Essay on Albert Cohen's Theory

In the years prior to the creation for the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program, America’s inner cities was experiencing a substantial increase of gang membership along the youth living in impoverished communities. During the early 1990s, many viewed gang activity as a particular community’s problem, but as youth and gang violence was increasing drastically across the United States’ inner cities, the public’s perception about this social issue changed. Due to the rapid rise of gang violence and youth membership, delinquent behavior by youths began to receive a substantial amount of academic and media attention.

The predominate theory of the social structure perspective that will be applied to Boyz N the Hood is Robert Merton’s Anomie/Strain theory and Robert Agnew’s General Strain theory which closely applies to Merton’s. The strain theory holds that crime is a function of the conflict between goals people have and the means that they can use to obtain them legally. Most people desire wealth, material possessions, power, prestige, and other life comforts. Although these social and economic goals are common to people in all economic standings, strain theorists insist these goals are class dependent. Members of the lower class are unable to achieve these goals of success through conventional or legal means. In return they feel anger, frustration, and resentment, which is referred to as the “strain.” Lower class citizens can either accept their conditions and live out their days being socially responsible or they can choose alternate means of achieving success illegally. These means can include but are not limited to theft, violence, or drug trafficking.

Prior to the infamous Crips and Bloods, there was the Slausons. Responding to the lack of organized activities for African Americans, three friends created a club, called the Slausons. Members joined to gain status, identity, to become part of a family and feel accepted. However, the Los Angeles Police Department was quick to label them as a gang. There grew neighborhood rivalries, which resulted in competitive fights, however they were not out to destroy one another.

Based on the social disorganization theory; Shaw and McKay account for high crime begins with poverty, low socioeconomic status and the inability to “control the teenage population,” (Sampson, 2016). Shaw and McKay also knew that within the community, delinquency was a trait that was picked-up by and from other delinquents. Furthermore, if the ability to control young

Even as delinquent subcultures classically are related to a wide variety of criminal activities, among delinquent groups and subcultures there is enormous disparity in the quality and force of group standards, morals, and interests. Furthermore, the degree to which delinquent activities is associated to these aspects is challenging. A large amount criminal

In the 1950’s, Cohen (1955) took Merton’s theory of crime further by focusing on gang delinquency within the working class demographic. Cohen used the central idea of the anomie theory but narrowed its focus on this particular subculture and elaborated it in order to explain the characteristics of gang delinquency.

Future gang members tend to become involved in delinquency--including violence--and alcohol or marijuana use at an early age. During childhood and early adolescence, friendships with aggressive peers, conduct problems, and involvement in delinquency are stepping stones to gang membership. Future gang members are likely to have other gang members in their school classrooms, they perform poorly in elementary school, and they have a low degree of commitment to school. They often are identified as learning disabled. They show higher levels of stability in the family, peer group, and school settings, and they spend lots of unsupervised time with friends. Many youth gang members have none of these characteristics. These are good kids, from good families, and they are good students; however, these youths do not remain in gangs long. Adolescents ' allegiances to friends, gangs, and other peer groups tend to be brief.

As seen in the video the one mother saw that the gangs were trying to pressure her son into a gang through school and his friends so she moved but the same thing happened once they moved to another school there was no avoiding it. So the kid’s peers have a very high influence on the individual. If the friends are already engaging in delinquent activity then it would be somewhat natural thing for the individual to mimic the same things. The second part of the theory is commitment. The theory explains that participating in activities the promote adherence to societies moral and ethical code of conduct will keep them from participating in delinquent behavior. Most of the kids are not engaging in after school activities or other activities that would promote behavior that is looked up to in society. The next part of the theory is involvement or preoccupation. Herschi related this mainly to school and doing homework to keep the kids occupied so they won’t get caught up in delinquent behavior. But many of these kids aren’t going to school on a regular basis or they gave up on the schooling system so they are not being preoccupied with anything that is beneficial to achieving prosocial bonds. The final part of this theory is belief in the laws and moral code. As the one man said “people in gangs don’t care as long as they’re making money.” By that statement alone you can assume that they will

Juvenile delinquents have created a subculture that provides them with motives, reasons, and justifications that enable them to account for their involvement in proscribed activities. Within this subculture they have developed a rational to justify their misdeeds, during times when they are brought under scrutiny by police, courts etc. For instance, when youth engage in a crime, and are charged with a criminal offense, they deny their involvement. What youth fail to realize, is that as they engage in criminal acts, they disrupt the fabric of society.

