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Shaw, Clifford R.: The Jack-Roller

First published in 1930 and reissued in 1966, The Jack-Roller is the life history of “Stanley,” a 23-year-old Chicago man who had compiled by the time of its initial publication an extensive record of delinquency, crime, and incarceration both as a juvenile and a young adult. This entry describes the book, highlights aspects of Stanley's background and personality that contributed to his delinquency, comments briefly on the intellectual context of early-20th-century Chicago in which The Jack-Roller was compiled and published, and concludes with observations on the potential value and limitations of offender autobiographies as sources of data about crime.

Stanley

Stanley was the product of a large blended family with an employed but alcoholic father and an emotionally indifferent, if not abusive, stepmother. The family's residence was in low income and high delinquency areas of Chicago. Stanley's conflict with and antipathy for his stepmother figure prominently in his early life, and she is singled out repeatedly by him as a major source of his problems. She also condoned or encouraged his stealing.

Stanley began running away from home and living on the streets well before adolescence. He found close at hand both cultural conditions and delinquent companions that offered little resistance, if they did not facilitate, his drift into low-level crime. Jack-rolling is a dated name for strong-arm robbery, typically committed by yoking from behind victims who are adjudged unlikely to offer effective resistance. Mugging is the more contemporary name for it.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Stanley's personality was his lifelong interpersonal abrasiveness. He was quick to take offense and retaliate at perceived signs of interpersonal disrespect or unfair treatment from others. Whether this was rooted in part in his family's precarious material circumstances and the inevitable disrepute that accompanies it is unclear, but Stanley was unmistakably a product of the working class and its culture. The significance of this and the possibility that his prickly personality had origins at least in part in repeated disrespectful treatment by authority figures and others are not considered in The Jack-Roller.

Shaw

Clifford R. Shaw, who encouraged Stanley to write his autobiography, provided topical categories for and edited it and was instrumental in seeing it through to publication. At the time, Shaw was on the staff of the Institute for Juvenile Research, an innovative Chicago-based state agency created to study and develop promising responses to juvenile delinquency. Shaw was educated at the University of Chicago, where sociologists viewed crime and other forms of social pathology as products of socially disorganized urban conditions.

One chapter of The Jack-Roller describes the social and cultural aspects of the neighborhoods in which Stanley's family resided during his formative years. Shaw and his colleagues believed that life histories could lay bare the interaction of individual characteristics, family dynamics, and adverse neighborhoods. The “boy's story” could show how these various factors were understood and responded to by him, and the part they played in the development and sequencing of delinquency. Truancy, for example, generally preceded onset of minor delinquency and gave way in turn to more serious infractions.

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