You Reap What You Sow

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You Reap What You Sow The film, Menace II Society, is a prime example of deviance and social control as learned, rather than a result of biological programming. It can be shown that Caine, in Menace II Society, was a product of his environment. Caine learns and accepts deviant behavior as a lifestyle, means of survival, and ultimately as his identity as taught to him by his family and friends through sociology’s Differential Association Theory, Labeling Theory, and Strain Theory. Differential Association Theory is the idea that people learn deviant behavior as a result of socialization through close interaction with our primary group(s). One’s primary group is made up of people who have the most impact on our socialization, and are usually the people most present in our youth. These social role models establish which behaviors are acceptable, or are the social norm, and as the OpenStax text asserts, “generally engage face-to-face in long term emotional ways” (123). The people that influenced Caine’s behavior were his parents, Pernell, who was Caine’s mentor, and his friends O-Dog and Stacy. As far back as Caine could remember, his father sold drugs and his mother was a drug addict. Caine witnessed his father kill a man, learned from his father how to buy and cook crack cocaine for sale, and spent half of his high school years ditching school to sell drugs, to be like his father. In his narrative, Caine said of his parents, “Instead of keeping a kid outta trouble, they turned me on to it” (Menace II Society. 1993). According to the OpenStax text, “researchers found that parents were the main influence on the behavior of the offspring” and as Caine’s first role models, his parents taught him how to act in society supporting that Differential Association Theory “may account for why crime is multigenerational” (149). According to Differential Association Theory,

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