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In criminology, Subcultural Theory emerged from the work of the Chicago School on gangs and developed into a set of theories arguing that certain groups or subcultures in society have values and attitudes that are conducive to crime and violence. The primary focus is on juvenile delinquency because theorists believe that if this pattern of offending can be understood and controlled, it will break the transition from teenage offender into habitual criminal. Image File history File links Scale_of_justice. ...
Criminology is the study of crime as a social phenomenon, including the causes and consequences of crime, criminal behavior, as well as the development of, and impact of laws. ...
Penology (from the Latin poena, punishment) comprises penitentiary science: that concerned with the processes devised and adopted for the punishment, repression, and prevention of crime, and the treatment of prisoners. ...
Anomie, in contemporary English, means the absence of any kind of rule, law, principle or order. ...
Differental association - A theory developed by Edwin Sutherland that holds that through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques, and motives for criminal behavior. ...
Deviant behavior is behavior that is a recognized violation of social norms. ...
Labeling Theory is a sociological approach to explaining how criminal behavior is perpetuated by the police and other labelers. The theory hypothesizes that the labels applied to individuals influence their behavior, particularly that the application of negative labels (such as criminal or felon) promote deviant behavior. ...
In criminology, the Rational Choice Theory restates the Utilitarian belief that man is a reasoning actor who weighs means and ends, costs and benefits, and makes a rational choice. ...
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In criminology, the Social Disorganisation Theory was one of the most important theories developed by the Chicago School, related to ecological theories. ...
Observational learning or social learning refers to learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and replicating behaviour observed in others. ...
In criminology, the Strain Theories state that social structures within society may encourage citizens to commit crime. ...
Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective which examines how individuals and groups interact, focusing on the creation of personal identity through interaction with others. ...
Victimology is the study of why certain people are victims of crime and how lifestyles affect the chances that a certain person will fall victim to a crime. ...
Blue-collar crime is regarded as consisting of violent crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, and vandalism, as well as things like shoplifting and burglary -- as opposed to white-collar crime. ...
Corporate crime refers to criminal practices by individuals that have the legal authority to speak for a corporation or company. ...
Juvenile delinquency refers to antisocial or criminal acts performed by juveniles. ...
Organized crime is crime carried out systematically by formal criminal organizations. ...
In the standard sense of the phrase, a political crime is an action deemed illegal by a government in order to control real or imagined threats to its survival, at the expense of a range of human rights and freedoms. ...
In criminology public order crime is defined by Siegel (2004) as ...crime which involves acts that interfere with the operations of society and the ability of people to function efficiently, i. ...
In criminology, public order crime case law in the United States is essential to understanding how the courts interpret the policy of laws where the moral and social order of the state appears to be threatened by clearly identified behavior. ...
In criminology, state crime is activity or failures to act that break the states own criminal law or public international law. ...
In criminology, the concept of state-corporate crime refers to crimes that result from the relationship between the policies of the state and the policies and practices of commercial corporations. ...
White-collar crimes (a term coined by Edwin Sutherland in 1939) or business crimes are those crimes specifically performed by white collar employees. ...
Deterrence ALOHA!! is a means of controlling a persons behavior through negative motivational influences, namely fear of punishment. ...
Prison reform is the steady improvement of conditions inside prisons, aiming at a more effective penal system. ...
Prisoner abuse is the mistreatment of persons while they are under arrest or incarcerated. ...
The movement for Prisoners rights is based on the principle that prisoners, even though they are deprived of liberty, are still entitled to basic human rights. ...
This theory of punishment is based on the notion that punishment is to be inflicted on a offender so as to reform him, or rehabilitate him so as to make his re-integration into society easier. ...
Recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior. ...
The neutrality of this article is disputed. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ...
Criminology is the study of crime as a social phenomenon, including the causes and consequences of crime, criminal behavior, as well as the development of, and impact of laws. ...
In sociology, the Chicago School refers to the first major attempt to study the urban environment by combined efforts of theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago. ...
Juvenile delinquency refers to antisocial or criminal acts performed by juveniles. ...
