Impact of Criminal Subculture on Social Interaction of Juvenile Offenders

Study relevance: significance of social environment of a minor for adaptation and overcoming difficult life situations is substantiated. It is shown that social environment exerts a psychosocial influence, forming minors’ ideas of themselves and their self-esteem. The role of minors’ social environment in various areas of social interaction is studied and importance of criminals’ social ties for inducing crime  and forming criminal ideology is shown. Besides, the impact of social ties on prevention and suppression of adolescents’ crimes is proven. At the same time, the influence of a criminal subculture on establishment of relations with social environment remains insufficiently studied. In particular, the subculture impact on changing minors’ ideas about interaction with other people and social groups is unclear. Understanding this will allow us to assess a degree of negative influence of a criminal subculture on minors. Study purpose: to identify social ties of juvenile offenders who share criminal subculture values, including by comparing with similar characteristics of law-abiding minors. Methods: the method of data collection is a questionnaire describing parameters of social relations, such as volume, stability, homogeneity, subordination and reference. Procedures of descriptive statistics and a nonparametric analogue of one-way analysis of variance (Kraskel-Wallis H-test) are used as methods for processing acquired results. The study sample consists of 229 people aged 13–17, 64.6% of whom are male, 91 of the surveyed are either convicted of crimes or are attending specialized institutions. The rest of the sample (138 people) is characterized by law-abiding behavior; during the survey period they are not suspected or accused. Results and novelty: new data on the specifics of social ties of the delinquent youth are received, in particular, small volume of relations, homogeneity of participants, low reference of social environment; prospects for studying social ties under conditions of social regulation of interaction with regard to gender and socio-cultural specifics are determined.