The Stickup Kids Chapter Summary

By the preliminary year of 1990s, the crack period that engulfed New York City in the 1980s was on the path to failure and delinquency percentages were correspondingly decreasing. But Randol Contreras noticed something special on the roads in South Bronx community where he grew up. Randol observed how his drug-distributing friends were no longer making money from retailing crack, but were revolving to mugging other dealers for a progressively deteriorating segment of the drug domain. Randol Contreras wrote the book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Randol shadowed a unit of Dominican males from streets of New York who were born at the end of the Crack Era. It’s a delicate story for Contreras who grew up watching

This allowed them to have their own version of the American Dream. On the streets of New York, these Dominican males were acknowledged as Joloperos in Spanish, or the recognized Stickup Kids.

In the book, Randol composes about his ventures with his friends “The Stick up Kids” and leads to analyze their conduct during their production moments. He notes how the production of crack increased after the decline of the Cocaine market. This is the time period when they staunch beyond inhumane delinquencies than ever formerly. Most people called them “The New York Boys – a name given to them by town locals who resented their presence or feared their violence and crime” (87). Contreras called them Stars after hearing their stories. He

Contreras states how these men would have suicide on their concentration during their outstanding eras, nonetheless they just “acted confident, bold, and socially and financially under control “(217). Soon their significance and desirability had taken an unexpected, bad plunge. Soon they had to modify into their original deprived place. Soon after they all hit rock bottom, as Contreras describes, “ Suicide, and self-destruction entered their bodies, and minds. Now, they became crime’s version of those triste fallen stars” (217). Contreras compares to them to meteoroids as “ because just like those meteors that zoom across the midnight sky, they were heading rapidly into a tremendous crash-and Boom”, as “sociologist Emil Durkheim would say, put them in a state of anomie” (217). In the interval phase drug business for Crack subsided and the Stickups were unsuccessful, the Stickup kids experienced anomie. Anomie is term defined by Émile Durkheim as a stage of interruptions of morals and ethics or from a absence of persistence or principles. Anomie might ascend when there is unpredictability amongst the ethnic ambitions and the measures of accomplishing them. According to sociologist Robert Mearton and his theory of anomie derived from Durkheim, the Stickup kids can be categorized as innovators in the society. Innovators are the ones who accept the targets of accomplishment but reject the custom