Peers and neighborhoods
Peers
• Peers play a significant role in maturation,
particularly during adolescence
• Strained and/or inadequate peer
relationships associated with delinquency
• Delinquents tend to associate with other
delinquents
• Delinquent acts tend to be committed in
small groups
Peers
• Many delinquents have poor social skills,
hang around with others who are similar
• Deviant values may be learned from a
deviant peer group. Some adolescents have
no prior history until they begin to “run with
the wrong crowd”
• Others have prior histories, find others like
themselves
Peers
• Peer associations might partly explain
desistance—if a person changes peer
groups, delinquency may cease
• For others, the continuation of the group
might lead to further criminality (substance
abuse, drug selling)
• Peer groups teach techniques,
rationalizations for activities, attitudes
Peers
• Whether or not a peer group has an effect
on an individual depends on how much the
person values the peer group, length of the
association, etc.
• Differential association (Sutherland)
Gangs
• Gangs intensively studied, beginning with
Thrasher’s work in 1927.
• Argued that gangs provide excitement, fun,
and opportunities for accomplishment and
respect, typically denied to poor adolescent
males in mainstream society
Gangs
• Less attention to gangs in the 60s and early 70s:
police activity, political activities, the draft, the
increased popularity of heroin
• Gangs re-emerged in the 1970s and spread
• Reasons: involvement of gangs in sale of drugs—
replacement for organized crime
• Economic changes-from a manufacturing to
service occupations. Less jobs for poor youths
Gangs
• Family changes: parental absence,
substance abuse, poverty, other crime (yet,
some gang members come from stable
families, and some youths from
dysfunctional families avoid them)
• Very wide variety of gangs
Gangs
• Common classifications: organized, serious
delinquent, party/social, retreatist, conflict
(predatory)
• Specialists vs. generalists
• Vary in terms of size, age range, duration of
existence, territory, activities, length of time
in the gang
gangs
• Most common in transitional neighborhoods
• Transitional neighborhoods characterized
by:
• Poverty, high levels of unemployment
• Deteriorated housing, usually rental
• Adjacent to downtown or industrial areas
• Physically unsafe (numerous code
violations)
Neighborhoods
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Health and mental health problems
Lack of accessible services
Housing projects
High levels of crime
Long term history of gang activity
Resident mobility
Ethnic segregation, hostility
Neighborhoods
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Broken windows phenomenon
Suspicion and mistrust
Unsafe conditions for police officers
Residents not cooperative with police or
other authority figures
• Diminished neighborhood control of youths
• Invasion by criminal element (esp.drugs)
Neighborhoods
• Social disorganization
• Residents unable to mobilize and
stop/prevent crime
• Cynicism, alienation, mistrust, fear of
retaliation, discouragement
• Potential leaders typically move out
• Businesses, churches, etc., leave
Neighborhoods
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Long-term tradition of crime and gangs
Members grow older, but the gangs remain
Family tradition
Recent trends
Lethal violence
Increased numbers
Greater number of ethnic groups
Trends
• “aging” of gangs, (thought to be due to the
erosion of the industrial base and the
availability of the drug market)