Definitions
Culture is all that is transmitted socially rather than biologically, representing the norms, customs and values against which behaviour is judged by the majority. A subculture is a distinctive culture within a culture, so its norms and values differ from the majority culture but do not necessarily represent a culture deemed deviant by the majority. A subculture is distinguished from a counterculture which operates in direct opposition to the majority culture. In sociology, a norm, or social norm, is a rule that is socially enforced. ...
Frederick M. Thrasher Thrasher (1927: 46) studied gangs in a systematic way, analysing gang activity and gang behaviour. He defined gangs by the process they go through to form a group: "The gang is an interstitial group originally formed spontaneously, and then integrated through conflict. It is characterised by the following types of behaviour: meeting face to face, milling, movement through space as a unit, conflict, and planning. The result of this collective behaviour is the development of tradition, unreflective internal structure, esprit de corps, solidarity, morale, group awareness, and attachment to a local territory." Thrasher maintained that gangs originate naturally during the adolescent years from spontaneous play groups which get into various kinds of mischief. They become gangs when they excite disapproval and opposition, thus acquiring a more definite group-consciousness. Like Durkheim and Merton, Thrasher described how the environment can be conducive to delinquent behaviour, that gang subcultures arose in the cracks, or "interstices," of urban neglect combined with the inner cracks of identity that occur in the turbulent years of adolescence. Clifford Shaw also described delinquency as a group activity which was transmitted from older to younger boys with the streets and jails of Chicago as their classrooms. Thrasher confirmed the work of the others in the School, finding the most gangs in the zone of transition with the highest incidence of single-parent families, unemployment, multiple family dwellings, welfare cases, and low levels education. These were the slums, the ghetto, and the barrios and he found evidence of at least 1,313 gangs with an estimated 25,000 members who found a different way to acquire an identity and status. The gangs became a youth's reference group where main values, beliefs, and goals were formed and, in a sense, also became a family, offering a sense of belonging and self-esteem.
E. Frankin Frazier In the earliest stages of the Chicago School and their investigation of human ecology, one of the key tropes was the concept of disorganisation which contributed to the emergence of an underclass. Analysts have viewed the ghetto as symptomatic of poverty and disorganisation, measuring the extent to which it diverges from middle-class values, representing it as a place of disorder, anomie and immorality. As the first African-American chair at Chicago, Frazier (1931) stressed the marital disruption, decadence, destitution, crime, and vice into which "Negroes" inevitably sank when migrating into the urban environment, using family structures as the determining feature of disorganisation. Two subcultural issues have emerged: Ecology is sometimes used incorrectly as a synonym for the natural environment or environmentalism. ...
A trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i. ...
Anomie, in contemporary English, means the absence of any kind of rule, law, principle or order. ...
- Frazier (1932) was interested to determine whether any West African customs survived in the U.S. According to the Creolists, the U.S. slave population and their descendants did not share a common culture and their customs, religious beliefs, dialects, and social structures varied too greatly to influence ethnic and cultural cohesiveness. Frazier who was of an extremely conservative creolist persuasion expounded that all cultural remnants of the indigenous culture had been destroyed in the melee of slavery and, in effect, the West African heritage had little or nothing to do with the present African American population in the U.S. Others of a revisionist persuasion, emphasised a continuity in African history and argued that there is a layering of cultures representing the diaspora populations in the New World.
- Frazier (1957) continued the discussion on social distance and what he terms the "common moral order", chronicling the growing social class distinctions between moneyed African-Americans who mimic whites, and their less fortunate brethren. Frazier (1932) had noted in his history of slavery that where human relationships were established between masters and slaves, both were less likely to engage in cruelty toward each other. It is also known that debtor slaves were as a rule treated with more consideration than were foreign slaves obtained by capture and trade. This system of protective patronage continued in the relationship between white culture and the new black bourgeoisie.
Finally, Frazier discussed the question of whether the Negro population was "over-churched" as a distinctive social structure. He identified five attributes of black families from a matriarchal perspective including strong achievement orientation, strong work orientation, flexible family roles, strong kinship bonds, and strong religious orientation which potentially introduced a gender bias into the subculture. Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. ...
