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am also reminded of Robert Sampson's [7] essay in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency where he proposes Bdynamic contextualism^ as a ...
Crime Law Soc Change DOI 10.1007/s10611-017-9686-2

Delinquency and modernity in cyberspace?: Comments on America’s Safest City Charis E. Kubrin 1

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

America’s Safest City is a must read for anyone concerned with issues of delinquency, juvenile justice, and suburban youth. In the book, Singer presents his theory of delinquency and modernity, offering a truly fresh perspective on the sources of delinquency in contemporary American society. There are so many things to like about this book: it introduces a new theoretical perspective; it directs a scholarly lens at the suburb, a place of American life that has been vastly neglected by criminologists; and, it draws on rich data from varied sources including ethnographic work, interviews with troubled youth, parents, and service providers, and extensive surveys of teenage residents in Amherst, New York—considered one of the safest places to live in America. America’s Safest City is also exceedingly well-written. It is one of those rare academic books which are hard to put down before reaching the end. It is also the case that the publication of America’s Safest City could not have come at a better time. At a time when there appears to be both a general tension and de facto separation between macro-criminology, concerned with large-scale historical, social, cultural, and demographic factors, and micro-criminology, concerned with individuals, small groups, and small-scale spaces, it is refreshing to see both persons and environment simultaneously considered in criminological theorizing. Singer’s theory of delinquency and modernity unites places with people, accounting for individuals as well as how they respond to broader societal and structural conditions. In this sense, it is truly an interactional theory along the lines of arguments made by James F. Short in his 1997 American Society of Criminology Presidential Address, The Level of Explanation Problem Revisited [1]. Singer’s theory of delinquency and modernity integrates both societal and relational components. First, there is the structure of society itself, which constitutes the modernity aspect of Singer’s thesis. It assumes that modern-day societies are complex and

I thank Christopher Bates and Nicholas Branic for comments on an earlier draft.

* Charis E. Kubrin [email protected]

1

University of California, Irvine, USA

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segmented in ways that did not exist in earlier times. The second component to his theory is relational. How adolescents adapt to the complexities, autonomies, and rationalities of a modern-day world—in other words, how they learn to become relationally modern—Singer argues, depends upon their relationships with others. These relationships, in turn, influence patterns of offending. In describing these societal and relational components, Singer’s thesis is that affluent youth have more opportunities to be relationally modern compared to less affluent, innercity youth. As a result, affluent youth are better able to avoid the potentially devastating consequences of frequent and serious delinquency. Furthermore, the small proportion of middle-class delinquents remains small, Singer suggests, precisely because of the support and opportunities that these youth receive when faced with personal difficulties. Impoverished youth, by contrast, lack opportunities for prevention, treatment, or diversion Bfrom the punishing hard end of criminal justice^ ([2]:6). In making these arguments, Singer is careful not to idealize modern life in suburbia, recognizing instead that Bnot all is well in these middle-class families and communities^ ([2]:7). Some affluent adolescents struggle more than others and have greater difficulty finding their place in the modern-day world: BSome parents, no matter what their social class, are too deeply troubled themselves to care for their children. Treatment programs and providers are not always that good. Sometimes the good schools are not the right schools for a particular youth’s unique learning style or disabilities. Suburban safety nets may not work for a proportion of youth who require more intense treatment and more care than parents are able or willing to provide^ ([2]:7). In other words, Singer theorizes that in the modern-day world, we should expect that suburban youth will vary in their levels of attachment to parents, teachers, coaches, and friends, and that these differences will have important consequences for offending. Stated alternatively, there is more of a struggle to be relationally modern for some affluent youth than for others.1 And indeed, this is what Singer finds in his analysis. Analyzing several years of survey data, Singer presents statistical models of offending based on familial, educational, peer-group, and neighborhood settings, showing that relationships matter for delinquency in all of these contexts. In particular, Singer finds that levels of emotional attachment to others in these diverse settings help to explain the frequency of offending. To further flesh out a larger picture of familial and other relationships, Singer spends several chapters of the book describing the least, most, and middling delinquent youth in his sample, weaving data obtained from subjects’ high-school surveys into the analysis of their personal interviews and further linking surveys of their parents. The chapters detailing the stories of these youth were among my favorite in the book. Importantly, the stories not only illustrate the youths’ diverging paths toward adulthood, but also reveal how segments of adolescents—within the same community—are differentially able to be relationally modern. By the time one finishes reading America’s Safest City, it is abundantly clear that both persons and the environment are essential and inter-related components in Singer’s theory, an important point that community and crime scholars, such as myself, can learn from. 1

