Trailer Park Boys has the reputation of being considered an example of low culture with seemingly mean less storylines. Many believe that this show has no educational value and contains storylines with little to no depth. However, in season 7, episode 10, Marxist ideas are displayed regarding the ruling class and the division of classes. As the Trailer Park Boys run an international drug smuggling operation, they are subject to the law enforcement, the ruling class, and must surrender to a police force. However, they are faced with a choice in which country to surrender to as they are in-between the two countries. The Trailer Park Boys demonstrates the division of classes in relation to Marx's work and how the ruling class influences a society. …show more content…
This represents Marx's ideas of the ruling class as, "the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force" (Engels and Marx 21). Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles are successful in sending the marijuana into the United States and receiving the tobacco in return before the authorities catch them. However, they are caught by Lahey and then the FBI who both have the resources and authority to arrest them and punish them for their crimes. This represents the idea that the police have a higher position in society than the Trailer Park Boys and are considered a part of the ruling class. Accordingly, when they are caught in the middle of the river with a police force on either side, they must make a choice in which side to surrender. For a moment the Trailer Park Boys have power over the ruling class, but they are still subject to their power as they will face punishment regardless of the decision they make. The division of power is evident through the situations in which the Trailer Park Boys were against various forms of law …show more content…
Lahey is an alcoholic who comes from the same town as the Trailer Park Boys and struggles with maintaining the typical image of a police officer. In the eyes of the American law enforcement, Lahey is below them and they have more power than a Canadian small-town police officer. While the Americans are shown as a sophisticated police force who have helicopters and a team of snipers ready to apprehend Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles, Lahey has a sole weapon and a bottle of liquor. This demonstrates that the Americans have more power than Lahey due to being, "the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production" (Engels and Marx 21). This is due to the availability of resources of the FBI in comparison to Lahey. Both sides claim to have control when trying to make the arrest and bargain with the Trailer Park Boys over the length of their prison sentence. Again, the struggle to be the ruling class is evident in this situation as both sides want to apprehend them. There was a divide in the power distribution between the Canadian and American law enforcement which led to an image of a division of classes and the ruling
Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely
The writings and pictures in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives offer a vivid portrayal of the poor living conditions of New York's tenement houses and illustrated the necessity for progressive reform in the late 1800s. A vicious cycle held many of the tenants in its grasps through a combination of the landlords' rent prices and a lack of sustainable incomes. To Riis, the landowners looked like “tyrants that sweeten the cup of bitterness with their treacherous poison” (166). In the destitute areas, crime grew rampant, and the poor packed themselves into the tenements. Disease and illness worked adverse to any improvement of living conditions.
How well Wes Moore describes the culture of the streets, and particularly disenfranchised adolescents that resort to violence, is extraordinary considering the unbiased perspective Moore gives. Amid Moore’s book one primary theme is street culture. Particularly Moore describes the street culture in two cities, which are Baltimore and the Bronx. In Baltimore city the climate and atmosphere, of high dropout rates, high unemployment and poor public infrastructure creates a perfect trifecta for gang violence to occur. Due to what was stated above, lower income adolescent residents in Baltimore are forced to resort to crime and drugs as a scapegoat of their missed opportunities.
As I walked down 125th ST Lexington Avenue I took a picture of a NYPD trailer park, because that’s what I see every day as I’m heading to work. This trailer park represents criminal justice to me because the officers that are in it help to reduce the crime. 125th St was A neighborhood full of homeless people, who spent their days smoking 2K which is synthetic marijuana. The NYPD trailer park is their twenty for seven helping to get the 2K off the street. One way the officers are helping is by getting the bodegas to stop selling it.
In Goffman’s book, these themes are represented in her chapter titles. First, in “The 6th Street Boys and Their Legal Entanglements,” Goffman describes the types of legal troubles the men are frequently involved in. The most common offenses were outstanding warrants for small reasons such as “failure to appear for a court date” or delinquent “court fines and fees” (Goffman, 2014, p. 18). The more serious technical warrants were issued for probation or parole violations such as drinking or breaking curfew. Most of Goffman’s legal analysis focused on outstanding warrants and the men’s reaction, or desire, to stay out of jail.
