Social Issues In Boyz N The Hood

General strain theory was developed by Robert Agnew. There are three major categories in the types of General strain theory: Failure to achieve positively valued goals, the loss of positively valued stimuli, and the presentation of negative stimuli. A positively valued goal has three sorts and those are money/economic success, status and respect. Lack of money causes strain because it is not obtainable through legitimate means. Strain will result from the lack of autonomy disproportionately affecting adolescents and the poor because of their lower position in society. Those three types of strains will increase the likelihood of experiencing negative emotions in proportion to the duration of stress. The links between strain and crime is that

Brent Staples’s essay is still relevant today because of the fear that lives inside people who don’t understand or accept others, which often leads to authorities abusing their power so that they can feel safe while others live their lives cautiously. This relates to how both African Americans and the police live their lives in fear and with caution. The police fear African Americans due to their own prejudice reasons which causes them to abuse their authority by acting more aggressive which helps themselves feel safer and stronger. This forces African Americans to live their lives with caution and patience because if they don’t, they put themselves at a higher risk of endangering themselves. Brent Staples wrote the article “Black Men in Public

On January 1st 2009 Officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed an innocent man. Oscar Grant was just getting off of the train from a previous New Year's party with a group of his friends. While on the train, one rider had reported that a fight broke out onboard. When Grant and his friends made it to the station, they were taken custody. That is when Officer Mehserle intentionally shot and killed Oscar Grant.

John Singleton is a phenomenal film director who is also known for the critically acclaimed movie Boyz N the Hood; I was surprised to find that this outstanding director is also from the same background as the characters in his films; he grew up in South Central Los Angeles. How he got introduced to the film is that in his teens every day he volunteered as a Gofer for USC film school, eventually, they allow him to attend as a student, there he studied to be a director. So he watches and experience and grew up around the areas of South Central Los Angeles, enough to reflect the same images in his films exactly how it is in South Central Los Angeles.

Throughout this semester, we have covered various criminological theories along with their strengths and limitations. These theoretical perspectives provide possible explanations to why individuals commit crimes. In addition to, these theories are indirectly woven within cultural objects such as song lyrics, movies, books, and television. For my cultural object, I chose to analyze a book titled; There Are No Children Here, that encompasses a variety of criminological theories. However, in this paper I will examine how Merton/Agnew’s strain theory and its assumptions are illustrated within the context and characters in this book. Specifically, I will focus on Lafeyette,

The film Boyz N’ the hood follows the lives of a group of young African American men growing up in the hood where poverty, crime and violence are rampant. The three main characters are Darin (Dough boy), Ricky (Darin’s brother), and Tre. In this this film there are many schools of criminology’s that help explain the roots of the criminality portrayed. The positive school which include the concepts of eugenic criminology, ID, Ego, Superego, modeling theory, mesomorph and positive reinforcement I believe explains the criminality in the film exceptionally well.

The movie “Boyz N’ the Hood” is a story centered on the issues that are seen in the urban areas of Los Angeles every day. Tre (the main character) is raised in a way that seems to be correct but he still ends up being a part of criminal activity. While watching this film in an academic setting it is easy to see the social and political reform messages that are being communicated to the audience. On the political side it is easy to see the race and ethnicity of the film maker while on the social side the audience can tell the filmmaker is spreading a message. All together “Boyz N’ the Hood” is a very good film that depicts the type of stuff that happens in the poorer parts of Los Angeles.

“[What goes] into the making of a young thug?” (Staples 242). In his short story, “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space,” Brent Staples shares what it is like to grow up as an African American male in America. Staples suggests that a person will become “a young thug” as a repercussion from their home life (242). Staples was raised in a neighborhood with “a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders” (242). As a result, an adolescent who was raised in this environment would have difficulty staying out of trouble and avoiding becoming a thug. The norm of his neighborhood was ultimately to become a thug who commits crimes. In contrast, if a person goes against the norm they were considered “good boys

The film Boyz N the Hood is a story about life in South Central Los Angeles. The film was wrote and directed by John Singleton in 1991. I chose this movie because of its relevance to the course and how it reflects pop culture in that time period. The opening line in the movie “one out of every twenty-one Black American males will be murdered in their lifetime” really catches the audience attention (Nicolaides & Singleton, 1991). This movie goes into detail and shows the life of three young males living in the hood of Los Angeles battling a life surrounded by drugs, violence, and questions of race. This film is a great image of how American pop culture was consumed in the early 90s.

As I go further throughout this chapter, I began to realize this chapter is about judgment of character, where you from and the ongoing justice for black lives. One of the interesting things about this chapter is where it explains the situation where the police commissioner is dealing with his fellow officers, as they wonder what side is he actually on. Which was also confusion. For example, where the police commissioner would visit the community park and the gym, where the truce meetings were held. The confusion part of this chapter was that he would actually talk the gang members, some gave him the okay to communicate and some wanted to kill him, because of the obvious, of him being a cop. Also where he expressed his frustration with foul

The intent of this movie was fulfilled by showing the audience the points he was addressing. The writer showed the cruel violence that was happening in Los Angeles and how no one on the outside seemed to know or even care about what was going on in the hood. The way the movie was produced showing a majority of the focus from Tre Styles point of view was helpful in letting the viewers understand how it is to live in the hood from someone’s perspective. There was two particular scenes in the movie that I felt was key to the development and understanding of the film. The first one was the scene where Tre’s dad Furious Styles takes him and Ricky to this billboard that is advertising “Cash for your home”. Furious goes on to talk about how there are gun shops and liquor stores on every corner in a black community. He addresses that the public on the outskirts of the hood wants the black community to kill themselves. I believe that this scene was essential to the development of the film because it highlighted one of Singleton’s intents to address inner-city black gun violence awareness. The second on was when Tre and Ricky were walking back home from the store when they got approached by a group of gang members in a car. Tre thought it would be best to split up but Ricky

The heated debate over Caucasian policeman abusing power in African American areas in the United States has been recently one of the leading topics in media, as a result of a contentious shooting in the town of Ferguson. The NBC News channel invited three authorities on the subject to discuss

Grease, a very well-known and largely popular musical with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John as the main characters. It’s a Romance about how Danny (John) and Sandy (Olivia) meet over the summer and fall in love, but when summer is over they find out they go to the same school and are in very different social cliques. The rest of the movie is how Sandy changes herself to stay with Danny. While it is a very popular movie, it also has many issues in how it portrays stereotypes of gender and sexualization and a lot of the sexiest generalization and issues can be found in the lyrics of the songs.

One critique of the strain theory is how it overemphasis the position of the social class in regards to crime and deviance. As we know, the strain theory applies mainly to the American lower class as they struggle the most. Our lower class are faced with the lack of resources to help them reconcile their goals. However, by looking at the variation of deviant and criminal behavior, the strain theory does not adequately account for any type of crimes besides the normal street or neighborhood crimes. Additionally, crimes that are considered as being white collar, in which they are known in our middle and upper-classes.

During the past decades, various criminologists developed different theories in an attempt to explain the causes of crime within the society. In return they were successful, as of today it was adopted or accepted, indeed all of theories explain the root causes of crime. One of these theories is anomie or strain theory which originally argues that the lower class frustration to higher class causes crime (Merton, 1938) in attempt to explain why majority of the people who commits crime are lower class. In 1985 Robert Agnew a sociologist come to an interest of studying the theory and finds a potential for the theory in explaining several causes of crime in society, but due to its limitation he developed and reformulated the theory to widen its dimension or scope. After revising the theory he come up into General strain theory of crime and builds its foundation in 1992.