Marshall B. Clinard
Marshall Barron Clinard was an American sociologist who specialized in criminology. Criminological studies spanned across his entire career, from an examination of the Black Market during World War II to much more general treatments of white collar crime. His 1957 textbook Sociology of Deviant Behavior is now in its 15th edition. In addition to studies within the United States, Clinard did research in Sweden, India, Uganda and Switzerland: supported, respectively, by the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the U. S. National Science Foundation.
Academic life
After graduating prep school in 1928 from Governor Dummer Academy in Newbury, Massachusetts, Clinard attended San Diego State University for two years, then transferred to Stanford University where in 1932 he earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology. Finding few teaching opportunities in anthropology at the depth of the depression, he switched to Sociology and continued at Stanford as a graduate student.As an undergraduate he had become aware of Edwin Sutherland's 1924 book Criminology and, upon completion of his M.A. degree in 1935, he moved to the University of Chicago to work with Sutherland as a Ph.D. student. Clinard not only gained a theoretical understanding of the way people become engaged in criminal behavior but also learned qualitative research techniques while working under Sutherland, Herbert Blumer and Ernest Burgess under whose guidance Clinard completed his Ph.D. dissertation.
In 1937, with his coursework requirements met, he took his first teaching job at the University of Iowa and did research on property-crime offenders who were sentenced during the 26-month period from July 1938 through August 1940 to the Iowa Men's Reformatory. He surveyed 200 offenders to quantify sociological variables, as influenced by whether the offender grew up in a rural, village and urban setting. And, for 60 rural or village offenders he quantitatively and qualitatively examined the roles of geographic mobility, gangs or associates, and criminal self conception.
Black market crime
In July 1941, with the data for his dissertation in hand, he moved his family to Washington D.C., working first as a statistician in the Bureau of the Census, then, from December 1942 to September 1945, chief of the Analysis and Reports Branch of the Office of Price Administration. The OPA work provided information he used in a 1946 publication, and led in 1952 to publication of a book about the black market. Clinard argued that the black market is not an outgrowth of gangster or marginal businesses. The political scientist Marver Bernstein faulted the book for lack of detailed discussion of the relationship between the OPA and the War Food Administration but found to be significant Clinard's statistics suggesting that "violators were not chiefly recruited from persons of recent immigrant background." In 2010, an entry in the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory by professor of Criminal Justice Kip Schlegel praised Clinard's documentation of OPA action, using methods which are "a model for... studying the nature and enforcement of white-collar crime."In 1952, the year the Black Market crime book was published, Clinard expanded on this study by discussing aspects of societal corruption in a variety of domains: political, individual, sports, etc. In a cover story of the Sunday New York Times magazine he demonstrated that these problems in the U.S. were occurring amid increasing levels of mobility, urbanization, individualism and materialism, and gave the problems a historical and sociological context.
At the end of World War II he took a position for a short time at Vanderbilt University then went to the University of Wisconsin for the bulk of his career.
International: Sweden & India
A 1954-1955 sabbatical year in Sweden provided an opportunity to deepen his Ph.D. research about the relationship between the locale where Iowan property crime offenders were raised and characteristics of their criminal activity. He replicated the earlier study in Swedish areas with the same mix of rural, village and urban upbringings but in a population much more homogeneous with regard to race, religion and culture. Both this study and a 1954 replication study in Iowa itself confirmed many of the original findings, but found that, unlike Clinard's study during the early 1940s, by the mid-1950s in Iowa rural offenders did not frequently leave the community in which they lived to commit crimes. Furthermore, the two follow-up studies found less tendency than the original research did for city-raised property offenders to move progressively toward more serious and complex property crimes over time.In 1958 Clinard started a more-extensive series of leaves-of absence from the University of Wisconsin: two years in 1958-1960 and another year in 1962–1963. Supported by the Ford Foundation, Clinard served as resident consultant to an Indian government program to promote self help as a means to change the slums of Delhi. He played a consultant role within a program launched in 1958 by the government of Delhi, India. The program became a department of the Delhi city government under the name "Department of Urban Community Development." B. Chatterjee, a social worker who for the previous ten years was executive secretary of the Indian Conference of Social Work was named Project Director. As part of the first two years' activity, Chatterjee and Clinard wrote a detailed description of their organizational procedures. The idea was not to view slums from an economic point of view, but rather to foster establishment of community associations, encourage local residents toward leadership, inculcate pride, and tackle civic services on an extremely local level. Starting with two community organizers and six small neighborhoods and expanding to cover only a small portion of the slums of Delhi, the first question asked at an initial group meeting was "What problems do you think the people in this area could solve for themselves?" Some interviewers sensed that this might be the first time that a resident had been asked what residents themselves could do to solve problems. In 1966 Clinard published a book which showed how the Indian effort fit within the international context and described, inter alia, how the smallest of neighborhoods in Delhi fit into larger vikas mandals of typically around a thousand people or more people and, in some cases, even larger areas consisting of multiple vikas mandals.
