La délinquance chez les jeunes : une évaluation approfondie de l’enchâssement social et du chevauchement des sphères relationnelles
Abstract: It is well established in the criminology literature that delinquent peers can have a detrimental effect on young people’s behaviors. The analysis of social environmental characteristics is therefore essential to fully comprehend the unraveling of individual actions. Since it is impossible for a youth, whether he offends or not, to completely isolate himself from the conventional world (Sykes et Matza, 1957, Warr 2002), the overlapping of conventional and delinquent relationships needs to be considered to grasp the extent of the social influence phenomenon. In addition, youth’s social networks are not limited to friends, family members, classmates and co-workers all have a potential influence on their behavior. This study conducted an analysis of the social environment of 237 youth aged 14-24, attending community organizations in Quebec. The results reveal that: 1) crime participation in a youth community sample is frequent, 2) social network’s relational characteristics reflecting social embeddedness are not indicative of crime participation 3) high intensity interactions with social network members significantly reduces market crime commission rates, even when controlling for the presence of offenders in the network, 4) presence of delinquent contacts in multiple social network’s relational spheres allows to create a delinquent dispersion index in order to reflect youth’s criminal embeddedness and finally 5) the more offenders are scattered across different relational spheres that make up the youth’ social network, the greater the risk of involvement in crime is. However, this measure of network delinquency does not predict offending rates. For intervention purposes, looking at network’s delinquent dispersion index might improve prevention of delinquent behaviors.
Delinquency Social network Social embeddedness Criminal embeddedness multiplexity