American street gangs: history, culture, and social impact

American street gang problem is one of a layered problem. The image f the American gangster has been glamorized by Americans, and shown to be one way, perhaps the easier way, of accomplishing the American dream. Unfortunately, as anyone living in a major American city like Chicago, Boston, or LA can tell us, there is nothing glamorous about bullets ripping through the paper thin walls of a housing development or finding your own child lying dead in the street before he or she has even reached puberty as a result of gangland violence. American street gangs have evolved, spreading now beyond the cities, to the suburbs and are now doing battle for the rural areas in order to expand the operations that feed the gangland lifestyle: drug marketing and manufacturing, prostitution, coercion, money laundering, and any other illicit vice that might be sold to Americans for a one hundred percent profit.

Add, too, to the formula the elements of the immigrant gangs like the Russian, Asian, and Middle Eastern "mafias." All of these individuals seeking the cheap and easy way to the American dream; which is, for many Americans, the American nightmare. Facing the problem of American gangs is not something most Americans seemed inclined to deal with so long as the violence and corruption does not touch their own lives. Still, it is a problem that law enforcement and average American citizens who would prefer not to deal with it, are confronted with daily. In some cities, like Detroit, American street gangs own the city. What can America do to curtail gang activity?

Glamorizing the American Gang Image

Americans might begin by ceasing to glamorize the American gang image through the lucrative markets in Hollywood and in music. Hollywood film is in particular a culprit, which has fed America's historic fascination with gangs with films like director Francis Ford Coppola's the Godfathe (1972)r, or director Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), or, more recently, Scorsese's (2006). Each of these are successful films glamorizing the life of the American gangster. Each of the three films features vicious and ruthless gangster life as profitable, one where gangsters have a "code of honor," that binds them. Also it gives a visual image of the wealth, and popularity of the gangster. It is easy to forget that it is Hollywood filmmaking at its best, or worst, depending upon how you like the Scorses style of gratuitous violence.

Contemporary music is no less a culprit of the gang image than is Hollywood. Rapping about belonging to a gang, selling drugs, and treating women badly has created massive wealth for any number of American artists like Notorious BIG, Ludicrous, Snoop Dog, and other hip-hop and rap artists. The problem is, in the case of Notorious BIG for example, the artists' own experience in the hood that allows them to rap in such vivid detail about the life in the hood follows them into their newfound glamorous life and, now, violence and murder have become associated with the rap industry.

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 (Hagedorn 194)."