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The Cultural Theory Of Crime And Violence

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Defined, a subculture is a culture that exists within the main dominant culture of a society. Therefore, members of a subculture will have different norms and values to those in the rest of society, which in turn could lead to them being seen as deviant because of this. Youth subcultures provide members with an identity that sits outside of that assigned by social foundations such as family, school, home and work. Participants of a subculture often make people aware of their membership by making characteristic and symbolic choices in the way they dress, style their hair, what footwear they wear, and intangible choice in interests, dialect, music genre and meeting places.
In criminology, the sub cultural theory emerged from the work of the Chicago School and its interest on gangs, and developed through symbolic interactions in to a set of ideas which argue that certain groups or subcultures in society have values and attitudes that are similar to those related to crime and violence. One of the most famous explanations to come from the Chicago school is that of Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. Shaw and McKay studied adolescent crime rates in Chicago. They divided the city in to a series of condensed rings; they then calculated the misdemeanour rates in the rings, finding that the areas with the highest rates of crime and violence were those situated right in the centre of the city, with the rates dropping outward from the centre. They found that delinquency was a lot lower in

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