GANGS

Gangs



Gangs

Introduction

Gang is a group of people who feel a close relationship, or intimate and intense between them, which usually have a friendship or close interaction with ideals or philosophy common among members. This leads them to group activities, which can range from a night out in groups of violent or criminal acts. It can also be used as a synonym for cheating.

Although in the beginning represented the workers, especially in the United Kingdom, over time the term has acquired a negative connotation, especially in Latin America, since its use usually refers to groups, gangs or subcultures that routinely perform violent acts against others or as a synonym for a criminal organization or affiliation (Cohen, 1955).

Gangs today are a worldwide phenomenon and, moreover, not unique to contemporary societies. Youth gangs have existed in Western and Eastern societies for centuries, and in the United States, gangs in urban centers existed before the 19th century. In many instances, gangs use the symbols, style of dress, and behavior of American gangs because these features are transmitted through movies, books, videos, and magazines. Indeed, today's urbanized and globalized world is producing gangs faster than ever before in a variety of shapes and forms, and contemporary gangs play a significant role in many kinds of violence (Decker, 2005).

Origion and History

Scholarly interest in gangs can be traced at least as far back as 19th-century journalistic accounts of adolescent males growing up in areas of high-population density and economic disadvantage. Charles Dickens's fictionalized gang in Oliver Twist, for example, was based on accounts of London street urchins.

More systematic and scientific study of gangs began in the 1920s in the United States with Frederic Thrasher's massive investigation of more than 1,300 gangs in Chicago. He concluded that young people seek out gang membership from a desire for excitement, and he painted picture of gangs as stable, coherent, and highly structured, with well-defined roles such as war counselor, armorer, and treasurer. Regarding stability, an early study in Los Angeles suggested that many of the city's gangs had histories extending back as much as 50 years (Hagedorn, 1988). This and other work noted that enduring gang identities are often based on locality, underlining another recurring theme in gang research— the significance of territoriality. Many other studies, however, failed to find such long term stability or even to find gangs at all.

Gangs in the United States developed during four distinct periods. The first stage occurred as a consequence of immigration and industrialization in the latter part of the 19th century, when groups of recent immigrants-primarily Irish and Italian-engaged in petty property crimes. In the 1920s, a second wave of gangs emerged in cities, again composed of recent immigrants, but they had symbols of membership and were more actively involved in crime than the gangs of the first period. In the 1960s, another generation of gangs developed that contained a significant number of racial minorities. The availability of automobiles and guns gave these gangs the ability to fight other gangs in neighborhoods across ...