William Chambliss Reaction To The Saints

William Chambliss (1984) examined one community’s reaction to two groups of high school boys who had engaged in the same frequency of deviancy in the US: the ‘Saints’ who were a middle-class group, and ‘Roughnecks’ who were a working class group. According to Chambliss’s reports, the “community, the school, and the police react[ed] to the Saints as though they were good, upstanding, non-delinquent youths with bright futures but reacted to the Roughnecks as though they were tough, young criminals who were headed for trouble” (Lilly, Cullen & Ball, 2011, p142).
The experiment concluded that the officers did not objectify the crime of traffic violation but allowed the appearances of the college students’ car to shape their judgment on whether they should make an arrest or not. As perplexing as it is,
Ferri in “The Positive School of Criminology”, argued ferociously in favour of the positivist school whilst severely criticising the classical school. He demonstrated the interrelatedness between three classes of causes: the anthropological factor (‘the organic and psychological personality of the individual’ as well as the ‘race character’), the telluric factor (physical environment he is in contact with that conditions him) and the social factor (social conditions that make life ‘insincere and imperfect) (Newburn, 2009, pp101-102). Garofalo, whose work was also influenced by Darwinism, proposed his own doctrine of “natural crimes” where he believed that the society existed as the “natural body” and crime are “offences against the law of nature”, true criminals were altruistic in nature with psychic or moral anomalies. Thus, based on his proposal of “natural crimes”, criminals must either adapt to the natural body or be eliminated. Barnes added that “their deaths would contribute to the survival of society” (Lilly, Cullen & Ball, 2011,