CRIMINAL AND DELINQUENT SUBCULTURESgroups. Some types of property crimes require
organization and coordination of activities in or-
der to be successful. Some also necessarily involve
the efforts of others, such as ‘‘fences,’’ in addition
to members of a criminally organized gang (see
Klockars 1974). Others, such as mugging and oth-
er types of robbery, may be carried out by indi-
vidual offenders, who nevertheless share a subcul-
ture supportive of such behavior. Most drug-using
subcultures tend to be less oriented toward par-
ticular groups than are conflict subcultures be-
cause the subcultural orientation is toward drug
consumption, and this orientation can be shared
with other drug users in many types of group
situations. To the extent that a subculture is orient-
ed to experiences associated with a particular group,
however, a drug-using subculture may also be
unique to that group.
As this analysis suggests, cultures, subcultures,
and the groups associated with them typically
overlap, often in multiple and complex ways. To
speak of youth culture, for example, is to denote a
subculture of the larger adult-dominated and
institutionally defined culture. Similarly, delinquent
subcultures contain elements of both youth and
adult cultures. Terry Williams’s (1989) lower class,
minority, ‘‘cocaine kids,’’ for example, were
entrepreneurial, worked long hours, and main-
tained self-discipline—all important elements in
the achievement ideology of the American Dream
(see Messner and Rosenfeld 1994; also Fagan 1996;
Hagan, et al. 1998). Most saw their involvement in
the drug trade as a way to get started in legitimate
business or to pursue other conventional goals,
and a few succeeded at least temporarily in doing
so. The criminal subculture with which they identi-
fied shared a symbiotic relationship with their
customers (including many middle- and upper-
class persons), who shared subcultural values ap-
proving drug use but who participated in the
subculture of drug distribution only as consumers.
For the young drug dealers, selling drugs was a way
to ‘‘be somebody,’’ to get ahead in life, and to
acquire such things as jewelry, clothing, and cars—
the symbols of wealth, power, and respect.
The nature of relationships between delin-
quent subcultures and larger cultural systems is
further illustrated by Mercer Sullivan’s study of
cliques of young men in Brooklyn, among whom
the ‘‘cultural meaning of crime’’ was ‘‘constructed
in... interaction out of materials supplied from
two sources: the local area in which they spend
their time almost totally unsupervised and undi-
rected by adults, and the consumerist youth cul-
ture promoted in the mass media’’ (1989, p. 249).
In other words, crime becomes meaningful to
young men when they interact with one another
and when they participate in youth culture, with its
highly commercialized messages. The research lit-
erature on criminal and delinquent subcultures is
devoted largely to describing and accounting for
these types of varied and complex relationships.THEORY AND RESEARCHDespite efforts to define the theoretical construct,
‘‘subculture’’—and related constructs—more pre-
cisely and to describe and account for the empiri-
cal reality they represent, no general theory of
subcultures has emerged (Yinger 1960, 1977). In-
stead, research has continued to reveal enormous
variation in subcultures, and theory has proceed-
ed by illustration and analogy, with little progress
in measurement or formal theoretical develop-
ment. Despite this scientifically primitive situa-
tion, principles of subcultural formation have been
identified, and knowledge of it has advanced.It is a ‘‘fundamental law of sociology and
anthropology,’’ noted Daniel Glaser, that ‘‘social
separation produces cultural differentiation’’ (1971,
p. 90). More formally, and more cautiously, social
separation is a necessary but not sufficient condi-
tion for the formation of subcultures. To the
extent that groups or categories of persons are
socially separated from one another, subcultural
formation is likely to occur.Albert Cohen argued that a ‘‘crucial’’ (perhaps
necessary) ‘‘condition for the emergence of new
cultural forms is the existence, in effective interac-
tion with one another, of a number of actors with
similar problems of adjustment’’ (1955, p. 59).
While the notion of ‘‘similar problems of adjust-
ment’’ can be interpreted to include problems
faced by quite conventional people with special
interests who find themselves ‘‘in the same boat’’
with others who have these same interests (let us
say, bird-watchers), this condition seems especially
appropriate to subcultures that embrace vandal-
ism, ‘‘hell raising,’’ and other types of nonutilitarian