I really appreciate how Singer avoids trivializing suburban youths’ troubles and discontents, which are central to understanding their delinquency. He argues that while their troubles are not the same as, say, innercity youth, the youth of Amherst and other suburbs do have their share of concerns and conflicts and at times, their difficulties can culminate into the sort of troubles that lead them into frequent offending.

Comments on America’s safest city

In fact, there are many lessons that community and crime scholars should take away from this book, even as I recognize that America’s Safest City speaks to a much broader audience. And while it is tempting in this essay to focus my comments in this context, I instead want to discuss what ended up being of greatest interest to me, which has to do with the key concept in Singer’s theory—modernity—and in particular, with the struggles adolescents experience to be relationally modern. In light of the fact that Singer collected the majority of his data for the book during the late 1980s and early 1990s, prior to the incredible technological advances in communication that have occurred since then including the World Wide Web, email, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, in the remainder of this essay I will raise a series of questions about what it means to be relationally modern in today’s world, a world where adolescents spend hours each day online and immerse themselves in virtual communities.

Delinquency and modernity in suburbia I found the book’s greatest contribution to be in Singer’s consideration of modernity; that is, why modernity matters and in particular, in his introduction to the concept of being relationally modern. To my knowledge, no other theory of delinquency accounts for modernity. As Singer rightfully notes, BTheories of delinquency tend to rely on facts about adolescents from an earlier era. They tend to focus on the delinquencies of impoverished inner-city males, often under the assumption that serious delinquency is boys’ gang delinquency^ ([2]:110). Singer’s theory of delinquency and modernity is thus unique. It is also compelling. Singer argues that the beginnings of a post-industrial form of modernity emerged soon after World War II, which not only decentered juvenile justice but also decentered the city. This changing modernity, he maintains, transformed the urbanized and industrialized city into a suburbanized, deindustrialized city. As such, the street corner as a place to Bhang out^ gave way to a variety of new places for adolescents to interact such as malls, parking lots, suburban wooded areas, and families’ basement recreational rooms. Hanging out on a street corner is not only less common in suburbia but also less relevant to the lives of today’s youth, according to Singer. In the post-industrial era of modernity, positional relationships are on the rise: BIndividual identities are in a state of flux and they have to be discovered through a process that can no longer be neatly structured, at least in a stage of life—adolescence—that is defined as transitional^ ([2]:133). Success in the modern day, Singer suggests, is to achieve a sense of self in society’s many, and often fragmented, places and contexts. Successful youth are able to achieve that sense of self through their secure sense of place in familial, educational, and recreational settings. There, and in other contexts, Singer maintains, adolescents learn to navigate the complex demands of a modern-day society and gain the ability to be rational and autonomous. To survive adolescence and to move successfully into adulthood, then, requires that adolescents grasp social complexity, their own autonomy, and the rationality of a multitier system of moral, social, and legal rules ([2]:83). Adolescents cannot easily reach that point, Singer suggests, without the assistance of others. Trust and empathetic identification, which enable adolescents and adults to recognize one another as well as each other’s concerns and troubles, are critical. If

