“It’s so easy for a kid to join a gang, to do drugs…we should make it that easy to be involved in football and academics.” –Snoop Dogg. In the past century, gangs have grown exponentially in urban and suburban environments throughout America. With it has come drugs, violence, and corruption. So we, as a society, must ask ourselves: What we can do to prevent this? It is my belief that the best way to combat gang growth is to invest more time and money into our education system. The chance of someone becoming a gang member is not actually based on race, as one might expect, but rather on the area they come from. This has always been the case. In fact, it was found that "observers of any given period tend to relate the characteristics of gangs to those of the particular ethnic groups prominent in the urban lower class during that period . . ., roughly, the more prevalent the lower-class populations, the more gangs." ("Demographic Characteristics"). So, if gang membership is determined by a low social class, then it is likely these individuals have common issues. These issues include unemployment, …show more content…
We can do this by implementing after school programs to give those at-risk children a safe haven. In Baltimore, it was found that in the three years after Baltimore’s Police Department opened a Police Activities League (PAL) afterschool program in one high-crime neighborhood, juvenile crime in the neighborhood dropped nearly 10 percent ("Afterschool Programs: Keeping Kids — and Communities — Safe "). Further, the National Crime Prevention Council claims that “providing latchkey children with before-and after-school safe havens decreases their exposure to neighborhood drug or other criminal activity” ("Strategy: Before- and After-School Programs"). By giving these kids an outlet we are preventing them from turning to crime and violence to deal with their