Deviant Behavior, Anomie & Criminological typology
Clinard first published the textbook The Sociology of Deviant Behavior in 1957, followed by two or three further editions each decade since then. Starting with the 5th edition Robert F. Meier has co-authored this book, and in 2016 the 15th edition appeared. Earlier, elements of Clinard's contentions about deviant behavior, as well as the phrase "deviant behavior" itself, appeared in a work about criminal behavior.At the 1962 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Clinard chaired a session titled Social Deviance and Disorganization where each of five sociologists presented a talk titled "_____ and Anomie: A Critique" and a sixth talk titled "Summary and Comments" was given by Robert K. Merton. The Free Press published a book edited from contents of the session. Milton L. Barron reviewed it, saying that the book reflects the importance of anomie theory to the analysis of social problems and that the theory of anomie vies with concepts such as "social forces, consciousness of kind, culture, primary and secondary groups, social disorganization, and differential association" and that the combination of Clinard's opening essay "The theoretical implications of anomie and deviant behavior" and Merton's concluding essay "Anomie, anomia, and social interaction" provide a framework within which these theories can vie. Barron specifically recommends to students of crime and delinquency the treatments of gang delinquency by Short, of drug addiction by Lindesmith and Gagnon and of inebriety and alcoholism by Charles R. Snyder.
In 1967 Clinard and Richard Quinney, a Ph.D. student at University of Wisconsin–Madison in the late 1950s, published a book which proposed, in place of a legalistic or an individualistic classification of criminal behavior, a division of eight criminal behavior types characterized by sociological properties and based on a theory of crime. The eight types of criminal behavior are each described by Clinard and Quinney and the discussion is deepened using readings, numbering 35 in total. In 1973 a second edition with each type described in greater detail by Clinard and Quinney but with no readings was published and in 1994 a third edition was published with the addition of a third author, John Wildeman.
International: Uganda & Switzerland
In 1968 Clinard obtained a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to teach and do research at Makerere University in Kampala and to help develop a program in deviant behavior and criminology. The grant also supported a doctoral student, Daniel Abbott. Together with a research staff they undertook a study of crime in Uganda, with emphasis on Kampala, and reported their research in a book which concluded that development often entails increased corruption in business and government and also tends to include an increase in crimes like armed robbery and auto theft, primarily by young under-trained males who have migrated to the city looking for work, but with little prospect for finding jobs, especially in the absence of relatives or friends in the city to help them adjust. Abbott's prior development experience in Latin America and Clinard's work in both developed and underdeveloped countries helped place this study in a wider geographic context. The attention on rural to city migration and on the role of slums is natural given the attention to these issues in Clinard's prior experience. The book has received attention from within Africa and beyond.During 1973-1974 Clinard received support from the U. S. National Science Foundation to study crime in Switzerland. He confirmed that Switzerland's reputation for low crime is supported by the data and explored the sociological roots of this. Clinard showed that the level of conventional crime is lower in Switzerland than in other comparably affluent and industrialized urban societies. And, he bolstered this finding by using multiple independent comparisons with other countries, for example by showing that Swiss public concern with crime is low and only slowly increasing and by documenting a near-constancy of insurance rates for burglary and theft in Switzerland. Clinard mustered data on Swiss white-collar crime to argue that Switzerland is high in crime, when viewed from this perspective.