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Social Institutions

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Social Institutions
Kelly Beam
Criminal Organization Week 3
Thomas Borton

A social institution is the area or group where a person lives or grows up. Getting an education creates a social institution because school helps to forming variable for the students who attend. The experience and knowledge a person receives in school, the environment a person grows up around helps them make the choices they make in life and develops what kind of person they become as an adult.
Social Institutions relate to organized crime as being the theory we are all a product of the environment we grow up in. Most feel what we are exposed to within any kind of social group for any length of time we will start to adopt many of the ways and characteristics of that group. It seems to become our way of life or survival mode so to speak. It becomes much easier and appealing to want to be a part of a group that maybe a family member has been or someone else close to a person is or was a part of. Most people tend to stick to what they know, which in some cases involves organized crime as a result of a social institution. Gangs, mobs and any other type of organized crime group can be considered a social institution that people end up participating in because that’s what their environment consists of or did consist of most of their life.
Many theories are applicable to organized crime and why criminal behavior exists and continues to occur. All of these theories involve the influences that social institutions have on the members of organized crime groups and how and why they exist and continue to. The first one which is most known to organized crime is the Alien Conspiracy theory. This theory puts the blame of the existence of organized crime in the United States on the outsiders and their influences (Lyman & Potter, 2007). The Alien Conspiracy theory adopts the idea that the mafia

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