Understanding Offending Behaviour by John Stewart

Author:John Stewart [Stewart, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, Social Services & Welfare
ISBN: 9781351876940
Google: lcw3DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36812334
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

6 Coping

Offending linked to having fun with peers and obtaining money to survive when homeless (Gateshead, Northumbria).

Loss of employment has played a significant part in this young man's offending. Poor self-esteem, poverty and a sense of uselessness coupled with poor family support has without a doubt led to his offending behaviour (Middlesbrough, Cleveland).

Meaning and interpretation

Our use of the type Coping is intended to draw a distinction between offending 'purely' for gain and stealing in order to have fairly basic things, the lack of which could be considered deprivation. Food, clothing, fuel and shelter are obvious candidates, the acute lack of which constitutes deprivation beyond poverty. Transport and leisure items are more dubious nominees, though we shall note that some offenders under supervision, supported by their probation officers, do claim that stealing to obtain them are 'survival thefts'.

One thing is certain, of all the types, Coping stands alone by involving just one kind of crime: stealing property (which it should be remembered includes here handling, fraud and deception). There is a fine line between stealing for gain and stealing to survive at a tolerable level of poverty above deprivation. As there exists a national scheme of Income Support which supposedly guarantees payments by right to eligible people it may be contended that no one can justify stealing to survive. There are several problems with that simple notion. Some people are ineligible for benefit, for example everybody under the age of 18 (unless they have dependent children, which is an interesting proposition in itself). Others are disqualified by Department of Social Security (DSS) rules, because for example they have committed a system offence such as 'voluntary' unemployment. And yet others have reduced benefits for a further host of system offences or have specific deductions from their 'applicable amount' of Income Support to pay for an ever increasing list of basic living costs: rent, electricity, gas, water, poll tax, mortgage interest and so on. Paying back loans under the DSS Social Fund became and remains one of the late 1980s' most notorious impositions on the poorest people in Britain. However, it has proved extremely difficult to identify cases, quantify the results and present campaigning lobby material in an objective way. For example, it was hard to identify claimants not receiving assistance from the DSS Social Fund, but still in need, just as it had been difficult to find young boarders who had been disqualified from receiving benefit under the old board and lodging time limits (on the Social Fund see Stewart and Stewart, 1993c; on board and lodging see Stewart, et al., 1986). The campaigning organisations turned to qualitative material expressed as 'horror stories' which fuelled the government's claim that researchers had been 'scouring the country for evidence of the fund operating harshly' (Lloyd, 1989). In that atmosphere we are rather conscious of the limitation of using qualitative data at this point. We rest our case on the objective character of the sample, the research instruments, completion of questionnaires by professionals and appropriate analysis.

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