Getting Paid: Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City

by Mercer L. Sullivan

Book Overview

The working class in New York City was remade in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1820s a substantial majority of city artisans were native-born; by the 1850s three-quarters of the city's laboring men and women were immigrants. How did the influx of this large group of young adults affect the city's working class? What determined the texture of working-class life during the antebellum period? Richard Stott addresses these questions as he explores...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801495989
• ISBN13: 9780801495984
• Release Date: December 1989
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Comparative Ethnography Hits the Spot

Mercer Sullivan's text follows three youth cliques in the Brooklyn area (in neighborhoods he coins Projectville, La Barriada and Hamilton Park), and studies their involvement in, and desistance from, local youth crime. The study is largely ethnographic, and so Sullivan alternates between dialogue between his subjects and an analysis on their criminal patterns. Sullivan also discusses how the physical ecology of the neighborhood, the transiency of the residents, levels of education, economic opportunity, family values, and access to a network of human resources--a system of social capital--affects the youths' criminal careers, and whether or not these acts of criminality are for the purpose of entertainment or income-generation.Being published in 1989, the text is a bit outdated, but his discussion as to youth crime in neighborhoods of social isolation is still very relevant today. Well worth reading.