I am reading the book Shooter by Walter Dean Myers. In my book the main character's name is Cameron Porter. He is a seventeen-year-old boy that attended a school called Madison High. There one of his closest companions Leonard, Len for short, has killed someone and maybe himself. I have only read about half of the book and only two of the five sections, so I don’t know exactly what led up to everything. But from what I’ve read, It seems like both Cameron and Len came from troubled backgrounds. Like both of Cameron’s parents are well off people and have lot’s of money but he doesn’t have a good relationship with his father because his father doesn’t treat him well and his mother doesn’t really notice him either. Cameron is bullied in school …show more content…
He has talked about how he and a female named Carla were the only “friends” of Len. I think Cameron hung out with Len so often because he didn’t really like others either but Cameron seems to know more about the world and have a more stable mentality about the world than Len had. For example Len had made Cameron and Carla go out to a shooting range with him and hung up six orange bags as targets. He instructed them to not look into the bags, knowing that something was up after shooting five bags. “ I asked Len what was in the bag and he said not to worry about it, that they were just targets. Carla must of had a bad feeling about it too. When we found the last target, she went right up to it. She must have been ten, no, five feet away and Len shot it. She didn’t even stop. She took it down and opened it up. Then she came back and walked right past us to the car. Turtles. The kind you buy in the pet store. There were four turtles in the bag. Carla was pissed.” This made Len get mad at Carla because she decided to not be friends with him anymore, so to get back at Carla, Len decided to leak out information to the school, saying that she was molested. This made Cameron even more mad at Len, but he still goes back to being friends with him. I don’t really understand any of the characters in the book, or their thought processes when they do things. Like
There are many stories shared in this book about the boys and their crimes. Most of the boys have physical abuse, drug addictions, gang affiliations or a combination of these in their background. Several of them have been bounced around to their grandparents, aunts and uncles or even foster care.
Two people with two completely different characteristics have something alike. Both Dally and Johnny are mentally tough because of their parents. Johnny and Dally’s parents both do not care for them and could care less about them. For example, during Dally’s childhood he went to jail, been in a gang, and has been in many fights and his dad still would not care for him even if he won the lottery. Dally also talks about his dad's disgrace towards him in the car with Johnny and Ponyboy, “‘ Shoot, my dad don’t give a hang whether I’m in jail or dead in a car wreck or drunk in a gutter...’”(88). Dally could easily live without his dad and he does for the most part. Dally just hangs around with his friends and stays at their place. Similarly, Johnny's parents use him like a rag doll to blow off steam, “his father always beating him up”(14). The gang knows what happenes in Johnny’s house. Once Ponyboy was witnessing, “Johnny take a whipping with a two-by-four from his old man”(33). Ponyboy talks about how loud and mean Johnny's mom is and,“you can...
In a person’s life, one must overcome obstacles that have the potential to either negatively or positively impact their future. Whether it is a serious obstacle, such as being involved with drugs, or a minor obstacle, such as procrastinating an important essay for the night before it is due, the choices people make can influence the way they live their lives. In Wes Moore’s inspiring non-fiction book, The Other Wes Moore, two boys with the same name start off living a few blocks away from one another, but turn out to be completely different individuals. At first, they were both troublemakers, getting in trouble with the law. However, as time progressed, the author, Wes Moore, became a Rhodes scholar and quite successful, while the other Wes Moore was sentenced to life in prison. The difference between these two men was the surrounding influences that shaped their growth as people. In a person’s growth, the most important factors are a positive role model in a positive environment because a positive role model will provide the path to success and will aid that person in achieving prosperity.
Wes (the author) has a family who wants to see him succeed. Although Wes didn’t know his father for long, the two memories he had of him and the endless stories his mother would share with him, helped guide him through the right path. His mother, made one of the biggest effects in Wes’s life when she decided to send him to military story, after seeing he was going down the wrong path. Perhaps, the other Wes’s mother tried her best to make sure he grew up to be a good person, but unfortunately Wes never listen. His brother, Tony was a drug dealer who wish he could go back in time and make the right decisions and he wanted Wes to be different than him. He didn’t want his brother to end up like him and even after he tried everything to keep Wes away from drugs, nothing worked and he gave up. As you can see, both families are very different, Wes (the author) has a family who wants him to have a bright future. Most importantly, a family who responds fast because right after his mother saw him falling down the wrong hill she didn’t hesitate to do something about it. The other Wes isn’t as lucky, as I believe since his mother already had so much pressure over keeping her job and her son Tony being involved in drugs. Same thing with Tony, he was so caught up in his own business that no one payed so much attention to
...nd Dahmer”, Jeff Dahmer would go to school noticeably under the influence, yet somehow go by “unnoticed”. If the teachers were aware of Dahmer’s state, they never took any form of action to discipline him, question him, or be worried with his condition at all. Not once throughout the entirety of the graphic novel does a teacher, student, or parent seem remotely concerned with Dahmer’s well-being. Dahmer fought off the urge to kill many times and did it with the help of no one and nothing other than his own twisted mind, so there is reason to believe any type of assistance from an adult could have been detrimental in the process of Dahmer overcoming his violent urges. Unlike Benjie, Dahmer had no one to look up to and admire. Benjie was eventually able to appreciate and respect Butler Craig as a man who cared enough about him to put Benjie’s life above his own.