When analysing The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, it is evident that there are a multitude of effects on the writing and its writer. Specifically, the clash between Jon Do as a person, and the bureaucracy of the North Korean government. Marxism works to explain the struggle between social structure which pertains to the book because of an unjustly founded class system. Furthermore, Jon Do has experienced both social classes, and it is clear that Jon Do struggles with the constant conflict between his identity and who he is forced to be. Thus, Marxism can be applied to the book since Jon Do exemplifies how the North Korean government consistently imposes socialistic values, and forces citizens to abide by those existing social classes
In the late 1960’s Heroin became a large problem in New York and the rest of the country. The Government nor the police knew what to do. So every person who dealt with the drugs or anything related was sent straight to jail. They had no idea that the problem required more than just locking the people. The narrator states “Billions of dollars are spent building more jails.”
“’The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.’” (Dick). This quote by Rick gives insight to how electric animals as well as androids (advanced electric animals) were viewed in society and possibly their use in criticizing American society. Social class is an aspect of our American society that is viewed negatively by some, and positively by others.
By the preliminary year of 1990s, the crack period that engulfed New York City in the 1980s was on the path to failure and delinquency percentages were correspondingly decreasing. But Randol Contreras noticed something special on the roads in South Bronx community where he grew up. Randol observed how his drug-distributing friends were no longer making money from retailing crack, but were revolving to mugging other dealers for a progressively deteriorating segment of the drug domain. Randol Contreras wrote the book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Randol shadowed a unit of Dominican males from streets of New York who were born at the end of the Crack Era.
Punished was Victor Rios study of criminalized black and Latino boys in Oakland, California. Victor Rios wanted to understand how the criminalization influenced the young boys. He was concerned about the effect the punitive environment had on the way the boys valued themselves and everything they do and the patterns of punishment and justice practices enforced by adult authority. He thought that criminalization was deeply embedded in Oakland and the social ecology, in which the boys grew up, was completely punitive. Victor Rios combined the methods of critical criminology and urban ethnography to study the effects and consequences that criminalization had on the marginalized young boys.
Synopsis In the introduction, Michelle Alexander (2010) introduces herself and expresses her passion about the topic of how the criminal justice system accomplishes racial hierarchy here in the United States. In chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow, Alexander (2010) suggests that the federal government can no longer be trusted to make any effort to enforce black civil rights legislation, especially when the Drug War is aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In response to revolts formed between black slaves and white indentured servants, rich whites extended special privileges to their indentured servants that drove a wedge between them and the slaves that successfully stopped the revolts.
John Steinbeck’s, Of Mice and Men, is a compelling story that has captured and embodied the struggle and loneliness felt by many during the Great Depression. While desire for the American Dream is prominent in the novel, Steinbeck is able to demonstrate the wants from different social classes through the construction of characters such as George Milton and Curley’s wife. With these characters, Steinbeck successfully displays the difference in ideas, values and attitudes of certain social classes in the 1930’s and the illustrates the rarity of achieving the American Dream. Steinbeck wrote this novel during the Great Depression, when America was suffering greatly by the disastrous crash of the stock market. From this point in time, separation of the different classes became
According to Marxist theory, social stratification is created by the differing economic competences among people and the relationship to the processes of production. Two distinct classes can be created in a society, one who own the factors and those who sell their labor in the production chain. Marx recognises that aside from the two distinct classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, there are two other distinctive group that somehow manage to relate: the petite bourgeoisie, those who own some of the means of productions but their profit earning power is not enough to earn them a position among the bourgeoisie and the underclass who have no social status such as beggars and the
(Lee 269). This shows conflict between classes because white people are giving black people a hard time. Black people were perceived as the lowest class and throughout the story people would treat them as if they were dirt. Being in the lowest class, they would have to do all of the terrible work. They never had a chance to get a good job and be successful because of the white people.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) considered himself not to be a sociologist but a political activist. However, many would disagree and in the view of Hughes (1986), he was ‘both – and a philosopher, historian, economist, and a political scientist as well.’ Much of the work of Marx was political and economic but his main focus was on class conflict and how this led to the rise of capitalism. While nowadays, when people hear the word “communism”, they think of the dictatorial rule of Stalin and the horrific stories of life in a communist state such as the Soviet Union, it is important not to accuse Marx of the deeds carried out in his name.