The preceding chapter demonstrated the importance of peers in the lives of most adolescents, and the next chapter will examine how peer influence can exert itself when it comes to delinquent conduct. Before considering the nature of peer influence, however, it is important to understand the nature of delinquent behavior itself. Are most delinquent acts the work of solitary offenders who operate without the cooperation or support of others, or are they acts committed by groups of adolescents? If the latter, are these groups large or small, stable or unstable, homogeneous or heterogeneous, organized or disorganized? Without some understanding of the nature of delinquent events, it is premature to speculate on their causes.

DELINQUENCY AS GROUP BEHAVIOR

One of the most consistently reported features of delinquent behavior is its group nature. Throughout the last century, investigators have noted a tendency for offenders to commit delinquent acts in the company of others. The “gregarious and companionate character” of delinquency, as Empey (1982: 121) has described it, was documented more than seventy years ago by Shaw and McKay (1931), who discovered that more than 80 percent of juveniles appearing before the Chicago Juvenile Court had accomplices. Similar findings drawn from official data were regularly reported by scholars from the 1920s through the 1960s (see Klein, 1969; Erickson, 1971; Reiss, 1986).

As self-report methodology came to be widely adopted by criminologists, evidence for the group nature of delinquency mounted.