Social Control In New York City

In the late 1980s, New York City’s social environment was distinctly divided. With the rise of the financial industry, the wealthy were making a profit again. However, the lower class was unbridled, as it reached a level of violence it had never experienced before. This crime is due to the terrible economic crisis New York City experienced for decades prior. Drug gangsters and many others had become permanently locked into the lower class. School, neighborhoods, and political institutions were deteriorating because of this severe crisis. Committing crimes had become the norm and many victims did not report them. The introduction of crack cocaine lead to teenagers having a substantial amount of money and guns in which amplified criminality.

Due to the social disorganization of the lower class in New York City, they significantly lacked social control because the community is deteriorating and experiencing an economic downfall. This absence of control leads to delinquency. As the schools’, political institutions’, and police departments’ ability to control society declines, juveniles are more likely to be befriend deviant peers and engage in delinquent behaviors. Social control can come in a variety of forms, including formal control and informal control. Formal control are agencies such as police, courts, and the government whereas informal control are parents and neighbors (Siegel & Welsch, 2016). A reason why there was so much crime was due to the lack of social control in New York City. The movie explains that criminal justice system was not performing as it should, an example of formal social control. The boys’ described their childhood neighborhood as fast paced and busy. This shows weak informal social control as the boys were unable to be observed by adults ensuring that their behaviors are acceptable. This lack of social control in the lower class, dramatically increased crime in New York

The timeline of the attack and the position of where the boys were in the park on the night of April 19th do not match. In addition, the semen found on the jogger did not match any of the boys’. In the course of the assault, the jogger lost a significant amount of blood. Due to this blood loss, the boys’ clothing should have had the jogger’s DNA on it, but it had none. The prosecutor countered this argument by stating that there was an additional juvenile working with the five boys, however he was not caught. Matias Reyes is connected to this case in a many ways. He is a serial rapist who assaulted a woman in Central Park two days prior to the Central Park jogger case. While in prison, Wise apologized for a scuffle over a television remote that occurred between him and Reyes. This apology made Reyes realized that Wise and the other four boys were being wrongly imprisoned for a crime he committed. Reyes felt guilty and later admitted to a correctional officer that he was the assailant who committed the heinous crime in Central Park. The investigation began again and Reyes was able to describe the rape in specific detail, in which this crime was consistent with previous crimes he had committed. In addition, the DNA of found at the crime scene matched the DNA of Matias Reyes’. The boys were then released for their