Free Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand by Mike S. Adams Page A

would also agree that peer pressure is an important part of the social learning process. Clearly, peers you encounter frequently and have known for a long time will have a great influence on your behavior. Also, if you formed the peer relationship early in life, it will influence you greatly—particularly if there is a strong emotional component to the relationship.
    All of these factors are on display in the movie Boyz N the Hood— particularly in the character Doughboy. He is exposed to heavy doses of pro-criminal influence growing up in the hood. Such influence is only compounded when he goes to prison. When he gets out, he falls back into the old influences that predated his criminal involvement. He is surrounded by very bad people who have been a part of his life for a very long time. And he is very close to those who helped lead him down a path of self-destruction in the first place.
    But not all theories of crime are liberal ones that assume people are inherently good until they are corrupted by bad society. “Control theory” is conservative in the sense that it assumes the worst about human nature and asserts that criminal impulses can be controlled by certain positive influences. Control theory is also featured in Boyz N the Hood— although less prominently than the progressive theories.
    Control theorists believe that explaining crime is not the main task of the criminologist. Since they consider humans to be predisposed toward crime, the focus of control theorists is actually on explaining law-abiding behavior. They ask the following question: How do bad people keep from doing bad things? Control theory offers a four-fold answer:
    1. Attachment. One way the criminal impulse can be controlled is through guilt. If a young person is attached to a parent—or to a teacher or to some other role model—then he will be less likely to commit crime. The youth knows that the transgression will cause the loved one to disapprove of him, so he conforms. In Boyz N the Hood, Tre’s attachment to his father keeps him out of a good deal of trouble.
    2. Belief. In addition to external controls on behavior, there must also be internal moral controls. Tre’s dad spends a lot of time with his son teaching him right from wrong—something few of the other characters in the film experience. Therefore, Tre actually has a positive and pro-social belief system.
    3. Involvement. This is just a restatement of the old maxim, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Put simply, one cannot commit crime while involved in constructive, conformist activities. As soon as Tre’s mother drops him off at his father’s house (the parents have joint custody), he is assigned various time-consuming chores. While the other kids are off getting into trouble, Tre is raking the yard or otherwise involved in constructive activity.
    4. Commitment. Tre’s father is not the only positive influence in his life. His mother is also a good role model. She is educated and intelligent. She teaches Tre the value of education. Because he does well in school, he is afraid to jeopardize his academic future by getting involved in delinquency.
    In the final analysis, Boyz N the Hood bears a greater resemblance to the field of criminology than it does to the world of reality. For every conservative explanation of crime, there are at least three liberal explanations of crime. But in real life it’s a different story. The liberal theories of delinquency perform poorly when tested scientifically. In fact, there is probably no other academic discipline that does as poor a job of explaining phenomena over which it claims jurisdiction or expertise as criminology.
    When the left-wing theories are actually subjected to empirical analysis, they rarely succeed in explaining over 10 percent of the variation in criminal conduct. To put that in plain English, criminologists often survey people about their involvement in crime. There is a lot of variation in self-reported