Criminological and Gang MembershipApril SmolkowiczGeorgia Gwinnett CollegeCriminological and Gang MembershipSocial scientists have researched and documented empirical findings of the many one-of-a-kind influential factors of formative years gang and non-gang involvement across the United States. While it is now not feasible to predict whether or not a younger man or woman will be a section of a gang, possession of certain danger elements can extend the probability.Social Leaning Theory Article One The motive of this paper is to analyze adolescence gang and non-gang attitudes and behaviors with the social learning idea factors and its possibility of predicting youths self-reporting of gang membership, explicitly with the ethnicity of “Hispanics’ and Anglos, of eight-grade college students in two southwestern cities”. The lookup article is empirical that meets the requirements of the capstone mission with the gaining of understanding on the difficulty of adolescence gang and non-gang membership attitudes and behaviors. The hypothetical context is primarily based absolutely on comparing key variables of the social learning theory, advantageous reinforcers, terrible punishers, and indications of differential definitions.The lookup method of cross-sectional quantitative records is used, that is then recoded systematically and equipped to be entered into a pc database. This evaluation will serve as an additional evaluation with the previous longitudinal information that is used

The socioeconomic stratification system shows a great disparity when examine the two polar ends of the spectrum; one is a high elevated class and the other a poor lower class. The high socioeconomic status creates an affluent neighborhood of well-kept and normative values of society; such as violence is wrong and a person maintains respect though hard work and opening his/her pocketbook. Meanwhile the lower class status formulates a broken and rundown neighborhood where social stress and chaos roam the streets through juvenile gangs, which promote their own personal values (such as encouraging violence, sex, and drugs) known as “the code of the street.” Elijah Anderson’s book, Code of the Street: Delinquency, Violence, and the Moral Life

Gang behaviour and conformity is due to lack of family, guidance and/or authority. Gang members often come from homes where they feel isolated or abandoned. They may turn to gangs when their need for love is not being seen at home. “[After completing a ten-year study of gangs in New York, Boston and LA, Jonkowski wrote] I found that there was as many gang members from homes where nuclear families were intact as there were families where the father was absent.” (Jankowski, 2002) Many teens in gangs do not feel loved and therefore do not feel important or special. Usually, in most

I'm Dr. Alexander Cohen, and I'm pleased to instruct you all. I received my PhD in 2011 from the University of Iowa, where I studied how politics and the weather interact. Since then, I've traveled throughout the U.S. and taught at a few different institutions, and currently reside in Rock Island, Illinois.

Crime and delinquency subculture reflects on culture patterns surrounding crime and juvenile delinquency. It is created not only by individuals, but as one culture, the American culture. Subculture is derivative of, but different from some larger referential cultures. This term is used to share systems of norms, values, individual, groups and the cultural system itself. Criminal or delinquent subcultures indicate systems of norms, values, or interest that support criminal or delinquent behavior. That’s why many juveniles are linked to the same criminal acts as youngsters. They tend to follow a pattern that is expected in their age group, like stealing. Young people experience their opportunity as

Gang Culture has increasingly become a subculture for many teenage youths. Mainly minority teens, these social outcast are often have no real economic stability and no parental supervision or guidance. As a result, teenagers often rebel and seek comfort in gangs. These gangs provide what is lacking in their lives, a sense of belonging. Minorities are often stereotyped and criticized, especially minorities born into poverty. They are condemned simply because they are not of the same race or of the same class as the majority (often middle class whites). Before these minorities can even prove themselves equal, society already pushes them towards the subculture that has risen out of oppression and rebellion. Gang culture reinforces, and in