Albert K. Cohen Cohen (1955) did not look at the economically oriented career criminal, but looked at the delinquency subculture, focusing on gang delinquency among working class youth in slum areas which developed a distinctive culture as a response to their perceived lack of economic and social opportunity within U.S. society. He was a student of Edwin Sutherland (Differential association|Differential Association Theory]] and Social Transmission Theory) and [[Robert K. Merton (Strain Theory). The features of this subculture were: From The American System of Criminal Justice by George F. Cole and Christopher E. Smith, Tenth Edition, Page 14: Crimes cimitted in the course of business were first described by crimonologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939, when he developed the concept of white-collar crime. ...
In criminology, the Strain Theories state that social structures within society may encourage citizens to commit crime. ...
- anti-utilitarian: in many cases, there was no profit motive in thefts or other crimes. The main intention was to foster peer bonding through sharing the experience of breaking the laws.
- collective reaction formation: the gang inverted the values of the majority culture, deliberately pursuing the mirror image of the American Dream.
- malice: many acts of vandalism and property damage were motived by spite, contempt, and personal intention to injure.
- short-termism: the gang lived for the moment, looking for instant gratification.
- group autonomy: everything was aimed at consolidating group loyalty.
Cohen (1958) explained this in terms similar to Strain Theory (i.e. as a form of rebellion) in that education taught the young to strive for social status through academic achievment but, when most of the working class failed, this promoted "status frustration" or reaction formation, inverting middle-class values to strike back at the system that had let them down. Middle class values stress independence, success, academic achievement, delayed gratification, control of aggression, and respect for property. Lower class parents encourage different values in their children (i.e. different socialisation. In lower class families ambition and planning must give way to pressing issues of the moment. They depend more on others, and have more of a group orientation, “watching each others backs”. In criminology, the Strain Theories state that social structures within society may encourage citizens to commit crime. ...
In psychology, socialization is the process by which children and others adopt the behavior patterns of the culture that surrounds them. ...
Walter Miller Miller (1958, 1959) agreed with Cohen that there was a delinquency subculture, but argued that it arose entirely from the lower class way of life. There was a clear distinction in values between the two social classes. Whereas the middle class is achievement and social goal oriented, Miller thought that lower class parents were more concerned with ensuring that their children stayed out of trouble, e.g. sons avoiding fights and girls avoiding pregnancy. Boys were expected to be tough and street-smart which gave them an incentive to join a gang. Given that their ordinary lives were boring, the exictement of crime was a welcome relief, bringing a sense of autonomy by denying the social controls imposed by the state. For the middle class, the most important institutions are family, work, and (for the child) school. For the lower class another institution plays a crucial role – the same sex peer group or gang is more important than family, work or school because it offers a sense of belonging, and a way to achieve status that they cannot easily achieve in mainstream society. Thus, delinquency was not a reaction against middle class values but rather a means of living up to their own cultural expectations for toughness and smartness. Indeed, the gang only recruited the most “able” members, so membership of a gang confirmed high status. It was simply unfortunate that the state had decided that many gang activites were crimes.
References - Cohen, Albert K. (1955). Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, Glencoe. IL: Free Press.
- Cohen, Albert & Short, James, (1958), "Research in Delinquent Subcultures", Journal of Social Issues, pp. 20-37.
- Frazier, Edward Franklin (1931) The Negro Family in Chicago (revised and abridged edition: 1967). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Frazier, Edward Franklin. (1932). The Free Negro Family, Arno Press.
- Frazier, Edward Franklin. (1949). The Negro in the United States. New York: Macmillan.
- Frazier, E. Franklin. (1957). The Black Bourgeoisie.
- Frazier, E. Franklin. (1957). Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World. New York: Alfred Knopf.
- Miller, Walter, (1958), "Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency". Journal of Social Issues. Vol. 14, 5-20.
- Miller, Walter, 1959, "Implications of Urban Lower-Class Culture For Social Work". The Social Service Review. Vol. 33, 219-236.
- Thrasher, F.M. (1927). The Gang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Thrasher, F.M. (1933). "Juvenile delinquency and crime prevention". Journal of Educational Sociology, 6, 500-509.
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