rows). Examples of “too blatant” deviant behavior would be openly selling marijuana, bothering reputable persons with repulsive behavior, being excessively loud and disorderly, or drinking on the street. (2) Disreputable person shows lack of respect or in some other way challenges the position or authority of police officers. (3) Disreputable person is in a respectable neighborhood where he “doesn’t belong” and thereby threatens conventional citizens who reside or do business there.
Moderate: (1) Disreputable person commits a crime in a location where he does not belong (such as a “nice” hotel). (2) Disreputable person injures another disreputable person. (3) Disreputable person fights with police.
High: (1) Disreputable person commits a face-to-face crime against a reputable person.
The 100 felony arrests in our sample were distributed as follows among the three categories of offensiveness: sixty-one mild, twenty-eight moderate, ten high (one not offensive).
The two measures, seriousness and offensiveness, obviously interact: persons fall into a higher category on the offensiveness scale for committing many of the crimes rated serious. In our sample the two variables interact in the manner shown in Table 4. Most cases would fall roughly on a diagonal from the upper right to the lower left, indicating that offensiveness and seriousness vary together. Obviously, however, the sample sags toward offensiveness (on a diagonal from upper left to lower right). Seven cases with some offensiveness had no