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

• 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

• 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

• 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)