| Native Americans are depicted as one of the more delinquent ethnicities in the United States. Still they remain one of the least studied. Research on the degree of offending is mixed and the explanation of their delinquency is even less understood. Among the explanations, cultural discontinuity theory has found considerable patronage. On the other hand, self-control theory is perhaps the most scrutinized explanation of crime and delinquency in the past decade plus, yet the importance of race as a component of the theory has not been sufficiently addressed. In particular, the influence of self-control on Native American delinquency remains relatively unexplored.;Using a sample of 328 Native American and 1122 White students, I explore the delinquency, self-control, and cultural discontinuity of Native Americans. Native Americans report higher levels of offending for four of the five categories, substance use being the exception. Native Americans report low self-control relative to their White counterpart. For both races, parental supervision influences self-control and self-control influences most forms of delinquency. However, self-control fails to mediate the effects of parental supervision on delinquency. Cultural discontinuity by and large fails to predict either the self-control or delinquency of Native Americans; hence, the mediating effect of self-control is irrelevant.;The results generally support Gottfredson and Hirschi's claim that self-control theory transcends race. Nonetheless, many of the findings raise questions about the subtleties of the theory, most notably the failure of self-control to mediate the influence of familial variables on delinquency. Furthermore, the results seriously challenge the claims of cultural discontinuity, though a wholesale dismissal of the theory is resisted given the nascent stage of empirical research on the topic. If nothing else the results call for further study on each issue presented. |
