Gangster Disciples Case Study

One ramification of Black Organized Crime was the Gangster Disciples. This group was a Chicago-based street gang that started in the late 1960s by a merging of two gangs. They were a well-organized group and they had tens of thousands of members spread around the streets of Chicago. According to Abadinsky (2013)," the Gangster Disciples are Chicago's best-known African American crime group." This being said people wanted to be a part of the Gangster Disciples mostly for the prestige of having that title; since everyone was welcomed many people joined. The Gangster Disciples was so powerfully built that to this day the Gangster Disciples is still running and growing rapidly. The Gangster Disciples was created by Larry Hoover and David Barksdale.

The Supreme Gangster and the Black Disciples were rivals and always at war until Barksdale proposed a peaceful merger of the two South Side gangs. Hoover accepted the offer and combined both names to become the Black Gangster Disciple Nation. Barksdale became the President and Hoover became the Vice President of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation. In 1973, Hoover was convicted of murder and was sent to prison serving a 150-year sentence. On September 2, 1974, Barksdale died from kidney failure as a result of a 1969 shooting he had. After Barksdale's death, Jerome Freeman broke away from the Black Gangster Disciple Nation and recreated Black Disciples. Although Hoover was in prison he also separated and created his own gang which he named the Gangster

They were in the streets starting out at such a young age and grew up in the streets of Chicago at a time period that crime was at a high level. They didn't have a chance to grow up in a neighborhood where they can avoid trouble. Instead, they grew up in a neighborhood where their peers were being delinquent from such a young age. According to Bogira (2011) "Chicago's ghettos in the 1960s were notorious for their shootings, robberies, rapes, fires, joblessness, single-parent families, dreadful schools and high dropout rates, rampant alcoholism and heroin addiction, abandoned buildings and vacant lots."For this reason the Gangster Disciples can go with the Social learning theory. According to Siegel (2011), crime is a learned behavior, people learn techniques and attitudes of crime from close relationships with criminal peers. The boys that started the Gangster Disciples came to Chicago at a young age and grew up in an environment where it was almost impossible to avoid getting into trouble. The boys had delinquent peers and hung out with gang members. In this way the boys grew up around this delinquent mentality and saw that the easy way to be respected and obtain money fast was to become a member of the Gangster