In order to meet the ideal measure of standards and morals to be a part of the usual social standard, one must be able to meet specific goals to achieve economic success. When these standards are not met, it is called anomie according to Robert Merton. In the documentary Bloods & Crips: Made in America, we see the underlying and outside factors which have provoked African American youth to become involved in gangs and gang related violence. According to Merton, “some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons... to engage in nonconformist conduct,” (672). There are two social structures that are important in order for youth to succeed the normal standard of living which can cause pressure on the individual and cause …show more content…
irrational behavior. Antisocial behavior derives when the assumption that all members of a society should show models of success runs into a dead end and the individual is unable to succeed. They will feel as if they do not fit in, which is why many African American youth join gangs in Los Angeles. Robert Merton seems to side with Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow Laws. She believes that mass incarceration and society's structure has a large impact on the violence that occurs in society, and in the ghetto communities that we see in Bloods & Cripps : Made in America. The war on drugs has been a mechanism where particularly young black American men have been targeted, stopped and search for minor offences and have been charged with felonies. Once these men are pushed in to the criminal justice system it becomes and trap and it is hard for them to get out of it. In the 1960's, the police officers job in Los Angeles at the time was to make sure people stayed where they were supposed to stay.
Blacks were not able to go into white neighborhoods and vice versa. This created a boundary for the African American youth to leave their neighborhoods and reach those goals that are supposed to be met by society's means. These blacks had a feeling of alienation and became culturally disorientated due to the harassment from the cops. They were unable to have a sense of identity and who they really were due to the fact that there was a segregated society being created. These African Americans began to see themselves as having no value and became self hated. Blacks were shown their life has no value and they were rejected. Blacks were being arrested for non-violent crimes and drug offences. People of color have been targeted. This punitive impulse to punish folks of color is linked to our discrimination history here in America according to Michelle Alexander. When being swept into the criminal justice system, it comes hard to live a normal life and have a job to succeed a specific standard of living. Being black stood as a boundary for the youth in America. African American peace/non-violence groups and activists were torn down and that is how the gangs began to form. Mass incarceration, specifically in young black men leads to more violence due to how society has structured whites and blacks all the way back to the Jim Crow Laws. They then …show more content…
eventually believed they should not respect society's rules. The gang called the Crips formed in Watt Los Angeles, and was formed by the black youth. Their rival gang the bloods was shortly formed after. The youth that was oppressed for so long eventually became victims of their own depression. They are referred to urban soldiers who are loyal to different stats. They all share growing up poor on the streets of LA and the experiences of growing up in a segregated society. According to Merton, when one is not able to reach this certain standard or goal of society, they are lead to crime in order to obtain economic success. There are structural blocks that lead an individual to anomic habits and non-conformity. Michelle Alexander would refer to the criminal justice system as being a structural block to young African Americans, The way society has treated African Americans has caused crimes to be committed in order to obtain societal status. Unemployment and deindustrialization in the past and present has caused violence, specifically in these ghetto communities. Leon Bing, author of Do or Die claims that when she had spoken to gang members from these neighborhoods have never seen the pacific ocean. Many of the youth do not leave their neighborhoods for years which causes them to have a bad attitude because they do not know anything else but violence due to how society chose to deal with segregation years ago. Gang members became gang members because they grew tired of being the victim in society. They were raised to be this way due to no role models and boundaries in their lives. Blacks did not have the same opportunity as whites due to historic discrimination. Many of the youth men here grow up without fathers and are effected by the war on drugs. These youthful black men find supervision and love outside of the home, due to that fact that there was none inside of the home from family. The absence of a male figure in the home caused much of this violence. They were not taught about manhood and lacked strong man influence. The street gangs misguided these youthful boys by teaching them to fight and be violent in order to be a man. They are taught in order to stay alive and achieve economic success, one has to rise to specific stats on the streets, by using violence. Robert Merton believed that some functions disrupted society.
The functions that take place in Los Angeles is what is causing these gangs and violence. Anomie is the social feedback from an individual due to the impotent access of reaching the "American Dream", status, income, education, and freedom. Anomie is a burden that people are usually born into and causes them to operate in way that are not useful to society and do not promote societal stability. Anomie shows that the opportunities here in America are not equal for all and this is because of boundaries an individual is stuck inside of, just how Michelle Alexander believes blacks are trapped inside of a racist criminal justice system for
years.
