Code Of The Street Summary

Everyone wants to be a part of the streets but not everyone has the heart, dedication, or strength to live the lifestyle. There is a law of ethics when running around in the streets. There are rules that one always has to follow in order to survive. There is no love when dealing with those that follow the code, ones heart has to be made coal because anything can happen and anything goes. Out there in the streets you are a family that continuously looks out for each other and let nothing separate the bond that you have on the streets. In this paper I will discuss what the code of the street is and what is consist of, also residential segregation and how it hold those in the streets back from achieving success.

Culture in urban communities, also referred to as inner-cities, are growing increasingly violent. In the article, The Code of the Streets by Elijah Anderson, he begins to take an in-depth look at the root of the evil. He deduces that economic factors, parenting and the troublesome environments largely influence the violent norms within this culture.

“Deviance in sociological context describes actions or behaviors that violate cultural norms including formally-enacted rules (e.g., crime) as well as informal violations of social norms.”

Whether in the Black community, or any community, we know that there are some factors that correlate with a lower rate of violence. Two of the leading ones are: economic stability and strong social networks. Communities in which people have their basic needs met correlate with a lower incidence of violence. Both of these will be difficult to achieve until racism is addressed (see reason number

The Elijah Anderson’s article, “Code of the Streets” is a perfect illustration for cultural arguments because it involves environments that are susceptible to learning a criminal culture; even up to a point of promoting that type of criminal behavior as “normal”. It also has links to Differential Association and Social Learning theories of crime

In Between Good and Ghetto Nikki Jones reflects the vulnerabilities experienced by inner-city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence. She finds that many youth feel a sense of distrust toward law enforcement and the judicial system and thus seek alternative approaches to resolve conflict. Girls expressed that based on their perceptions from neighborhood observations of police interactions, the criminal justice system was ineffectual, apathetic, and potentially racist. This often led girls to negotiate their conflict with violence whether it be in their neighborhoods, or on the school grounds. This challenges mainstream notions of feminity which suggests that girls do not engage in physical altercations leading to disciplinary infractions by school

Paul Watt and Kevin Stenson, The Street: It’s a bit dodgy around there’ safety, danger, ethnicity and young people’s uses of public spaces, chapter 15 in Geographies of youth, youth cultures: Cool places The aim of this chapter is to question young people’s feelings and experiences when moving around a town in the South East of England. The town, named Thamestown by the authors. The area in which Thamestown is location, is described as a predominantly white, wealthy middle class area of the south east of England. Between June 1994 and July 1995 Watt, Stenson and other researchers investigated, how an ethnically mixed group of young people use public spaces in terms of danger and safety. Several key points arise in this chapter. Racial segregation

The Bond connects to a lot of information from our textbook and class discussions. To begin with, article 28 in our textbook titled Violence and the Inner-City Code relates to this book. For instance, the article talks about how by simply living in such an environment such as the inner city; young people are put at special risk of falling victim to aggressive behavior. This was shown in the section of The Bond written by Sampson. He tells a story that between the summer of his junior and senior years of high school him and his friends got the idea of robbing drug dealers to make some quick money. In order to do this, they preyed on young drug salesmen, pulling a gun on them, taking their money, and driving off. The plan worked for a little while, but then fell through. While they were robbing someone, two policemen walked up. Sampson pretended to by a bystander while his friends tried to outrun the police. They failed, and ended up being detained. Sampson ran home and told his older sister everything, which then made him call the cops the next day. Soon enough, Sampson ended up serving four weeks at the Essex County youth house (106-107). Just because Sampson lived where he did, he got drawn into aggressive behavior and ended up paying for it. The article in the textbook also states that there are often forces that can counteract the negative influences- by far the most powerful is a strong, loving, “decent” family committed to middle-class values. This was

Throughout the article “The Code of the Streets,” Elijah Anderson explains the differences between “decent” and “street” people that can be applied to the approaches of social control, labeling, and social conflict theories when talking about the violence among inner cities due to cultural adaptations.

