Delinquents as Dummies

How do kids become delinquents? One study suggests it all starts with low intelligence. For some time, researchers have known that delinquents score an average of eight points lower on IQ tests than their nondelinquent peers. Furthermore, a team of psychologists from the University of Wisconsin have demonstrated that low IQ begets delinquency rather than results from it. Moreover, they say the way that low IQ leads to juvenile delinquency differs between African-Americans and whites.

The team, headed by graduate student Donald Lynam, followed more than 600 fourth-graders judged to be at high risk for delinquency. For two to three years, researchers gathered data on race, socioeconomic status, behavioral impulsivity, and success in school. Kids took standard IQ tests at the beginning and end of the study.

The prospective study design demonstrated that, among kids who later became delinquents, low IQ scores are present well before they take up nefarious activities.

In addition, boys with impulsive natures are at greatest risk because they consistently fail to weigh the consequences of their impulsive actions.

But perhaps the most significant finding, reported in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Vol. 102, No. 2), is the extent to which school failure presages juvenile delinquency. Students with low IQs are less likely to succeed in school and therefore less likely to respect the school as a bastion of authority. So they don't buy into the value system teachers are trying to transmit.

For African-Americans, the link between school failure and delinquency is especially pronounced. "When we measured black boys and white boys who were both performing poorly in school," Lynam said, "it was only the black boys who were at risk for engaging in delinquency."

Schools, he explains, exert informal yet powerful social controls on their students. For African-Americans, who are disproportionately represented in poor communities, schools may provide the social control lacking in a neighborhood of overburdened single-parent households. But if a boy finds school so frustrating that he rejects it, its power is null, and the chances for engaging in delinquency increase rapidly. Neighborhood pressures are then free to rush in and fill the void.

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