Deglamorizing American Street Gangs

Social researcher and author Deborah Lamm Weisel (2002) says that the glamorized image of the American street gang as drug dealers is not the image that is consistent with historical research (Lamm Weisel 75).

The drug gang} is certainly not a typical street gang... They didn't even grow out of a street gang. These kids started out to make money by pedaling crack and that is a very different phenomenon than street gangs (Knox 66) (Lamm Weisel 75)."

Lamm Weisel has gone back to the essence of the historical gangs that go back to the earliest immigrants who carved out sections of neighborhoods for themselves using coercion and violence to maintain territorial boundaries. However, it is easy to disagree with Knox, because for decades now street gangs have been associated with the violence and trafficking of illegal drugs.

In a journal article by John M. Hagedorn (2006), the social scientist-writer examines a century of street gang activity in Chicago (Hagedorn 194). Hagedorn writes:

It is an enduring, progressive insight of the "Chicago School" of sociology that criminal behavior is not a racial characteristic, as nativists, klansmen, and racists of all stripes might claim. Rather, the Chicagoans' doctrine stressed that violence, gangs, crime, and other "social dislocations" are primarily consequences of the intersection of urban ecology and social stratification. For example, "gangs," said the Chicago School's founder Robert E. Park, sprouted in the "city wilderness" without regard to race, creed, or color...

This difference in professional and historic opinion demonstrates how much we do not understand about street gangs, other than the violence that is printed in American newspapers daily. There is much more research that needs to be done in order to better understand the problem of street gangs in America. Without the understanding, there is no way to address the problem other than through law enforcement, which is an after-the-fact solution. Overcrowded American jails are testimony to the fact that law enforcement on its own is failing to curtail the problem of street gangs in America.
Works Cited

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=111541618

Contemporary Gangs: An Organizational Analysis. New York: LFB Scholoarly Publishing, 2002. Questia. 14 May 2008 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=111541620.

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A www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5017029131

Hagedorn, John M. "Race Not Space: A Revisionist History of Gangs in Chicago." The Journal of African-American History 91.2 (2006): 194+. Questia. 14 May 2008 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5017029131.

Scorsese, Martin (dir). Casino, motion picture. Universal Pictures (1995), USA.

Scorsese, Martin (dir). The Departed, motion picture. Warner Brothers Pictures (2006), USA.