preview

Building Social Bonds Essay

Better Essays

The fourth and final step to building social bonds is the social bond of belief or creating a common value system. The halfway house/community college needs to create a common pro-social value system that ex-felons can buy into that will utilize peer pressure among the ex-felons to reinforce the system. The common value system could steal certain ideas from so called street culture such as honor, loyalty, and respect. Those same ideas are also part of military culture. The emphasis would be on a universal moral values such as respecting others, being nice to other people, etc. Ex-felons already have a common deviant value system, but there are values that could be pro-social. A value is not inherently bad. A value only becomes a negative when it is interpreted badly. For example, loyalty can be a good thing, but when it leads people down bad paths it is a problem. Society is built …show more content…

Though such participants might not ever earn their degree, there would still be strong social bonds built between the ex-felons involved. If the program is successful these social bonds should extend past the program. In the best case scenario, these social bonds would last for life. If the program is truly successful, strong social bonds will not just be built among the ex-felons, but within and between their families as well. Imagine the strong social bonds that could be created among the children of the ex-felons involved. Children tend to gravitate towards others that are similar to themselves and any program involving ex-felons will have children interacting with the children of other ex-felons either accidently or directly encouraged by the program. If the program is truly successful, the social bonds built will transcend into the next generation and hopefully beyond even that generation. As a result, such a program could break the multigenerational cycle of criminality that exists across generations in some

Get Access