Order and its shadow: delinquency as reproduction and resistance.

As societies attempt to create order and structure they produce symptoms of distress, such as high rates of crime, delinquency and mental disorder. The project of developing a totalizing perspective on a phenomenon as varied and complex as delinquency requires a search into both the underlying structuring principles that create the social order and local subsystems shaped by the uneven pressures of society as a whole. Delinquency is not a monolithic phenomenon, but rather a series of overlapping syndromes. Consequently many different types of theory emerge, each of which is plausible as an explanation for certain types, aspects or characteristics of delinquency. A beginning can be made by granting the discontinuity and overlap of the disparate syndromes. Given that there are different but overlapping causes, there is no single life situation, system or subsystem that inevitably shapes an adolescent into a delinquent. Yet there are alternative pathways generally associated with historical conditions of discontinuity and destabilization. It is possible to discover the routes by which many adolescents are shaped and constrained by our ordinary daily practices. Even then, it is useful to be cautious about a singularizing view of the constituting factors. Ultimately, delinquency is a phenomenon that can stand for many things, so our task remains to uncover the particulars of each case. This essay examines the persistence of delinquency in complex societies. It links a variety of theories from different fields and consequently contains a partial review of the literature. It principally seeks insights within the variation and multiplicity of the phenomena for the socio-cultural regularities which shape contrastive patterns of populations or subgroups in rates of delinquency, at this very general level a comparative model can be constructed to explain group differences in rates of delinquency. Certain types of delinquency are part of a discourse of resistance as well as being routinely produced by unequal advances in economic development and the gap-widening effect of systems. In this sense, at the population level there is something other than 'freedom in history operating.