Search results

Elijah Anderson's subcultural explanation for the adoption of the "code of the street" has directed scholarly attention toward specific cultural norms and scripts that encourage or sanction violence in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. We provide an explicit test of the general assumption that the code of the street is predominantly endorsed by youth residing in urban communities. Using data on 2,183 juvenile offenders committed to the State of Georgia's Department of Juvenile Justice between July 2002 and December 2003, we examine youths' strength of endorsement of code-specific attitudes. Importantly, these delinquent youth formerly resided in Georgia zip codes of varying degrees of urbanism, from highly urbanized to isolated rural areas. The findings suggest a considerable generalizability in strength of endorsement of the street code among delinquent youth residing in very distinctive types of territorial units. These analyses illustrate that the contemporary preoccupation among criminologists with an urban-based theory of the code may be misguided; the street code has broader reach than the inner city and is, in general, neither race-specific nor more strongly endorsed among delinquent youth in highly urbanized areas.

Research indicates that mismatches between individuals' identity standards and how they perceive others view them, or reflected appraisals (RAs), produce distress that individuals may attempt to alleviate by altering their behavior so as to achieve identity verification. While there has been a recent interest in understanding how individuals negotiate a criminal identity, little research has been conducted in naturalistic settings based on specific experiences and feedback received from others. We assess how discrepancies between one's criminal self‐view and RAs affect negative emotions and projected conformity after individuals are processed in the criminal justice system. Using a sample of 973 participants in the Australian Reintegrative Shaming Experiments, we find that discrepancies between criminal identities and RAs affect the amount of shame/guilt and embarrassment experienced by offenders and their projected conformity and that embarrassment mediates this relationship.