Cohen’s theory assured that lower class youth enter into gang delinquency as a group response to a failure to acquire status as measured by middle class norms and values. Since lower-class youths are disadvantaged in institutional settings such as school, they lack the means and opportunities to attain culturally prescribed goals. He said that working class youths suffer from status frustration, they realize that they cannot achieve in middle class terms. According to him, even though lower class boys want a middle class status; they can not compete with middle class boy because they don’t have middle class values. As a result, they engage in reaction formation and reject the middle class world.
These systematic disparate treatments contribute to a dysfunctional community and lead to the socioeconomic destruction of the African American family infrastructure.” (Coulson-Clark, et. all, 2010) Because racial profiling, discrimination, and the disparities within the criminal justice system seem to always be a topic of concern, the best way to understand what is happening is to research the problem to gain a better perspective and point of view. The need to find the reason behind the higher numbers of
To put it simply, there are two main type of effects on the poverty levels in the black community: structural and behavioral. The first of these two effects is structural, or the situation they have little control over. Henry Louis Gates Jr. indicates in his essay “The Way to Reduce Black Poverty in America” that “Nearly a third of black children are born into poverty,” (451) . Being born into a poor household is not something one has control over. Although, the situations that lead to having a child in poverty can be linked to the second of the effects of poverty levels, behavioral.
This impacts the quality of life for all of us if we have to “throw away people.”A justice system that tolerates injustice is doomed to collapse (The Sentencing Project, 2000). Illegitimate racial disparity is the result of contradictory treatment by the criminal justice system. This is located by the race of people in society. It may involve racial bias whereas others are influenced by factors that are associated with race (The Sentencing Project, 2000). Additionally, addressing racial disparity is a challenge but can be accomplished by the following.
Research indicates that pathways into crime and drug use are causally related because they both result from factors such as physical and sexual abuse, poverty, lack of education, poor mental health and unemployment. Globally, the rise in the illegal drug use is the main cause of domestic violence, depression, unemployment and the rising crime rates experienced by many countries. Addiction and drug-related crimes are the most intractable social problems facing the world today. Illegal drug use and crime do not have a direct causal link. The two are related by specific common causes which include temperamental causes, parental alcoholism, antisocial personality behavior and poor relationships with parents.
Gangs are one of the results of poverty, discrimination and urban deterioration. Some experts believe that undereducated young people, without access to good jobs, become frustrated with their lives and join gangs as an alternative to boredom, hopelessness and devastating poverty. Studies have attempted to determine why gangs plague some communities but there has been no definitive answer. Consequently, people working to solve gang problems have great difficulty. They find the situation overwhelming, and the violence continues.
Rather than place the blame at the feet of the poor, the author demonstrates how federal and local governments aided in cutting off persons from decent housing, economic and educational opportunities with legalized segregation and planned metropolitan expansion that sought to ensconce the poor in the shadows of southern society. This intensified the poverty as a whole to the point where it then became the highest ranked poverty are in the nation. Dyson points out that this nation’s willful ignorance and naivety concerning its poorer and disproportionately darker citizens is disturbingly sad and dissapointing. The second and third chapters, “Does George W. Bush Care About Black People?” and “The Politics of Disaster,” focus directly on toward the “rhythms, relations, and rules of race” that informed the federal government’s response to Katrina, or lack thereof, and the anemic structuring of FEMA that has been embattled by a history of what the author refers to as “a combination of cronyism, politicization, inexperience and incompetence” respectively. According to Dyson, Katrina uncovered a culture of “passive indifference” to the problems plaguing poor black folk that as a matter of consequence is indistinguishable from “active malice.”
Unfortunately, depression has often been misdiagnosed in the African American community. According to a Surgeon General report (2001), African Americans are over-represented in populations that are particularly at risk for mental illness. This is due to the fact that the census cannot reach certain populations of African Americans who are incarcerated, homeless or refuse to even participate in the census survey. Due to cultural backgrounds, depression may be exhibited differently among African Americans. The website for Mental Health
To broaden the topic and touch on the psychophysical effects, we can look at the Indian Reserves and how they’ve become dangerous environments not only in a physical sense, but in a psychological sense as well. The unrelenting stresses of colonization have impacted the reserves with such negativity, they are the reason the remaining reserves do not reflect a meaningful notion of community and why life on the reserves is characterized by a much higher degree of violence, hate, and aggression driven substance abuse than in other communities. In reaction to colonization, one of the most damaging aspects is the inward turn of self-hate and the negative energy that accompanies it. Lee Maracle refers to this as “systemic rage” and states it’s commonness among colonized peoples. Colonialism consists in such things as resource exploitation of Indigenous lands, residential school syndrome, racism, expropriation of lands, extinguishment of rights, and welfare dependency.
Poverty is most marked among African American single-parent families. I agree with this article because I have several friends and classmates that often used drugs to forget about the things that they have or had going on in their life. Those that use drugs to try to heal their pain use a saying, “Roll my pain up in a blunt, and smoke my problems away or drink so much alcohol because they are depressed on the inside. However I would think being in poverty would eliminate the access of drugs due to lack of money. To eliminate drug abuse parents should monitor their child’s behavior to determine if they see signs of depression and try to not to let their decisions or struggles effect their child’s