Albert K. Cohen

Albert Kircidel Cohen (June 15, 1918 – November 25, 2014) was a prominent American criminologist.^[1] He is known for his Subcultural Theory of delinquent urban gangs, including his influential book Delinquent Boys: Culture of the Gang. He has served as Vice President of the American Society of Criminology from 1984–1985^[2] and in 1993 he received the society's Edwin H. Sutherland award.^[3]

Albert Cohen was a student of Talcott Parsons^[4] 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,^[5] 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.