Street Corner Society Synopsis Essay

The Brothers are a group of mostly black boys (with the exception of one) who so not smoke, drink regularly, and value education as they all attend high school. Though they are merely a peer group and not their own subculture as they value academics and athletics and are not as bothered by the stigma of living in the projects. Describing the differences in the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers, the MacLeod points out that the Hallway Hangers rarely have parental supervision, many have lived in public housing for several years, many have absent fathers, and the educational attainment of their families is very low. The Brothers on the other hand have more parents and siblings who graduated high school and attended at least some college, more have father figures living in the house, and their average time living in Clarendon Heights is less than the Hallway Hangers.

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.

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

Before getting into the case of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Podair begins by discussing how the New York population became so divided in the first place. After WWII ended in 1945, the industry landscape shifted from on one that mainly relied on manufacturing to one contrived of service occupations. As a result, there was a plummet in the demand for low education labor, and a spike in the desire for workers with higher education. Resultantly, black communities were marginalized and jobless. Similarly, housing constraints and de facto segregation lead to mainly black neighborhoods, leading to neighborhoods that provided abysmal education for its local youth. A region in the Bronx that epitomized this lackluster educational system is the schooling system of Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

There are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz, tells a story about the family of LaJoe and Paul Rivers. The book focuses on Lafayette and Pharaoh, two of the younger children in the family, and their interactions with each other, the neighborhood, their family, their friends, and the police. Following the family over three years shows the importance of neighborhood factors when it comes to crime. According to Sampson and Groves (1989), social disorganization refers to “the inability of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls”. Many aspects in the book exemplify how neighborhood factors, social controls, and community factors have impacts on crime. The book exemplifies how neighborhood disadvantage can lead to informal social controls, which in turn produces crime. Due to these factors, social disorganization is the best theory to explain the crime that occurs in There are No Children Here.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the “Outsiders” takes place, the divide in the social classes is very prevalent. The two main social classes that were represented were the rich Socs and the poor greasers. The two groups divide themselves by what their families incomes are either you are rich and live on the westside or you are poor and live on the east side. “ Hey can you see the sunset real good from the West side?” (Hinton,129) In the text it is showing Pony talking to the Soc girl Cherry who lives on the Westside. It is showing how divided the two groups are. People usually hand out by people they in the similar social class with a few exceptions of course. Furthermore in the story the westsiders the Socs hung out together, and the east sider the greasers hung out together dividing each other. In addition the two gangs divide themselves by how they act. “ There are lots of drive-ins in town - the Socs go to The Way Out and to Rusty’s, and the greasers go to The Dingo and Jay’s” (Hinton,19) In the text the gangs both went to there own hangouts because the Socs went to there higher end places and the greasers went to there lower end places. A real life example of this is that all of the most of the rich families would hang out at a country club with other friends in their social class and the poor would hang out a bar with there friends.Social classes create divides in the community Because the Rich Socs and the Poor Greasers live in separate parts of the city because of their income differences. That difference also leads them to handout at different places and handout with that group of people in that social classes. The Isolation of these two groups lead to all the violence that was seen throughout the book.

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.

In his research Jay Macleod, compares two groups of teenage boys, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. Both groups of teenagers live in a low income neighborhood in Clarendon Heights, but they are complete opposites of each other. The Hallway Hangers, composed of eight teenagers spend most of their time in the late afternoon or early evening hanging out in doorway number 13 until very late at night. The Brothers are a group of seven teenagers that have no aspirations to just hang out and cause problems, the Brothers enjoy active pastimes such as playing basketball. The Hallway Hangers all smoke, drink, and use drugs. Stereotyped as “hoodlums,” “punks,” or “burnouts” by outsiders, the Hallway Hangers are actually a varied group, and much

