Summary Of Delinquent Boys By Albert Cohen

Albert Cohen’s main interest lay in explaining juvenile delinquency, and his major work ‘Delinquent Boys’, published in 1955, claimed that a delinquent subculture exists which could explain crime amongst juveniles. He said that when we look at the delinquent subculture we see that it is “non-utilitarian, malicious and negativistic”. This, he explains, is because the subculture takes its norms from the wider culture and turns them upside down. Therefore, what the delinquent does is right according to the standards of the subculture because it is wrong according to the standards of wider society. But why do juveniles form or join these subcultures in the first place? Cohen argued that certain sections of youth feel rejected by society and the