Geoffrey Canada shares his story about growing up in an inner city neighborhood of the South Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. Geoffrey Canada is one of four boys who live with his mother after their father left them. Geoffrey Canada talks about the struggles of growing up in the inner city and facing many challenges. As Geoffrey Canada grew up he witnessed a lot of violence which included young children getting their hands on firearms. The prevalence of firearms among children has changed the nature of violence in the United States. Violent acts have transformed from fists, sticks, and knifes to guns. Guns have undermined the street code of honor, the OGs back in the day were ruthless but not killers, this new generation has no developed courage and fighting skills but relied on guns for protection.
Chris and Doughboy, two brothers in gangs, live with a single mother. Chris is headed for an athletic scholarship and there is hope he will escape gang life, however, with no mentor this does not happen. Tre is a young gang member whose father is always there in the background, and this is what keeps him alive and gets him out of gang life eventually. The movie makes a clear the point that if a child is watched by some adult who cares from early childhood, they stand a better chance of surviving the urban gang life they cannot escape otherwise. Scenes from the early childhood of the three boys foreshadows this as Chris and Doughboy are in juvenile hall as children, while Tre is spared this as a result of his father looking over him. This theme will continue throughout the film. The landscape of the urban ghetto and the legacy left to black youth, and the death it brings upon them is well portrayed in the film.
Young black men crowd the corners of Baltimore. They are all hard talk, hard jaws, and crisp white t-shirts as big as sails—strapped. One precocious boy witnesses a shootout near a drug lord’s stash house and takes up sticks to play guns ‘n’ robbers. His trajectory is as follows: he graduates from sticks and piss-balloons, to g-packs and real guns, to taunting cops with brown bags of excrement, to housecats and lighter fluid, to bold, cold-blooded murder. In the words of social reformer Charles Loring Brace, this boy is one of the dangerous class—an undisciplined, delinquent youth. A creation of David Simon’s for HBO’s crime drama, The Wire, the character of Kenard may be a fictionalization, but his presence adds to the much-praised realism of the series. There really are young boys like Kenard that exist on the streets of American cities—falling into the easy and familiar trap of the drug industry. The Wire makes a point to follow the tread of Baltimore’s youth throughout all of its five seasons, introducing the topic of juvenile delinquency to the considerable range of social issues the show discusses. The Wire almost flawlessly represents the factors which cause a young person to “defect”— from the failings of the city school district, a difficult home life, or the struggle of homelessness, to the surrounding environmental influences that arise from life in the city of Baltimore. However, while The Wire and its examination of causalities does many things for the discussion of Juvenile Delinquency on the whole—taking the conversation to levels no other scripted telev...
At the age of thirteen-year-old, Jonathan (a pseudonym) knows all the names and shapes of the weapons circulating his neighborhood. Jonathan lives with his brothers and mother in a poor-income neighborhood of a metropolitan area. As a result of a lack of father’s presence in his life, his uncle serves as his male role model. In many occasions, when his uncle “goes out and steal” at the nearby stores, Jonathan is often his look out. Despite the criminal laws and police regulations, crime rates in these poor urban neighborhoods are escalating with incarceration rates and death rates follow suits. According to Elijah Anderson (1994), an American sociologist at Yale University, the inclination to violence is derived from the situations of life among the urban poor; these circumstances could be the lack of paying jobs, the stigma of race, the rampant drugs use and drugs trafficking, and the lack of hope for the future. Accordingly, who or what is responsible for the problems displayed in these African American, urban poor communities? The answer comes down to choices. The behaviors of these African American can be attributed through the individual’s disposition and the situational influences; thus, two theories hold the key explanation to answer the inquiry of this phenomenon: Rational Actor Theory and Structured Socialization Theory, respectively.