The two main divisions were between the Greasers and the Socs, and this rivalry led to many conflicts in the book. Hinton illustrates the divisions and fighting in this quote, “They caught him and one of them had a lot of rings on his hand that’s what had cut Johnny up so badly” (Hinton 33). Johnny was attacked by four Socs when he was playing with a football at the park. There are many times in the book where Socs attacked Greasers that were walking alone. Howard explains the divisions and violence of the gangs in this quote, “Tulsa was one of many American cities that had seen an increasing division between social classes since World War II, and the animosity between Greasers and Socs gangs illustrated the extent to which this division between social classes had permeated society” (Howard 28). The Greasers were seen as the poor outcast while the Socs were the popular one with all the money. The Socs provoke the Greasers by saying hurtful things and attacking them so both gangs feel the need to fight to prove that they are better. Hinton did a good job of portraying the violence and building up to these points and this keeps the reader interested in the book.

So far, both theories are able to explain the crime inequality observed insides neighbourhoods; however, when it comes to explaining the difference in crime rates between neighbourhoods with similarly low levels of poverty, social disorganization theory is not able to fully explain why such difference may occur, as it places a greater focus on the internal dynamics of the neighbourhoods than on the external contingencies (Peterson & Krivo, 2010, p. 92). Based on Table 4.5 of Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial DivideI, minority low-poverty areas have roughly two and a half times more violence than their white counterparts (Peterson & Krivo, 2010, p. 88). Social disorganization theory insists that residential instability (percent of those who owns and percent of those who rent) , population heterogeneity (internal differences, including ethno-racial differences), poverty (percent of those who live in poverty), income, deteriorating neighbourhood, and population loss (percent of those who leave due to deterioration) are mechanisms that leads to the absence of informal social control and increases social disorganization, causing the loss of control over youths who then hang out at spontaneous playgrounds and form gangs with delinquent traditions that get passed down through cultural transmission. If such was the case, then one would expect neighbourhoods with similar and comparable local conditions to have similar average rates of crimes. However,

This Neighbourhood Study aims to examine the demographics of Hillingdon Primary Care Trust (HPCT) such as age, gender, ethnicity, social groups in relation to the prevention of obesity. An insight into the prevalence of obesity as well as the causes and its effects shall be evaluated. Public health strategies regarding the prevention of obesity and its effects in comparison to Government strategies shall be addressed. The nurse’s role as an educator in relation to this public health issue, strategies formulated by HPCT to prevent obesity and how it focuses on other diseases associated with obesity shall be discussed. The following section gives a definition of obesity, health education and health prevention.

The theoretical conversation Ralph explores in the book is isolation. He draws ideas from Wacqaunt and Wilson’s The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City. In the article, the central argument is there is an interrelated set of characteristics that corresponds to social-structural problems in the inner city and the process has triggered “hyper-ghettoization.” The evidences Wacquant and Wilson present are mainly statistical and anthropology data. The article explains many of the residents are isolated due to the social-structural, economic, and political issues that surround them. The residents being moved by

There is an area in NYC named El Barrio within El Barrio there is a large group of working-class Puerto Rican residents living their lives but struggling with facing street cultural and their ethnic background. Living in harsh situations put a toll on the residents that were trying to live and make it out. In El Barrio, street culture is clustered and influential and is challenging for them to continue the traditional Puerto Rican culture. In this paper, I agree that street culture has a significant impact on the resident than their traditional Puerto Rican culture, I demonstrate by looking at their jobs, relationships, drug usage. Also, looking at substantial, significant residents Primo for a male aspect, Candy for a female perspective, but connect to the whole community in El Barrio. I believe this is significant because these are the three-main topics that was brought up also the two main voices for each gender, which helps the reader read about the unique way street culture had started to have more of an influence of tradition.

The main assumption of Social Disorganization Theory is the ability to explain why crime committed by lower class communities is more prominent than neighborhoods from communities in better economic areas. This theory is the relationship of the destabilization of urban communities and neighborhoods through Shaw and McKay’s study (Quoted in Siegal, 2010) that used the analysis of Ernest Burgess’s Concentric Zones Model. This model generates ideas that the closer to “zone 2”, individuals in a community have more stress factors