The impression that I made out from watching this film is that back in 1965 in Los Angeles the gangs Crips and Bloods was found to protect black Americans from the violence cause by white police officers and white gang members. During those periods black kids in high school and junior schools were being attacked by white students in school so black people teamed up together to fight against them in school; and that was how the black gangs became. Some gangs were sponsored by Slausons, Farmers, Bausinessmen, and Gladiators. Moving forward, bastards of the party came from a passage in city of quartz which was later made a documentary film in 2005, it was produced by Alex Demyanenko, and directed by a former blood gang member Cle Sloan. Inside this movie, it explored the creation of two of Los Angeles’s notorious gangs Crips and Bloods from the perspective of Los Angeles community.
The documentary, “Crips and Bloods: Made in America” talks about many social concerns. In the documentary, both discrimination and economics are the main factors for the problems in Southern California. The gangs started because of discrimination. By denying people because of their skin color to join social activities such as the boy/girl scouts is what led to the formation of groups that later turned into gangs. Apart from that, hatred and threats escalated the situations that then turned the gangs into what they are today. According to the documentary, because of the gang rivalry there exists an invisible line that separates the territories of both the Crips and the Bloods. Not only is that the only factor, but also
This can be applied to American society, where the society may lean too heavily towards either of these social structures. This can then create stress where stressing over goals mean that any form of achieving them becomes acceptable. Merton was more interested on the overemphasis on goals and how that may have generated antisocial behavior. This behavior arises when the expectation that all members of society should exhibit success but run into restrictions on legitimate means to succeed. He says that the cult of success can create illegitimate means because the violator knows the rules of the game, but the validation of success outweighs the weak imperative to play by the rules. He states, “…Crime… [And] the entire catalogue of proscribed behavior, becomes increasingly common when the emphasis on the culturally induced success-goal becomes divorced from a coordinated institutional emphasis” (Merton 675-676). This is shown in the Crips and Bloods documentary because the individuals in both gangs know what they do is wrong, such as dealing drugs, but they still need to be successful by having money and having good appearance by dressing nicely. It is difficult for them to go by the rules when at one point, the whites did not give them
Differential Association Theory is defined as a theoretical perspective that examines how people learn to be deviant or a conformist based on the community they are a part of. For example, because students are sitting in class room they have learned to conform to gain rewards and now are able to achieve in society. Edwin Sutherland coined the term differential association to indicate this: from the different groups we associate with, we learn to deviate from or conform to society’s norm. (Handlin 2015, Smith 2017).
Gangs have been in existence since the beginning of the Roman Empire. There were speeches made by Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero, which references groups of men who constantly fought and disrupted Roman politics (Curry, 2013). The history of street gangs in the United States begins with their emergence on the East Coast around 1783, as the American Revolution ended. Though many believe the best available evidence suggests that the more serious street gangs likely did not emerge until the early part of the nineteenth century (Sante, 1991). Although our country has had their share of feared gangs like in the 1980’s with the turf war between the Bloods and Crips, back in the 17th and 18th century the Mohocks of Georgian, England were one of the most feared gangs. What draws juveniles to the gang lifestyle? Many people will say that most gang members are children from impoverished communities, single family homes where there was no father present, or maybe there is a more psychological/sociological answer? By appearance and presence most gangs cause fear, crime, and disillusionment in the communities they occupy. Throughout history joining a gang has been perceived as a life without any reward, yet by joining this lifestyle many juveniles are able to gain the needed stability and security in their lives.
Surprisingly, little has been written about the historical significance of black gangs in Los Angeles (LA). Literature and firsthand interviews with Los Angeles residents seem to point to three significant periods relevant to the development of the contemporary black gangs. The first period, which followed WWII and significant black migrations from the South, is when the first major black clubs formed. After the Watts rebellion of 1965, the second period gave way to the civil rights period of Los Angeles where blacks, including those who where former club members who became politically active for the remainder of the 1960s. By the early 1970s black street gangs began to reemerge. By 1972, the Crips were firmly established and the Bloods were beginning to organize. This period saw the rise of LA’s newest gangs, which continued to grow during the 1970s, and later formed in several other cities throughout the United States by the 1990s. While black gangs do not make up the largest or most active gang population in Los Angeles today, their influence on street gang culture nationally has been profound.
