Final Paper

Essay 1:

Explain how Bourgois’s In Search of Respect and Contreras’s Stickup Kids locates the inner lives of drug dealers and drug robbers with the context of history, structure, and culture? In your discussions, explain how culture is a creative response to collectively experienced structural problems within a historical context. Be as specific as possible in your response using examples from the literature and class discussion.

Bourgois locates the inner lives of drug dealers and drug robbers by talking about the early 1990’s. He states that in the context of history, your life is shaped by historical moments that you live in. You make choices of the moment in structural conditions. He starts by telling the story of a boy named Gus and how violence and crack was normal for him growing up. He talks about how at 13 Gus shifts and fell into the teenage drug selling team. He tells how Gus moved up in the business and ran the crack selling business Monday through Saturday noon to midnight. Gus felt he was getting played because he was only making $600 while being there every day all day. After a while of wanting to make more, he left the business and started his own business independently. After being charged with multiple convictions, he was sent to Rikers Island. Next Bourgois introduced Pablo. Pablo attended school in the Bronx and joined the junior varsity team. He also talks about how he was good at football and quickly moved up to the varsity level. He was really good at ball and wanted to move up in life. He attended college and like normal college students, he struggled. He struggled with passing classes and having money. He would ask his mother for money, but she would never have any to give him. He later met somebody that...

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...he must go sell drugs and steal to achieve his wealth, to middle and upper class; his acts are seen as deviant. For the mafia leader, his way of making money is culturally accepted by his peers. In order to reduce crime, we need to change the way people learn to act out. We need to change how people in the underground economy feel about making money. We need to start having better education for those that are in lower class cultures and help them obtain good paying jobs with their degrees. This way, it will help stop the deviancy by showing there are other ways to make ends meet and achieve their goals. For those that stay in school and have good jobs, there needs to be some sort of extracurricular activity for them to join so they do not follow back in the cultural values and norms due to differential association and differential social disorganization theories.