There Are No Children Here: The Influence of Childhood Experience on Criminal Behavior

The biography, ‘There are no children here’ by Alex Kotlowitz, shows the journey of two young boys and the challenges they face with having to grow up in the inner city of Chicago. The River’s family lives in the inner city of Chicago at the Governor Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex, where violence and poverty are at a high. The two boys, Lafayette and Pharoah, live in a small apartment with their siblings and mother, LaJoe. With their father rarely being around, Lafeyette felt the need to step up and be someone his family can rely on by helping his mother out either around the house or with his younger siblings. LaJoe feels she failed as a mother to her three oldest children because they were involved in drugs and have been in jail at least once. They had all fallen into the social norms of prostitution, drug dealing, and getting in trouble with the law. LaJoe believes that education is the only way to get out of the inner city and its troubles. Over the years living at Henry Horner, the neighborhood slowly decayed, middle-class families fled, and job employment decreased drastically. For the city, “unemployment was officially estimated at 19 percent; unofficially, it was probably much higher” (Kotlowitz 11). Their neighborhood had once been among the cities wealthiest area, but it has turned to shootings occurring on the regular. Violence occurs so often there that the police department does not keep record of all the shootings because it is just a normal thing that happens in those neighborhoods. Pharoah calls the neighborhood a ‘graveyard’ because of the amount of people of all ages have died due to the many problems wrong in the inner city such as gang violence or drugs. Now their neighborhood was like a ghost town, there was no entertainment for the children such as bowling allies or public libraries. 

The boy aims to show that there is no sense of community or trust within the people because they feel like they are just trying to get by and avoid getting involved with the issues. It wants to show the story of children’s lives that grow up living in poverty and high crime areas and how it can affect someone’s life. Broken windows theory states that visual manifestations of social disorganization are what causes crime. The public housing complex itself does not look safe with mailboxes broken, dirty streets, and no light poles outside the complex to make people feel safe. It was even worse inside the complex with the River’s family housing eight people in an apartment not much bigger than a prison cell that has no laundry and roaches and maggots everywhere daily. It does not help that there are no libraries around which indicates lack of education for the schools around there. Along with there not being any after school activities going on such as clubs, sports, or tutoring. This causes social problems and delinquency because if there is no entertainment for the children they will choose to get involved with gangs or drugs. Gangs tend to recruit young children to get them to do their dirty work and the boys do not want to get involved with that. Lafeyette says that there are “a lot of people in the projects who say they’re not gonna do drugs, that they’re not gonna drop out, that they won’t be on the streets. But they’re doing it now. Never say never” (Kotlowitz 29). This means that the projects changes people in a bad way, they are different the person they were before they moved there. It turns children towards drug use, not trying or even just going to school which causes them to drop out with no sort of education and the only means is to join a gang or become a dealer to survive. Lafeyette feels like he needs to set a good example for his siblings because they did not set one for him. He needs to be the one that does not get caught up in the projects stereotype and change the way his family is living. When the summer ended “the police would record that one person every three days had been beaten, shot at, or stabbed at Horner” (Kotlowitz 32). This is no surprise to the people that live in the inner city of Chicago’s public complexes, since it has become a societal normal that is driving their community further apart. 

Neighborhoods and the environment that people live in influence criminal behavior, if someone’s friends are getting involved in criminal activity then they could feel peer pressured into doing the same thing. Social problems occur in inner cities because of poverty, drug addiction, and population turnover which then also leads to crime. Children who are not doing good in school, go home to an unstable family, or live in a dangerous area will show signs of social disorganization and are more likely to pursue criminal acts than someone that has a stable home life. Differential association theory states that when individuals are around others, they tend to adopt certain characteristics of theirs such as attitudes and motives towards criminal behavior. Edwin Sutherland claims that all behavior is learned, it is not a result of a biological or psychological defect. In the inner cities of Chicago, the norm was to become a part of a gang and people being forced into committing a crime that spreads violence throughout the neighborhood.

Social learning theory shows the learning process and social behavior of an individual suggesting that new behaviors can be received through imitating and observing other people’s actions. Once they see someone doing something, they apply those behaviors to themselves and assume if that person can do it then they can too. I chose this particular theory because I think there are a lot of things that relate in this story to why children end up on the wrong path of gangs, drugs and violence in the inner cities of Chicago. This story shows young boys growing up in a dangerous environment with the standard being that children from there do not get an education and end up on the streets involved with the wrong people. They see criminal behavior everywhere they go and have societal norms of modeling that behavior to the point where they get in trouble with the law. They do not think about the punishments and only think about the rewards their actions can get them. Lafayette’s friend, Rickey, appears to be a bad influence on the boys that could be taking Lafeyette down the wrong path. Rickey suggested that they both steal some tapes from a video cassette store, but Pharoah insisted they leave. When he said no, Pharoah was “disappointed in Rickey, but even more so in Lafeyette, who seemed to bow to the pressure of his friend” (Kotlowitz 151). The River’s boys come in contact with people that are participating in deviant behavior all the time and it is normal for children in their area to get pulled into that crowd just because it is simply around them. 

The criminal behavior people in their community are participating in is because they see other people doing it, like their friends, and they want to be accepted or they need the money and protection. People that live in the inner city get judged and are associated with criminals just because it is a social norm being that is where most come from and where most crime is located. Lafeyette has already come in contact with death at a young age, but finding out his friend, Bird Leg, was shot and died really took a toll on him emotionally. His involvement in a gang was not because of their drug power, but more of the fact that it was the sense of community he belongs to and the group identity of fitting in with others. Lafeyette feels that with all the violence around him, he might not make it into adulthood. While Pharoah’s response to the summer’s violence took a toll on his physical health causing him to develop a stutter and get scared easily by loud noises due to the shootings. Differential association talks about different ways that people are more likely to commit crime when there is opportunity to. It is said that the earlier someone is exposed to conduct norms and the longer they are exposed to those will turn them towards criminal behavior. LaJoe always wanted the best for her children which was to get them out of the projects she no longer knew of and to get them to a better place for them to have a future. She was so busy with other things trying to keep their family safe that, “the relentless violence of the neighborhood also wore her down”. 

The boys have been exposed to dangerous environments and poverty their whole lives and are attached to bad things occurring on the regular. They believe that everywhere in the world also has gangs just as bad as theirs because that’s all they have experienced. Lafeyette cannot talk about certain things that happen even if it was two years ago, certain things can traumatize someone enough for their physical and mental health to decline. With the regular occurrence of shootings and the unknown, the longer people are exposed to them the more strongly they are attached. This all leads to crime and is why a lot of children that grow up in a high crime and poverty areas, usually lean towards using or selling drugs, theft, or gang violence.