American Me: Social Disorganization Theory

Situated predominantly in urban areas, gangs are becoming a major problem in today's society. The youth and adults are turning into gang members often times to leave behind the current situation they are living now. Many people who aren't familiar or affiliated with gang members are known to be curious as to why it is that the youth and adults join a gang. Some answers might be the current situation, obtaining social status, sense of protection, amongst other personal reasons. Everyone who joins a gang has different situations about why they decide to associate with gang members. In the novel, G-Dog and the Homeboys by Celeste Fremon, focuses on the gang members about East Los Angeles. This book draws the attention on the youth residing within the East Los Angeles territory and a look at the East Los Angeles gang members and how they play a major role in the book as one of the Latino gangs in East Los Angeles.

The film brings the viewer forward in time to 1959 with Santana as a young man of 16 growing up in the barrios with his friends and fellow gang members Mundo and JD. After being arrested and sent to juvenile hall, Santana has his “manhood” taken from him on the first night and murders the man who sodomized him. The power and respect that killing this man brought from his peers was intoxicating; his act also brought him a long prison sentence.

Using criminological terms and concepts, focus on a jurisdiction, neighborhood, or geographic locale with which you are familiar. Regarding a human behavior which you select to focus on in that geographical space, write two concise yet comprehensive paragraphs on how social disorganization theory can inform your understanding of behavior and place, and one weakness which would find your understanding somehow lacking, and why. Then write two equally compelling paragraphs on how routine activities theory would foster your understanding, and one weakness which might leave your understanding lacking, and why.

According to Sierra Paquette-Struger reporter for the The Ontarion on September 9th, Ahmed Mohamed, young fourteen year old boy, was wrongfully arrested for bringing a homemade clock to MacArthur school. Mohamed successfully built a working clock and brought to school with the intentions to show his teachers. Mohamed is a young “minor who was detained and interrogated for hours and denied access to a lawyer and his parents. He was accused of something egregious and made to feel like a terrorist” (Paquette-Struger, 2015). Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, the father of the victim, believes that his son was treated wrongfully due to their Muslim religion and the events of the previous terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.

The documentary Crips and the Bloods: Made in America tells the dramatic story of the perpetual gang violence that runs the streets of Los Angeles, California. Gaining an inside look at how and why this violence is continued, the video focuses on the individuals that are affected by the gangs. Families are torn apart due to endless murders, children are taught to hate and act violently towards their neighbors, and people lose their soul to the gangs that they call their families. Of course every person must make a choice to engage in this sort of life, but sometimes these people are put into situations where there are no other options. In order to further think about what has caused and maintained the violence in the LA area, we can look towards Agnew’s General Strain Theory and the Labeling Theory.

Three correlates of criminality in the film were: poverty, mental health status, and family circumstances. The neighborhood, Beecher Terrace was the low-income area where most of the prisoners and juveniles delinquents came from. Neighborhoods like the one in film are the stereotypical type of areas where people in poverty live. The neighborhoods contain large populations of low income residents. A low income neighborhood typically means the schools zoned to the neighborhood are low quality and the crime rate is high. A individuals mental health status is also a predictor of

In this paper, I will analysis the film Boyz N the Hood based on and around the criminology concept of the General Strain Theory. The film Boyz N the Hood depicts a story about an African-American boy growing up in “the hood” of South Central LA. South Central is a place where on average 1 out of 21 African American men will be die as a result of “the streets”. African Americans within the African-American community are more susceptible to becoming a casualty to gang affiliation and violence. If a person makes the wrong choices in life or even if they are faced with the right circumstances that force this person to join a gang their likelihood of dying as a result dramatically increases.

Victor Rios is not only an author of a book called Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, but he is also an ex-felon. Rios holds a PH.D. in sociology and is now an assistant professor at the University of Santa Barbara. Victor Rios has published on juvenile justice, masculinity, and race and crime in scholarly in journals such as the Critical Criminology. He has not only lived the life he preaches about, he has shown to be extremely knowledgable in this life he has once lived and is also considered an expert in his field of sociology among his peers . Rios grew up in the streets of Oakland, California and found himself in the midst of trouble when he joined a gang at the age of 13. Victor Rios lived the life of the typical stereotypical hispanic young male, living in high crime poverty neighborhoods. As a young boy, he began dealing drugs, participating in the killings of people, and violence. Throughout his life, he has witnessed a great deal of horrific tragedies that not many thirteen year olds experience ever in their whole life. Throughout his experiences, he was able to live and tell his stories through his book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. Victor Rios has used his past experiences for the good, he has mentored many kids who are going through what he went though as an adolescent. Throughout the many obstacles he has faced, it has opened up the opportunity for him to write this book about his life and the gang

