Criminal Deviance

At the Oregon Social Learning Center, Tom Dishion and his colleagues studied if deviant behavior was affected by deviant talk. So he had 13 and 14 year old kids be interviewed about some of the activities they did. Very few out of the kids said they never did criminal deviant acts. The others admitted to it though and a lot of it. Some of the kids even said the same things as others and this proved that when a kid does a criminal deviant act, he or she is never alone. Delinquents will always act in groups. The things that the kids admitted to were getting drunk and doing drugs. Some even admitted to victimizing girls and were proud of it. Tom found it astonishing at how open the kids were and furthered his research with the next part of his experiment. He now had his colleagues laugh whenever one of the delinquents mentioned a criminal deviant act and he found out that the kids would talk more on the subject the more laughter they got. These kids were being recorded and yet they just did not care about how much they said because all they wanted was some attention.