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Contemporary Gangs

Author: Deborah Lamm Weisel
Publisher: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC
ISBN: 9781931202305
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Annotation Questioning whether organizational theory can lead to greater understandings of gang structure, size, and growth and contribute predictive theories about gang success and expansion, Weisel (political science and public administration, North Carolina State U.) conducted field research with four Chicago and San Diego gangs. Qualitative analysis methods and software were used to identify varying aspects of gang organizations including labor specialization; patterns of leadership; extent of hierarchy; occurrence of regular meetings; payment of dues; and adherence to rules, discipline, and penalties. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Understanding Contemporary Gangs in America

Author: Rebecca D. Petersen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This unique book provides readers with a comprehensive and contemporary perspective on gangs in America. Its current articles, written by national experts in the field, contain a variety of diverse viewpoints and contribute to a well-rounded understanding of gangs and their broad societal implications. KEY TOPICS A seven-part organization covers 1) understanding and defining gangs; 2) gender issues; 3) race and ethnicity; 4) gangs in prisons and schools; 5) violence and drugs; 6) gang victimization; and 7) gang prevention and intervention. For law enforcement, police, court personnel, prosecutors, public defenders, attorneys, lawyers, judges, prison/correction staff, social workers, educators, and government workers.

Gangs

Author: Scott Cummings
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791413258
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book is an examination of contemporary gangs in American cities. Gangs have proliferated over the past ten years and pose a new set of challenges to public officials, law enforcement agencies, and urban educators. Most major cities are now confronted with serious problems derived from gang violence, drug traffic, and disruption of the public educational system. In the face of deindustrialization and deepening recession, many minority youngsters view gangs as attractive alternatives to a futile search for employment in a deteriorating urban economy. Perhaps most significant, gangs are now beginning to emerge in small and medium-sized cities. Some of the nation's leading scientists and scholars have been brought together in this book to examine the contemporary contours of America's gang problem, including Daniel J. Monti, Joan Moore, Scott Cummings, Howard Pinderhughes, Diego Vigil, Ray Hutchison, Felix Padilla, Jerome H. Skolnick, Pat Jackson, and Robert A. Destro. New material dealing with wilding gangs, migration and drug trafficking, and public educational disruption appear in this volume. Other topics covered include how gangs are organized, what social function they serve, their relation to conventional society, and the social and psychological factors that contribute to their rise. The relationship of the contemporary gang problem to past research is explored, and a rich variety of case histories and comparative analysis is presented. The book also includes a section on public policy.

Views from the Streets

Author: Roberto Aspholm
Publisher: Studies in Transgression
ISBN: 9780231187732
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Views from the Streets explains the dramatic transformation of black street gangs on Chicago's South Side during the early twenty-first century. Drawing on years of community work and in-depth interviews with gang members, Roberto R. Aspholm sheds new light on why gang violence persists and what might be done to address it.

YOUTH GANGS

Author: Robert J. Franzese
Publisher: Charles C Thomas Publisher
ISBN: 0398091072
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 18

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Book Description
In the quarter century since the first edition of this book, scholarship on gangs in general, and especially youth gangs, has grown exponentially. This massive expansion of the literature on youth gangs, especially in the past decade, warranted this expanded and updated fourth edition. The first chapter has an expanded discussion of definitional issues, plus recent data from the National Youth Gang Survey, material on the evolving economic nature of gangs, and gang use of internet and social media. The second chapter continues by examining gang violence and drug involvement, and the extent to which they are intercorrelated, with new material on victimization of gang members and gang involvement in drug use and sales. Chapter 3 focuses on racial and ethnic decadences in gangs and the important role of race and ethnicity on gang membership and gang behavior in the U.S. The fourth chapter examines female gangs and gang membership and the changes that have taken place in the nature and extent of female gang membership over time. The fifth and sixth chapters place contemporary American gangs in the historical and international perspective. Chapter 5 includes a new section on youth gangs in the new millennium, and Chapter 6 has been reorganized, particularly to reflect the burgeoning research on European and other international gangs since the turn of the millennium. Chapter 7 has been expanded to include recent developments in the actual and potential application of biosocial, psychological, and life course developmental theories to gangs. Chapter 8 provides a comprehensive, multilevel theory of gangs with updates including new propositions, and new evidence for both the new and old propositions, based on more recent work in theory development and theory testing for gangs. The ninth and tenth chapters’ revisions focus on legislative and justice system efforts to deter gang crime and membership. Chapter 10 also focuses on intervention and assistance programs outside the justice system, including discussion of the Gang Resistance Education and Training program. The final chapter concludes by considering the future of youth gangs in the U.S. and elsewhere in light of historical and cross-national evidence, theory, and experience with gang interventions and programs, considering more recent developments in those areas, and whether they justify any change and for what would be expected of the future of youth gangs.

Street Gangs

Author: Max G. Manwaring
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic government information
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
The primary thrust of the monograph is to explain the linkage of contemporary criminal street gangs (that is, the gang phenomenon or third generation gangs) to insurgency in terms f the instability it wreaks upon government and the concomitant challenge to state sovereignty. Although there are differences between gangs and insurgents regarding motives and modes of operations, this linkage infers that gang phenomena are mutated forms of urban insurgency. In these terms, these "new" nonstate actors must eventually seize political power in order to guarantee the freedom of action and the commercial environment they want. The common denominator that clearly links the gang phenomenon to insurgency is that the third generation gangs' and insurgents' ultimate objective is to depose or control the governments of targeted countries. As a consequence, the "Duck Analogy" applies. Third generation gangs look like ducks, walk like ducks, and act like ducks - a peculiar breed, but ducks nevertheless! This monograph concludes with recommendations for the United States and other countries to focus security and assistance responses at the strategic level. The intent is to help leaders achieve strategic clarity and operate more effectively in the complex politically dominated, contemporary global security arena.

God's Gangs

Author: Edward Flores
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147987812X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Winner, 2014 Distinguished Contribution to Research Award presented by the Latina/o Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association Los Angeles is the epicenter of the American gang problem. Rituals and customs from Los Angeles’ eastside gangs, including hand signals, graffiti, and clothing styles, have spread to small towns and big cities alike. Many see the problem with gangs as related to urban marginality—for a Latino immigrant population struggling with poverty and social integration, gangs offer a close-knit community. Yet, as Edward Orozco Flores argues in God’s Gangs, gang members can be successfully redirected out of gangs through efforts that change the context in which they find themselves, as well as their notions of what it means to be a man. Flores here illuminates how Latino men recover from gang life through involvement in urban, faith-based organizations. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Homeboy Industries, a Jesuit-founded non-profit that is one of the largest gang intervention programs in the country, and with Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal ministry with over 600 chapters, Flores demonstrates that organizations such as these facilitate recovery from gang life by enabling gang members to reinvent themselves as family men and as members of their community. The book offers a window into the process of redefining masculinity. As Flores convincingly shows, gang members are not trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginality. With the help of urban ministries, such men construct a reformed barrio masculinity to distance themselves from gang life.

Gangs and Society

Author: Louis Kontos
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231507518
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Compiled by three leading experts in the psychological, sociological, and criminal justice fields, this volume addresses timely questions from an eclectic range of positions. The product of a landmark conference on gangs, Gangs and Society brings together the work of academics, activists, and community leaders to examine the many functions and faces of gangs today. Analyzing the spread of gangs from New York to Texas to the West Coast, the book covers such topics as the spirituality of gangs, the place of women in gang culture, and the effect on gangs of a variety of educational programs and services for at-risk youth. The final chapter examines the "gang-photography phenomenon" by looking at the functions and politics of different approaches to gang photography and features a photographic essay by Donna DeCesare, an award-winning journalist.

Gangsters Without Borders

Author: Thomas W. Ward
Publisher: Issues of Globalization: Case
ISBN: 9780199859061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Based on author T.W. Ward's eight and a half years in Los Angeles conducting participant observation with MS-13, Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang takes an inside look at gang life in the United States and in a global context. Taking us through their journey from their homeland in El Salvador to the mean streets of Los Angeles, Gangsters Without Borders offers a perspective from the point of view of the hard-core members who live this hard, fast, and dangerous life. A powerful and engaging overview of gang dynamics, Gangsters Without Borders contextualizes the sources and severity of the marginalization felt by Salvadoran immigrants and debunks myths about street gangs in the United States. This account of gangster's lives before, during, and after their involvement with the gang, delivers an intimate and analytical portrait unlike any other.

The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs

Author: Josephine Metcalf
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496801059
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The publication of Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member in 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles—New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed it a “shocking and galvanic book”—and set off a new publishing trend of gang memoirs in the 1990s. The memoirs showcased tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging but also offered many of the first journalistic and autobiographical accounts of the much-mythologized gang subculture. In The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs, Josephine Metcalf focuses on three of these memoirs—Shakur’s Monster; Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.; and Stanley “Tookie” Williams’s Blue Rage, Black Redemption—as key representatives of the gang autobiography. Metcalf examines the conflict among violence, thrilling sensationalism, and the authorial desire to instruct and warn competing within these works. The narrative arcs of the memoirs themselves rest on the process of conversion from brutal, young gang bangers to nonviolent, enlightened citizens. Metcalf analyzes the emergence, production, marketing, and reception of gang memoirs. Through interviews with Rodriguez, Shakur, and Barbara Cottman Becnel (Williams’s editor), Metcalf reveals both the writing and publishing processes. This book analyzes key narrative conventions, specifically how diction, dialogue, and narrative arcs shape the works. The book also explores how these memoirs are consumed. This interdisciplinary study—fusing literary criticism, sociology, ethnography, reader-response study, and editorial theory—brings scholarly attention to a popular, much-discussed, but understudied modern expression.