Gangs have been a point of concern for states and societies around the world for centuries. Youth gangs are not exempt from that same categorization and have operated for the same amount of time worldwide. Over the last century however, a proliferation of youth gangs has been witnessed, especially among Hispanic youths immigrating into the United States. Researchers and scholars have offered multiple theories as to why youths, and Hispanics youths in particular integrate themselves into gang organizations. Three schools of thought arise when conducting gang integration research. Rational Economics Theory1 proposes that youths, and all individuals, join gangs for financial and material benefit. Cultural Deviance Theory considers youth gang members as exposed to a lower class subculture that rationalizes and even promotes crime, delinquency and gang membership, contrasting to the “normal” set of prescribed values and culture in more civilized society. Acculturation Theory argues that youths join gangs as a means to be acculturated by ethnically or compositionally similar peers, whether as a response to ethnic marginalization by members of the host country or inability to acculturate to their new home.
According to http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu/d_index.htm was “rooted in a multitude of political, economic, and social factors.” These included but were not limited to police abuse, lack of affordable housing, economic inequality, black militancy, and rapid demographic change.
Prohibition sparked it, but things such as money, drugs, territory and a few others kept it going. Money for one was a very big problem that made gangs violent. In a time where money was few and far between, people had to do what was necessary to survive. People began robbing banks, stealing cars and even killing people for the green little piece of paper that makes the world go around, money.
Blacks were mistreated, they were subjected to biased laws and injustice. Blacks were the “victims of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” according to Kings Speech (I Have a Dream). Police brutality includes, but is not limited to: false arrest, intimidation, racial profiling, surveillance abuse, sexual abuse, and tampering with
There were three main periods where gangs in Los Angeles grew at a rapid rate. The first of which was...
One of the reasons young people join street gangs is because of neighborhood disadvantages. A theory that can contribute to why young people might join street gangs is Social Disorganization Theory. Social Disorganization theory assumes that “delinquency emerges in neighborhoods where neighborhood relation and social institutions have broken down and can no longer maintain effective social controls (Bell, 2007).” Social Disorganization contributes to residential instability and poverty, which affects interpersonal relationships within the community and opens opportunities for crimes to be committed. The break down of neighborhood relation and social institutions create a higher likely hood that young people will affiliate with deviant peers and get involved in gangs. When there is lack of social controls within a neighborhood the opportunity to commit deviance increases and the exposure to deviant groups such as street gangs increase. Which causes an increase in the chances of young people joining street gangs. If social controls are strong remain strong within a neighborhood and/or community the chances of young people committing crime and joining gangs decreases.
From the mid 1950 gangs start to be a real problem in US, and in particular in several cities like Chicago. There was immediat response in form of labelisation by a local press and the gangs were assigned a particular image, of a poor, unsitisfied with their social milieu youth. Like stated in Diamond “ local press gave them the nick names, like “ gang feuds” “grudge killings” “ gang complexes”, “feelings of inadequacy” , “ new teen age terrorism” they were seens as a “Rebel without cause” ( Dean quotted in Diamond” ), all this confirm the rincipal quotation for this question and general thoughts of Adamson, as well insist on the structural construction of gang epidemic. Diamond confirms also Adamson statement on point of the white predominance amoung the juvenile delenquency, by stipulating them having “predominantly white face” (Diamond, 2009) in
You come home from school one day, you notice the door is unlocked, you step in. You see, your mother helplessly on the floor, blue and purple around her eyes. You see blood everywhere. She lays breathless, cold, lifeless you realize she is dead. Next thing you know the leader of the gang you are a member of walks into the room and holds you at gunpoint. He says “you shouldn’t have gone behind the gangs back” and pulls the trigger. Gangs have a negative effect on youths. Many youths join gangs and endanger their lives and the ones they love, being a part of a gang will fill your life with violence, and after joining you have no choice but to give up your family and friends. A gang will make your life be filled with agony, violence and they will distance you from your family.