MISCELLANEOUS FACTORS: ALCOHOL USE
The use of alcohol is widespread in American society, but the amount of its use and its impact on social and sexual behavior is quite unclear. “Excessive” drinking is a class- and culture-bound concept. The weekend binge, cocktail parties, solitary drinking, and bar-hopping all represent different social class and subcultural variations of alcohol use. An even wider variation in the modes and uses of alcohol may be found in cross-cultural comparisons. Given this variation, the relationship between alcohol use and sex-offense behavior is obscure. Alcoholism, meaning the use of alcohol to such a degree as to involve loss of social position, income, and stable social relationships, has often been thought of as a causative factor in criminal behavior in general as well as in sex-offense behavior. Two general patterns of causation are usually suggested, sometimes singly and sometimes together. One is a theory of personality deterioration, i.e., continued and “excessive” drinking over a long period of time, leading if not directly, at least indirectly, into criminal styles of life. This is essentially a long-run theory of the relation between alcohol and crime. A second theory is one of inhibitory breakdown and regressive behavior which occurs in individuals, regardless of their prior patterns of alcohol use, who suffer serious intoxication through ingesting alcohol rapidly. To borrow an analogy from medicine, this would be a brief acute condition of alcohol poisoning as opposed to the chronic long-term poisoning of the confirmed alcoholic.
Abstinence from alcohol is a characteristic of only 16 per cent of the control group and a similar proportion (14 per cent) of the prison group. A plus or minus of about five percentage points from these two groups would include most of the sex-offender groups. No clusterings or trends are observed in the percentages of teetotalers among the various groups. Abstinence, as we employ the term here, does not mean that an alcoholic beverage has never passed the person’s lips. We include persons who drink a small amount once or twice per year. An example would be the man who has one drink at a wedding or the man who will allow a drink to be pressed upon him by friends rather than risk being impolite by adamant refusal.
Our next category is that of slight to moderate use of alcohol. By this we mean anything from a few drinks a year up to a drink every two days. Infrequent drunkenness, such as an annual intoxication at a New Year’s party, would not exclude a man from this category. Except for two, all the sex-offender groups have from two to three fifths of their members in this category of moderate drinkers. Our nonsex offenders come close to marking the extremes of the range, the control group having the three-fifths figures and the prison group the two-fifths. The only observable clustering is that the homosexual offenders have rather large proportions (52 to 63 per cent) of moderate drinkers, the proportion being larger among those with older partners. This situation may reflect the fact that they frequent bars for sexual purposes.
The next category we employ is that of frequent use of alcohol, by which we mean the range from a minimum of one drink per day up to but not including alcoholism. We would include a man who regularly got drunk once every month even though his drinks, if prorated, might not attain a daily average. We are trying to include in this group those who use alcohol habitually, and those to whom alcohol has some importance, but who are not alcoholics. The groups with the fewest frequent users are the control group and the homosexual offenders vs. adults, both with 18 per cent, while the aggressors vs. children have the most, nearly one third. In general, the various groups cluster around proportions of one fifth to one quarter. The only trends noted were that the homosexual offenders tend to have rather few frequent users and the aggressors tend to have many.
There is a great variation among the comparative groups in incidence of alcoholism, the proportions ranging from the 6 per cent of the control group and the offenders vs. adults up to the 40 per cent of the aggressors vs. children. In all the tripartite groups those whose objects were children have larger proportions of alcoholics than those whose sex-offense objects were aged twelve or older. In two of the four tripartite groups these differences are quite large. There is also a tendency for those whose sexual objects were minors (age-period 12—15) to have more alcoholics among their members than those involved with adults.7
An additional and anticipated finding was that never less than half, and generally two thirds to all, of the offenses committed while drunk were committed by frequent drinkers or alcoholics. Moreover, of the drunken offenses (including aggression) against children, from half to four fifths were committed by just the alcoholics. Only about one fifth to two fifths of the drunken offenses against adults were by alcoholics. Conversely very few (0 to 5 per cent) of the offenses committed while sober were committed by alcoholics and not many more (0 to 17 per cent) by frequent drinkers.
In summary, while the use of alcohol is more important among the sex offenders than among the control group, it is more important still to the prison group. Alcohol as a group phenomenon does not seem to be any greater a factor in the predisposition to sex-offense behavior than in predisposition to nonsexual criminality. Intoxication inclines persons to legally punishable behavior, but it does not determine the form that behavior will take.
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