The Vandal: Society's Outsider

The Vandal: Society's Outsider No school today. Vandals have systematically damaged calculators and laboratory equipment, flooded the building with fire hoses, overturned furniture and splashed paint all over the walls. Something like that happens every week in some community, but last week's example was notable because it occurred in one of the wealthiest and most stable suburban communities in the U.S.: Greenwich, Conn. There, in a city that has no serious racial or community problems, the intruders damaged the high school to the tune of more than $10,000 and forced it to close down for a day.

The sabotage in Greenwich will be added to a national bill that is already of staggering proportions--and it is rising steeply every year. No one can fix an accurate price tag on vandalism, which is not always reported, not always identifiable as such and covers everything from toilet graffiti to arson. But the U.S. Office of Education in Washington sets the annual cost of destruction in public schools alone at more than $100 million. In New York City, the cost of school vandalism amounted to an estimated $6,500,000 last year. Public telephones are another prime target; some $10 million a year goes to the repair or replacement of pay phones destroyed by vandals and thieves. Why, in an era of unprecedented prosperity, has an increase in the most senseless of all crimes against property taken place?

"Political Judgment." The answer lies partly in the character of the times, a period of great social upheaval, and partly in the nature of the vandal, who is as difficult to define as he is to catch. In New York City, for example, police make arrests in only 2% to 3% of all reported cases. The vandal's deeds, as British Sociologist Stanley Cohen of England's University of Durham has observed, are commonly described as wanton, pointless, aimless, senseless, meaningless or mindless. Cohen is one of several social scientists who think that none of these objectives really apply.

"To characterize property destruction --whether it is pulling up paving stones in Paris, breaking embassy windows in Jakarta or wrecking a slum-area store in Los Angeles--with a phrase like 'reckless, ignorant vandalism' is a political judgment," Cohen has written. He agrees with Fordham University Sociologist John M. Martin that every act of vandalism carries a heavy freight of motivation and even logic--though scanalized and law-abiding citizens are not likely to appreciate either. As a classic example, the Luddites who smashed the new textile machines at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution were venting their rage on a new technology that threatened their handicraft jobs.

Much contemporary vandalism, says Sociologist Martin, is similarly vindictive, a blow struck in anger by the havenots, the oppressed and the dispossessed. "Most research into school vandalism," says Cohen, "indicates that there is something wrong with the school that is damaged. The highest rates of school vandalism tend to occur in schools with obsolete facilities and equipment, low staff morale and high boredom among the pupils."

Moreover, Cohen argues, "wanton" destruction may be but a distorted image of a larger picture. "The values associated with juvenile vandalism and thought to be peculiar to delinquents, such as the search for excitement and kicks, the high regard for toughness and aggression, might reflect values running through the whole society."

This view is also held by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University and possibly the leading U.S. authority on the anatomy of vandalism. Years of study and experimentation have gone into Zimbardo's theory, which plausibly explains the present--and in Zimbardo's judgment seemingly irreversible--national surge in such destruction. The vandal is typically young (nearly 80% of all those arrested are under 18), and the young of today care little for the society their fathers built. Furthermore, in an age of expanding permissiveness, the vandal is no longer so heavily concentrated, if he ever was. among the underprivileged and the poor; as Sociologist Martin has noted, vandalism cannot be classified along racial, ethnic or even economic lines.

Contemporary life invites the vandalistic act. The media play so endlessly on themes of violence and aggression that they become, to the young at least, an accepted part of life. Wholesale renunciation of traditional values --the death of faith, the obsolescence of marriage, the campus as a locale for riot, the cop seen as pig--casts the adolescent adrift from all moorings. In this respect, according to Zimbardo, vandalism is "an attempt to show you have some effect on your environment. Destructive acts are chosen because they are more readily seen and because they are often more easily accomplished than constructive ones."

Whatever hope Zimbardo offers rests on society's ability to recover its waning spirit of community. Where that occurs, vandalism is rare. Nathan Goldman, chairman of the sociology department at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, reports that a school deeply involved in its neighborhood--by holding night programs for parents, for instance, or by opening its doors to extracurricular community functions--invariably deters the vandal. Somehow, the behavioral scientists feel, man must discover how to apply this lesson on a broader scale. The vandal's deed is his declaration of defiance against a society that he neither understands nor approves. The solution to it does not lie in the direction of punitive laws or shatterproof windows, but in restoring the outsider's lost faith in the community.

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