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Causes of gang violence
Psychological influences of gang membership
Sociological theories of gang
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Causes of gang violence
Psychological influences of gang membership
Sociological theories of gang
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
For many youths, gang life is all they know. Many gang members have other family members who are involved in gangs already. In Lauger’s (2012) ethnography of the DFW boyz, he found
The fourth time period the author looked was gangs in times of mass incarceration. During the incarceration times street gangs have been more assimilated into prison gangs. Many of the youth do not want the older men controlling them so they rebel. As the street gang's youths went to prison they had to join with the prison gangs or risked of being attacked. The street gangs and prison gangs unify which means that the collective association is close and have more resources. .
Watching the documentary, Crips and Bloods: Made in America, I learned that white people never gave black people in America the chance to succeed because they were constantly targeting them. I learned that people who grow up in south California really have no choice but to join a gang and result to violence because if they don’t they will not survive. Kids who are born in this part of LA are born into drug dealing families, broken homes, or to parents who are working multiple jobs just to make ends meet. These children have no guidance and no one to show them the right way of life. They join gangs so they can feel protected and like they belong somewhere in this world.
Utilizing research findings and realistic experiences, Shakur, Howell, and Griffiths disprove myths about gangs, justify the reasons for young people being recruited because of their desire to be understood by others similar to them, and girls integrating themselves into the groups from their relationships with members. Howell and Griffiths managed to explain the principles behind gangs and their members' lifestyles, while Shakur provided real gangster experiences as supporting evidence for the research findings. Theories to gangs may be existent, but without proper research leading to the findings, or experiences from subjects who lived the lifestyle, beliefs about the organizations merely become empty
I think the key aspect of viewing gangs and the young people they influence is keeping in mind how they are inducted into gangs and how they are contained in them. Now, I have never experienced this system personally. I've only seen into this world through media; which, as we know, can be wildly inaccurate and rarely provides the full story. But I think that's where the importance of Levitt's credibility comes into play.
In the article “Gang Membership and Drug Involvement“ by Beth Bjerregaard, when we hear about gangs we think of murders and drug dealers but are gangs involved in more stuff than we think. Gangs are more likely to sell drugs than non gang members. Gang relationships are very complicated and many members have violent behaviors . Gang memberships and their drug use. Many gangs sold drugs likes heroin, cocaine and marijuana.
In Policing Gangs in America, Charles Katz and Vincent Webb discuss the issues that take place within American Gangs today. This book goes into great detail on how the gang officers work and the different kind of atmosphere they work in. Their job isn’t like other law enforcement jobs. It’s one of the more dangerous occupations in the Criminal Justice system. These gang officers focus on how they react to public gang issues.
Since the beginning of time there have always been clicks and groups that were made up of people who had the same goals in mind or same interests. However, nowadays gangs consist mostly of people who commit the same type of crimes together that involve drug charges or murders. Gangs noticeably started getting their “bad image” beginning with a man named Al Capone. The rebellion started with the prohibition era. Al Capone was the most powerful gangster in Chicago during this era.
There is a number of reasons that range from simple to complex, on why teenagers join gangs, and we can help by finding solutions to their specific problem before they choose to join one. To help someone get out of a gang, we as a society need to show there’s more out there in the world that they could do that will make a positive impact. Teenagers have different reasons to join gangs depending on their life situation. Everyone in the “Greasers” in The Outsiders had different reasons to be part of the gang. “We were used to seeing Johnny banged up-
In the 1990s, gang violence was on the rise, where it was dominantly founded in youths. Anderson, Dyson, and Lee (1996) argued that when a group of African American youths join together and commits delinquent acts and crime, they already categorized as gangs to the American public. This affect and many other affects is what creates an increase in gang violence. Those other factors are socioeconomic status, history, race, gendered, and geographic background. They play a huge role on the creation and formation of gangs.
This paper draws on existing sociological research in identifying a number of theories used in explaining the formation of gangs. The theories discussed are social structure theories, social conflict theory, and social process theories all of which highlight elements of strain in different forms as they relates to gang formation. According to Merton, (as cited in Schneider & Tilly, 2004) structural theories significantly emphasize the role of social and economic structures as the causes of delinquent behavior and tend to treat criminal behavior as the result of the undesirable and dysfunctional structures (P. 3.).
Members of gangs live off of the power they feel they have on their communities and continue to intimidate society through their violent
But there can also be a forced alliance as many can be compelled to join or work for a gang under threat so they don’t have a choice and have to follow orders for the sake of their own lives. Much of whether gangs are seen as a social problem comes from perspective. Society is more prone to seeing gangs in a negative point of view because the social reality is not reaching the ideals and standards of people’s conception of a perfect world. Many external factors such as the media and personal opinions encourage a bad outlook on gangs. The media inflicts fear and depicts gangs to be a threat, which the community looks at in a negative view.
Gang violence has been a problem in society for several of years and is a growing problem each and every day. The youth that is involved in gang violence will have numerous effects upon them that will come soon or later when associated with a group of thugs. Children and teenagers if they still go to school when accompanying a gang, they face the heightened risk of dropping out of school; teen parenthood; be victimized by another gang ; abuse drugs and alcohol; commit petty and violent
Most gangs are made up of young males that are of a similar background and have a desire of acquiring