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adolescents are unable to recognize and be recognized in social settings, they run the risk of serious delinquency. In other words, adolescents cannot succeed in this era of modernity without the aid of parents, family members, and others who can recognize the unique circumstances of adolescence and also the fact that today’s youth must learn to live with ambiguity, to identify with the adaptive process, to make a virtue out of contingency, and to be self-directing ([2]:83). Of course, not everyone is equipped to live in an ambiguous society. Delinquents, Singer suggests, lack the relational modernity that would otherwise enable them to confront society’s demands and complexities. In crafting these arguments, Singer presents the reader with an alternative metaphoric vision of delinquency: the suburban roadway of relational modernity. This metaphor is different from the urban ethnographies we are all familiar with but especially those that employ imagery of the Bstreet corner^ (think William Foote Whyte’s [3] Street-Corner Society; Elliott Liebow [4] Street Corner Men; and Elijah Anderson’s [5] A Place on the Corner). This new metaphor, Singer suggests, must reflect several key symbolic aspects, including the car-dependent quality of suburban living, the absence of corner stores, and suburbia’s lower population density. Singer portrays the suburban roadway of relational modernity as a roadway that reflects a multitude or network of interconnected streets. In particular, his metaphor draws on contemporary social theory to suggest that the development of modern-day identities is an ongoing process: BSuburbia not only contains a complex network of subdivisions, but also a maze of roadways. It can be a lonely place. Its lower population density creates more room for taking off on one’s own and pursuing one’s own roadway. Along the way, adolescents encounter more or less visible signs of how best to proceed. Each sign contributes to the adolescent’s own unique set of on-going narratives. These narratives are the stories that adolescents tell about themselves, as they are driven and begin to drive from one place of activity to the next. They are the definitions of the situation that both shape and mediate their lives^ ([2]:136). Thus, the physical structure of the suburban community serves as a creative and illustrative metaphor for adolescents’ lives, experiences, and development. Singer further argues that suburban roadways are not simply physical places of supervision. Rather, they depend on adolescents operating their lives on their own. In other words, there is the expectation for autonomy—the need for individual decision-making to make a modern-day society work ([2]:130). There is much more that I could write about Singer’s metaphor and his theory of delinquency and modernity, but I’ll stop here to note that, for me, his arguments are wonderfully refreshing and cogent. Indeed, one aspect of Singer’s theory that I really appreciate is how closely connected—how anchored—it is to history, to a particular historical time period. Criminologists have long argued the importance of considering historical context in theory and research on crime and delinquency2 yet this framing is so rarely achieved.

2 Here I am reminded of Gary LaFree’s [6] essay in the Annual Review of Sociology where he argues that, problematically, ahistoricism characterizes much theory and research on crime and delinquency and that this ahistoricism is rooted in three common and rarely examined assumptions: theory and history should be separated; time may be treated ahistorically; and quantitative methods should take primacy over historical considerations. I am also reminded of Robert Sampson’s [7] essay in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency where he proposes Bdynamic contextualism^ as a promising paradigm for criminological inquiry, an approach which recognizes and attempts to join developmental and historical insights, event structures and community context, qualitative narratives and causal explanation, and ultimately, time and place in the study of crime.

