Cohen, Albert K. (1918–)

Albert K. Cohen has had a substantial influence in the field of sociology, criminology, and more specifically, juvenile justice. Cohen was born in Boston on June 15, 1918. He went to Harvard in 1935 and studied sociology under Pitirim Sorokin, Talcott Parsons, and Robert Merton. After finishing his bachelor's degree, he went on to Indiana University to begin a graduate degree, working under the direction of Edwin H. Sutherland. There he had an internship at Indiana Boys School, a school for delinquent juveniles. He received his master's degree in 1942 and returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. He wrote his dissertation on the origin of the delinquent culture and completed his degree in 1951. Cohen took his first faculty position at Indiana University, where he taught for 17 years. He moved to the University of Connecticut, from which he is now retired as professor emeritus.

Cohen has been recognized as an outstanding criminologist and sociologist in many ways. His books, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (1955) and Deviance and Control (1966), influenced the way criminologists view juvenile gangs. His articles “An Evaluation of ‘Themes’ and Kindred Concepts” (1946), “The Study of Social Problems: Discussion” (1948), and “The Sociology of the Deviant Act: Anomie Theory and Beyond” (1965) were also influential in criminology and sociology.

Cohen was the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, vice president of the American Society of Criminology, and in 1993 received the Edwin H. Sutherland award from the American Society of Criminology. In 2000, Cohen was recognized as an American Society of Criminology Fellow.

One of Cohen's most notable works was Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, written in 1955. Cohen applied a combination of differential association and anomie theories to explain juvenile gang delinquency. He noted that most juvenile criminal behavior was committed by groups or gangs rather than by individuals. Furthermore, juvenile gang behavior was described as nonutilitarian, serving no useful purpose. Thus Cohen's application of theory was different from that of his predecessor, Robert K. Merton, who argued that criminal acts served cultural goals, such as acquiring monetary reward. Cohen recognized that juveniles often engaged in crime to gain status among their delinquent peers. Juvenile gangs functioned as a separate culture aside from the dominant culture. The subculture served to insulate lower-class juveniles from the mainstream culture and provided a way for them to rebel against the dominant middle-class culture and gain status of their own.

The causes of juvenile delinquency, according to Cohen (1955), included poor social skills, a lack of educational opportunities, and an inability to delay gratification. Environmental influences were key concepts in Cohen's theory of juvenile delinquency. The type of family into which one was born led to the type of interactions and opportunities one would have and, subsequently, influenced juvenile delinquency.

Another key concept of Cohen's theory of juvenile delinquency was “middle-class measuring rods.” According to Cohen, those who were not middle-class would fall into one of the following categories: corner boy, college boy, or delinquent boy. The category of corner boy is the most common and includes youth who engage in petty delinquency and periodically in delinquency. The college boy accepts and strives to meet the middle-class norms. Realistically, however, college boys are doomed to fail because they do not have the capacity to achieve middle-class standards. The delinquent boy rejects middle-class norms and establishes his own set of norms, thus facilitating gangs and ganglike behavior. Cohen referred to the delinquent boy behavior as reaction formation, which includes an exaggerated response to one's inability to succeed. Youth in this category are described as engaging in “short-run hedonism,” [Page 66]indicative of living day to day with no long-term vision in mind. The delinquent subculture, therefore, develops from an inability to attain middle-class measuring rods, and the juveniles develop behavior that is negativistic, malicious, and nonutilitarian.

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