While neutralization and differential association theory both explain the homicides committed by Ortiz, the elements of differential association provide a more in-depth explanation. Ortiz learned from a very young age what attitudes and values were viewed as acceptable by his gang affiliated parents and peers. Ortiz was jumped into the 500 Block gang when he was only eleven years old. He was the youngest member of the gang ever allowed in. Considering his role models included his father, mother, aunt and older brother, which were successful gang members, he did not observe or experience an adequate exposure to conventional norms. Becoming a gang member was part of the family business. Many generations before Ortiz served in the gang and it had became a family tradition that Ortiz was expected to carry on. His friends were also in the gang because they lived in the same housing project as he did. The housing project that the gang formed due to where Ortiz was raised. The gang thrived from the poverty and disparity that was present in the housing development.

By the age of 16, Santana’s worldview and identity is well established. He exhibits a strong internalization of his Chicano (a Latino subculture) heritage and has begun to experience and establish an awareness of what Peter Bohmer describes as “internalized colonialism:” the socially and economically structured practice of securing the labor of non-Whites for the least desirable, "dirty and servile" jobs that are unwanted by Whites (Bohmer, 1998). Forming his own gang seemed to be a “natural” alternative to becoming a “pawn” in the well-established system of internalized colonialism. His Latino gang became a sub-cultural “vent” for relieving much of young Santana’s social, economic, and personal hardships, as well as a means of developing self-respect through the illegal and coercive powers made possible by gang activity and gang unity.

Gangs are an organized group of criminals that want to be respected, a sense of belonging, and protection. Gangbanging is a method gangsters use to get what they desire for instance, they commit violent acts, illegal activities, and terrorizing the community. La Vida Loca is a lifestyle gangsters live by to gangbang, to create havoc, to live life on the edge. Luis Rodriguez, author of “La Vida Loca: Two Generations of Gang Members”, is writing about his and his son’s gangbanging experiences. Rodriguez migrated from Mexico to Los Angeles at the age of 2, by the age of 12 he had built silence within his body and wanted nothing but bring fear to others as he felt fear all his life. By the age of 15 Rodriguez had dropped out of school, at age

Immigrants coming to this country often end up with gang affiliations. In Youth Gangs in American Society, Shelden, Tracy and Brown (2013) note that “the emergence of

This boundary was also a factor that lead Raoul to joining a gang in his youth. He affectionately referred to them as the “homeboys” and didn’t go into too much detail about their activities (and I was afraid to pry) but his membership in this gang was one of the things that got him into trouble and negatively influenced his educational attainments. Raoul grew up in Sanger, surrounded by other Mexican immigrants who were in the same low-economic cycle and poor neighborhoods as he was and his parents were concerned about making sure the bills were paid, and worked long hours to make ends meet. Strains on the family structure, coupled with linguistic boundaries, leads to a breakdown in the family structure, forcing youth to look outwardly for support and care, which is provided by gang membership (Lee and Zhou 2004). Gang affiliation provides a surrogate family that gives support, no matter what factors might be working against its members and provides a place for marginalized to belong, especially in migrant communities.

Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s “Social Disorganization Theory” is an ecological theory based on the concept that people and their environments (neighborhoods) are related and affected by each other. Robert E. Parks, who saw the city as a patterned ecological system, thought that poverty-stricken inner cities were areas invaded by new occupants with different nationalities and ethnicity and that the social structure or “nature” of the neighborhood was thus affected. The basis for Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s “Low Self-Control Theory” is that crime is the result of a person’s need for immediate pleasure and comfort, and this impulse causes him or her to commit an illegal act. Individuals focusing on the present may lack the ability

In the early part of the twentieth century, some social observers criticize that “while criminal anthropologists Lombroso and Hooton focused their attention on discerning whether criminals had larger foreheads or more tattoos than non criminals, they ignored the larger changes in society that were occurring around then” (Cullen, 97). In other words, these social observers indicate that the traditional criminology, such as the biological theory, is established without considering the presence of the society. Thus, researchers start to focus on examining the social factors, such as education level, age, and social class to explain criminality in the context of the community. In this paper I will argue that in the frame of the social disorganization theory, the social characteristics, such as instability of high crime community are factors of social disorganization, and crime is viewed as a phenomenon that is caused by social disorders. As a result, the criminal justices agencies tend to implement laws and policies that stress the importance of “collective efficacy.” Nevertheless, as one of the key stages in criminal justice system, incarceration may increase the potentiality of instability, and may lead to more crime activities.