In this paper, I plan to first describe the “Code of the Street” which is a term coined and a book written by Elijah Anderson. I would also summarize and describe two journal articles that test Anderson’s idea of the “Code of the Street” for a more definite explanation. I will tell how the two articles that I have chosen relates to some of the concepts that Anderson talked about in the book. I will then define general strain theory and social learning or differential association theory. Lastly, I will explain how general strain theory and social learning theory or differential association theory explain some of the behaviors that were seen by the individuals in the book published by Anderson. I will point out some of the individual’s behavior and demonstrate whether it may lead to crime or whether the behavior was learned in any way.

For this assignment I decided to read the book Code of the Street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city by Elijah Anderson. This book is about how inner city people live and try and survive by living with the code of the streets. The code of the streets is basically morals and values that these people have. Most of the time it is the way they need to act to survive. Continuing on within this book review I am going to discuss the main points and arguments that Anderson portrays within the book. The main points that the book has, goes along with the chapters. These points consist of Street and decent families, respect, drugs violence, street crime, decent daddy, the mating game, black inner city grandmother. Now within

According to Leoniek Kroneman, Rolf Loeber, and Alison E. Hipwell (2004) research is looking at four major points and questions for girls on conduct problems and adolescences; which it also focuses on filling the gaps in reviewing neighborhood influences on gender differences in conduct problems and delinquency. The methodology that use was meta-analysis; notably many sources were used in this meta-analysis, but some really stand out. One of the sample that Kromeneman, Loeber, and Hipwell (2004) use was take a sample of 225 girls’ age 11 to 19 years old of African American living in housing projects; which more than half of the girls had admitted that they had attack someone out of rage and displeasure, and addition

African Americans quite often experience lifestyles in impoverished, inner-city neighborhoods. Violence generally consumes these types of neighborhood. In this instance, it no longer matters whether children from these neighborhoods are exposed to violence on the television because it is a daily part of their lives. Most people would positively use their negative background and experiences to strive

Normative conceptions of deviance “assumes there is a general set of norms of behavior, conduct, and conditions with which we can agree” and emphasizes the characteristics that separate the deviance from social norms (Laus, 2017). In a normative perspective, behavior that conforms to the social norms is “expected”, and many people do meet these expectations (Laus, 2017). However, when people’s behavior violates those expectations despite the consequences, the normative perspective asks why those people chose to deviant rather than conform (Laus, 2017). Thus, using a normative approach, one may argue that poverty results from one’s own behavior and poor life choices, such as dropping out of high school. In his book, Deviant Behavior, Eleventh Edition, Erich Goode describes Americans’ views of and the stigma of poverty and disrepute, and one view, in particular, employs a normative outlook, as stated in the following: “If people can’t do what they have to do to get ahead, some feel, they deserve to be poor; what the poor need is sufficient grit, character, determination, and gumption to pull themselves up out of their condition by their bootstraps” (85). This American view emphasizes the poor’s behavior and assumes why those in poverty do not conform, implies people are poor due to not being determined or resourceful enough to overcome their economic hardships.

Adolescents’ fear of crime is another factor that likely contributes to adolescents’ sense of neighborhood belonging. Fear of crime refers to how safe someone feels when doing activities in one’s neighborhood, such as walking to school. Fear of crime can also refer to how people feel about their environment after hearing from other people’s experience with violence (Ceballo et al., 2001) . Exposure to community violence influences youth’s fear and anxiety levels. Adolescents that are highly exposed to crime experience more fear and trait anxiety than those that haven’t been exposed to that much crime. These adolescents have more fears of injury, danger, and the unknown. They also exhibit more internalized problems like withdrawn behavior and somatic complaints (Molnar, Gortmaker, Bull & Buka, 2004). Gates and Rohe’s (1987) revised reaction to crime model, tested on six Atlanta neighborhoods, showed that the longer one lives in an area and is familiarized with it, the higher the resident perceive the crime rate in that area is. Past victimization and perceived neighborhood problems is also positively associated with perception of crime rate. The model also found that the more people interact within their neighborhood, the greater their fear of crime is. Researchers suggest this could be because when socializing, people exchange knowledge of crimes being committed, which enhances their fear of victimization.