t is important to distinguish gangs from clubs or groups. Using Thrasher's definition, a gang starts "spontaneously," often by a group of boys meeting on the street corner, near their residences. This is where the term "street corner groups" originates. There may be a club house or special room for meetings. "Movement through space as a unit" means simply that the gang acts as one, there is loyalty in whatever the action may be. Usually that action is some kind of violence or conflict that involves a crime, or protection of the area the gang has defined as its "territory" from other invading gangs (pp. 37-46).
In Social Order of the Slum, Suttles agrees "In slum neighborhoods territory aggregation usually precedes any common social framework for, orderly relations" (Suttles, 1968, p. 8). So it is also true in gangs.
Thrasher further says, "The gangs dwell among the shadows of the slum" (p. 3). The slum that Thrasher refers to is one of the common denominators of gang membership. Indeed, it is the slum that provides the incubator that gives birth to gangs. It is the slum that is the major determining factor, as to whether an individual will become a gang member or not. Therefore, in order to study gang membership one needs to study or at least acknowledge the gang member's common geographical environment --the slum. Slums share many common characteristics, in that they contain deteriorating buildings, frequent turnover of residents, and social and economic upheaval. Suttles, thirty years later, studied the Adams area in the middle of Chicago. He saw the same patterns occurring, but with different groups than Thrasher had observed. In Suttles' book, Social Order of the Slum, the groups were Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Black. While in Thrasher's book, The Gang, (from the 1920's) the groups were Polish, Italian, Irish, Slavic and other new immigrant nationalities (Thrasher, 1927; Suttles 1968).
Thrasher use...