Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringin’ upke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks,
Golly Moses,
Natcherly we’re punks!

These lines are from the comic ensemble number “Gee, Officer Krupke” in the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story. The song is performed by members of the Jets, a white working-class gang, as they mock the authorities’ attempts to explain and “treat” juvenile delinquency. Addressing the police officer Krupke, they cycle through caricatured diagnoses offered by the legal system, psychiatry, and social work, blaming their behavior on upbringing and social conditions. Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics (with music by Leonard Bernstein), using slang, internal rhyme, and vaudeville-style patter to satirize mid-century institutional responses to youth crime.

The passage is a deliberately exaggerated plea: the boys insist they are “punks” only because their parents are addicts and alcoholics and their “bringin’ upke” made them uncontrollable. Sondheim’s lyric turns self-pity into parody, exposing how easy it is—both for institutions and for the youths themselves—to reduce complex social realities to a single causal story. The humor carries bite: the boys weaponize the language of social explanation to evade responsibility, while the song simultaneously critiques a society that prefers tidy labels and bureaucratic fixes over genuine understanding. The rhymes and mock-earnest tone underscore the gap between lived hardship and official diagnosis.