Comments on America’s safest city

Still, this historically grounded perspective reminds us that we also must consider what might have changed in the time since Singer conducted his study. Although America’s Safest City was published in 2014, as I noted earlier, Singer’s analysis draws on data that were collected from surveys of youth and their parents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In particular, Singer’s data come from surveys of middle school students conducted in 1987 and high schoolers conducted in 1990, supplemented by surveys of parents in 1990 and again in 2000. These data were further supplemented by personal interviews conducted in 1996 with roughly 5 % of former survey respondents and by conversations with city officials. So essentially, we are talking about data collected well over 20 years ago. Why might that matter? In those twenty-plus years, we have witnessed incredible technological advances in communication that none of us could have envisioned at the time of Singer’s data collection. I believe that such advances have significant implications for Singer’s theory of delinquency and modernity and in particular for what it means to be relationally modern in today’s increasingly virtual world. First, consider the decade of the 1990s. This decade brought about some of the greatest technological inventions in communication in human history, among them the World Wide Web, the first webcam, the Global System for Mobile Communications or GSM, the SMS or text message, the laptop computer, the smart phone, e-mail, Google, Napster, and other peer-to-peer file sharing websites, to name just a few. And the 1990s laid the foundation for the beginning of the information age in the 2000s, which saw the entire world growing closer together online through social media platforms such as Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, among others. My point in providing this laundry list is that emerging technologies have completely altered the face of modernity. In other words, Bmodernity^ has become increasingly more modern over time. Yet because of when the data were collected, very little of this transformation is captured or reflected in Singer’s data and analysis. While Singer does acknowledge that Ba late modern day world is a world of the Internet and instant communication^ ([2]:65–66) and concludes the book by sharing the story of Nick D’Aloisio—a young, relationally-modern man who successfully adapts to the digital information economy of a post-industrial modernity as he develops a new, globallyproduced reading app (short for application)—Singer stops short of fully exploring this new reality and explicitly considering just what these evolving technologies mean for his theory of modernity and delinquency. I argue here that these incredible technological advances in communication are rather consequential for Singer’s theory, particularly in the formation of Brelational modernity.^ And while I do not have the answers myself, in the remainder of this essay I raise several questions about his theory in the context of what is, most certainly, a Bnew modernity.^

Delinquency and modernity in cyberspace? One question relates to what these collective technological advances may mean for Bthe local.^ In characterizing the suburbanized, modernized world, Singer describes how a safe city’s subdivisions or sub-communities—whether focusing on familial, social, or legal systems—are many, each representing smaller communities and sub-communities of their own for youth to navigate. He states: BCommunities in their miniature are to be found everywhere; subdivisions have their communities, suburban office parks and

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shopping malls have their communities as well^ ([2]:68). At the same time, Singer argues that such spaces offer less significance in the lives of youth today, explaining that BThe local in today’s contemporary world is increasingly less relevant as sociability depends less on direct physical presence^ ([2]:66). Is it not the case, then, that the local becomes even less relevant today as youth spend more and more time online and in virtual communities? Speaking of which, how must the concept of Bcommunity^ be reenvisioned to sufficiently account for these alternative, virtual communities that have become ubiquitous in the lives of youth today? A related question considers the fragmented and thinly layered contexts within which modern youth find themselves navigating: To what extent are the Internet and related virtual environments now constituting new critical contexts or sub-communities—beyond the family, school, and peer-group—in which adolescents must navigate and learn to be relationally modern? Singer makes a more general point: BWhat has changed are the techniques for becoming socially modern: They require adolescents to adapt not only to their biological transitions during puberty but also to newly created familial, educational, and peer-group requirements. Their ability to reach adult status and create a sense of self independent of a locally defined place requires acknowledging that they, their parents, and society are on the move^ ([2]:66). In light of this observation, what might be some new techniques necessary for becoming relationally modern in a technologically advanced world? Are some earlier techniques now obsolete? Another question asks, how do significant advances in communication in the last two decades impact adolescents’ ability to create a modern-day sense of self? Recall that Singer considers a modern-day sense of self to refer to a reflective self, an esteemed self, an efficacious self, or an actualized self—a result, in part, of the fact that the modern democratic nation-state is rooted in notions of individual responsibility, free will, and the right to pursue personal happiness. Singer also emphasizes the belief in autonomy for adolescents, noting that in pre-modern times, the individual’s self-interest was to be denied whereas in today’s more enlightened society, a sense of self reigns supreme (as reflected in the concepts of self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-actualization). One of the central arguments of America’s Safest City is that the affluent suburbs provide plenty of physical space and opportunity for adolescents to develop sense of self, often through what Singer calls Ba wealth of enabling choices^ ([2]:74). The affluence of a safe city and its families, Singer maintains, is more likely to assure that basic needs are met, allowing adolescents to pursue their own interests. But what about the online community, with its own abundance of enabling choices? Unknown is how adolescents develop a sense of self in this particular context and how the influences of both physical and virtual places may interact or be at odds with one another (consider, for example, the situation where an adolescent may be popular among peers at school but encounters cyber bullying online). A more pointed question asks, what does a sense of self mean now in a (virtual) world where adolescents change their Facebook status every hour, post selfie pics relentlessly, and adopt avatars in video games that they play online for hours on end? In essence, if the struggle to be relationally modern must be considered in the context of modernity’s many expectations as Singer argues throughout, it remains to be seen how new and diverse expectations stemming from the new modernity impact the challenges that adolescents face to be relationally modern today.

