In considering the nonsexual offenses of the various sex offenders, we have used the traditional crime categories with a few modifications of our own:
Crimes against property. These include larceny, burglary, fraud, theft, damaging property, and similar crimes. None involve bodily harm or threat of bodily harm.
Crimes against person. Here we class all nonsexual offenses involving violence or harm (or threat of harm) to humans—e.g., homicide, manslaughter, assault, battery, and armed robbery.
Crimes of vagrancy and disorderly conduct. Loosely defined and hence convenient to the police, this category includes a wide variety of trivial but undesirable behavior. Examples are drunkenness, loud and boisterous behavior, minor fighting, begging, loitering, profanity, and similar products of poverty and/or alcohol. An unknown number of these offenses were simply police “pickups” for purposes of identification or investigation, and the term “vagrancy” or “disorderly conduct” provided a convenient label for the legal charge necessary to hold these persons.
Crimes against public order, other than vagrancy and disorderly conduct, include a number of unrelated offenses. All narcotics violations and gambling offenses are placed in this category. We have also included all military offenses which would not be offenses if committed by civilians: absence without leave, insubordination, etc.
Sex-connected crimes. These are offenses wherein sex is clearly an element, but which cannot be classed as sex offenses because the element of immediate sexual gratification of the offender is absent. Examples are bastardy, bigamy, prostitution, pimping, and sale or possession of pornography.
Crimes against property represent the bulk of the offenses of the prison group; nearly half of their offenses were of this type; this finding is similar to that of other studies of criminals. No sex-offender group equals this proportion, but four approach it. The range for the sex offenders is from 18 to 45 per cent with the bulk falling between 29 and 42 per cent. No clear trends or clusterings are evident, although some tripartite groups are more prone to commit property offenses than are others.
The per capita number of crimes against property gives a somewhat different picture: the prison group have by far the most (1.7 per man), and the per capita crimes against property of the sex offenders are, with but one exception, less than half of this (see Table 124). In other words, the sex offenders include far fewer thieves than the prison group. The only generalization to be drawn from the figures is that the aggressors are more inclined toward crimes against property than other groups, an inclination in keeping with the philosophy of taking what one wants, be it property or sex.
Crimes vs. person account for one tenth of the prison group’s convictions. Five sex-offender groups, including all three aggressors, exceed this figure, the maximum being 18 per cent. The homosexual offenders, as a group, have the smallest proportion of crimes against person: about 4 to 6 per cent. An examination of the per capita numbers shows the prison group and the aggressors as being quite comparable (the aggressors’ figures being 0.27 to 0.48 and the prison’s 0.37), but the other sex offenders have no more than 0.16 crimes against person. If the aggressors are excluded, one can say that sex offenders are nonassaultive and that the homosexual offenders are the least physically dangerous of all.
Crimes of vagrancy and disorderly conduct are the commonest nonsexual offenses: even the group with the smallest proportion of such offenses, the prison group, had one fifth of its convictions stemming from these charges. All groups had from one fifth to one half of their convictions in this category. The homosexual offenders are especially liable to arrest and conviction, since they loiter about schools, theaters, bars, and other suitable places; indeed, from 40 to nearly 50 per cent of their convictions derive from vagrancy and disorderly conduct. Oddly enough, the groups with the most persons rated as frequent drinkers and alcoholics do not appear to have unduly large proportions of their convictions based on vagrancy or disorderly conduct. Obviously the effects of alcohol are being overridden by other factors, as in the case of the homosexual offenders, who were our soberest group. Nevertheless, the drunkenness of our most alcoholic group, the aggressors vs. children, could not be wholly masked for they display the highest per capita number of vagrancy and disorderly conduct convictions (1.1). The range per capita is from 0.27 to 1.08, with most sex offenders falling between 0.33 and 0.62. The prison group ranks third with 0.72. As one would anticipate from our earlier statements, the homosexual offenders, as a group, have large per capita figures (0.58 to 0.92).
Crimes vs. public order represent in some ways a wastebasket category and hence one would not expect the figures to mean much. A plus or minus of five percentage points around the prison group’s 16 per cent embraces nine of the sex-offender groups. The only generalization that can be made is that the incest offenders have relatively large proportions of their convictions for crimes vs. order (23 to 36 per cent), and the aggressors have relatively small proportions (10-12 per cent). The low figures for the aggressors, we must hastily add, are the result of their promiscuity in other types of crime rather than of any respect for order. Actually their per capita convictions for crimes vs. order are not small. The highest per capita figure, 0.56, was that of the prison group; the lowest was 0.18. Eleven of our 14 comparative sex-offender groups fall within the ten percentage points from 0.18 to 0.28. Once again the incest offenders rank high in crimes vs. order, having per capita rates of 0.27, 0.36, and 0.40.
Sex-connected crimes constitute a very small proportion, never over 4 per cent, of the crimes that led to conviction. Only four groups have figures of 3 per cent or more. Three of the four, the homosexual offenders vs. minors and adults, and the exhibitionists, owe most of their convictions to masquerading and/or transvestism. Since we decided, after making these calculations, that there was sufficient sexual gratification involved in such cross-dressing to warrant a small sex-offender category for masqueraders, these convictions should be subtracted from the percentages of sex-connected convictions. The subtraction reduces the sex-connected convictions for these three groups to between 1 and 2 per cent. The number of convictions per capita for sex-connected offenses is always quite small, the largest being 0.06.
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