Urban Code or Urban Legend

• Author: Shelley Keith,Elizabeth Griffiths
• Published date: 01 July 2014
• Date: 01 July 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/2153368713500318
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Race and Justice
2014, Vol. 4(3) 270-298
Urban Code or Urban
ª The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
Legend: Endorsement of
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DOI: 10.1177/2153368713500318
the Street Code Among
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Delinquent Youth in
Urban, Suburban, and
Rural Georgia
Shelley Keith1 and Elizabeth Griffiths2
Abstract
Elijah Anderson’s subcultural explanation for the adoption of the ‘‘code of the street’’
has directed scholarly attention toward specific cultural norms and scripts that
encourage or sanction violence in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. We provide
an explicit test of the general assumption that the code of the street is predominantly
endorsed by youth residing in urban communities. Using data on 2,183 juvenile
offenders committed to the State of Georgia’s Department of Juvenile Justice between
July 2002 and December 2003, we examine youths’ strength of endorsement of code-
specific attitudes. Importantly, these delinquent youth formerly resided in Georgia zip
codes of varying degrees of urbanism, from highly urbanized to isolated rural areas.
The findings suggest a considerable generalizability in strength of endorsement of the
street code among delinquent youth residing in very distinctive types of territorial
units. These analyses illustrate that the contemporary preoccupation among criminol-
ogists with an urban-based theory of the code may be misguided; the street code has
broader reach than the inner city and is, in general, neither race-specific nor more
strongly endorsed among delinquent youth in highly urbanized areas.
Keywords
code of the streets, criminological theories, urban, rural, youth, violence
1 Department of Sociology, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, USA
2 School of Criminal Justice, Center for Law and Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA
Corresponding Author:
Shelley Keith, Department of Sociology, Mississippi State University, P.O. Box C, 207 Bowen Hall, Hardy
Road, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA.
Email: skeith@soc.msstate.edu

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Keith and Griffiths
271
Anderson (1999) provides an ethnographic account of the subculture of violence in
inner-city Philadelphia, which he identifies as the ‘‘code of the street.’’ The code con-
stitutes ‘‘a set of informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior, particularly
violence’’ (Anderson, 1999, p. 33). In Anderson’s view, structural barriers in the local
environment, such as a lack of jobs, distrust of the police, racism, and rampant drug
use and trafficking, lead to the development of a culture oppositional to middle-class
values. This culture emerges as a means of coping with highly aversive local condi-
tions. Because young people in extremely disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods
experience barriers to status acquisition through education or employment, they cam-
paign for respect and esteem in the eyes of their peers via alternative status-conferring
mechanisms, like being tough and having ‘‘nerve.’’
While the argument that disadvantaged local socioeconomic conditions feed the
existence and proliferation of a street code encouraging violence in response to certain
affronts is persuasive and has received considerable empirical support (Baumer,
Horney, Felson, & Lauritsen, 2003; Brezina, Agnew, Cullen, & Wright, 2004;
Drummond, Bolland, & Harris, 2011; Stewart & Simons, 2006, 2010), Anderson is
ambiguous about the origins and breadth of the street code. Is it new or old? Does it
arise in present-day inner-city communities of color in the same way that it may have
emerged among 19th-century herding societies of the South or in the 19th-century
Wild West? Why might its emergence be historically and temporally context-specific?
According to Anderson (1999, p. 179),
The code of the streets and the world it reflects have taken shape in the context of the exist-
ing structures and traditions in the black community in the United States. Some of these
traditions go back to the time of slavery . . . [but] elements of the code, which works to
organize problematic public areas, can be traced back to the Roman era, to the shogun
warriors, and particularly to the old American South and West or even to biblical times.
Thus, while the code’s origins may be ancient, its specific manifestation in present-
day inner-city communities of color is a function of the particular social, spatial, and
politico-economic arrangements that give rise to the structural deprivation and iso-
lation of the ‘‘truly disadvantaged’’ from the 1980s through the present (Anderson,
1999; Matsuda, Drakulich, & Kubrin, 2006; Peterson & Krivo, 2010; Sampson &
Wilson, 1995; Wilson, 1987).
There is considerable reason to speculate that the influence of the code extends
well beyond the inner city. First, as Jargowsky (1997, p. 19) notes, ‘‘many pockets of
extreme poverty exist outside of metropolitan areas,’’ which may encourage code
adoption among affected youth. Second, if a code of honor permitting violence in
response to affronts to family or respect first emerged in the rural Old South (Nisbett
& Cohen, 1996; Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967), then traces of that cultural code may
remain irrespective of local economic conditions in this region. The existence of an
historically based, spatially contained Southern code of honor is, indeed, one of the
central explanations for elevated levels of violence in the South (Butterfield, 1995;
Nisbett & Cohen, 1996; Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967).

