Walter Benson Miller was born February 7, 1920, in Philadelphia and died March 28, 2004, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[citation needed] Miller worked with James Q. Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies in the 1960s.
Miller, a jazz, blues and bluegrass musician, found that his knowledge of and interest in music helped him establish rapport with gang youth.
Unlike other theories of youth gangs, Miller saw gang members as essentially normal youth who were trying to achieve belonging and status according to the criteria of their own lower and working class, as opposed to middle class, communities.
Miller, Walter B.1958 Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency.