What Is The Theme Of The Book Homeward

The book Homeward was a very eye-opening read on not only life after prison, but the in-depth stories of how prisoners feel, how they were raised, and the impact it had on their life. There were many topics covered from personal interviews. I learned many things from this book. In the first chapters, I learned research can be biased. It was common knowledge that our criminal justice system was not perfect, but I did not realize how unfair it can be. Government officials do not only just look at the crime committed, but some look at the features of the person as well, whether that is their race, gender, etc. With that being said, the book had mentioned there being mostly African American and Latino men that make up most of the population in

Mentioned by sociologist, W.I. Thomas, there are 3 factors that come into play. There is needed supervision of young people, which lots of these criminals did not have growing up. Then there are formal and informal organizations. The people who are incarcerated, lots did not keep busy to keep out of trouble, instead found themselves with gangs, selling drugs, and other deviant things. Lastly, friendship networks were important because having close tied bonds kept people out of trouble, well these criminals lacked social bonds, but that is a different theory. Continuing, with social disorganization, there is a key causal model that helps us understand a series of crime. There are four main keys that impact the person affected. There is usually some sort of disruption in this person's social life, which we see happen to these criminals. Whether this be experiencing homelessness or poverty-stricken inner-city neighborhoods, these criminals had disruptive social change in their childhood. The next key is conventional institutional breakdown. It is very plausible for there to be a mental crisis in the mind of someone who is brought up the way these criminals were. Living in poverty, these people either went to school and would get into trouble there or would end up dropping out. The third key is decreased social control. For lots of these interviewed criminals, they experience some type of mental illness. This makes them take a step back from social interactions and crowds. Some got into many fights before prison, which is because of disrupted social bonds. The last key to this causal model is an increased drift into deviance. In this book, it was common to see these criminals progressively get worse through the years before incarceration. Many would start with light drug abuse then turn to the hard drugs and spend all their money on it. Along with this, gangs were also quite common in some of