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Race and Justice 4(3)
Third, the proliferation of messages consistent with the street code in both social
(YouTube, Facebook, etc.) and more traditional media outlets (music, movies, etc.)
may encourage the spread of a cultural code in places that might not otherwise have
been susceptible to its influence. For example, gangsta rap songs allow ‘‘listeners of
rap, many of whom are White youth, . . . [to] vicariously experience the ghetto, a place
symbolizing danger and deviance’’ (Weitzer & Kubrin, 2009, p. 7). Scholars contend
that exposure to cultural messages consistent with the code in the media does not
presuppose internalization of the street codes’ violent themes among its consumers
more broadly because most youth have ‘‘more attractive conventional ways of
attaining self-worth’’ (Matsuda et al., 2006, p. 342). Yet, the degree to which the code
is endorsed by delinquent youth outside of the inner city remains an empirical
question.
Finally, the interpenetration of rural and urban lifestyles, attitudes, social condi-
tions, and economic prospects raises questions about the distinctiveness of experience
that can be anticipated across these territorial units. Lichter and Brown (2011, p. 584)
argue, for example,
that the social and spatial boundaries that have divided rural from urban America histori-
cally are rapidly shifting, blurring, and being crossed. Rural-urban interactions also are
increasingly symmetrical rather than asymmetrical, with mutual interdependencies and
reciprocal flows of people, goods and services, and information.
To the extent that migrants to the suburbs, exburbs, and edges of urban areas
represent ‘‘cultural carriers’’ of attitudes and values, that rural America is racially and
ethnically heterogeneous, and that technological innovations have ‘‘facilitated the
rapid (and relatively costless) movement of information and capital’’ across place
(Lichter & Brown, 2011, p. 567), the spatial and social boundaries that once dis-
tinguished urban from rural places are becoming increasingly obsolete.
Few studies have explicitly tested the assumption, however, that the street code
affects the behavior and attitudes of nonurban youth (but see, Piquero et al., 2012;
Taylor, Esbensen, Brick, & Freng, 2010). When tests of the code—or the violence
stemming from there—have involved samples outside of inner-city neighborhoods,
scholars at least implicitly assume that the urbanism of the community is relevant
by including a dichotomous control variable in their models (Baumer et al., 2003;
Brezina et al., 2004; Cao, Adams, & Jensen, 1997; Heimer, 1997; McNulty & Bellair,
2003). In these studies, however, the urban control is almost never significant. There-
fore, evaluating the reach of the code is important for exploring and demythologizing
the current emphasis on cultural attitudes permissive of crime in inner-city neighbor-
hoods or, more specifically, in urban communities of color. Consequently, this study
explores the reach of the code of the street across urban, suburban, small city, and rural
areas among 2,183 youth committed to the State of Georgia’s Department of Juvenile
Justice (DJJ) over the 18 months between July 2002 and December 2003. In the
remainder of this article, we first outline several similarities and differences across
rural and urban areas that may influence street code endorsement among youth. We

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273
then describe the data, the analytical strategy, and the results before discussing the
implications of this research.
The Origins of the Street Code
Is the code of the street an urban phenomenon? Research evaluating Anderson’s (1999)
cultural code that endorses or legitimizes violence in response to disrespect has tended
to view the code of the street as a manifestation of specific urban problems. This is not
surprising, as inner-city neighborhoods are precisely the kinds of places in which rates
of violence and youth violence, in particular, are elevated. Yet, findings are mixed as
to whether code-like values are most prevalent in the central city (Berg, Stewart,
Schreck, & Simons,...