The current study examines the self-reported victimizations of 90 public school teachers, over one-third of whom reported school-based theft of personal property or threats of violence. The study addressed two basic questions. First, what was the relationship between these school-based victimization experiences and the level of fear expressed by teachers? Second, what was the relationship between both the victimizations and fear and teacher satisfaction with their jobs and their employers? In order to provide a thorough examination of these relationships, several recognized correlates of teacher satisfaction, including respondent’s sex, age, work assignments, and racial attitudes and orientations, were included in the analysis. It was found that teacher satisfaction was influenced not only by factors normally associated with teaching, but also by perceptions of and experiences with youthful misbehavior at school. For its part, fear of crime exhibited a strong direct link to both types of satisfaction, and it apparently mitigated the influences of racism on satisfaction with one’s job and employer. These observations were consistent with an emerging perspective in victimization studies, which views the link between victimizations and fear of crime as part of the more general social climate, including perceptions of one’s work environment, a perspective that frees the researcher from the confines of more traditional conceptualizations about crime.

The links among family ties, parental discipline, as measured by the use of physical punishment, and self-reported acts of misbehavior have intrigued sociologists for almost 75 years. However, the available literature regarding the incidence of youthful misbehavior provides few insights into these putative links for families where the parents make the effort to send their child or children to a parochial school. To this end, a random sample of 74 high school students attending parochial school in a medium-sized southwestern city was obtained. Among the family ties variables, family activities was a more consistent predictor of adolescent misbehavior than youths' evaluations of their parents and the parental discipline variable was positively related to delinquency: the greater the use of physical punishments, the greater the delinquency. Although no causal significance is assigned to these findings, they do suggest that, first, what the parents of the parochial students in this study do is more important than how they are seen by their children; and, second, that some punishments, either in response to or as a preventive force against delinquency, may have just the opposite effect.

This article examines a program designed to provide a family court with a means of lessening the probability that youths on probation for shoplifting will return to criminal behavior. A single staff member within the family court screened possible participants, all of whom were defined as first‐time shoplifting offenders and had been assigned to formal or informal probation. Each individual was invited to participate in a four‐hour clinic, during which time the realities and possible consequences of shoplifting were explained. If they were able to successfully complete six months of supervised probation, then only the administrative record remained; the conviction itself was expunged. Over a period of nine months, a total of 154 juveniles were invited; however, only 100 actually took part in all facets of the program. A total of 30 clinic attendees and 14 nonparticipants were excluded from the present analysis, owing to missing data, or the fact that at the time of follow‐up, they were legally classified as adults. The prior and subsequent court contacts of 110 subjects are reviewed. While less than 3% of either group had subsequent shoplifting arrests, nearly 26% of the program group and 35% of the nonparticipants were rearrested. Factors associated with long‐term success and failure are examined. Possible reasons for these observations are discussed, with specific grounding in the shoplifting literature and the concepts of juvenile diversion and “net‐widening.”

Ten hypotheses were tested concerning their relationship to successful completion of a Bureau of Indian Affairs sponsored adult vocational training program. The data were collected from the case records of all participants in the Adult Vocational Training Program (AVT) in the Portland Area Office (Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington) for the period 1964-1966. "Success," the dependent variable, was defined in two ways: first, as completion of training program versus noncompletion, and second as the percent of training completed (number of months of training completed divided by the total number of months required for completion of that training program). This second definition of success permitted the utilization of fairly powerful statistics, including multiple regression analysis. The records of these 316 participants revealed that males were significantly more likely to complete training than were females. After controlling for sex, the results for males revealed that employment experience was the single most important factor associated with successful training. Marital status, off-reservation living experience, and the BIA field interviewer's assessment also emerged as weak correlates for males. For females, off-reservation living experience was the strongest factor, followed by Indian ancestry, interviewer's assessment, and employment experience.