Conti, Norman Paul; PhD

                         UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, 2000
 
                         SOCIOLOGY, CRIMINOLOGY AND PENOLOGY (0627); EDUCATION, VOCATIONAL (0747); SOCIOLOGY, INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS (0629)
 

                         The specific task of this ethnographic study is to construct a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of
                         socialization that exist within the police training system. In order to better understand the process of
                         <italic>becoming</italic> a police officer it is important to observe the organizational structures that
                         facilitate this transformation. This was accomplished through twenty-one weeks of participant observation
                         and three waves of questionnaires focused on ascertaining the structure of the recruit group's social
                         network. The general question that this dissertation sets out to answer is: How is police socialization
                         accomplished? Entailed within this general question are more specific ones: (1)&nbsp;how does the
                         structure of academy training Contribute to resocialization; (2)&nbsp;what are the key mechanisms
                         contained within this system that facilitate the group change; (3)&nbsp;what are the formal and informal
                         mechanisms of socialization within this organization; (4)&nbsp;how do these in/formal mechanisms relate
                         to one and other? The results of this study were that the police academy training system is the functional
                         equivalent of a total institution and paramilitary recruits play a key role in peer socialization. Moreover, it
                         was discovered that the recruit network evolves with a direct relation to such factors as prior structure,
                         infrastructure, mini-mechanisms. Here again it is assumed that the paramilitary recruits are playing a key
                         role as a part of these factors.

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