Code of the Streets

Theoretical Origins

Criminology has a rich history of attempting to understand configurations of criminal behavior through a cultural lens. Early theoretical models attributed a subculture to segments of the population purportedly most involved in violence, including working-class adolescents, Italians, southerners, and urban dwellers. A separate body of literature emerged along these lines that imputed a subculture to Blacks. According to models of this variety, Black males—plagued by a recent history of systemic racism and periods of brutality at the hands of the White majority— abided closely to alternative conduct norms embodied in a “culture of violence.” These norms stipulated that persons deploy serious and even lethal aggression to resolve interpersonal disputes. Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti, for instance, speculated that adversity in the African American experience was responsible for this cultural substrate, but this was never specified concretely. Further, theorists gave little weight to structural conditions and therefore were virtually silent as to whether oppositional norms were linked—in any way—to broader forces. By the early to late 1960s, following the publication of several contentious works in urban policy and sociology, the idea that deviant conduct norms explain violence among Blacks and lower-class persons became increasingly unpopular. The scholarly orientation in criminology at the time mirrored this trend. Ruth Kornhauser's critical evaluation of cultural models contributed further to the waning status of subcultural theory. However, there was a resurgence of interest in cultural models in the last decade of the 20th century, perhaps due to the explanatory limitations of purely structural explanations.

Violent crime rates climbed in America's cities throughout the 1970s and again in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, rates of homicide involving Black youth peaked at an unprecedented level. While this was occurring, many cities were witnessing structural decline brought about by large-scale transformation in the industrial sector. William Julius Wilson noted that urban communities were becoming distinguished by a disproportionate concentration of impoverished, female-headed Black families. Middle-class flight ensued, dense person-institution networks evaporated, and, in the wake of this, the urban poor grew increasingly isolated from mainstream role models. Wilson suggested that alternative behavioral protocols emerged from this milieu; these were less apt to assign negative sanctions to deviant and violent behaviors. Within this intellectual context, Elijah Anderson researched the cultural mechanisms driving violence in contemporary urban America.

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