The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur...

This book Monster: the Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur aka Kody Scott depicts all of the events that Kody went through from the day he joined a gang up until when he decides to leave the gang, and his life after the gang. He joined the Eight Tray Crips when he was only eleven years old. He gets initiated into the gang after his sixth grade graduation, and he describes his initiation as an even bigger right of passage into society than his own graduation. The reasons that Kody suggests that he had joined a gang has to do a lot with the whole concept of belonging. He makes it sound like his family life was not a very good one, and that in school he felt as if he had no power because he hints at being bullied as a†¦show more content†¦In this story Kody’s actions are learned first through the observations of others in his neighborhood or school. People all around him at the time were deciding to join gangs; it was the thing to do. During his initia tion he observed what the others did when it was his turn to shoot at the people in the streets, and after he shot and potentially killed them he was praised and rewarded with officially being a member of the gang. After that night his gang members positively reinforced him anytime he killed or hurt anyone from the enemy gangs, at times even civilians. Even while his mother was disapproving and there was a potential for severe punishment from the police, the positive reinforcement from his friends was more powerful because of his level of respect and admiration for them. An aspect of this theory that Albert Bandura claims teaches people violence is behavioral modeling, which states that people learn how to act by modeling what they have seen others do. This is shown throughout the book because Kody ends up joining a gang, like many others that he knows have done, and he goes along with what other people in the gang are doing and saying. He grows up around his gang members and fashio ns his behaviors to be similar to the ones that he looks up to, and this behavior is repeated with his younger brother, who idolizes Kody, when he joins