Albert Kircidel Cohen (June 15, 1918 – November 25, 2014) was a prominent American

criminologist Criminology (from Latin , 'accusation', and Ancient Greek , ''-logia'', from λόγος ''logos'', 'word, reason') is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behaviou ...

. He is known for his Subcultural Theory of

delinquent Delinquent may refer to: * Delinquent (royalist) In 1643, near the start of the English Civil War, Parliament set up two committees: the Sequestration Committee, which confiscated the estates of the Royalists who fought against Parliament, and ...

urban gangs, including his influential book ''Delinquent Boys: Culture of the Gang.'' He has served as Vice President of the

American Society of Criminology The American Society of Criminology (ASC) is an international organization based on the campus of Ohio State University whose members focus on the study of crime and delinquency. It aims to grow and disseminate scholarly research, with members wo ...

from 1984–1985 and in 1993 he received the society's Edwin H. Sutherland award.

Work

Albert Cohen was a student of

Talcott Parsons Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in soci ...

and wrote a Ph.D. under his inspiration. Parsons and Cohen continued to correspond also after Cohen left Harvard. In his 1955 work, ''Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang'', Cohen wrote about delinquent gangs and suggested in his theoretical discussion how such gangs attempted to "replace" society's common norms and values with their own sub-cultures. He proposed two basic ideologies, the first of which is called status frustration.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cohen, Albert K. American criminologists 1918 births Harvard University alumni 2014 deaths