For instance, Kagan states, “It prevents taking into account the family and home environment that surrounds him- and from which he cannot usually extricate himself- no matter how brutal or dysfunctional” . In other words, Kagan argues that the courts do not acknowledge the juveniles age, mindset, family, or home environment. Such aspects shape the juveniles into the individual they are today. Kagan identifies that the origin of the predicament is the type of home the adolescent comes from. Kagan’s idea comes into play in Scott Anderson’s New York Times’ article, “Greg Ousley Is Sorry for Killing His Parents. Is That enough?” where fourteen year old Greg Ousley inhumanely murders his own parents. For example, Anderson states, “Greg says Jobie [Greg’s father] could go says without uttering a single word and can recall only one occasion when he told Greg that he loved him – and this, Greg says, occurred when Jobie was drunk… Sometimes the
One of the earliest lessons he ever learned was from his mother. She told all four of her boys to never let people think they were afraid and that they were never to become victims. This is shown with each word that Canada uses in his title. The first phase of his life consisted of “Fist”. He recalls the time when he first moved to Union Ave and he was trapped inside his apartment because he hadn’t established himself in the neighborhood. He would sit up in his 3rd floor apartment and jealously looked on, as all the other kids would play in the streets. One day his older brother John had enough and walked outside to face his fate. The rest of his brothers followed and eventually each got beat up as a pass to the streets. None of them showed their fears or their pain, a lesson that they first learned from their mother. This was only one of many steps/ factors in becoming an established individual not to be reckoned with. Age was the other factor to be considered. The older you were, the more respect you got from others. There were the young adults, who were the biggest and badest on the block. They weren’t usually around to defend their turf because they all belonged to a gang, however everyone knew they ruled all. Next were the mid-teen boys who were the “real rulers of Union Ave (18)” They were the ones who enforced the rules. The lower categories were the early teens and the pre teens. The early teens were just learning the rules whereas the pre teens couldn’t go off of the sidewalk. Geoffrey belonged to the lowest rung, the sidewalk group. As time wen...
As the dirtiness- based hierarchy starts with whites at the top, in Detroit, with legal jobs and safe communities, with their practices aimed at reducing risk and danger to their people. Therefore, meaning that those who are not them, Caucasian, are the dangerous ones. By reinforcing class inequality systems that are fabricated by the understandings of how we view people by using the word ‘dirt’ can give a child less meaning to his or her life. He knows no better than what he does, for his family and society have taught him these values, money matters. He does not plan on the drug trade culture to be a forever situation, but sees it as a temporary circumstance to be in. It is not “forever” for adults are not the ones selling dope. They are the one in his society that are either killed or locked away until they are middle aged. The lack of older role models around them results in them acting older than their age. This then leads to taking over responsibility among family matters that others are no longer capable of, for one reason or another. These morals of family show that he would rather think about their survival first before think about him and the repercussions that may occur. His family is the meaning of his life. Even when doing time, he is thinking of what will do in the future that can help his sick mother, and if he can
When Deborah was only sixteen she became pregnant with her first child by Cheetah and boy she liked when she was younger. Cheetah and Deborah got married and then had their second child. Deborah became very unhappy in the marriage because Cheetah started drinking and doing drugs. He started abusing Deborah. Cheetah pushed Deborah so much she almost killed him if it wasn’t for Bobbette. Deborah’s brothers Sonny and Lawrence were doing well except for Joe. Joe was another case. Joe went to the military, and the family was hoping that would do him good; but he came out worse than when he went in. Joe was threatened and beaten up by a boy named Ivy. Joe was in so much rage he went and stabbed him and killed him. Joe eventually turned himself in to the law, was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced fifteen years in prison.
Kyle's parents were never there to support or to help Kyle deal with his problems. Kyle's father is always out drinking and smoking weed with his coworkers and is never their to support Kyle. Kyle's mom is always getting wasted at home (she is a stay-at-home mom) and crying herself to sleep because her husband is never there to love her. This has a serious impact on Kyle. This teenager is stuck to fend for himself and to
It is known that our family is the most important influence on our socialization. As Butterfield explains throughout the first half of his book, the Boskets always dealt with non-promising circumstance and events. These events and circumstances led them to develop and pass down traditions of violence and a lack of trust. One example of this is found on page 143, "Worse it reinforced Willie's belief that the way to settle things was by getting physical." Another example of this is found in how "Laura never knew her father and thus when Butch, was in prison she felt that he had neglected her, similar to the way her father did" (135). Also, Willie's mother taught him to swear at a really young age; Butterfield notes that "he was swearing and committing deviant acts before he even entered school" (138). Through this action one not only sees the distrust passed down but the onset of Labeling theory and how it will haunt Willie his whole life.