Youth Gangs in American Society

In their book Youth Gangs in American Society, authors Shelden, Tracy, and Brown (1997) take a sociological approach to the subject of youth gangs, their origin, development, and potential future. The book has a good deal of information about the gang culture, but the interpretation of the authors places more blame on society than on the offenders and fails to convince as to its view of the origin and nature of the gang problem in society today.

The authors rightly note that there was no gang problem until the mid-nineteenth century, and the problem of delinquency was noted among various urban groups as the nation became more industrialized and presumably as the population became more condensed in the cities. The gang problem today, of course, is much greater and has become an epidemic in our cities, to the point where whole areas are completely controlled by gangs and where much of the public lives in fear. The approach taken by these authors places the blame on a variety of social institutions that have no desire to create a gang culture but that are here blamed for it just the same, from the news media for writing about the Watts riots and making black youth seem criminal to the economy for changing in a way that produced an opportunity and a need among these same black youth. At any rate, the authors find that most of the gang trappings originated with Hispanic gangs and then were taken over and modified by the new black gangs that developed in the late 1960s.

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er control of the same market. It is in this sense that violence is more likely when crime is "disorganized" rather than when it is "organized," or when the wars are settled and the organized gang is doing business without competition. When illicit goods and services are provided in an organized manner and criminal enterprises operate in a businesslike manner, profits are likely to be maximized. Excessive violence attracts attention and leads to a crackdown that only increases the cost of doing business and thus the prices of the goods and services involved. The authors conclude based on arrest records that the selling of crack is not an exclusive domain of gangs (Shelden, Tracy, & Brown, 1997, 145). While this is true, it does not mean that gangs are not deeply involved in this traffic. The authors often use evidence that a gang is not exclusively involved as if that exonerates the gang from the degree to which it is involved or as if it lessens that involvement in some way, which clearly it does not. The history of criminal organizations would seem to indicate that there will be a decrease in violence associated with gangs and drug trafficking, but this seems to depend on the degree to which law enforcement is able to dis

Category: Government - Y