social inequality, lack of community integration, and lack of meaningful employment and educational opportunities, along with the larger economic picture of a changing labor market and the corresponding emergence of a more or less permanent underclass mired in segregated communities (Shelden, Tracy, & Brown, 1997, 62).
Throughout, the authors emphasize gang membership as a social process, perhaps a social process that has been distorted, but a social process just the same. They only secondarily consider the nature of the criminal enterprise that the gang constitutes and accept the idea that gang membership in certain communities is almost inevitable. This stems from the sociological perspective that the authors take and involves them more in considering the gang as a subculture than as a criminal enterprise. The cultural aspect is evident in an examination of gangs, of course, but the authors give it such a life of its own here that they fail to consider t
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