Gang membership, Drug Selling, and Violence in Neighborhood Context

Smiley is a man who was released back into the society on a parole. He was sent back to live in his neighborhood. Shinichi Suzuki, a famous Japanese violinist who invented Suzuki Method, got the right idea of Smiley’s situation when he said “Man is a child of his environment”. It means that Smiley is a product of his environment. His neighborhood is a no picnic.

The neighborhood is a basically a graveyard of American dreams. Like everyone else in America, Smiley values individualism, achievement, money, and family unity highly. However he is in a hostile society where his rough background is rejected and regarded as a stigma. He does not have education or an escape from his neighborhood where people are under a great strain. The reason for the strain is because American culture sets the bar for gold standards of an ideal lifestyle that in the reality that social structures in some groups cannot follow (Shelden, Brown, Miller, & Fitzler, 2008). According to strain theory, Smiley’s neighbors all want same things but they cannot get them legally so they decide to find illegal loopholes.

They go in this state that Robert Merton would call anomie (Shelden, Brown, Miller & Fritzler, 2008). According to him, the state is when “social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconforming rather than conforming conduct” ( p.78). A gang in Smiley’s neighborhood pressures Smiley into practicing norms that are considered unacceptable legally . Smiley’s gang approves stealing, violence, abuse of drugs, and organized crimes. Smiley had to adapt by conforming to the gang’s values, follow ritualism like wearing certain colors and speaking gang jargon, and view the world as us ( gang) against them....

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