Comments on America’s safest city

And finally, what about the role of parents in this new modern world, individuals who play a major role in helping adolescents learn to become relationally modern? Singer acknowledges that the right way to parent is not easily determined given modernity’s many expert opinions and the fact that there are fewer traditions from the past to guide the conduct of youth in the present. Certainly this is even more so the case in today’s modern, virtual context, where Bexpert opinions^ on any and everything abound. How does this abundance of options and these diverse sources of expert opinions affect both parents and youth as they navigate the challenges to be relationally modern? And recall Singer’s argument that in a relationally modern world, it’s a two way street between adolescents and parents: BThere is no one way street in a relationally modern world; instead, a relationally modern world requires recognition at both ends, with adolescents having attachments to parents, teachers, coaches and others who represent the values of a law-abiding society, and parents, teachers, coaches, and others being socially and personally engaged with youth^ ([2]:86). On the one hand, parents today often cannot keep pace with the technological advances in communication that their children so readily and easily embrace. Articles aimed at educating Btech-troubled parents^ with titles such as BPractical Advice for Raising Kids in the Digital Age^ abound. On the other hand, technology also has allowed parents to keep closer tabs on their children than ever before. Consider, for example, parents who install GPS tracking systems in their children’s cars or phones in order to monitor their whereabouts—technology that simply did not exist when Singer conducted his study. In essence, it is critical to consider how all of these technological advances may be impacting parents’ (and others’) ability to recognize adolescent troubles and to steer youth on the path toward relational modernity. In light of the above discussion, it is worth asking one more set of questions: is Singer’s metaphor of the suburban roadway of relational modernity already becoming outdated? Is it necessary to identify yet another, alternative metaphor to appropriately capture the Bnew modernity^ of today? I am not sure what this new metaphor would be—perhaps the Internet information superhighway?—but it certainly should invoke the newest (and most complex) community in which adolescents struggle to be relationally modern—the World Wide Web or cyberspace. I will close this essay by noting that my single favorite line in Singer’s book is: BAs cities are transformed so are its youth^ ([2]:255). This sentence really hit home with me and echoes my earlier point about the need to unite places with people in the study of crime and delinquency. Singer goes on to state, BSo like cities themselves, there is an on-going narrative to adolescents as they transition into modern-day adulthood^ ([2]:255). I could not agree more with this statement, except that I would simply add that this ongoing narrative now must consider cyberspace and the myriad other virtual communities created through important technological advances in communication—all of which have come to define the new modern.

References 1. Short, J. F. (1998). The level of explanation problem revisited- the American Society of Criminology 1997 presidential address. Criminology, 36, 3–35. 2. Singer, S. I. (2014). America’s Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia. New York: New York University Press.

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White, W. F. (1948). Street corner society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liebow, E. (1967). Tally’s corner: A study of negro streetcorner men. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.. Anderson, E. (1978). A place on the corner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LaFree, G. (1999). Declining violent crime rates in the 1990s: Predicting crime booms and busts. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 145–168. 7. Sampson, R. J. (1993). Linking time and place: Dynamic contextualism and the future of criminological inquiry. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30(4), 426–444.