Chambliss and Saints and Roughnecks Essay

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Reflection: Saints and RoughnecksIn his essay “The Saints and the Roughnecks” William Chambliss examines a curious phenomenon in high school: while delinquent behavior was common among boys of various social classes at Hannibal High School, only the negative behaviors of the lower-class, less academically inclined boys was viewed as delinquent. The clean-cut, high-achieving so-called Saints often cut class early, hung out at pool halls, and, objectively speaking, engaged in more delinquent actions than the so-called Roughnecks who were lower class and did more poorly in school. But the Saints were viewed as fundamentally good boys who were going through a normal phase of life before they became upstanding members of the community, while the Roughnecks were viewed as inherently unredeemable individuals. This was even though the Saints catcalled women and engaged in vandalism of construction sites.Reading the essay made me very angry. Chambliss, while not defending the discrepancy in attitude to the Saints and Roughnecks, argues that no one was seriously hurt by the Saints’ behavior. But drunk driving is now considered a very serious offense, and there is no way to know that the women the Saints sexually harassed were not psychologically harmed by what they were subjected to. Teachers admitted to give the Saints the benefit of the doubt, and thus all of the boys had relatively high GPAs, despite the fact they were truant and cheated.

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…fewer places to go than the Saints. Again, the fact that they could be seen more frequently by authority figures engaged in delinquency increased the perceptions they were delinquent.Both social conflict and symbolic-interaction perspectives underline the fact that it is not often objectively the harms of certain behaviors that result in the people who commit them from being stigmatized. In fact, so-called nice boys like the Saints may engage in very hurtful actions, and may actually not justify society’s positive perceptions of them in work and school. From a social conflict perspective, society has been set up to validate their position already, and from a symbolic interaction perspective, authority figures are unable to see them as dangerous or harmful,….....

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